Did Wall Street nail Gov Spitzer?

Was there a medium-size right-wing conspiracy to nail Governor Eliot Spitzer, above and beyond his own diligent efforts in the same cause? It certainly looks like it, the right-wingers in question very possibly hailing from Wall Street, whose ruling powers loathed Spitzer for his crusades against them when he was New York's attorney general. If threatened, Wall Street plays very dirty. Let's nose along the trail.

It is clear that the federal investigators' probe started with Spitzer, not the prostitution ring. Spitzer's bank wire transfers led them to the Emperors Club, the call-girl business efficiently administered by a 23-year-old Blair Academy grad, Cecil Suwal, on behalf of her 62-year-old boyfriend, Mark Brener, from a high-rise in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, with fine views of Manhattan.

The official story is that it was Spitzer's efforts to break down a $10,000 transfer to an account fronting for Emperors Club that alerted clerks at his Manhattan branch of the North Fork bank. A similar transaction at another bank where Spitzer had an account also supposedly twitched a red flag.

In a requirement originally aimed at drug dealers, all banks have to report deposits of $10,000 and more to the Treasury Department. People not wanting to have their bank snitch to the feds about their transactions routinely keep the sums below the red-light figure, and feds have told the banks to adjust their mandatory snooping to report $8,000-plus sums, or sums that add up to $10,000.

Spitzer divided his $10,000 transfer down into smaller units, thus allegedly triggering a federal probe. But it strains credulity to believe that North Fork's 'suspicious activity report' on a well-known client immediately aroused the interest of the government clerk scrutinising the hundreds of thousands of SARs churning through his computer in the