By: KENNETH MAXWELL

Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2   

It was an extraordinary fall from grace. The crusading, hard-edged, moralistic, take no hostages, ambitious, 48 year-old Governor Eliot Spitzer brought down, not by his multiple enemies, by his own foolishness and arrogance.

Spitzer was caught up in a federal wire-tapping and banking surveillance case which involved a high-end prostitution ring. The federal indictment listed Mr. Spitzer as one of the clients, client number nine to be precise, in court documents charging four other people with managing an international prostitution ring. Apparently the governor had hired a prostitute who had traveled down from New York to meet him at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC, on February 13, and he paid her U$4,300 for her services.

New Yorkers who are not easily shocked were aghast at the Governor's hubris. His political support evaporated overnight. And a sex scandal in New York is the last thing New York Senator Hillary Clinton needed in the middle of a hard fought presidential campaign, reminding everyone, yet again, of her own wayward husband's high risk frolics in the Oval Office.

Eliot Spitzer, son of a wealthy New York real estate baron, educated at Princeton and Harvard Law School, made his reputation as attorney general of the State of New York, an elected position he held from 1999 until 2006. As attorney general he become a relentless hammer of the big shots on Wall Street, taking aim at the titans of the financial markets who were more used to quiet deference than high profile prosecutions. Among Spitzer's targets were major Wall Street firms charged with tainted stock research; investigations into fraud in the mutual fund industry, charges against the head of the New York stock exchange, Richard Grasso, for excessive compensation; charges against March & McLennan for cheating corporate clients; and not least bringing down the powerful chief executive of the American International Group, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg.

Needless to say Wall Street is ecstatic with Mr. Spitzer's self destruction. The Wall Street Journal's editorial summarized the matter on Monday: "Governor Spitzer who made his career by specializing not just in the prosecution, but the ruin of other men, is himself almost certainly ruined." In fact that is what happened. And in 48 hours.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper.