Before Eliot Spitzer was Client No. 9, he was a "f---ing steamroller." The ex-New York guv is headed to Harvard to talk ethics -- but it's not the tawdry romps with prostitutes that make the former sheriff of Wall Street's Ivy-League lecture a bit nausea-inducing: it's his record.
The embattled ex-governor known for throwing tantrums and bullying ("I"m a f---ing steamroller!") others has had significant moral lapses, but he was also was behind a plot to smear political adversary and possibly the most powerful Republican in New York, Joe Bruno, by ordering state police to monitor his activity. He then lied about his role in the so-called "Troopergate" scandal in summer 2007 and whined about it when intestigators tried to probe him further.
The brash politician viciously and regularly attacked peers as both governor and attorney general of New York and his zeal for zeroing in on adversaries has been well-documented. His early ethics lapses included eluding state election laws by not disclosing 11th-hour influx of cash into his 1994 campaign fund for NY attorney general, according a 1998 piece in the New York Times.
The address is scheduled for today at the university's ethics school. He may leave out the part about his telling role on his soccer team as a youth: as the "enforcer" who "took people out."
