Legal News

Emperor?s Club Booker Expected to Plead Guilty. What?s Next for Spitzer?

By Dan Slater

One down, and three to go. Or is it four? And therein lies the question raised by this morning’s news, reported in the NYT, that Temeka Rachelle Lewis, the Emperor’s Club booker that facilitated Eliot Spitzer’s trysts, will plead guilty to charges related to her role in the prostitution ring.

According to the NYT, Lewis (pictured in a 1997 University of Virginia class photo) is expected to plead guilty in federal District Court in Manhattan to charges of money laundering conspiracy and conspiracy to commit interstate travel in aid of racketeering. She would be the first of the four defendants charged in the ring’s operations to have her case adjudicated.

What awaits the other three? There’s Mark Brener, the 62-year-old Israeli émigré charged with running the ring; Tanya Hollander, a 36 year-old nutritionist who worked part time for the ring; and Cecil Suwal, 23, who prosecutors say ran the ring’s day-to-day ops. According to the report, lawyers for the three other defendants have been negotiating possible guilty pleas with prosecutors, and two are expected to plead to charges soon.

And what about Spitzer himself? Do the plea deals with the Emperor’s Club operators mean he’ll finally be prosecuted? “It’s an indication — it’s not definitive” that a decision is near on Spitzer, said Patricia A. Pileggi, a criminal defense lawyer who served for 25 years as a federal prosecutor, five of them as the chief of the public corruption unit in the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn.

A spokeswoman for Spitzer declined to comment to the NYT, as did a spokeswoman for the office of Michael J. Garcia, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, which is prosecuting the prostitution case.

LB Readers: Back in March, there was speculation — based on past experience — that the feds were more likely to prosecute those who ran the prostitution ring than the johns who patronized it. Does Lewis’s pending guilty plea have any bearing on whether Spitzer will be prosecuted? Should he be?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on May 13, 2008 (boomark / email).