NEW YORK | In a stunningly swift fall from grace, Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned Wednesday amid a call-girl scandal that left him facing the prospect of criminal charges and perhaps disbarment.
He made his announcement without securing a plea bargain with federal prosecutors, though one law enforcement official said the former governor was believed to be negotiating one. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.
Spitzer will be succeeded on Monday by Lt. Gov. David Paterson, a fellow Democrat who becomes New York’s first black governor and the nation’s first legally blind chief executive.
Announcing his resignation, Spitzer said: “I cannot allow my private failings to disrupt the people’s work.”
Among the possible charges that law enforcement authorities said could be brought against the former governor: soliciting and paying for sex; violating the Mann Act, the 1910 federal law that makes it a crime to take someone across state lines for immoral purposes; violating bans on interstate travel with intent to commit a crime; and illegally arranging cash transactions to conceal their purpose.
Conviction on some of the charges could carry a prison term of more than five years.
In a statement issued after Spitzer quit, U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia, the chief federal prosecutor in New York, said: “There is no agreement between this office and Gov. Eliot Spitzer relating to his resignation or any other matter.”

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Eliot Spitzer’s resignation is a tragedy in the strictest classical sense: The legal substance of his offenses pales before his stupidity, hypocrisy, and, yes, immorality in committing them. The legal substance pales also before the damage his character flaws have wreaked upon the public need and, in his election, its hope for real government and market reform.
Since Spitzer, the former prosecutor and world-class public moralist, knew that high-priced prostitution rings often swim in organized crime and function as staging grounds for blackmail of prominent people, he has ended his public life perversely incarnating Henry Kissinger’s already perverse observation that “Power is the greatest aphrodisiac.”
But while Spitzer brought this on himself, that doesn’t let his Republican inquisitors entirely off the hook.
Their professional narrative is that the case simply fell into their laps and that they handled it with all due restraint: A routine bank review turned up “suspicious activity;” a routine follow-up by the IRS and then the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network showed that a public official was involved, thereby bumping the matter to the FBI and the U.S. Attorney, who obtained a wiretap of conversations which, of course, they had to listen to and parse. All they did after that was inform Spitzer, as the law also requires them to do.

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Ashley Alexandra Dupree was identified as “Kristen”, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer’s hooker at the Emperor’s Club VIP.
Dupre, whose real name is Ashley Youmans, was paid almost $4000 by Spitzer in a Feb. 23 rendezvous at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C.
The prostitution scandal caused Spitzer to resign yesterday, effective Mar. 17.
Dupre is an aspiring musician and has posted songs on her MySpace page. Since her identity has gone public, her song and MySpace page views have skyrocketed.
For more people news, please check out http://news.finditt.com/NewsList.aspx?cat=14&wcat=16

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When Silda Spitzer became a political wife she sought advice from Hillary Clinton.
She could never have imagined that she might one day face an agonising decision over whether to “stand by her man” in public — as Mrs Clinton had to.
A hard-driving corporate lawyer who met her husband at Harvard Law School, Mrs Spitzer sacrificed her career after marrying into one of New York’s richest families.
Now, faced with public humiliation, she looked dazed as she appeared alongside her husband — for 67 seconds — as he issued a public apology about the scandal on Monday. Earlier in the day she was reportedly one of the few voices in his inner circle counselling him not to resign in haste.
Mrs Spitzer, born Silda Wall in the small town of Concord, North Carolina, still uses her maiden name for professional purposes. One of three siblings, she likes to tell friends that her name — a variation of the old German Serilda — means “Teutonic war goddess”.
Her father, Robert, made a comfortable living as a hospital administrator. When she applied for college her mother, Trilby, insisted that she list her mother’s profession as “home administrator” rather than housewife.
The family spent summer holidays at the beach. Years later her father confessed that he hated the sea and sand.

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