The Spitzer Sting

Was there a medium-sized right-wing conspiracy to nail Eliot Spitzer, above and beyond Spitzer's own diligent efforts in the same cause? It certainly looks like it. It's clear that the feds start ed with Spitzer, whose wire transfers led them to the Emperors Club VIP, a prostitution business efficiently administered by a 23-year-old Blair Academy grad, Cecil "Katie" Suwal, on behalf of her 62-year-old boyfriend, Mark Brener, from a high-rise in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, with fine views of Manhattan.

The official line is that it was Spitzer's efforts to break down a $10,000 transfer to an account fronting for Emperors Club that alerted clerks at his Manhattan branch of Capital One's North Fork bank. A similar transaction at another bank where Spitzer had an account also supposedly twitched a red flag. Banks have to report transactions of $10,000 and up to the Treasury Department. People not wanting to have their bank snitch to the feds about their transactions routinely keep the sums below the red-light figure, so the feds have told the banks to adjust their mandatory snooping to report smaller sums, or sums that add up to $10,000.

Like innumerable other affronts to privacy, this reporting requirement began as a tool in the "war on drugs" and is now part of the furniture of our lives. All the same, it strains credulity to believe that North Fork's "suspicious activity report" on a well-known and presumably valued client immediately aroused the interest of the IRS employee scrutinizing the many SARs churning through his computer on Long Island. The official version has the IRS man noting Spitzer's name, then passing the information up the food chain to the Justice Department and the US Attorney's office in Manhattan.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.