So back in April, 2002, I had just wrapped up the "Flash Notes/E-mail" project and was planning on taking off a couple of days from work to go check out the cherry blossoms in Washington, DC. No, I did not have a room booked at the Mayflower although wouldn't that have been ironic.
I went into the office to pick up a book to bring for the train ride down, and was stopped by one of the attorneys that I frequently worked for on my projects. I was told to report to a conference room (mind you, I was not dressed appropriately for a work meeting) immediately. Thinking that I was going to get chewed out for being at the office improperly dressed, I then found out that was the least of Merrill Lynch's concerns. Silly me.
Eliot Spitzer, then the NYS Attorney General, had decided to sue Merrill Lynch under an antiquated law known as the Martin Act, and basically had gotten an injunction that prevented us from issuing research of any kind. Everyone was scrambling and I had the good fortune of having been at the wrong place at the wrong time. A vicious rumor had circulated that I possessed some of the necessary skills needed to help solve this problem. Lucky me.
What ensued was 7 months of long days of hard work, frustration and fortunately a happy ending for me on a personal level. But things were so dire in those first few weeks that at one point, my male manager personally offered to hit Duane Reade to get me anything I needed, including feminine products (now that's leadership). It was so disheartening to read the papers everyday when you knew that much of what you read were snippets and did not provide full context.
Because of the exposure, I had the opportunity to work with some very senior people in the firm. And I had the chance to hear about meetings with Mr. Spitzer, most of which were characterized by words that are not appropriate for a family-friendly blog. The problems were more around leaks by the Attorney General's office and threats made by them to ruin peoples' lives if we didn't acquiesce to everything they wanted right then and there. This is regardless of the actual truth factor. Clearly someone who portrayed himself a man of integrity but was anything but.
Mr. Spitzer now had his national and, to a certain extent, his international stage, so he decided to continue to push for more reforms. I have no idea where all of the money went from all of the firms he fined. I know it didn't lower my folks' property taxes. Mr. Spitzer continued to grandstand and bully anyone who dared to oppose him. Even though we have a system of innocent until proven guilty, the nature of today's press makes it very difficult to undo any damage caused by erroneous information.
Fast forward to 2006 to when Mr. Spitzer was elected Governor of NYS. Now that I was an out-of-state person, I obviously couldn't cast a vote, but I was stunned by how much Wall Street and countless others forgot about how they were treated by this person. Mr. Spitzer was elected by a landslide, one of the largest margins ever apparently. It is because of my experience in 2002 that I can almost guarantee that I will never vote for a career prosecutor to any executive-branch office. They didn't learn how to play nice with other kids in the sandbox.
In his first year, Mr. Spitzer arrogantly assumed that his style would translate with the NYS Legislature. Yeah, that worked. The threatening of people continued - I tried using the 'I'm a **cking steamroller' line with my new colleagues, and for some reason it didn't do me any favors. OK, just kidding. But Mr. Spitzer thought it was a great way to ingratiate himself with his legislative branch. Other miscues took place over that initial year but no one could foresee what was to come....
Yesterday's news was shocking and caused the financial markets to trend upward because of all of the jubilant celebrations most likely taking place at every firm across Wall Street. Mr. Spitzer's lack of discretion and respect for his marriage, even while purporting himself as a man of high integrity, morality and ethics, is a disgrace to his family and to his constituents. I bet he tried to threaten the Feds when they told him the story was going to break. See Eliot doesn't like to lose. But boy oh boy, that would have been a great call to listen in on. His arrogance in that he wouldn't get caught is pretty funny given the tactics he employed when prosecuting people.
In exchanging some e-mails with former colleagues from that 2002 period, here are some of the quotes:
- Loved seeing him squirm
- Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy
- Once a man of low integrity, always a man of low integrity
- Hilarious
"He’s a hypocrite. He destroyed reputations of people who had good reputations, deserved reputations. He talked today about his standards, but what he didn’t talk about was the standards he held everybody else to that he couldn’t keep…We all have our own private hells. I hope his private hell is hotter than anybody else’s.”
Here was another good one:
"I didn’t hear any cheer, but I heard a lot of animated conversation, and somebody said the best thing that you could own yesterday was the nearest liquor store to Ken Langone’s house, because there were probably 33 cases of champagne being ordered.”
What did we drink last night? At first, I thought I would get out a particularly expensive bottle of wine to celebrate because really it was the insanity of that project that drove me to Greece, which in turn drove me to my future husband (deliberately corny and geeky statement by design). But then I found a bottle with a great name - "Heart of Darkness" made by Bonny Doon. It went down quite nicely.
[Note that I am not advocating my former firm's innocence or guilt. My beef is the process in which a settlement was obtained. Also given that this post is somewhat of a political nature, it is only fair to note that this is my opinion, and not Marc's.]