The Hookers Aren’t the Real Problem With Spitzer

I’m still riding high on the Elliot Spitzer hooker scandal. What a tool.

Note that I didn’t call it a sex scandal. That the governor of New York was having sex with these women is not the problem. (Mrs. Spitzer might have a different opinion.) No, the problem is that he was hiring hookers. To be more specific, he was hiring them in violation of the law. He even owed them money.

As a libertarian, I think that if consenting adults want to trade sex acts for money, no legitimate government purpose is served by stopping them. However, just because I’m in favor of legal prostitution doesn’t mean I approve of its illegal forms.

The folks who run illegal prostitution rings are probably not doing it because of their strong libertarian sensibilities. They’re doing it because they want to make money, and they’re willing to break the law to do so. In fact, the whole operation ends up taking place outside the law, which places everyone involved outside the protection of the law. And if New York is anything like Chicago, that means this prostitution ring is under the control of organized crime.

That’s a huge problem for a government official, especially one who has had law enforcement duties, such as Elliot Spitzer in his former position as New York State Attorney General. Once he had had a few dates with the ladies of the Emperor’s Club, they owned him. They could threaten to blow up his career at any time by going public.

(That might expose a few of the ladies to prosecution, and maybe even a couple of people running the ring, but it wouldn’t touch anybody higher up.)

It’s possible that a high-class escort service that has clients able to pay $1000 per hour wouldn’t ever engage in blackmail. Their reputation for discretion might be so valuable that it’s not worth risking. Why resort to extortion when clients pay them millions of dollars per year of their own free will?

Still, think about what it means that the top prosecutor in the state of New York owed money to the mob and regularly did business with them.

As a Manhatten ADA, he went after a Gambino labor-racketeering operation in 1992. But then he went into private practice for a few years before taking the New York Attorney General’s office in 1998. In that role, he focussed on consumer issues and business fraud. None of the notable cases on Spitzer’s Wikipedia page involved organized crime. Why not?

As Attoney General, he would have been in position to decide which cases are worth further investigation…and which ones would be shut down. If I worked in the New York AG’s office right now, I’d be asking everyone there if Spitzer shut down any cases that were still good.

Interestingly, during his term as Attorney General, he did actually prosecute cases against two prostitution rings. Why those two? Could he have been eliminating the competition as a favor to someone?

Really, I have no idea what was going on in the New York AG’s office, or whether any mob figures ever had a friendly conversation with Spitzer about his entertainment expenses. This is all just speculation. As far as I know, the FBI court documents only cover his time in the Governor’s office, so it’s possible he was clean while he was the Attorney General. But I doubt it.

I don’t really care if a politician has sex outside his marriage (that’s between him and his wife), and I don’t care that he paid women for sex (that’s between him and them), but I do care if he’s doing favors for the mob.