Legal News

Report: Spitzer to Leave Behind Public Sector, Join Real Estate Biz

By Dan Slater

Eliot Spitzer and his wife Silda Wall Spitzer before the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series at the Glen auto race in Watkins Glen, N.Y. Aug. 12, 2007. (Credit: Associated Press/Tom Ryder)

First thing’s first: Happy 49th Birthday, Eliot!

Today, as Spitzer enters the last year of his fifth decade, it looks as though he might hang up his legal shoes and follow instead in the footsteps of his father, real estate mogul Bernard Spitzer. The New York Sun’s Jacob Gershman reports that Spitzer is shopping around a plan to start a vulture fund that would scoop up distressed real estate assets around the country, revamp them, and flip the properties for a profit.

According to the Sun, Spitzer recently gathered “a group of high-level Washington, D.C.-based labor union officials” in a conference room at the headquarters of his father’s Manhattan real estate business and pitched them his idea.

During the meeting, the Sun reports, Spitzer “expressed relief that he was no longer burdened with the frustrations of being governor . . . . And, in contrast to his repentant resignation speech that he delivered beside his tearful wife, Silda Wall, he took a more relaxed view of his indiscretions.” According to the Sun, Spitzer says he’s found consolation in the remarks of fellow New Yorkers who stop him on sidewalks and tell him that sex is “no big deal” and that the disclosure that he frequented prostitutes was distorted out of proportion. Europeans, the former governor has noted, have been especially supportive of him and perplexed by the fallout from the scandal, writes the Sun.

In the half-hour meeting with union leaders, Spitzer reportedly noted that the conference room in which they were sitting would have been his personal office had he entered his father’s business after graduating from college. He also said he was determined to take his father’s real estate company, which includes holdings such as the Corinthian apartment building on East 38th Street, to “the next level.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on June 10, 2008 (boomark / email).