Baltimore Sun- Whatever Eliot Spitzer may have done in Room 871 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on Valentine’s Day, he was the right person at the right time on Wall Street in the early 2000s. Of course Wall Street does not acknowledge this.
"I have never had any doubt about his lack of character and integrity, and he’s proven me correct," former New York Stock Exchange director Kenneth Langone told the Associated Press after Spitzer was reportedly caught on tape summoning a hooker. (Langone was one of Spitzer’s targets.)
Impugning the prosecutor, however, changes nothing about the shenanigans he uncovered. That gleeful sound coming from Lower Manhattan yesterday? It’s a direct measure of how much Spitzer accomplished as New York’s attorney general.
When Spitzer started upending rocks in 2002, America knew there was something sleazy in corporate finance. Enron was in bankruptcy. WorldCom and other telecom companies were imploding. People were losing homes, in some cases, on bad bets on over hyped Internet stocks.
