Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer met regularly with prostitutes in multiple cities for 18 months before being identified as a client of an escort service and resigning in disgrace, a lawyer for an employee who arranged the trysts said Monday.
Lawyer Marc Agnifilo said his client, escort service booker Temeka Lewis, revealed key information to prosecutors before the March 2008 resignation of Spitzer, who was called Client-9 in court documents charging four employees of the pricey prostitution ring.
He said Lewis, who was sentenced Monday and received no jail time after cooperating with prosecutors, arranged meetings between Spitzer and prostitutes, including one who discovered he was the governor of New York when she saw him on television.
“There was a regularity to it,” Agnifilo said outside court of meetings Spitzer arranged with the Emperors Club V.I.P. escort service using various aliases including George Fox.
The lawyer said Lewis, 33, provided detailed information about the meetings such as the methods of payment, the locations of hotels, the approximate dates, the names of women the governor saw and the names used by the governor.
He said information Lewis provided helped the government conclude Spitzer hadn't used campaign or government money for the meetings with prostitutes and thus didn't need to be criminally charged. Prosecutors announced late last year that Spitzer would not be charged.
Agnifilo said Spitzer sometimes used postal money orders, a relatively unsophisticated way to move money around. He said the government investigated the money trail to establish Spitzer hadn't used government money.
Agnifilo declined to be specific about how many times Spitzer met with prostitutes.
“I think the full truth put his involvement with the Emperors Club at more than sporadic,” he said.
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But he nodded his head when he was asked if it was possible Spitzer might have sampled most of the more than a dozen escorts who were advertised by the service, which had a Web site and charged up to $5,500 an hour.
Law enforcement officials have said Spitzer, the millionaire heir to a New York real estate fortune, had spent tens of thousands of dollars, perhaps as much as $80,000, on the high-priced escort service's women.
Lewis, a Brooklyn resident and University of Virginia graduate who majored in English, worked at the escort service from October 2006 until her arrest in March 2008. She set up a February 2008 meeting between a prostitute and Client-9.
She pleaded guilty in May 2008 to conspiracy charges after beginning her cooperation with prosecutors even before Spitzer resigned just days after her arrest. She apologized in court Monday, saying: “I deeply regret my decision to break the law.”
Three other former employees of the escort service already have been sentenced for their roles. Mark Brener, the service's owner, was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison. Cecil Suwal, its manager and Brener's ex-girlfriend, was sentenced to six months in jail. Tanya Hollander, a former booking agent, got a year's probation.
