ALBANY — Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer was reading his newspaper on a recent Thursday morning when he was jolted by a comment made by his successor, David A. Paterson.
In the 22nd paragraph of a New York Times article on Aug. 21, Mr. Paterson said that aides to Mr. Spitzer had lacked experience in Albany, and added that the Spitzer administration’s management approach sometimes “just didn’t work.”
Mr. Spitzer grew upset, according to a senior aide to Mr. Paterson and another official. He picked up the phone, reached a Paterson aide, demanded a public apology from the governor and “issued threats, veiled and unveiled” against Mr. Paterson, said the aide, who insisted on anonymity because he did not want to anger either man.
No public apology was offered; Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Paterson have not spoken since June.
Six months have passed since Mr. Spitzer’s breathtakingly quick exodus from office after being implicated as a patron of a prostitution ring. One day, Eliot Laurence Spitzer was a national figure some saw destined for the White House; the next he was a target of ridicule.
Now, in interviews with friends and former aides, and through e-mail messages obtained through a Freedom of Information request by The New York Times, a picture emerges of Mr. Spitzer trying to focus on the future and his family, with the threat of criminal charges still hanging over him. He is working at his father’s real estate firm, and has discussed with friends whether to undertake charity, environmental or free legal work to try to rehabilitate his image.
But despite his efforts to move forward, Mr. Spitzer can be moved by flashes of anger, especially when it comes to what he views as his achievements and legacy, and he has faced an adjustment as he confronts life without the power he once wielded.
In June, he traveled with his three daughters and his wife, Silda Wall Spitzer, to Southeast Asia, where the family could enjoy time together far from New York and the prying media. But while the family was in Laos, news broke that the state’s highest court had thrown out most of the charges in the civil case that Mr. Spitzer, as state attorney general, had brought against Richard A. Grasso, the former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, over Mr. Grasso’s $139.5 million compensation package.
Mr. Spitzer called a reporter back in New York — though it was the middle of the night there, given the time difference — to criticize the ruling and suggest people to call who would back up his view.
On Sept. 18, approached by a reporter outside his father’s Fifth Avenue office, he lamented the federal rescue of American International Group, the giant insurer, and defended the aggressive steps he had taken to force the ouster of its chairman, Maurice R. Greenberg, in 2005 amid an accounting scandal.
He said his political demise shouldn’t diminish his achievements. “I committed my sins and I’ve paid for them,” he said. Then he added, referring to A.I.G.: “But I was right.”
Asked how he was doing, he shrugged and responded, with resignation and a degree of joylessness: “Making money is making money,” before heading inside the building. He declined to speak further.
Mr. Spitzer’s daily routine, once scrutinized by a roving pack of reporters, aides and cameras, has taken on a more quotidian feel. He sometimes jogs in Central Park before work, buys his own cup of coffee, drops his daughters at the school bus and hails his own cab to the Fifth Avenue office building that houses his family’s real estate business.
The glare of the cameras has been replaced with fleeting moments of recognition in an Upper East Side neighborhood filled with high-profile people. Sometimes people ask for his autograph or offer him supportive words or smiles. Construction workers snicker at him and cabdrivers take pictures of him on their cellphones.
It wasn’t like this when the news first broke in March. Then there were gestures of comfort from the powerful inhabitants of Mr. Spitzer’s world. Former Vice President Al Gore reached out to him, as did Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, according to e-mail records. (After he resigned from office, Mr. Spitzer’s e-mail communications with public officials were no longer considered privileged, and thus were subject to public records requests.)
Ethel Kennedy, widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, relayed to the governor a quotation to lift his spirits.
“Our greatest glory consists not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall,” Mrs. Kennedy wrote, adding: “See you back on top.”
Mr. Spitzer was so moved by the words that when he resigned a few days later, he used them in his short resignation speech.
The same week, Mr. Spitzer sent an e-mail message to a top aide describing the personal turmoil he had brought to his family. “We are surviving,” he wrote. “Silda has tough moments. My job now is to take care of her. I have done more than my share of damage.”
Assemblyman Mark Weprin, a Queens Democrat who has been close to the Spitzers, recalls the former governor telling him at the time: “It’s been horrible living a Greek tragedy.” He added: “But what am I’m going to do?”
At 49, Mr. Spitzer is plotting a second act, though his life will be in limbo until his legal troubles are resolved. Over the last two months, four of those charged in the prostitution ring have pleaded guilty, including a booking agent who, as part of her plea deal, has agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Prosecutors have not signaled whether they will charge the former governor. He has hired a criminal defense lawyer, Michele Hirshman of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, his former top deputy in the attorney general’s office, to represent him, and a crisis communications firm to handle media inquiries.
He is also expected to appear before the state’s Commission on Public Integrity, which is hearing an appeal from a former aide who the commission has said improperly used the State Police to gather damaging information about the Senate Republican leader at the time, Joseph L. Bruno. The aide, Darren Dopp, has suggested that Mr. Spitzer was more involved in the effort to undermine Mr. Bruno than he has acknowledged.
One friend, who asked to speak anonymously because he did not want to be seen as violating Mr. Spitzer’s confidences, said: “I think that he’ll sort of be in a holding pattern for a while doing his father’s real estate stuff while the legal stuff gets sorted out. It may take years for it to get fully sorted out.”
He has become highly involved in running the real estate businesses controlled by his ailing father, Bernard Spitzer, 84. They include several high-rise apartment buildings on the East Side of Manhattan, one of them the 57-story Corinthian condominiums, with more than 800 units.
His close friends remain in touch and have encouraged him to rehabilitate himself through some charitable work, though he is more focused for the moment on building on his father’s already estimable wealth.
“I told him that I think, in the end, this incident will be a footnote to a great life lived greatly, and that he still has the ability to make enormous contributions,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, who once counted Mr. Spitzer as a student and now counts him as a friend. “One of his goals has to be to make this a footnote in his obituary, and not make it the lead.”
Mr. Dershowitz added that the former governor was “working every day, he’s not goofing off, he’s not pitying himself.”
“He said to me he had the best job in the world and he did something stupid that made him give it up, but he’s not the kind of person that obsesses about the past,” he said.
Friends said Mr. Spitzer considered starting a real estate investment fund, though it does not appear those discussions went far. The Spitzer real estate group has not been particularly active in some time, in part because of the advancing age of his father, who has Parkinson’s disease. Bernard Spitzer was hospitalized for Parkinson’s after his son’s resignation in March, but has since been seen in public in much improved condition.
In recent weeks, the Spitzers’ business created two new limited liability companies, Spitzer Holdings and Spitzer Realty. Jeffrey A. Moerdler, the lawyer of record on the filings, declined to discuss them.
There have been some moments of happiness in recent months. Mr. Spitzer has been devoted to his daughters, and after his eldest, Elyssa, was accepted into three top-flight colleges, Harvard, Princeton and Williams, he e-mailed a former aide and urged her to “have a drink with an umbrella for us.”
Even though Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Paterson were running mates in 2006 and partners in the administration, Mr. Spitzer does not speak regularly to his successor. Mr. Paterson, in a recent interview, said the last time he spoke to the former governor was while training in June for the Utica Boilermaker, a popular 15-kilometer road race.
“He called to wish me luck,” Mr. Paterson recalled. He added that Mr. Spitzer, who has also run the Boilermaker, warned him that the race included “a lot of hills,” then cracked: “Well, maybe he was telling me about being governor.”
Most of the former governor’s friends were reluctant to speak about the state of the Spitzers’ marriage — a grim-looking Ms. Wall Spitzer remains one of the most searing images of Mr. Spitzer’s brief appearances after the story broke.
Herbert E. Nass, a Manhattan lawyer and friend of Mr. Spitzer’s since they ran against each other for president of their seventh-grade class at Horace Mann, said the former governor was contrite.
“He’s remorseful, and I think he’s focused on his wife and his kids,” Mr. Nass said. “He walks home from work and tells me he’s gotten positive — he hasn’t gotten a lot of negative stuff out in public — and he’s focused on his family.”
His friends say they do not have a deep understanding of the couple’s bond, but say that it appears intact. Ms. Wall Spitzer has emerged more publicly in recent weeks, writing an appeal that was highlighted on a Fortune magazine Web site for the charity she founded, “Children for Children.”
“I think the marriage is going to stick together, but whether it does long term, who knows?” said Mr. Weprin. “Who knows about any marriage? But it survived the bumpiest ride it could.”
Winter Miller contributed reporting. |
