Daily News: A Valentine's Day Mess

By Helen Kennedy
Daily News Staff Writer

On the eve of Valentine's Day, Gov. Spitzer made sure the girl was on a train from Penn Station, withdrew a wad of cash from an ATM and left the door of his Washington hotel room ajar.

It was only then that he asked what she looked like.

Her name was "Kristen," and she was "an American, petite, very pretty brunette, 5-feet-5 inches and 105 pounds," the hooker booker told him.

They spent two hours together in an elegant, cream-colored room at the gracious old Mayflower Hotel before he left at midnight, leaving Kristen with $4,300, the room for the night, cab fare and whatever she wanted from the minibar.

Kristen later said she thought the evening went "very well."

The embarrassing details of Spitzer's tryst with a tart—from the complicated payment negotiations to a semigraphic after-action report—were laid outlast week in a just-the-facts FBI affidavit.

It began, as federal court documents often do, with money.

Spitzer, identified in the court papers simply as Client 9, was a regular client of Emperors Club VIP. He wanted to set up a date in Washington for the evening of Feb. 13, but the managers of the hooker ring complained that his payment - "a deposit of money sent by mail" - had not arrived.

Spitzer said he had made his payment through the bogus firm QAT Consulting Group "same as in the past, no question about it."

There was some discussion at the prostitution office about whether the $400 credit Client 9 had left over with the company was enough to send him a girl, even if his deposit didn't arrive. It was decided that no, that wasn't enough.

The money arrived in the nick of time, and Kristen boarded the 5:39 p.m. out of Penn Station, arriving at the Washington hotel about 9:30 p.m.

The streets were coated with ice outside the historic old hotel just a few blocks from the White House. J. Edgar Hoover ate lunch there every day for 20 years, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt dictated his famous, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself" speech in room 776.

In 1999, House impeachment managers used the hotel's $5,000 Presidential Suite to grill Monica Lewinsky about her affair with President Bill Clinton.

Spitzer, who arrived in Washington on a state plane after a trip upstate, called hooker booker Temeka Lewis and said in a taped call he had gone to the hotel and rented room 871 on the VIP club floor.

He registered under the name "George Fox," which is the name of a friend and donor.

Spitzer told Lewis he left the door to room 871 ajar so Kristen could go directly to the room without having to give her name to the front desk.

Lewis worried that "the hotel staff might pass by the door and close it, and [Spitzer] said no, itwas okay. [He] explained that the door would not be visibly open, but if someone pushed it,the door would open," the FBI affidavit recounts.

Lewis told Spitzer he owed a balance of $2,721.41.

She said if he "wanted to [tack on] an additional $1,500 or $2,000 it would be better," the affidavit said. "He said he did not know if he could get to a machine to do that, but he would see."