MySpace, sex service with a website, smurfing — the Eliot Spitzer scandal is
a high-tech morality tale.
"Kristen" — the callgirl a one-hour session with on the night of February 13 in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel led to the New York governor’s
downfall — is actually Ashley Alexandra Dupre who has her own MySpace page. "I am
all about my music, and my music is all about me," she says on her MySpace page
where she lists Whitney Houston, Madonna, Mary G Blige, Amy Winehouse and Celine
Dion among her friends. The New York Times has an interview with her.
Though Spitzer announced his resignation yesterday, he hasn’t been charged with any crime
though prosecutors have not ruled that out yet. Dupre, a New Yorker, went to
Washington for the date with the governor as wanted by him. That’s "transporting
across state lines", a federal crime.
Spitzer was recorded fixing the appointment with the girl’s agent on the
phone. But the Emperors Club VIP also had a website to attract clients. Pictures of
the girls were posted without showing their faces and they were rated on a scale of one to seven diamonds, much like hotels are rated with Michelin stars. The charges ranged from $1,000 to more $5,500 an hour. Credit card payments were accepted.
These details were revealed in the FBI chargesheet
against two men and two women charged with "arranging connections between wealthy male clients and more than 50 prostitutes" in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Miami, London and Paris among other places. The two men were also charged with conspiring to launder more than $1 million. The FBI chargesheet can
be downloaded as a PDF file.
Smurfing or suspicious money transfers triggered the federal investigation.
The New York Times reports:
Employees of a New York bank detected Spitzer was moving around thousands of
dollars in what they thought was an effort to conceal the fact that the money
was his own, federal officials said.They said the apparent sleight of hand kept the transactions small and
removed his name from deposits, reported the New York Times. The governor’s
actions prompted the bank to file alerts known as Suspicious Activity Reports
with the Treasury Department, which were reviewed by IRS agents…A few months later, another New York bank sent its own reports of suspicious
activity to the Treasury. They showed that Spitzer and others, including people
overseas, collectively deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars into an
account of a company called QAT International Inc., whose business involved
foreign accounts and shell companies and appeared to be vaguely related to
pornography websites.
QAT International Inc and QAT Consulting Group were Emperors Club front companies which received the "prostitution proceeds" to conceal the "illegal nature of the business", according to the FBI chargesheet.
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