Spitzer Saga Continues

You won't have forgotten Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York who stepped down earlier this month in the wake of revelations that he'd used money parked in a shell company to hire the services of a prostitute employed by a company called "Emperor's Club VIP," which advertised its service on line and touted its 1-5 Diamond ranking system for the women it made available.

Two core questions have never been addressed by our not-so-brilliant media, which suffers from collective attention deficit disorder.

1. did Spitzer just start hiring hookers recently - maybe via a little extra job stress while being governor? Or was he hiring hookers for a long time, including during the period when he was busting their employers? In other works, was New York's most self-righteous D.A. in recent history screwing and arresting the same people at the same time, in time-honored crooked-cop tradition?
2. did Spitzer have contact with any of the people that work behind the scenes in organized prostitution? Most prostitution rings, as far as I know, are controlled by organized crime.
   

Today's New York Times has an article that turns over the second of these overlooked pieces of the puzzle. The call girl Spitzer saw in Washington D.C., aspiring R&B singer Ashley Alexandra Dupre (pictured here), knows a guy called Anthony Scibelli, who has been named in a large-scale federal indictment of the Gambino crime family. Scibelli's lawyer describes him as not a mobster but a "hard-working contractor," one who also apparently "has contacts in the music business." Scibelli supposedly just wanted to help Spitzer's famous "Kristen" (Dupre) with her singing career. The lawyer denied this help involved having sex with her.

Is it just a coincidence that Dupre knows both the former governor of New York and an alleged member of the Gambino syndicate? Maybe. But we are definitely only part-way down this particular rabbit hole.