Client 9: The Unsolved Mystery in Eliot Spitzer’s Downfall

You know that feeling you get staring into the wet, big, venal eyes of a wealthy Wall Street CEO? The feeling that the mind behind those eyes has orchestrated some not-good things, or knows about some not-good things yet to come to light, or has ample reserves of money and power to orchestrate some not-good things at any point in time? This movie has a couple pairs of those eyes, namely Hank Greenberg’s (former CEO of AIG) and Ken Langone’s (former director of the New York Stock Exchange). Absolutely terrifying. Although, in fairness to Langone’s eyes, his nose and chins are terrifying, too.

If you have only a passing understanding of what happened to New York attorney general and then governor Eliot Spitzer—prosecuted prostitution rings, then got busted patronizing a prostitution ring—you may have no sense of how mysterious the story really is, how beside the point all the things you know are. Way more interesting: the murky power-broker politics and the unlikeliness of the Justice Department’s official version of how they caught him.

When Spitzer became attorney general of New York in 1999, he didn’t want to just enforce the law, he wanted to (according to the narrator) “use the law to change the way society worked”—on issues ranging from the environment to gender equality to investment-industry reform. Author Peter Elkind says, “The job had been a second-tier position—it had been focused on regulating crooked car dealers, and Eliot Spitzer focused on Wall Street, the biggest guys around, and Spitzer’s premise, which was right, was that Wall Street can’t be left to regulate itself or terrible things will happen.”

Spitzer explains, “CEOs began to take everything they could, and ultimately that was going to destroy our economy.” One of the CEOs he had his eye on: AIG’s Greenberg, years before AIG’s Hindenburg moment. When Spitzer tried to investigate, he was told to back off by the Justice Department’s Michael Garcia, on the premise that the Justice Department would take it up (it never did). Meanwhile, Garcia was securing a federal wiretap in the case against Spitzer and the escort ring, even though the feds don’t do prostitution cases. “Normally focused on terrorists, mobsters, and Wall Street, Garcia’s office was suddenly spending enormous resources to go after a small escort service,” the narrator says. “Garcia was a Republican. Was this a political hit?”

The Spitzer investigation “began at the very moment the Justice Department was involved in a huge scandal of its own, and the issue was whether the Justice Department was hiring and firing U.S. attorneys based on politics, and whether it was going after powerful Democrats in order to get rid of them,” Elkind points out. But Spitzer doesn’t blame his political enemies or whine about the ridiculousness of the laws he broke (since when do johns get prosecuted, anyway?) or indulge in conspiracy theories about who brought him down. “There are all sorts of rumors about bringing me down,” he says, admirably without a hint of self-pity. “I brought myself down.”