Eliot Spitzer emerges as true hero in war against corporate corruption

• Bill Wippert/Buffalo News State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has found a lot of ammunition in embarrassing corporate e-mails.
• Investors shrugged when state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said Dec. 10, 2001, that he was investigating research at Merrill Lynch & Co. and across Wall Street.
• Merrill's stock slipped 4 percent over a week.
• Spitzer, 45, a second-term Democrat first elected to the state's top law enforcement position in 1998, may run for governor in 2006, when his rivals could include Sen.
• Charles Schumer and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
• Picking one company as a first target, he releases internal e-mails to discredit his adversary and spark public outrage before they can respond.
• Then he uses admissions from that company to prod industrywide settlements that spare his office the expense of a trial.
• "It's almost a self-executing strategy: Everybody brings their best evidence to Eliot at this point," says Constantine, who founded the New York law firm Constantine & Partners with Spitzer in 1994.
• A day after Spitzer filed suit against New York-based Marsh, the company said it would stop taking so-called contingency commissions from insurance companies cited in Spitzer's suit.
• Spitzer called them "lucrative payoffs" to steer business to certain insurers.
• "These cases he brings are almost impossible to defend against because of the adverse publicity."
• Jack Ehnes, chief executive of the California State Teachers' Retirement System, supports Spitzer's insurance probe even though the fund holds $3.27 billion of insurance industry shares and the Standard & Poor's 500 Insurance Index has fallen 12 percent since Oct. 13, the day before Spitzer's announcement.
• Spitzer's staff of 20 lawyers working on finance and securities cases is dwarfed by the legal teams of most corporate opponents and regulatory counterparts.