Lloyd Constantine - Journal of the Plague Year: An Insiders Chronicle of Eliot Spitzers Short and Tragic Reign

ON SUNDAY MORNING, March 9, 2008, I awoke in my massive bed in Chatham, New York, in the arms of Jan, my wife. I had slept the recently rare deep, uninterrupted and comforting sleep of an untroubled and prosperous man, in spitting distance of his 61st birthday.

The weekend had been very sweet. We had ritualistically made successful contact with each of our three children, living in San Francisco, Thailand and Wisconsin. Each seemed to be in a good place. One major reason I continued to work, after the economic imperative for my gainful employment ended, was to avoid worrying about my kids full-time and obsessively, and annoying them even more than I already did with my frequent advice.

The rare trifecta, all my kids happy at one moment, had been an important, but not the only, soporific. The previous days company including two wonderful young protgs, who were friends of the entire Constantine family and of each other, augmented that comforting circumstance. We had spent the day at our weekend home in the Berkshires discussing their extensive humanitarian work, including the girls early departure from Boston the next morning to New Orleans for a Katrina-related mission. As she was preparing to depart in a heavy rain to face the Massachusetts Turnpike alone, I had merely to glance at the other guest, a 32-year-old boy and veteran of the Peace Corps, who was an associate in my former law firm, Constantine Cannon, seemingly still bearing my name.

I knew that he would decipher my subtle glance, sacrifice the skiing we had planned for Sunday and immediately insist that he drive with the girl to Boston, then take the cheap and infamous Chinatown bus for the six-hour ride back to Manhattan.

That everyone was behaving admirably that Saturday, my kids by being happy or feigning happiness, our guests by being such sensitive and humane people and Jan and me by appreciating all this, rounded out what had been a very rare, very good week, in my job as senior advisor to New York Governor Eliot Spitzermy closest male friend, protg and former law partner. The 17 months preceding that very good week in early March 2008 had been very, very bad for Eliot, his administration and our friendship. Consistently feeling that my senior advice was unheeded or undermined by others in Eliots inner circle, I had steadily assaulted him with strident and sarcastic critiques of the administrations transition to office and its performance after taking charge. These critiques had been delivered in person, on the phone, by email and, when they were particularly harsh, by handwritten memo.

At various times during this period, I thought of beginning a diary with the code name A Journal of the Plague Year borrowed from the 18th-century novel about the Black Plague written by Daniel Defoe. But each time I got that urge, I had suppressed it as being puerile and premature since there was still loads of time in the presumptive eight or 12 years of the Spitzer governorship to get things on track, begin to fulfill the promises Eliot had made to the people of New York and then take our successes on the road to the White House. I told Jan that the very good week was possibly the beginning of the extravagant success that had been expected by the unprecedented majority that had elected Eliot and by the hundreds of talented people who had left big jobs, often abandoning lucrative compensation (as I had) to work for Eliot. Many of these people had moved less-than-enthusiastic families to Albany or, failing to do so, were shuttling between New York City and its suburbs to the state capital, where they inhabited Spartan quarters.

The very good week at the governors office had included major progress toward the passage of an austere, but on-time, budget, due April 1. In this budget, Eliot would close a $5 billion budget deficit by making tough, skillful and intelligent choices. He would wisely administer pain on many agencies and constituencies while maintaining progress in certain programs vital for the social and economic progress of New York, such as higher education. This was one of the areas I directed for the Spitzer Administration and the portfolio I enjoyed and cared about most.

My portion of the very good week had been filled with higher ed. budget negotiations, speeches and meetings with college officials, faculty, students and representatives of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Albanys Times Union, the capitals powerful and only daily, had spent much of the past year chronicling the Spitzer Administrations problems and had even become an unhappy participant in our most prominent fiasco, known as Troopergate. But during this rare very good week, the TU was reporting our newfound toughness and skill, and three days before had profiled me and spotlighted Eliots higher education program, front page, front and center and above the fold.

So Sunday, March 9, 2007, preceded by the deep and restful sleep, the wonderful Saturday, and the very good week at the office, was gentle, fun and uneventful until 7:35 P.M., when I received the first of several email... from Eliot. The first was innocuous and routine, asking where he could call me on a landline, since he virtually always had access to me on my cell phone. But Eliot, generally courteous and respectful of me, even in the worst moments of the preceding year, and even when I was not of him, rarely just called. Instead, Eliot would send a less obtrusive email asking when and at what number he could reach me. I thought nothing of this opening volley that Sunday evening, since I received an email like this on most days when we did not actually see each other. Since both of our BlackBerrys were appendages, I would quickly respond to his inquiry (as I did this time with my 518 Chatham number), and he would call me within minutes. But not this time. Instead, Eliot sent several more emails... as the evening progressed, repeating the question of whether I was available for a call. I responded affirmatively each time, but he didnt call. At 10:37 P.M. Eliot emailed, once again, but this time asked me to be at his Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan at 7:00 A.M. the next morning. At that moment, I assumed that something bad was happening. Eliot knew I was in the Berkshires with Jan and that we would have to leave at 4:00 A.M. to guarantee arrival by 7. Being a gentleman and respectful of Jan, Eliot would normally travel in the middle of the night himself rather than ask us to do it. That is, unless something was wrong. So I called Eliot straightaway and asked what was happening.