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Hemmed in by forces beyond his control, with all exits but one blocked, the steamroller never had a chance. On Wednesday, March 12, beginning to inch his way out of the Moby Dick-sized pickle into which he’d maneuvered himself with the help of federal agents and a suspiciously timely tip to The New York Times, Gov. Eliot Spitzer took the obvious and, under the circumstances, most noble path, resigning from the state’s top job he has held for a rocky 14 months. In an irony worthy of a Korean soap opera, the Times, the Eastern liberal-elite journalistic bastion upon which Spitzer had built his political juggernaut, just two days earlier had been force-fed the story of his having been trapped by the FBI’s public corruption unit into making a public acknowledgement of the news that he’d been wiretapped making arrangements to meet in a Washington hotel with a New York City-based hooker.
Amid cries for him to step down and a threat by one of his fiercest political enemies, assemblyman and Republican Minority Leader Jim Tedisco, to begin impeachment proceedings if he didn’t resign, the governor threw in the towel in a Manhattan news conference early Wednesday afternoon. “I cannot allow for my private failings to disrupt the people’s work,” Spitzer said in strikingly non-specific language as his beleaguered wife Silda stood at his side. “Over the course of my public life, I have insisted – I believe correctly – that people take responsibility for their conduct. I can and will ask no less of myself. For this reason, I am resigning from the office of governor.”
At Lt. Gov. David Paterson’s request, the resignation will take effect on Monday, March 17 – St. Patrick’s Day – when Paterson will become the state’s first African-American governor. Interestingly, through a quirk in the state constitution, Republican Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno will assume the lieutenant governor’s position, wielding a gavel and a tie-breaking vote should the increasingly evenly divided body ever be caught in a deadlock.
Mann, oh Mann
The storm clouds had gathered over the previous weekend, following the Thursday morning, March 6 arrest of what news organizations uniformly described as a high-class “prostitution ring” that included a Dutchess County woman, Tanya (or Tania, depending on her mood) Hollander, 36, of Milan (who, like a lot of people in the northern reaches of the county, uses a Rhinebeck mailing address). Hollander – described in a sealed complaint filed by U.S. attorneys as someone who arranges sexual trysts between prostitutes and wealthy clients – and her alleged compatriots, 62-year-old “ringleader” Mark Brener and his reported live-in girlfriend and alleged bank runner, 23-year-old Cecil “Katie” Suwal, both of Cliffside Park, N.J.; and Temeka “Rachelle” Lewis, 32, of Brooklyn, were charged with, among other things, violating the Mann Act, a 98-year-old piece of federal legislation that seeks to mitigate prostitution via human trafficking, by deeming it a crime to transport an individual from one state to another for the purpose of having paid sex.
The organization for which the quartet allegedly toiled was identified in the complaint as Emperors Club VIP.
Hollander’s rural neighborhood was besieged this week by a small horde of largely unsuccessful reporters looking to score an interview with her about her role in the scandal. According to the Daily News, Hollander maintained a Web site identifying herself as a “nutritionist and ‘holistic health counselor,’” who bought a Milan bungalow five years ago for $310,000. No personal connection has been made between Hollander and Spitzer, who has a country home in nearby Gallatin, just over the border in Columbia County.
Spitzer and his wife first sucked it up and appeared together before the media dogs on Monday in Albany, where the governor issued a short, equally non-specific apology for having “acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong.” As the governor subsequently repaired to his Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan over the next two days to sort out what little was left of his political future and try to work out a deal with federal prosecutors, the public weighed in, and it wasn’t pretty. A quickie Marist poll confirmed the will of the electorate: as Spitzer’s popularity plummeted to 30 percent, 49 percent of registered voters said he should face criminal charges.
Wiretap on the shoulder
Meanwhile, tabloid-minded newshounds such as we at Ulster Publishing scoured the conveniently available federal complaint for references to Spitzer and, tipped off by a little bird in the zeitgeist, homed in on a long series of paragraphs of a series of wiretapped phone conversations concerning one “Client-9,” identified somewhere along the line as Spitzer. The passages recount in embarrassing detail the machinations the governor allegedly undertook to manifest a Feb. 13 (Valentine’s Day Eve) encounter at the ritzy Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. with a prostitute identified in the complaint as “Kristen,” as well as to leave a down-payment on a future encounter with an Emperors Club VIP escort. The feds allege that Spitzer paid for a round-trip Amtrak ticket for “Kristen,” which may leave the governor open to being charged under the Mann Act. He has not been charged, although he reportedly has of yet received no assurances of immunity in return for his resignation.
Spitzer’s total bill for the encounter and the down-payment, according to the wiretapped passage cited in the complaint, was $4,300.
For some reason, prosecutors included in the complaint a post-appointment evaluation conversation between “Kristen” and her alleged handler for the meeting, Temeka “Rachelle” Lewis, which goes like this: “LEWIS asked ‘Kristen’ how she thought the appointment went, and ‘Kristen’ said that she thought it went very well. LEWIS asked ‘Kristen’ how much she collected, and ‘Kristen’ said $4,300. ‘Kristen’ said that she liked him, and that she did not think he was difficult. ‘Kristen’ stated: ‘I don’t think he’s difficult. I mean it’s just kind of like ... whatever... I’m here for a purpose. I know what my purpose is.’
“‘I am not a ... moron, you know what I mean. So maybe that’s why girls maybe think they’re difficult ... .’ ‘Kristen’ continued: ‘That’s what it is, because you’re here for a (purpose). Let’s not get it twisted - I know what I do, you know.’ LEWIS responded: ‘You look at it very uniquely, because ... no one ever says it that way.’ LEWIS continued that from what she had been told ‘he’ (believed to be a reference to Client-9) ‘would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe - you know - I mean that ... very basic things.’ ... ‘Kristen’ responded: ‘I have a way of dealing with that ... I’d be like listen dude, you really want the sex? ... You know what I mean.’”
The passage reads a bit like the Starr Report, and was fodder for much speculation as to what was meant by the term “difficult” and the dark reference to “things that, like, you might not think were safe.”
An accident waiting to happen
A phone call was made to William “Dollar Bill” Mersey, an adult advertising representative in New York City who is familiar with the prostitution trade. As it turned out, Mersey has been sitting on dynamite for a year and a half, wondering when it would go off.
“Yeah, well, this is the story,” said Mersey, contacted on Tuesday. “It was a year and a half ago. I was sitting in a whorehouse, and the news was on. It was when Eliot Spitzer was campaigning for election, and one of the girls says, ‘Hey! That guy used to be my regular! What’s he doin’ on television?’ So I told her, ‘He’s trying to get elected to be the governor of New York State, that’s what he’s doing on television.’
“Her name was Zane. And she says, ‘He used to be five minutes for 500 bucks. He used to come out of Action magazine.’ She says, ‘I got him from Campbell,’ who was another girl who lived at 220 East 52nd Street.”
Mersey, an independent contractor who plays the legal role of middleman for prostitution outfits seeking to advertise in publications like the Village Voice, Escort and Eros, approached one or more magazines at the time to pitch them on his story. “They were afraid,” he said. “So that’s the story and nobody wanted to do anything about it, and I was curious when somebody was gonna come forward. But it looks like he was booking through Emperor VIP, which is an agency I used to run ads for. … I don’t think they were after Spitzer, I just think they were after a mark in his agency and Eliot turns up on the wiretaps.”
As it turns out, Mersey was off the mark on this, as ABC News reported Tuesday night that the prostitution investigation was in fact a side-effect of concern triggered by the governor’s suspicious-looking transfers of large amounts of cash, “initially leading agents to believe Spitzer was hiding bribes, according to federal officials.”
Timing-wise, the investigation peaked just as the state Senate – in the wake of Democrat Darrell Aubertine’s victory over Republican Will Barclay – veered closer to Democratic hands, leading to speculation that Bruno, who has been locked in a pitched political battle of wills with Spitzer since the governor’s ascendance, had something to do with this week’s startling turn of events. Bruno, unlike Tedisco and others in his party, had declined to join the call for the governor’s resignation, and has been remarkably circumspect in his post-scandal comments.
One hundred dollars a minute
Meanwhile, Mersey has other insights into the affair. Of Spitzer, he said, “Yeah, he’s a big payer, apparently. As Zane said, he was five minutes for 500 bucks. And I don’t think it’s that big a deal, except that he’s married, so he looks untrustworthy.”
The Associated Press late Tuesday corroborated Mersey’s assessment of Spitzer as a “big payer,” quoting unnamed federal investigators as saying he spent as much as $80,000 with the Emperor Club VIP service over a number of years.
Mersey disputes any aspersion that the governor would have been a “difficult” customer. “Really? Because the girls that I talked to said he was really easy, he was a five-minute trick. I don’t know, if he’s booking all-nighters, maybe he’s difficult.”
Mersey also described his dealings with the Emperors Club VIP contingent as less than the gilt-edged outfit described in the federal papers and goggle-eyed news reports. “Emperor VIP is not a big agency,” said Mersey, at least, he added, when he encountered it a few years ago. He described Brener, the “ringleader,” as “A … little … guy named Mark and his Asian girlfriend, and I got rid of him because he was cheap, which is OK, but I would take pictures of the girls, and then he would go take pictures himself with a camera that wasn’t automatic, and he’d e-mail me these out-of-focus, f---ed-up pictures, and tell me that’s what he wanted to use. And it’s like, ‘Dude, why am I there takin’ pictures so that you can come in behind me and do a horrible job? I can’t make you money using these s---ty pictures.’ So eventually then he just wanted to do like help wanted ads and Eros for $50, which is non-commissionable. So I just stopped taking his calls. But I know who the guy is.”
Sentiment regarding Spitzer’s troubles around the nation is mostly of the head-shaking sort, accompanied by moral posturing and statements of disbelief that he could be so dumb, or full of himself, to try such a stunt in the full glare of his notoriety. But Norma Jean Almodovar has other ideas. Almodovar is the executive director of COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). She is a “retired call girl and traffic cop” and works to decriminalize prostitution. It was around 2 p.m. Monday in Los Angeles when her husband called her from upstairs where he was watching MSNBC to tell her to turn on the TV. Eliot Spitzer was bringing prostitution back into the news again. According to Almodovar: “If every politician elected or otherwise who had visited a prostitute were to resign, there would be nobody left to run the government.”
(Additional reporting by Paul Joffe)
