Journal of the Plague Year: An Insider's Chronicle of Eliot Spitzer's Short and Tragic Reign

By Lloyd Constantine

The March 10, 2008, disclosure that Governor Eliot Spitzer had patronized prostitutes from the Emperors Club VIP sex ring shocked New Yorkers and his admirers around the world, who had celebrated Spitzer as the "Sheriff of Wall Street" and a likely future U.S. president.

Ironically, one man's disillusionment with Spitzer had begun to disappear fifteen hours earlier, when Spitzer confessed what the rest of the world would soon learn in a media storm of unprecedented intensity. For Lloyd Constantine, Spitzer's senior advisor and longtime friend, the confession explained the governor's recently erratic behavior and marked the end of a "plague year," which encompassed the troubled Spitzer administration and its flawed transition to power.

Journal of the Plague Year is Constantine's intimate account of the seventeen calamitous months preceding the March 10 revelations and the futile sixty-one-hour battle waged by the author and the governor's wife to persuade Spitzer not to resign but instead to fulfill promises made to the voters who had elected him in a record landslide. The book concludes a month after Spitzer and Constantine resigned, as they confronted their shattered careers. People seeking information about Spitzer and prostitutes will find none here. Instead, they will learn how the Spitzer regime suffered crippling setbacks after the governor declared war with the legislature in his inaugural address, including defeat over the choice of a comptroller, a premature effort to end Republican control of the state senate, capitulation on a mediocre $122 billion budget negotiated behind closed doors, the scandal called "Troopergate," and a controversial plan to give driver's licenses to illegal aliens, which sparked a national debate affecting the 2008 presidential election.

Spitzer and his administration got their bearings at the beginning of 2008. However, the March 2008 revelations and Spitzer's refusal to fight for his job quickly ended his short and tragic reign.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781620873441

Lloyd Constantine

Heron Lloyd Tait, Lloyd, as he was affectionately called by parents, siblings and friends, was born in Bamboo, St. Ann, in the beautiful Caribbean island of Jamaica. With the warm climate, abundance of places for frolic and fun, five sisters, and an unending supply of tropical fruits, game birds and river fish, Lloyd completed his early education and, with the help of a scholarship, Engineering College, without even knowing that his family was poor. After a Mechanical Engineering and Life Insurance career, Lloyd moved his family away from the political uncertainties of the time, to Canada, where he spent two decades with a transit company. Lloyd is twice estranged and has several children. He became awakened to the fact that his job was not going to bring financial security; neither would the service business he operated until his decision to fold due to the prevailing business environment. Lloyd wanted time and financial freedom and he determined that Network Marketing, called the “Business of the 21st Century” by Robert Kiyosaki, offered the best scope for these. This was also the perfect vehicle to make a difference in other peoples’ lives as he could build, mentor, coach and help a team of like-minded people use their time and energy to better advantage than they could with their jobs; all this from their homes. He was also now able to spend more time on his passion…writing. He had always to publish his writing so that he could share his thoughts with the world. The collection of poems he had been storing over the years was augmented by the prolific writing in 2011 and 2012. Encouraged by friends to publish he finally took the plunge when one of his friends emailed me the details of Xlibris. The rest, as they say, is history. Lloyd has other writing projects on which he is currently working. Another anthology follows as well as his first full novel.