When Eliot Spitzer dragged his feet over resigning the governorship, media speculation was rampant that the Dem governor was using his office as a bargaining chip, trading his job for assurance that he will escape prosecution or prison on federal charges. But Michael Garcia, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, made it a point to put the kibosh on the suggestion that Spitzer would waltz away from his hooker scandal by releasing a statement that said: “There is no agreement between this office and Governor Eliot Spitzer, relating to his resignation or any other matter.”

Former CT federal prosecutor H. James Pickerstein tells the New York Post that “it's against very, very firm government policy, especially when dealing with a high elected official” [to drop a criminal investigation in return for a resignation] “because the government doesn't want to appear that it is in any way interfering with the electoral process.”

Then too, since at this point only Spitzer knows what, exactly, he’s done to break the law prosecutors would be buying a pig in a poke in such a deal.

An anonymous former prosecutor tells New York Law Journal, “On the one hand, you don't want to be unfair by prosecuting someone for conduct the average person wouldn't be prosecuted for, but you also don't want to create the false impression that someone is getting away with something because they are a public figure or a celebrity.”

An unnamed a law-enforcement source tells The Post that federal investigators will likely spend the next several months examining Spitzer's bank, credit-card and other financial records, going as far back as the beginning of his tenure as NY's attorney general, before they determining whether, or how, to prosecute him.

Criminal lawyers and former prosecutors are sharply at odds over whether Spitzer will be prosecuted for – or can be convicted of – violating the Mann Act (transporting a person across state lines for immoral purposes); money-laundering (purchasing money orders to pay for his trysts); or structuring (making three wire transfers of less than $10,000 each from an account at North Fork Bank to an dummy corporation that fronted for the Emperors Club).

The Mann Act is rarely prosecuted these days, and is meant to punish pimps, not johns. Spitzer’s defense can also make a plausible case that his evasive financial transactions were aimed at avoiding embarrassment, not to break the law willfully. Here’s a round-up of the legal arguments for and against charging Spitzer with each of the federal offenses he allegedly committed:

† Mann Act: NY criminal defense attorney Harlan J. Protass, an adjunct professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of law, explains that the Mann Act “proscribes the knowing persuasion, inducement, enticement, or coercion of ‘any individual to travel’ between states ‘to engage in prostitution, or in any sexual activity for which any person can be charged with a criminal offense,’” meaning that Spitzer’s paying for a train ticket for “Kristen” to travel from NY to Washington, D.C. “would almost surely fall within the range of conduct prohibited by the Mann Act.” While conceding that “the Mann Act technically applies [in this case,” Former prosecutor Andrew C. Hruska disagrees, telling New York Law Journal that the statute is “generally is reserved for cases involving force - sex transactions or illegal labor trafficking. It's the force that's the material part.”

† Money-Laundering: “Money laundering requires the use of money that is already dirty - the statute starts out with the funds having to be the proceeds of specific unlawful activity and this appears to be clean money,” defense attorney Kathryn Keneally, who specializes in white-collar crime, explains to New York Law Journal. Professor Protass begs to differ, pointing out that while the money started out clean, Spitzer’s “payments to shell corporations controlled by Emperors' Club VIP may constitute … participation in a money-laundering conspiracy.”

† Structuring: "The crime of structuring requires that you act to keep the cash transaction under the $10,000 reporting threshold and it doesn't look like he needed [to break down] $10,000," Keneally, tells New York Law Journal. Former prosecutor Hruska adds, “As in any white-collar case where there is not strict liability, the government has to prove intent - the hurdle is to show there was the intent to avoid the currency reporting requirements.”

Leaving aside the merits of any of the above arguments Alan Dershowitz criticizes the FBI for monitoring Spitzer’s activities in the first place:

There is no hard evidence that Eliot Spitzer was targeted for investigation, but the story of how he was caught does not ring entirely true to many experienced former prosecutors and current criminal lawyers. The New York Times reported that the revelations began with a routine tax inquiry by revenue agents "conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks." …

We are talking about thousands, not millions, of dollars. We are also talking about a man who is a multimillionaire with numerous investments and purchases. The idea that federal investigators would focus on a few transactions to corporations - that were not themselves under investigation - raises as many questions as answers.

Money laundering, structuring and related financial crimes are designed to ferret out organized crime, drug dealing, terrorism and large-scale financial manipulation. They were not enacted to give the federal government the power to inquire into the sexual or financial activities of men who move money in order to hide payments to prostitutes.

Once federal authorities concluded that the “suspicious financial transactions” attributed to Mr. Spitzer did not fit into any of the paradigms for which the statutes were enacted, they should have closed the investigation. It's simply none of the federal government's business that a man may have been moving his own money around in order to keep his wife in the dark about his private sexual peccadilloes.

All well and good, but Attorney General Spizter would have relentlessly and ruthlessly pursued these charges -  even if the criminal investigation ultimately petered out - if only to intimidate, harass and ultimately destroy his target.    

Even if he ultimately avoids criminal prosecution, Spitzer may face professional discipline – either in the form of a private letter of admonition or a public censure – and could even be disbarred, as Bill Clinton was after his perjury conviction in the Paula Jones case.

Based on the facts that have emerged to date, it’s impossible to determine whether Spitzer’s actions would merit a private admonition or public censure, Barry Kamins, former deputy chief counsel at the 1st Department disciplinary committee, tells New York Law Journal. But Spitzer’s prominence and the publicity surrounding his transgressions may force the committee to go public with its condemnation, he adds. Or not – Spitzer’s resignation is an “acknowledgement of contrition and remorse which would be a very significant factor in evaluating the proper punishment,” counters Michael S. Ross, a former state and federal prosecutor.  

What about Spitzer’s law license being suspended or revoked? It’s possible, says attorney Richard Godoski, because he is a public figure, thus his transgressions "reflecting more seriously on the legal profession." Absent criminal charges, the NY state bar is not likely to move against Spitzer, counters Richard A. Zitrin, who teaches legal ethics at the Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.

Finally, even if Spitzer keeps his law license, with his resignation Spitzer loses his superdelegate status to the Dem National Convention in August, and Hillary Clinton is down one pledged delegate.

Editorial Note: This post was amended to correct Michael Garcia's title. 

What Does A John Get For $5K An Hour?

Columnist and former Dan Quayle press secretary Rich Galen can’t for the life of him figure out what a ho could possibly do for a client that’s worth thousands of dollars an hour: “I have a fairly active imagination, but even if A LOT of Beach Volleyball were involved, I can't think of anything which would be worth $3,100 per hour.”

Galen’s not the only one who wants to know – although he may be the only one to admit publicly that he finds Beach Volleyball erotic.

Before the Emperors Club Web site was taken down, reporters for The Washington Post noted that clients were promised that its services would make life “more peaceful, balanced, beautiful and meaningful” – but warned that “under no condition will our escorts ever accept money for services which are considered indecent.” The WaPo also reports. “Bargain prostitutes started at $1,000 an hour.  …  In recruiting employees, the Emperors Club also offered the possibility that women could become an “Icon” - an elite prostitute available to the most loyal clients for a minimum of $5,500 an hour.”

The Stiletto imagines that at those obscene prices, just about nothing a man would want would be considered “indecent” – though one of the “schedulers” was recorded on the wiretap suggesting that soon-to-be-former Governor Eliot Spitzer (D-NY) may have actually thought up an activity that a $5,500-an-hour hooker would find beyond the pale.

Anyway, when the media weren’t busy speculating what Spitzer could be charged with they were trying to find out what clients could expect for a one-hour tryst that cost thousands of dollars.

Here’s the, um, analysis by the WaPo’s “flawed mortal” Harold Meyerson:

I'm not sure that I've even had a sexual fantasy that, if actualized, would be worth $5,500 an hour. Of course, fantasies can involve particular, unattainable persons, and an economist might say that if the client has an obsession that only a certain provider could satisfy, that could drive the price way up.

Of all the details in the transcript of the back-and-forth between Spitzer and the Emperors Club's traffic manager, the one I find most mind-boggling is when Spitzer, just before he hooks up with his hooker, asks to be reminded of what the lady looks like.

He's paying $4,300 for this experience and … he can't remember whether he booked tall or short, blond or brunette? We're not talking obsession here. We're talking positional goods.

Positional goods are those commodities that are more valuable than their run-of-the-mill counterparts because a special status attaches to them, since only a select few can have them. Since the Web sites on which prostitutes advertise indicate that the average hourly rate is around $300, the Emperors Club maximum rate, which is roughly 18 times higher, could be justified by the particular appeals and skills of its hookers. I haven't conducted empirical research on this one, but let me just say: I doubt it.

I suspect that what makes a prostitute worth $5,500 an hour is that she costs $5,500 an hour. The value here doesn't dictate the price. The price, rather, dictates the value.

The WaPo ran a second piece that same day investigating the question (using a different price point, however): What do you get when you pay a prostitute $4,300? “Other than that,” here’s what:

[A] pledge of ironclad silence, and the promise of an unusually attractive, intelligent companion - albeit one who measures companionship by the hour. …

[T]he economic logic of high-end prostitution is the same everywhere. Often, they say, it's not what happens in the bedroom that costs. It's a question of who comes in, and what does - or doesn't - come out. …

But the vice squad detectives and sociologists interviewed by the paper agree with Myerson that the price dictates the value:

“The people charging $50 an hour on Route 1 and those charging $300 are probably for the same acts,” said Capt. Ron Lantz of the Fairfax County vice unit. “You're just getting charged more at Tysons [hotels] for women who consider themselves a higher quality.”

That promise of quality often includes good looks, a clean bill of health and the ability to serve as a charming conversationalist and elegant companion at social functions. In some cases, experts said, this Hollywood fantasy can actually be true: Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia University who has interviewed prostitutes in New York City, said some of them left behind highly skilled jobs.

Venkatesh said his research showed that, in more than 40 percent of the liaisons between johns and prostitutes at this high price point, no sexual intercourse actually occurred. “It's an expensive conversation" in some cases, Venkatesh said. “It happens a lot more than we think.”

So the bottom line is: If you have sex with a high-priced ho, you’re buying her silence. If you don’t have sex with a high-priced ho, you’re buying her witty conversation. Considering that most men can easily get sex without paying for it, and most women won’t shut up The Stiletto thinks high-priced hookers are a rip-off.

Silda’s Not The Only Woman Hurt By Spitzer

Naturally, when word got out that soon-to-be-ex Governor Eliot Spitzer (D-NY) had a thing for high-priced hos barely older than his children, most people’s sympathies were with his wife, Silda, and daughters Elyssa, 17, Sarabeth, 15, and Jenna, 13. But not political reporters and analysts. They were wringing their hands over how the sordid mess affected the other woman in Spitzer’s life.

No, not “Kristen.” Hillary.

The Nation’s John Nichols on how Spitzer’s skanky behavior throws the NY senator’s presidential campaign off message in these crucial days leading to the PA primary:

Hillary Clinton really wanted the endorsement of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer for her presidential race.

She got it.

Now, however, she's got another campaign headache. …

It's not that Clinton is tied in any way to the governor's troubles.

Rather, he is a distraction - the big player in her adopted home state who is now in big, big trouble.

The Clinton campaign immediately began sponging Spitzer's name from the Senator's campaign website - just as Idaho Senator Larry Craig's name disappeared from the website of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney after Craig's bathroom troubles in Minneapolis. …

The media won't let go of this one, and sooner or later Tim Russert and Chris Matthews are going to be obsessed with everything Hillary Clinton has to say about it. Clinton will be answering breathless questions about all her governor's troubles, about whether he should resign and, of course, about her impressions of what it means when prominent political players - like governors or, say, presidents in the 1990s - get wrapped up in sex scandals.

Washington Post White House correspondent Peter Baker explains how the Spitzer sex scandal brings back memories that the Clinton campaign has been trying to squelch from the beginning:

[H]is apparent involvement with a prostitution ring has not only distracted attention from her efforts to take down the front-runner, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), it has also brought back unhelpful memories of her own husband's dalliances in office. There on cable television again were pictures of Bill Clinton hugging Monica S. Lewinsky. And the image of Spitzer's wife standing painfully by his side while he acknowledged unspecified wrongdoing could not help but remind some of Hillary Clinton's own stand-by-her-man moment.

This certainly is not the way Clinton's strategists would have mapped out this week on the campaign trail. They want voters to be thinking about that 3 a.m. phone call in terms of who is ready to handle a crisis in the White House, not in terms of where an unfaithful husband might be catting around town. And, sure enough, the late-night comedians wasted little time linking the Spitzer case to the Clintons. Jay Leno joked Monday night that Spitzer's scandal “means Hillary Clinton is now only the second angriest woman in the state of New York.” David Letterman offered a Top 10 List of excuses Spitzer might cite, including the No. 1 excuse: “I thought Bill Clinton legalized this years ago.”

The Atlantic’s Matt Yglesias wonders whether the whole sordid affair will lead people to “worry about the fact that putting Bill Clinton back in the White House seems to raise the possibility of once again having a Democratic administration derailed by a sex scandal.”

While Baker calls Spitzer “a bad-luck charm” for Hillary, The Nation’s Jon Wiener takes a contrarian view:

A woman president is not going to get arrested for soliciting sex in a rest room at the Minneapolis airport.

A woman president is not going to be caught sending hot text messages to young congressional pages.

Many voters may find these arguments persuasive in the wake of the Elliot Spitzer story: if you want to avoid losing your leaders to sex scandals, vote for a woman. …

The question is not whether we will see new revelations, but whether disgust over

Spitzer's destruction of his career will lead some voters to look to a woman for freedom from sex scandals.

Of course, Wiener’s argument fails if conclusive evidence ever materializes that Hillary is a practicing lesbian, as has been rumored for years – not that there’s anything wrong with that, other than losing her status as an aggrieved wife by matching Bill’s marital infidelity with her own.

Then there’s New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who feels personally betrayed, by Spitzer – never mind Silda, or even Hillary for that matter: “I thought electing Eliot Spitzer governor of New York was a really good idea. … [A]lthough Spitzer has been in New York politics for years and years, I never ever heard a single person say, “What if it turns out he’s paying for $1,000-an-hour call girls with wire transfers - you know, like the ones he used as evidence when he was attorney general? Really, it never came up.”
 

Is This One Of Those Jobs That “Americans Won’t Do?”: Part VIII

The city of Northampton, MA, has hired professional sniffers from Environmental Compliance Services in Agawam to evaluate the odiferousness of the Glendale Road landfill whenever a resident in the area complains about malodorous breezes wafting from the dump. Trained sniffers rate the intensity of the stench on a scale of 1 to 8, with 8 being the rankest possible. Between February 29^th, when the $24,999 contract went into effect, and March 8^th professional sniffers made 20 visits to the landfill -  at $600 a pop, $750 after 5 p.m. -  to check out 32 odor complaints. Ward 6 Councilor Marianne L. LaBarge tells The Republican that, “[a] man came in, and I heard him say he was hired to detect odors with his nose, that he was a certified nose sniffer. I've heard of wine tasters. ...”

Editorial Note: You’d be amazed at some of the jobs Americans are doing. To read previous posts in the “Is This One Of Those Jobs …” series, click here (second item), here (third item), here (third item), here (second item), here, here and here.

Well-Chosen Words: Part III

Addressing the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a trade group representing 200 black newspapers, regarding Geraldine Ferraro’s lament about race trumping gender amongst primary voters (“If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman … he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”) Hillary reiterated that she rejects, repudiates and regrets Ferraro’s remarks. But does she renounce them? Is there any other repetitive, redundant rhetoric Hillary could have restated to register how reprehensible she thinks they were?

BTW, though still a Hillary supporter Ferraro resigned from the campaign’s finance committee so “so I can speak for myself.”