Spoiling for a Fight: The Rise of Eliot Spitzer

By Brooke A. Masters

Book Overview

"Compelling, suspenseful, and deeply reported . . . Masters gives a dramatic inside account of the fight between Spitzer and the titans of finance."--Newsday

Few politicians have burst onto the American scene with as much impact as Eliot Spitzer. As New York's attorney general, he exposed wrongdoing by stock analysts, mutual fund managers, and insurance brokers, and investigated corporations that have misled or defrauded ordinary investors and consumers. And as the next governor of New York, Spitzer is now a rising star on the national political scene.

No reporter has had better or more complete behind-the-scenes access to Spitzer than Brooke A. Masters, who covered him for four years at The Washington Post. Spoiling for a Fight is her dramatic and revealing portrait of the politician who has brought down some of the biggest names in American finance and has set his sights on higher office. And in a new afterword, she chronicles his ascension to New York's highest office and assesses his future political prospects.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0805083022
• ISBN13: 9780805083026
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Good stuff

This is a rip roaring account of Elliot Spitzer and his big cases. A very important work and one that sheds light on corporate skullduggery such as Merril's Henry Blodget and others. Spitzer was a hero of the stock market bubble and a household name in New York, sort of the Guliani of the first five years of the Millenium. Seth J. Frantzman

A balanced look at Spitzermania

This book will intrigue anyone interested in the political process and law. Masters offers a balanced view of Spitzer's war against wall street. The gist of the book is Spitzer's background and education (rich, ivy league, privilleged) and his ambitious rise to NY Attorney General where he has whipped into shape Wall Street. In doing so, Spitzer has caught the ire of many people who beleive that he is trespassing on sacred SEC and federal government grounds. Others feel Spitzer is doing the job the SEC SHOULD have been doing. Whether you like him or not, the book offers an interesting perspective into a rising politician and the reaons why he will probably never have a legitimate shot at the White House (hint, its for the same reasons he's been thus far succesful).

WORTHY OF A PULITZER

So well known are Eliot Spitzer and the corporate visionaries he brought to boot, so widely praised has he been, so robust the expectancy of his gubernatorial future, that any writer about him risks becoming another entrant in a great sack race of redundancy. Brooke Masters's Pulitzer worthy "Spoiling for a Fight: The Rise of Eliot Spitzer", however, is both a journalistic triumph and, socially measured, a public service. Her close description of the facts and settings, rendered in a highly readable style, reflect her Harvard and London School of Economics degrees burnished by sixteen years with the Washington Post. When in 1999, thirty-nine year old Eliot Spitzer was sworn as New York's 63rd Attorney General, few took into account that he was a True Believer in the progressive tradition of Brandeis and FDR. No one, including himself, foresaw that in an epiphanic moment he would link federalism with the Martin Act's empowerment of him to obtain ex parte injunctive relief upon a complaint that had not yet been answered. So it was that every razzledazzle analyst and fleetfooted broker trudging into 120 Broadway would soon find Spitzer sitting in a prosecutor's heaven, playing for keeps. Here was a steel-willed, politically ambitious warrior who had the street smarts to sense that his own nature and the workings of a random chance might position him to ascend. Spitzer, transforming what attorney generals do, attacked midwestern power plants for polluting New York, ripped into the Food Emporium and A & P, Gristedes and other major supermarkets and drugstore chains, for mindboggling working conditions of immigrant deliverymen, and convicted the first felonious sweatshop operator in a decade. His unsuccessful attempt to bring gun manufacturers under control proved him a man of initiative, practical, yet moral, quick to learn early the golden lesson of watching one's back even when dealing with one's apparent ally, a lesson he may have occasion to recall when governor. As for righteous anger, when the Red Cross attempted to divert 9/11 funds to its other causes, Spitzer seized it, as it were, by the neck, compelling it to use every cent for 9/11 victims. Turning towards Wall Street, Spitzer saw hanging fruit ripe for the taking. When Merrill Lynch was taken by Spitzer in the direction of the gallows for bid rigging, its attorney, Robert Morvillo, warned Spitzer that "Merrill Lynch has a lot of powerful friends". In what must have been a surge of concealed, evangelical joy, Spitzer, without warning, thereupon seated Merrill in a kamikaze plane and waved it off the flight deck at 120 Broadway. Merrill was served with a detailed, horrific complaint, while Spitzer, surrounded by a mass of reporters, instantly becoming famous in London, Nairobi, Sydney, and Tel Aviv, rose as Merrill's stock plummeted. Analysts and bankers renewed their Ativan prescriptions as Spitzer sent out subpoenas to Wall Street firms. In media interviews, he tho