The Harder They Fall

MET criminal justice expert on why Spitzer fell when others might have survived

By Art Jahnke

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned yesterday, two days after it was revealed that he had booked a Washington hotel room for an interlude with a high-priced call girl and had allegedly spent up to $80,000 on other trysts with prostitutes from an escort service targeted by federal investigators. Spitzer, who earned a reputation as the “sheriff of Wall Street,” was both admired and loathed for his relentless pursuit of white-collar crime. BU Today spoke with Tom Nolan, a Metropolitan College associate professor of criminal justice, who spent 27 years as a Boston cop, about the deeds — and the arrogance — that brought down a legendary crime fighter.

BU Today: What was Spitzer thinking?
Nolan: I think at some unconscious level this guy wanted to be exposed. I just can’t fathom why he would expose himself to that kind of risk. I know he is a smart guy, he went to Princeton and Harvard, but he is clearly devoid of any street sense. For a public figure to engage in this kind of extremely high-risk behavior just defies common sense.

How much did arrogance have to do with his lack of common sense?
What I see is that a lot guys go to Washington, and it’s like they have fairy dust sprinkled over them. They think they become impervious to any harm. This guy had everything, the beautiful wife, the family, the money. I wonder if he ever realized how fortunate he was.

It’s been reported that he was caught in an investigation that began with suspicious cash transactions. How did that work?
Banks are required by federal law to report cash transactions. If you deposit more than $10,000 in cash, they will report that to the IRS. We don’t know yet how much cash he moved. We will know more as this unfolds. There was some notion that the movement of cash was done to conceal the source, and that’s what set this off. Wherever you see a federal investigation, it means they thought something serious was going on.

What laws did Spitzer violate?
We have the 1910 Mann Act, which prohibits the transporting of people across state lines for purposes of prostitution.

You were a cop. Seriously, do most police care about prostitution?
Typically, police don’t delve into things like that. But here you have financial impropriety and crossing state lines for the purpose of prostitution. But yes, prostitution is usually very low on the radar. It’s something they only get involved in on an exceptional basis. It’s a misdemeanor and in many cases, arguably a victimless crime. I think they went after this because it was a little more highbrow. You’ve got high-priced call girls, and it involves politicians. You’ve got concealment of money and the crossing-state-lines angle and the fact that this is person of high stature.

It’s hard to find someone with more enemies than Eliot Spitzer. Do you think he was set up by someone who knew this was going on?
Would I like to think that someone dropped a dime? Yes, but I don’t see that now. It appears as though it was the money.

So the moral of the story is, watch what you do with your money?
It always goes back to the money. Once you start screwing around with money, you expose yourself.

Why couldn’t Spitzer sweep this under the rug like so many others have done?
I think part of it is that sex sells. If we learned nothing else from the Clintons, we learned that sex is hot. Particularly when you have a situation where a person called himself a steamroller and was a crusader against just that kind of corruption.

Could another high-profile politician who did not call himself a steamroller survive this?
Maybe. Had this been another person — our governor, say — he may have weathered this. Because of the mantra that Spitzer adopted, and because he stood on a pedestal condemning others for this kind of behavior, his position became untenable. It is all about persona.

Art Jahnke can be reached at jahnke@bu.edu.

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