Razzle Dazzle
Spitzer Didn't Think Twice

By RICHARD STEIER

In the movie version of Chazz Palminteri's "A Bronx Tale," a father played by Robert DeNiro, counseling his teenage son on the perils of lust, says, "Sometimes in the heat of passion the little head tells the big head what to do, and the big head should think twice about it."

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT: Much like a teenager, Eliot Spitzer acted without regard to consequences or the possibility that he would get caught, and judged others harshly while failing to live up to the standards he set for them. 'The remorse I feel will always be with me,' he said while announcing his resignation as Governor March 12.

To understand Eliot Spitzer, one could do worse than to conclude that if he ever received such a lecture, he didn't pay it much attention. Perhaps the reason is that in important and ultimately destructive ways, at 48 he still acted like a teenager.

He was horny and full of himself, verbally abusive and oblivious to the feelings of others, and judgmental without much thought to whether he was capable of living up to the standards by which he judged the rest of the world, despite his insistence on the day he resigned that he was doing so because he believed that everyone must "take responsibility for their conduct."

Remorse Only Because He Was Caught

Mr. Spitzer was not reacting to that principle, but to the fact that he was discovered violating it, and in such a way that it was impossible for him to continue to govern the state. Either he never considered the potential consequences of his dalliances with high-priced hookers, or he dismissed the possibility that he could get caught.

Those are also characteristics of teenagers, and of adult criminals. The deposed Governor's undoing reminds us that most felons get caught because of stupidity or recklessness.

This is a man, after all, who gave lectures about how even Wall Street bright boys tripped themselves up with e-mails, text messages and indiscreet conversations, then attracted IRS attention with a series of clumsy financial transactions and got caught on a government wiretap talking business with an international prostitution ring.

"He never thought of keeping a shoebox of money in his house?" State Sen. Diane Savino said only half-jokingly a few hours after Mr. Spitzer announced his resignation March 12.

"There are all sorts of theories up here," the former union official whose district covers parts of Staten Island and Brooklyn said from Albany, where legislators were trying to hastily put together a budget. "Too rich, too smart, some people think he had a psychiatric disorder. It's sad, whatever it is. This was somebody with incredible talent who may have thought any good they did outweighed the mistakes they made."

Mr. Spitzer had some significant accomplishments during his 14-1/2 months in office, notably in areas that benefited unions, from a law reforming Workers' Compensation to one that gave the state's 60,000 home day-care workers the right to organize. He also signed off on the agreement between the United Federation of Teachers and the Bloomberg administration granting city Teachers the right to retire at age 55 if they had 25 years of service and brought to fruition a deal increasing state aid for education that Governor Pataki had let languish for years.

Yet much of what he had hoped to get done didn't happen, with a large share of the blame resting on his desire to assert his primacy rather than work collaboratively with legislative leaders to fulfill his agenda.

'Just Cared About Himself'

"He never understood government or people, or what it took to be a human being and listen to the needs of others," one person who dealt with him for more than a decade said last week. "He didn't care about anyone but himself. In the end, that was his fatal flaw."

The man who early in his tenure said he was merely invoking a James Taylor song when he described himself to Assembly Republican leader James Tedisco as "a bleepin' steamroller" wound up evoking a lyric from Mr. Taylor's "Fire and Rain": "I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend."

That was the result of a standard he set even before he left his post as State Attorney General to become Governor, when he renounced his past support of then-State Comptroller Alan Hevesi, who had deployed a subordinate as a driver for his mentally and physically fragile wife.

Mr. Hevesi had misused a state worker for private benefit, however understandable the impulse might have been. When the Governor-elect was challenged by Republican state officials to live up to the high standards he had preached during his 2006 election campaign, Mr. Spitzer harshly cut his ties to a man he had lavishly praised not long before. Old loyalties were not going to become a political wedge that could be used against him to derail his reform agenda, or worse, muddy his own image.

But having established that code of conduct, he had no hope that even his own party's legislators would rally to his defense when he got caught in wrongdoing that could not be rationalized and produced sympathy only for his wife and children. It may not have involved personnel transgressions - although it's unclear whether State Troopers were asked to turn a blind eye to his liaisons with hookers or were unaware that Mr. Spitzer was sneaking out of one room and into another after they thought he had retired for the night - but the screwing around reeked of hypocrisy.

Another Foolish Battle

The scandal sets back the attempt of Democrats to win a majority in the State Senate. And Mr. Spitzer had already earned more than his share of ill will among legislators from his own party last year with his asinine battle to keep them from anointing one of their own - Tom DiNapoli - to succeed Mr. Hevesi as State Comptroller.

It wasn't as if Mr. DiNapoli lacked the ability to do the job, or even that his pedigree was different from previous City and State Comptrollers, many of whom had been legislators before taking on the role of chief fiscal monitor. It wasn't even as if picking a replacement was Mr. Spitzer's prerogative; indeed, some legislators questioned the decision of Assembly Speaker Shelly Silver to give him a say in the process.

But Mr. Spitzer was convinced he knew best, and when the Assembly decided differently, he traveled throughout the state castigating individual Democratic legislators in their districts for what he described as shameless cronyism. He wasn't exactly laying the foundation for a groundswell of support in the lower house of the Legislature once his world came tumbling down and Republicans in both the Senate and Assembly began beating the drums for impeachment.

One irony was that it was Assemblyman Tedisco - the man he had threatened to steamroll early last year - who threatened to start proceedings if Mr. Spitzer didn't resign on the day that he did. But that paled before the fact that Mr. Spitzer used state aircraft to fly to Washington for his fateful tryst with the hooker known as "Kristen" on Feb. 13, a day before the official business he conducted in the nation's capital when he testified before a congressional subcommittee.

Misplayed Bruno Battle

Some of Mr. Spitzer's top aides - if not the Governor himself - had gone after Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno on his use of state aircraft for dubious purposes, although in that case the liaisons were with campaign contributors rather than prostitutes.

The Senate's top Republican is the subject of an ongoing Federal investigation into his private business dealings, which whether illegal or not stand as examples - as do some of Mr. Silver's - of the kind of ethically questionable practices Mr. Spitzer had vowed to clean up if elected. A personal dislike also developed between Mr. Spitzer and Mr. Bruno, and again the then-Governor's adolescent streak and problems controlling his temper surfaced when he allegedly described his adversary as "senile." Mr. Bruno never sank to that level, and there are few who would quarrel with the epithet he chose to describe Mr. Spitzer: a "bully."

The Troopergate fiasco in which top Spitzer aides enlisted the State Police to put together a chronology of Mr. Bruno's travel on state planes and helicopters when the business pursued was more heavily political than governmental always seemed like a teenage prank gone sour. If the story had been played the way the Governor's Office hoped, it might have embarrassed Mr. Bruno, but not so much that he would have stepped down or that fellow Republicans' chances of re-election this November would have been jeopardized. When it didn't, the scolding was delivered by Mr. Spitzer's fellow Democrat, State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, and his standing among the public - which had elected him with 70 percent of the vote - fell below 50 percent favorable.

In retrospect, much of the conduct that roused Mr. Spitzer to righteous indignation mirrored his own abuses, or actually seemed benign in comparison.

Iffy Criminal Case

The criminal case against Mr. Spitzer is not a compelling one unless it turns out he used state or campaign funds. The Mann Act, intended when it was passed by Congress 98 years ago to prevent the transport of prostitutes across state lines, is rarely used, particularly against johns. And the "structuring" of bank transfers that Mr. Spitzer engaged in to come up with the money to pay the prostitution ring is usually prosecuted only when either tax fraud or drug-trafficking is involved; in his case he was moving the money around to keep his wife in the dark.

Tony Soprano, who dealt extensively in cash in his fictional world, kept large sums stashed in his basement and other parts of his property to avoid the sort of sudden withdrawals that cause banks to issue "Suspicious Activity Reports." It apparently never occurred to Mr. Spitzer that he might learn something from this different sort of hedge fund.

Senator Savino saw an irony to the events that were set in motion when Mr. Spitzer's bank notified a Long Island Internal Revenue Service office about his transactions, concerned that he might be using the money for illegal campaign purposes or else was the target of extortion.

'Civil Servant Nailed Him'

"It was a civil servant who took him down - just a lowly IRS agent," she said of the man who once was considered a possible future President, back before his character issues began to surface.

"There's an arrogance that everyone knows about Spitzer," said one person who knows him well. "But this is just pure silliness."

Except, he added, for the wife and three daughters whose world was rocked by last week's revelations, and those staff members who might lose their jobs once Mr. Paterson completes his transition.

Other than by those people, there was not much mourning of Mr. Spitzer's demise. Governor David Paterson has long had a good relationship with labor - not incidentally, his father, Basil, is labor counsel to several prominent unions including the UFT, Transport Workers Union Local 100, and Teamsters Local 237.

A statement issued by State AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes following the resignation said the new Governor "has proven time and again his willingness to work with organized labor on issues of shared concern and interest."

It made no mention of the man he had just replaced. "We're focusing on the future," was the explanation given by Mr. Hughes's spokesman, Mario Cilento.

Hillary's Omission

Hillary Clinton, who had a less-than-warm relationship with Mr. Spitzer, took a similar view, and it was notable that in her statement, she said her "thoughts are with Governor Spitzer's family" - not the man himself, who revived the extra-marital drama visited on her by her husband while he was President.

On Day 435 of his administration, when his sexual machinations came to public light, everything changed for Eliot Spitzer. There would be no great transformation of the state under his reign. Aside from inadvertently creating the circumstances that produced New York's first black Governor, he would be remembered more as a punch-line than a leader, a comet who unlike his predecessor burned out rather than fading away.

A child born into wealth in Riverdale had provided a different kind of Bronx tale than Mr. Palminteri, but his movie's words resonate in summing up Mr. Spitzer. "The saddest thing in life," the father played by Mr. DeNiro told his son, "is wasted talent."