Keeping A Close Eye On Wall Street

Albany isn't likely to be his last stop. At 44, Spitzer comes up on any Democrat's shortlist of future presidential candidates (something he says he has given no thought to at all). Joe Lieberman, John Kerry, Richard Gephardt and Wesley Clark have all gone to see him, hoping for his endorsement, NEWSWEEK has learned. Clark let it be known he'd consider asking him to join his cabinet, or even to be his running mate. Spitzer isn't backing any of the candidates yet, though people close to him said he toyed with coming out for Kerry, who impressed him when they met. "Everyone is talking about him, not just Democrats," says Donna Brazile, who managed Al Gore's 2000 campaign. "What he does resonates with ordinary people."

Spitzer would seem an unlikely champion of the common man. He grew up rich in Riverdale, N.Y., the son of an engineer who made a fortune in real estate. He was intense, and a good student. He attended the exclusive Horace Mann School, then went on to Princeton and Harvard Law. But in the Spitzer household, privilege came with demands. "Though I had it very easy," Spitzer says, "I knew that my dad had not, and that there was an expectation of hard work." The atmosphere was proper: asked what kind of kid his son was, Spitzer's father replied, "The application of the word 'normalcy' would be appropriate." Spitzer learned verbal combat at the dinner table, where the children were required to lead discussions about a chosen topic. His father, Spitzer says, was quick to pounce on any failure of fact or logic. "Every dinner was a debate forum." Spitzer and his wife, Silda Wall, who was a law-school classmate, have similar--but less intimidating--round tables with their own three daughters.

After law school he tried private practice, and worked as a prosecutor in Manhattan, where he ran a sting operation to shut down the Gambino crime family's stranglehold on trucks in the city's garment district. He opened a fake sweatshop run by undercover cops and manned by real workers who didn't know the place was a setup. "Here is Eliot Spitzer, of Harvard Law School--he's so proud showing me how good the buttonhole is that his workers have sewn, how good the zipper is," says Michael Cherkasky, Spitzer's former boss. "And I'm thinking, Eliot, we've gone too far with this."

That kind of intensity can make Spitzer intimidating to work for. Those close to him say he isn't the kind of boss who lords over his underlings. But his temper can get frightening when he believes someone has let him down. "He only flashes it on the rarest of occasions," says Cherkasky. "It's 'I'm trusting you to get this right. That's your job. You're endangering my work and all these other people's work with your sloppiness'."

Spitzer spent millions on his first attempt to become attorney general in 1994, but lost. He won the second time out four years later, in a race so close it took six bitter weeks to count the votes. At first he worried that taking on the investment industry might actually spell the end of his political career. "He thought that it could absolutely dry up his financial resources to be an implacable enemy of Wall Street," says a close friend. "He was crossing swords with his people--the Harvard people, the Princeton people, the people he grew up with."

Spitzer admits he's probably lost a few of his many friends who work on Wall Street. Cliff Sloan, a longtime friend, recalls Spitzer's puncturing the tension at a dinner with a group of people who were upset with him. One of them asked why he hadn't started eating, says Sloan. "He said he was waiting for them to taste the food first." Spitzer also finds himself the occasional target of spontaneous rage. At a recent dinner party a woman walked up to him and threw a fit. "What you're doing is outrageous; it's wrong," she fumed. He listened politely, then deadpanned, "Where do you work?"