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Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer speaks at the Reuters Global Financial Regulation Summit 2010 in New York last month.BRENDAN MCDERMID/Reuters

The face is instantly familiar, as is the deep gravelly voice. Only the setting is incongruous: Instead of a government office, it's a quiet room high above New York's Fifth Avenue, with views north toward a lushly green Central Park.

A little more than two years have passed since Eliot Spitzer vanished from the public eye after a prostitution scandal ended his tenure as governor of New York. For someone whose reputation was built on occupying the moral high ground, it was not just an implosion, but a political Chernobyl, stunning and catastrophic.





Yet now it appears - as both his supporters and detractors might have predicted - that New Yorkers haven't seen the last of Mr. Spitzer.

Slowly and carefully, he is edging back into the spotlight. He pops up on television from time to time, writes a column for slate.com and is now teaching a course at City College.

All this comes at a time when more than a few New Yorkers would confess to feeling nostalgia for the "sheriff of Wall Street," a title Mr. Spitzer earned through his willingness - eagerness, even - to battle the nation's major investment banks during his time as the state's top lawyer.

How and when Mr. Spitzer, 50, might contemplate a return to elected office is a question that has the state's political bookies humming. It's too early, they say, for him to run, but the idea is far from implausible.

Meeting the former governor, who now works from the headquarters of his father's real-estate empire, the main impression is of someone in exile. Mr. Spitzer beckons me into his office, first stopping to pick up an envelope from a small mail slot. He opens it, revealing a letter several pages long, with careful handwriting in black ink. Too far away to see what it says, I ask whether it's a good letter or a bad letter. Mr. Spitzer shakes his head, doesn't say. "I get lots of this," he says, putting it aside.

Two years on, the scandal still has legs. Two recently published books ( Rough Justice and Journal of the Plague Year) and a yet-to-be-titled documentary focus on Mr. Spitzer's fall from grace, revealing fresh seamy details (he spent about $100,000 (U.S.) on high-priced prostitutes in total, and once engaged three in a single afternoon).

Yet Mr. Spitzer isn't hiding, which some see as a deliberate strategy. "It's meant to remind you that there are other facets to Eliot Spitzer," says William Cunningham, a veteran political strategist and former adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "New York is a great place for second chances."

When it comes to his political future, Mr. Spitzer doesn't rule anything out. "No matter how I parse it, I tend to cause trouble when I answer that question," he says. "Do you miss it? Of course."

Our meeting takes place just after U.S. regulators accuse Goldman Sachs Group Inc. of civil fraud in mid-April. Mr. Spitzer ventures that it will change the terms of the debate in Washington on how to fix the financial system (true) and revive efforts to rein in the size of banks (a bill to that effect is proposed days after we talk).

This is a man who devours public policy with the same relish that some inhale sports coverage. He rattles off a series of books he has read about the financial crisis, joking that there's a "bubble" in such manuscripts, and rues the fact that he missed his chance to write something. He has some frank feedback for the Obama administration, which, he says, only belatedly came around to pushing for an overhaul of the financial system.

"There's no question, they've moved," he says. "But I'm always a little hesitant of converts of convenience."

Mr. Spitzer doesn't come across, as he once memorably described himself, as a "fucking steamroller." When criticizing people, he emphasizes that he is not making personal attacks (although in a recent interview with The New York Times, he couldn't resist lobbing a few rhetorical grenades in the direction of Andrew Cuomo, his successor as Attorney-General and potentially New York's next governor).

As the state's top lawyer, Mr. Spitzer never shied away from a fight, the more bare-knuckled the better. He went after major investment banks for conflicts of interest; he took on American International Group Inc. years before its practices ended up requiring a government bailout. He earned plaudits in some quarters and enduring enmity in others.

His political rise was so meteoric that he was discussed as a potential future president. But his tenure as governor, just 14 months long, was plagued by political infighting and its own ethical controversies, well before the call-girl revelations and his subsequent resignation. Some political pundits suggest Mr. Spitzer would rather atone for his personal failings than dwell on the setbacks of his governorship.

Hank Sheinkopf, a long-time political consultant, said it would be unwise to underestimate Mr. Spitzer's ability to return to elected office in the coming years. "My money is on Eliot Spitzer," Mr. Sheinkopf said. "He has the time, he has the resources, and now he has the patience."

In a poll conducted last month, 45 per cent of New Yorkers thought Mr. Spitzer should run for office at some point. Another 48 per cent said his political career is over. Mr. Spitzer says someone e-mailed him a link to an article about the poll, but he didn't look at it.

His current focus, he says, is his family, including his wife, Silda, whom he married in 1987, and their three daughters, aged 16 to 20.

Asked how he handles the very public rehashing of the scandal, he seems weary.

"You become incredibly callused" to the parade of headlines, he says.

"Each one incrementally hurts a little less, even though obviously at a very deep level it causes enormous discomfort to my family, to friends, and…" His voice trails off. "You have to force yourself to get up and go forward and confront it."

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