I think something is fishy about the Spitzer investigation.
The NYT is reporting that the Spitzer/hooker revelations came about not because of an initial investigation into the prostitution ring, but the other way around...
The prostitution ring was apparently uncovered because of a Spitzer investigation that was triggered by a bank employee reporting "suspicious activity."
To my mind, that "suspicious activity" was more than likely a CRT (cash transaction report) and a CRT is triggered every time a person makes $10,000 or more in cash transactions during a single 24 hour period... There are tens of thousands of CRT's filed every single day though and they don't always trigger full-out federal investigations with wiretaps and everything... Especially not for a guy known to be one of the richest people on earth.
Even if the bank did file a CRT, that still doesn't explain why the feds started investigating a guy that is widely known to have hundreds of millions of dollars through the legitimate means of his old money family for a few thousand dollar transactions.
Even IF Spitzer hit the $10,000 threshold for a CRT, so what?
The guy's got hundreds of millions of dollars and everyone knows it's not from dealing drugs.
There are thousands of super rich people that get flagged for a CRT within an hour of walking through a casino door... a CRT is NOT an issue for those people. (I used to work in the casino industry and I know this to be an absolute fact. I've filed tons of CRT reports... It's not unusual at all when you've got a millionaire in the house. It's almost guaranteed to happen when a really rich person walks through the door.) The feds don't bother them because they know they're rich and they know where their money came from.
CRT's are supposed to trigger alarms when the people involved have no obvious logical legitimate means of coming by $10,000 to blow... i.e: drug dealers with no known source of legitimate income, etcetera.
This isn't at all the case with Spitzer... The dude's got hundreds of millions of dollars and everybody knows he's got it and how he came by it... He's one of the world's richest people for fuck's sake.
It would be like starting an investigation on Paris Hilton to see whether the $15,000 in cash she withdrew went for a bunch of coke or a purse.
It doesn't make any sense for them to investigate him, unless they were just investigating him for everything; just hoping to catch him doing something wrong.
For a guy like Spitzer to have wiretaps and a federal investigation thrown at him because he withdrew lousy $4,000 in cash, which they later found out was for a hooker just boggles the mind.
The bank reporting story is bunk. I don't know how else to say it... It's just bullshit. If Spitzer hit $10,000 in cash transactions in a 24 hour period, the bank had to file a CRT. That's standard operating procedure... So if Spitzer did hit that $10,000 threshold, the bank didn't have a choice and had to report it.
The thing that isn't standard operating procedure isn't so much what the bank did (although if they reported cash transactions under $10,000 for a customer that has hundreds of millions of dollars and the governor of their state; I'd like to know their reasoning why) but what the feds did... The bank might have had to report the transaction, but the feds most likely had no reason at all to go through such efforts to investigate it.
Logically, there was no reason on earth for the federal government to pullout all the stops on a old money guy who is widely known to be one of the richest people on earth and also happens to be the Democratic governor of the state of New York, over a few thousand dollars in transactions... or even a few $10,000 transactions.
The guy's rich, they know he's rich and rich people spend money... Nothing unusual about that.
I didn't question this when the first reports came out that Spitzer got caught up in the prostitution ring investigation... I just thought:
Boy, that was stupid of him.
But from the second I heard about the prostitution ring NOT being the target, but Spitzer; alarms started going off in my head, because even if a bank employee did decide to report "suspicious activity"... The government would have known that a few grand isn't suspicious activity at all for one of the world's richest people.
That kind of money for that particular guy would only be suspicious activity to the government if they wanted it to be suspicious activity and wanted an excuse to investigate him.
From the moment I read the reports that Spitzer was the target because of his bank reporting "suspicious activity", I was convinced that they weren't investigating any particular crime, because of who the man is and how publicly known his wealth is there was no real reason to suspect him for blowing a few thousand dollars or even $50,000... He's got a ton of money to blow, after all.
I'm almost positive that they weren't investigating a crime, they were investigating the man and just hoping they would find a crime... Which in this case, they did.
I just think this whole thing stinks to high heaven... Spitzer getting caught up in a prostitution sting would be one thing, but a prostitution ring getting caught up in an unnecessary investigation of Spitzer just seems so wrong to me.
Spitzer could have easily be withdrawing that money (money that the government knew he came to have by entirely legitimate channels and knew to be in no way suspicious, by the way) to go shopping with or go gambling at a casino, to pay off a baby-momma of his illegitimate love child, pay his wife a Valentine's gift with cash so she doesn't see the charges on the credit card statement to keep it a surprise, or any number of entirely legal (if not entirely moral) reasons...
They simply had no reason to investigate Spitzer, even if the bank did file a CRT. This investigation seems like an investigation run by bush's politicized Justice Department that just happened to hit paydirt...
This makes me wonder if they're ordering wiretaps every time a known multi-millionaire Democrat withdraws a few grand, just to see how they spend it?
Because that's seriously how this looks to me. There is just no way they order wiretaps and investigate every rich person that withdraws a bunch of cash.
The casino and fashion industries alone would bankrupt our treasury from all of the investigations that would require and murderers, terrorists and rapists would be running wild, because all available man power would be going to see how the Britneys, Bill Gates and Elliot Spitzers of the country spend their mountains of money.