Spitzer Linked to Prostitution

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The club's Web site displays photographs of scantily clad women with their faces hidden. It also shows hourly rates depending on whether the prostitutes were rated from one diamond to seven diamonds. The highest-ranked prostitutes cost $5,500 an hour, prosecutors said.

The four defendants charged in the case last week were charged with violating the federal Mann Act, a 1910 law that outlaws traveling across state lines for prostitution.

"I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong," Spitzer said at the news conference. "I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public, whom I promised better."

The scandal was bad news not only for Spitzer but for the entire Democratic party in New York. Spitzer went into 2008 intent on taking back the state Senate from the Republicans.

"Today's news that Eliot Spitzer was likely involved with a prostitution ring and his refusal to deny it leads to one inescapable conclusion: He has disgraced his office and the entire state of New York," said Assembly Republican leader James Tedisco. "He should resign his office immediately."

Spitzer clashed with Wall Street executives throughout his two terms as attorney general, launching several prosecutions that rocked major companies earlier this decade. Among other things, he uncovered crooked practices and self-dealing in the stock brokerage and insurance industries and in corporate boardrooms, and went after former New York Stock Exchange chairman Richard Grasso over his $187.5 million compensation package, which Spitzer called unreasonable and unlawful.

He became known as the "Sheriff of Wall Street." Time magazine named him "Crusader of the Year," and the tabloids proclaimed him "Eliot Ness." The square-jawed graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law was sometimes mentioned as a potential candidate for president.

But his term as governor has been fraught with problems, including an unpopular plan to grant driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and a plot by his aides to smear his main Republican nemesis.

Spitzer had been expected to testify to a state commission he had created to answer for his role in the scandal, in which his aides were accused of using the state police to compile travel records to embarrass Senate GOP leader Joseph Bruno.

His cases as attorney general included a few criminal prosecutions of prostitution rings and tourism involving prostitutes. In 2004, he took part in an investigation of an escort service in New York City that resulted in the arrest of 18 people on charges of promoting prostitution and related charges.