Eliot Spitzer once ran a garment sweatshop to trap the Gambinos
To break the Gambino family's grip on Manhattan's garment district, a young prosecutor named Eliot Spitzer opened his own clothing workshop, hired 30 workers and turned out shirts and sweaters. Once its manager got close to the mobsters, investigators planted a bug in their office. The case launched a career that reached the governor's mansion.
Spitzer grew up in the prosperous Riverdale neighbourhood of the Bronx, youngest of three children of a real estate developer and an English literature professor. He scored 1590 out of 1600 on the SAT, led student government at Princeton, edited the Harvard Law Review and clerked for a federal judge before joining Robert Morgenthau's Manhattan District Attorney's office in 1986.
As head of its labour-racketeering unit he pursued organised crime for six years. The sweatshop sting ended in 1992 with Joseph and Thomas Gambino pleading guilty to antitrust charges rather than hard-to-prove extortion, paying $12 million in fines and promising to leave the trucking and garment trades. That route let them avoid prison.
After losing a first bid in 1994, he won the attorney general race in 1998 by just 0.6 percent over Republican Dennis Vacco, carrying no upstate county at all. The campaign drew scrutiny when he admitted his father had largely bankrolled it through loans. In office he broke with the habit of leaving national matters to Washington, taking on securities fraud, internet fraud, white-collar crime and environmental cases. The pursuit of financial firms earned him the nickname Sheriff of Wall Street, and in 2002 he was re-elected with 66 percent.
In 2006 he won the governorship with 69 percent of the vote, the widest margin in the state's history, and was sworn in on 1 January 2007 at the first outdoor inauguration there in over a century, followed by a concert with James Taylor and Natalie Merchant. His term lasted less than two years: he resigned in 2008 after being exposed as a client of a prostitution ring, and lieutenant governor David Paterson took over. He later hosted television shows and taught at City College of New York.
Source: Eliot Spitzer
