Sir Elliot Spitzer, NYS Atty General

Let's face it, the public sector doesn't pay much.
As a result, we get a lot of morons and puppets as the head of our Federal agencies . . . people like Elaine Chao, Ann Veneman, and Harvey Pitt just to name a few.

Guliani made his name by going after Mike Milken.
Spitzer is simply doing the same in his dragnet of Wall Street.

And for anyone who thinks that the research that was coming out of Wall Street from 1998-2000 was worth more than toilet paper, I have a bridge in great condition that I'd like to sell them!
 
Spitzer is pure POS. Why was he silent in the 90's? Because he was a major investor in Cramer Berkowitz. Hope he crashes and burns.
 
"Fast forward to 1998, the year Cramer, Berkowitz & Co. (Jeff Berkowitz was named full partner in 1998) faced "the perfect storm" of financial circumstances. Cramer had been generating average profits of 24 percent a year since 1987, beating the market averages, and making hundreds of millions of dollars for his clients. Then came the failure of the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund, the collapse of the Russian stock market, and a fierce U.S. stock slump. As a personal favor to his friend Eliot Spitzer, now attorney general of the state of New York, Cramer opened his normally closed fund to redemptions, just at the point when it was down 25 percent for the year. To Cramer's astonishment and anger, the fund's partners began withdrawing capital despite Cramer's stellar performance up until this slump. Cramer Berkowitz faced a liquidity crisis-big time."

From "Confessions of a Street Addict"
By James J. Cramer, Simon & Schuster, 2002
 
From what I’ve seen on the street, almost any legal action on the side of investors is usually a scam of one sort or another.

For example, when PG got into hot water over the basis swap deal with Bankers Trust, they started a suit saying “we did not understand the products and they stiffed us”, while in reality they had very knowledgeable people running the treasury dept. The swap was a bet on the short rates being lower then the long rates and the rates went exactly in an opposite direction. PG was hit with some 300 million loss. If the rates stayed where they did, PG would have made a killing. B.T, on the other side, was just a market-maker for this speculative position and was fully hedged. The court in Cincinatti decided that BT is not entitled to the full payment of 300. As a result, BT lost some 200 million because whatever they gained from the swap, they lost on hedges.

Another example is a recent case, when some guy invested 170 million of his “hard-earned” money into commodity futures, lost almost all of it (some 150 M), and then tried to sue the broker (Bear Stearns) on similar basis – “the risks were not explained to him”. The guy was a seasoned speculator who took a very risky position. Luckily enough, his case was overturned in Supreme Court and he lost.

I have not followed the story with Eliot S, but I am willing to bet that his case against the Wall Street is very similar and is somewhat fabricated. At least one thing I can say – using 20/20 hindsight is very easy for an attorney, to be a true hero he should have started in ’99.
 
There is another book which contains info about Eliot Spitzer's relationship with Jim Cramer's hedge fund. Nicholas Maier was a trader at Cramer's hedge fund who wrote a "tell-all" book. His book is kind of lightweight, but it does offer another perspective of Cramer, than what Cramer himself offers in his own books. The Maier book is missing an index.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Trading With The Enemy by Nicholas Maier.
Chapter 4 Answer the F---ing Trading Lines
circa 1994 (before Spitzer was NYS AG)
p.32-33
  "You can't let just anyone talk to Jim!" said Jeff [Berkowitz]. "Ask them who they are and what the call is regarding," he added before starting on about his BMW. I learned it was a Black 528 before the outside line rang again.
  "Cramer & Company," I answered. Once again someone asked for Jim. I had no intention of making the same mistake twice, especially since everyone on the trading desk was now watching me. I asked the person who he was and what the call was regarding. After giving his name, the man insisted he was a friend.
  "Sure," I said. "I know. You're his best friend, just like the last guy who called." I put the man on hold, and after a while he finally hung up.
  "Who was that?" Jeff asked.
  "Another salesman. Eliot Spitter, or something," I laughed. Everyone just looked at me, mouths hanging open, so I added, "Spitter, now that's a stupid name!"
  "That was Eliot Spitzer, you f---ing moron!" Jim screamed. Eliot was, in fact, a friend of Jim's. One Jim would later throw a fundraising party for when he pursued the New York State attorney general's office, which he eventually won. We invited every broker who covered us to that party, kept track of who came, and, most important, noted who contributed to Eliot's campaign. The smart brokers made sizable donations and were rewarded for it. The others didn't place too many trades for Cramer & Company over the next few months. I, for one, gave $50 and never again forgot his name.
  "There are certain people you just have to put through to Jim," said Jeff, wagging an index finger.
  "But you just told me--"
  "I know what I told you, and now I'm telling you to figure it out. If you can't answer a stupid f---ing phone right..."
  "That was Eliot Spitzer, you f---ing moron!" Sal reiterated. Mark was obviously finding something amusing while Clark crouched over and whispered to me not to ever put Eliot Spitzer on hold again.
-----------------------------------------------------------
 
From Confessions of a Street Addict by James J. Cramer
p.186
  Then, one day in early September, I got a call from one of my biggest investors, Eliot Spitzer, who was making his second bid for New York State attorney general. When Eliot studied with me at Harvard Law he had seen how driven I was and how much I loved the stock market. When I set up the fund he had come in as a partner early on and I had made the man a ton of money. Now the papers were saying that Eliot might be violating campaign finance disclosure laws by getting hidden money from his family. That was a total crock and I knew it, as I had made a boatload for Eliot. But there was only one way to refute this charge and it was pretty simple: Eliot needed money from the fund. He needed me to open up the fund.
 
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2002/1209/072_print.html
FORBES feature Witch Hunt by Michael Freedman, 12.09.02
Eliot Spitzer vows to pursue every abuse on Wall Street. Will that include those in his own office?
  While he crusades to hold Wall Street to the highest standards, the evidence suggests Spitzer has toed the gray lines that separate truth from hypocrisy and divide the honest from the unethical. Some examples:
*   He failed to disclose $9.1 million in loans that funded his 1994 and 1998 candidacies, in possible violation of state law. Spitzer points out a rival candidate sued regarding this, and the suit was dismissed. The loans came from J.P. Morgan Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people )--one of the banks that Spitzer hasn't investigated. He also reaped riches in a hedge fund that may have profited from some of the practices he now decries.
*   Spitzer mischaracterized and exaggerated evidence in his investigation of Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER - news - people ), ignoring information that undermined his case. He also discussed his investigations with the media and revealed future efforts to a hedge-fund manager who could have profited from the information. And he publicly threatened criminal action to force Merrill into a civil settlement--despite state ethics rules that forbid this kind of leverage.
. . .
  To pay for the campaign, Spitzer took out a $4.3 million loan from J.P. Morgan, secured by personal property, including apartments in Manhattan. His salary at the time: $271,000--far less than he would need to repay the debt. He came in dead last and returned to private practice. He ran again in 1998, borrowing $4.8 million more from J.P. Morgan, against his Manhattan property and other assets. It was a bitter race, with Spitzer slamming incumbent Republican Dennis Vacco for taking campaign money from companies that did business with his office. Vacco countered that Spitzer had failed to disclose his own loans, as required by the Martin Act--the very law Spitzer now uses to go after Wall Street.

  Opponents also claimed his father must be paying off the two loans, a potential violation of campaign finance laws that limit the amount candidates may receive from family members to $260,000. At first Spitzer told reporters the money had come from his personal savings. But with just days to go until the election, he admitted to the New York Times that his father had lent him money to repay the first Morgan loan. It is still unclear what happened to the remaining debt--or why Spitzer failed to disclose the loans. He insists he did not have to, noting that he voluntarily told his New York co-op board in 1998. State filings show only that Spitzer continues to owe more than $5,000 to J.P. Morgan.

  To dig up still more money for his 1998 campaign, he turned to an old law school chum, hedge-fund manager James J. Cramer. In the 1990s Spitzer had invested an undisclosed sum in Cramer's fund, and Cramer says he made Spitzer a "boatload" of money. Cramer would pick up bits of news, load up on the right stocks, leak the gossip to Wall Street analysts and bail out after the price popped. Cramer also knew that investment banks rewarded their best clients by letting them in on hot IPOs. In a recent tell-all book, former Cramer employee Nicholas W. Maier writes of getting in on popular stock offerings by promising to buy more at a higher price later, to keep the stock up. Then the hedge fund promptly dumped all the shares for a quick gain. Cramer denies this. Spitzer says he was unaware of any controversy regarding the fund.
 
Quote from Pabst:

Spitzer is pure POS. Why was he silent in the 90's? Because he was a major investor in Cramer Berkowitz. Hope he crashes and burns.
More...

Leave it to Pabst to get this thread going into a COOL direction. Awesome job kc11415.
 
who are three people who have been doing more (than spitzer) to stop some of the criminals on wall st?

i sometimes see ppl bashing him...and never heard names of elected or appointed officials who are doing more...

muchly appreciated - and i don't care what their background or political affiliation, just actions.
 
gaj,
That's a clever bit of rhetoric, but quite irrelevant. You see, there's an "equal protection" clause in the U.S. Constitution that requires the law to be applied equally, fairly & impartially to all. That's a concept Eliot hasn't quite mastered.

For instance, Eliot used kid gloves on the Microsoft antitrust case and was instrumental in leading the settling states in giving Microsoft a toothless slap on the hand. I can guess your next question might be, "What the heck does that have to do with the thread at hand?!?!" Well, strangely enough, it has quite a lot to do with it.

From Confessions of a Street Addict by James J. Cramer
p.36 (during the time Cramer worked as a broker for Goldman Sachs)

  But soon after I began my weekly rounds to Chemung County Bank among other robust institutions, I got a call from the man who served with me as my business manager when I was president of the Harvard Crimson. He was looking for some honest information about the market, looking for a broker his firm could trust, who was not out to rip them off or gouge them. He was in Seattle and he wanted me to come out and see him to give him some advice about what to do with his stock and his money.
  We chatted, and I told him that I would love to come out sometime. I had a terrible cold and didn't want to make the trip. But the caller, Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft, said the firm was thinking of going public and that if I didn't mind he would like to see me sooner rather than later. How soon? I said. "How about tonight, for dinner?"
  ... I paused for a second, during which he said that if I could come tonight, I could also meet Bill Gates, Sr., who was also trying to figure out what to do with his and his son's possible riches.
  "Sure, Steve. In fact, I am leaving right now," I said.
  Next thing I know I am on an airplane to Seattle, sick as a dog, but determined to bring in what could be the greatest herd of elephants of all time.
  ... Steve did most of the talking. Whatever I said, it worked, because I flew back that next morning, ... with an awfully big chunk of business.
  ... I was summoned to my manager's office. What was this about going out to Seattle?
  He was furious saying that nobody was allowed to poach business like that. He wanted me to give the account to the San Francisco office, whose territory it was. I refused. ... My manager wouldn't pay for the airfare. ... In a few years, Ballmer became one of the largest clients in the firm. I was never reimbursed, though. ...
 
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