Friendless Spitzer expected to resign after call-girl scandal

Eliot Spitzer, the New York state governor and self-styled Mr Clean who has been caught by federal investigators using a high-class prostitution service called Emperors Club VIP, is expected to resign as early as today, according to a source close to the governor, speaking to the Wall Street Journal.

Spitzer appears to be paying the price not just for his hypocrisy but for the uncompromising line he took in his previous role as state attorney general. He took on everyone - from the titans of Wall Street (forcing the New York stock exchange chief executive Dick Grasso to resign in 2003) to the Gambino crime family - with a zeal he may now regret. On at least two occasions he prosecuted the people behind prostitution rings.

As the Washington Post reports: "Even sympathetic analysts said the governor... did not have a reservoir of goodwill to draw upon that might help him overcome this latest controversy."

Evidence lodged with a Manhattan court shows that Spitzer is the man identified as Client 9 in various conversations recorded at the Emperors Club by federal agents with the help of an insider. He apparently paid $4,300 for a girl called Kristen to be flown from New York for an assignation at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC on the night of February 13.

According to a conversation contained in the court documents, an Emperors Club employee told Kristen she had heard that Client 9 "would ask you to do things that... you might not think were safe". Kristen responded by saying: "I have a way of dealing with that... I'd be, like, listen dude, you really want the sex?"

The club's website ranks its girls using a diamond system: three diamonds cost $1,000 an hour, seven diamonds $5,500 or more. Kristen appears to have been available at the lower rate. It may not have been a one-off
appointment: a wiretap records Spitzer saying: "Yup, same as in the past."

The New York Times, which broke the story after learning that Spitzer had told senior colleagues he was in trouble, reported that Spitzer's travel records show he was in Washington on February 13, staying at the Mayflower, and that he testified before a congressional committee the next morning.

Clients of prostitutes are rarely charged in America, but Spitzer appears to have fallen foul of the 1910 Mann Act, which makes it a crime to transport someone between states for the purposes of prostitution.

Spitzer is also in trouble with his wife of 21 years, Silda, and with Hillary Clinton, who, as a senior Democrat, he publicly endorsed. If he resigns as Governor, he will lose his rights as a super-delegate at the Democratic party convention where he would have given his much-needed vote - the way things stand - to Clinton.

Again if he resigns, under state law his lieutenant governor David Paterson - a man "as widely liked as Mr Spitzer is controversial," according to the WSJ - will become New York's first African-American governor. ·