While still attorney general and partially responsible for hunting down and prosecuting prostitution rings, Eliot Spitzer started his long love affair with the Emperors Club, a well-organized hooker outfit that would eventually bring him down. It’s been reported that he spent over $80,000 on ladies from the club, and according to Peter Elkind’s Rough Justice, which is excerpted in Fortune this week (and picked up in “Page Six”), that number totaled closer to $100,000. And before he developed his affinity for “Kristen,” a.k.a. Ashley Dupré, Elkind reports, he had a special thing for a prostitute named “Angelina.”
When they first met in 2006, while Spitzer was still AG, Angelina didn’t really like him. “It was very businesslike,” Angelina said. “He was not one of those people who I would have said went out of their way to make me feel lovely and nice, like many did. It was very impersonal.” So the next time they met, she got “rather pushy” and told him that for $1,200 an hour, “we are going to sit and have a chitchat and have a nice little date here.” Spitzer seemed to like her feistiness, and shared with her some of the Scotch he’d brought along. They listened to classical music and he told her he was a lawyer. Eventually, after she got to know “George Fox” (as Spitzer called himself) a little better, and realized who he was, the dashing politician began to, well, change her:
Angelina’s time with Fox honed her interest in government and politics. She read a book written about him. She pored over his newspaper coverage. And as she followed his public battles, Fox’s favorite escort was privately cheering him on. “Treating people with disrespect in any circumstance is wrong,” Angelina said later. “And the way he went about it was wrong. But the stuff he was trying to do is admirable. And no one else is brave enough to do it. Whether that comes from narcissism or whatever — it doesn’t matter. It’s like a real sense of justice.”
Speaking of justice, the Fortune story also points out that despite all his blustering, GOP hit man Roger Stone actually had nothing to do with taking down Spitzer. Spitzer, through his sketchy financial wranglings, managed to do that all by himself. Let’s give credit where credit is due.
Eliot Spitzer’s flameout [Fortune]
