Word: spitzers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...maybe it shouldn't have been. Although Spitzer had never before shown signs of a personal temperament that ran to the louche - Masters says his treatment of past girlfriends and female employees was always respectful - he had a long history of recklessness, a sense that the usual boundaries of authority didn't apply...
...Part of it was being not just the brilliant son of a multimillionaire - someone who surely sensed entitlement from an early age - but the son of a particular multimillionaire, Bernard Spitzer. Bernard (who is in his 80s and suffering from Parkinson's) was a fierce, demanding parent. He once reduced Eliot to tears during a game of Monopoly. Bernard, a real estate developer, had ordered his son - at the time a boy of 7 or 8 - to sell him a piece of property; Eliot then couldn't afford the rent when a roll of the dice landed him on that...
...Eliot Spitzer always had a complex relationship with authority. As attorney general of New York - the position he held for eight years before winning the governorship - he made a name for himself by aggressively prosecuting Wall Street fraud; this magazine called him "Crusader of the Year...
...many on Wall Street felt he went too far, pressuring ethically wayward but not necessarily criminal companies into agreeing to unfairly large settlements by threatening CEOs with prolonged legal battles. (Spitzer extracted at least $5 billion in penalties from financial firms, according to Masters.) In December 2005, former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead, who was then chairing the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., alleged that Spitzer tried to bully him after Whitehead wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed criticizing the attorney general's zealotry: "I will be coming after you," Spitzer allegedly told Whitehead, who said he immediately took notes...
...Spitzer got into trouble again just after taking office as governor. After reporters inquired as to whether Spitzer had used a state plane to fly to California for a fund-raising trip - he had not - Dopp asked state troopers to look into the state-funded travel habits of Spitzer's chief antagonist, Republican state senate leader Joseph Bruno. When the trooper request was made public, the state G.O.P. objected bitterly. Teams of investigators are still looking into whether the governor and his people illegally used their authority to try to intimidate Bruno...