N.Y.’s Top Lawyer May Be Losing His Luster on Wall St.

The number of Wall Street executives who quake in their boots at the mention of Eliot Spitzer may be dwindling.

Rich and powerful targets of the white-collar-crime-fighting New York attorney general have been increasingly emboldened to complain publicly, sensing that he may have overstepped his bounds in some cases.

In the most recent example, Ken Langone, a former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange compensation committee whom Spitzer is suing, wrote a scathing opinion piece that appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Friday that said Spitzer’s suit was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

Those complaints, combined with a high-profile loss against former Bank of America Corp. broker Theodore Sihpol in June, leads some critics to reckon that Spitzer’s image is losing a bit of its luster.

Michael Greve, a longtime critic of Spitzer and a political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, said: “I can’t talk about the Langone case in particular, but there is a pattern: everything that goes to trial, and ends up in court, he loses.”

Spitzer made his name in the early part of this decade with his no-holds-barred approach to fighting corrupt practices. He shamed his opponents in news conferences and won big settlements, including a $1.4-billion deal with 10 Wall Street firms.

But the arrival of the new Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox and the departure of SEC enforcement director Stephen Cutler -- a partner of Spitzer’s in many investigations -- has left the attorney general with fewer like-minded friends among federal regulators.

Despite the changing image, several experts said that it was not clear that Spitzer’s influence had waned.

“Is he looking a little more tarnished than a year ago? Yes. But is he seriously weakened? I don’t think so,” New York University economics professor Lawrence White said.

It may be too soon to say that the case against Langone has been lost, said Jonathan Turley, a professor at the George Washington University Law School in Washington. “Prosecutors haven’t revealed everything they have, so it’s hard to render judgment on them,” Turley said.

But Spitzer suffered a blow when Sihpol was acquitted by a Manhattan jury on 29 counts of helping a hedge fund trade mutual funds illegally. Spitzer plans to retry Sihpol on four criminal charges on which a jury was unable to reach a verdict.

And individuals and companies have grown more willing to fight Spitzer in public. Lawyers for Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the former American International Group Inc. chief executive accused of accounting crimes, have said the insurer made unnecessary accounting changes under pressure from Spitzer.

In early September, money management firm J. & W. Seligman & Co. openly challenged Spitzer, demanding his office halt investigating or requesting information about the firm’s alleged excessive fees.