Binghamton has a ‘good’ reputation: Whenever I tell someone I went here, they usually say, ‘Oh, that’s a good school,’ and then there’s an awkward pause before we move on to a topic they know more about. People just don’t hear much about Binghamton except when it makes news ‘ lately there’s been a lot of news, and it has mostly not been good. Binghamton’s nebulous academic reputation has in recent years been colored by scandals of varying degrees of notoriety.

The cameras swooped in to Binghamton when an unhinged Vietnamese immigrant killed 13 people at the American Civic Association on Front Street; the press descended once more when that December, a desperate grad student about to lose his funding fatally stabbed anthropology professor Richard Antoun. The New York Times followed the Division I men’s basketball program’s fall from grace and provided a national stage for its eventual implosion ‘ but not before the team’s hulking ogre of a center caused an international incident by drunkenly stomping a kid I went to high school with over a misunderstanding with a girl. The attacker then absconded to his native Serbia with help from bribed diplomats, straining relations between the two countries.

Binghamton alumni have also become famous for playing supporting but vital roles in one-of-a-kind tabloid scandals. Tanya Hollander ’94, was outed in 2008 as a high-class hooker booker in the investigation of the prostitution ring that took down New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Stanislav Shpigelman graduated from Binghamton in 2004 near the top of his class, but two years later was caught spilling corporate secrets worth over $6 million in what government lawyers called ‘one of the most widespread, varied, and premeditated insider trading rings we have ever prosecuted.’ And in a karmic twist, both were prosecuted by the office of Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia, Binghamton class of 1983, who would go on to let Spitzer fade into ignominy by declining to press charges against him.

The Holistic Hooker Booker

In 2003, back when he was still New York’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer came to Binghamton to give a talk ‘ about ethics. In front of a group of business students and faculty (maybe Shpigelman wasn’t there) he warned, ‘We all have to play by the same rules ‘ The moment you begin to think you are beyond reproach and not accountable, that is the moment you can be brought down.’

Spitzer had apparently decided by 2008 that he was beyond reproach, as he was frequently using a 50-girl high-class prostitution ring called the Emperor’s Club VIP. The ensuing scandal brought down the once-heralded good-guy ‘steamroller’ governor and brought to the fore all sorts of interesting characters involved in the sex-for-hire machinery.

Among the mechanics oiling the club’s sex-for-hire machinery were the club’s booking agents ‘ or as the New York City tabloids would quickly dub them, the ‘hooker bookers’ ‘ who would arrange meetings and payments between the johns and the girls. Temeka Rachelle Lewis, 32, of Brooklyn, and Tanya Hollander, 36, of Harpur College, who was described in The Times as a ‘clog-wearing nutritionist’ from Rhinebeck (and originally Long Island), N.Y.

But after his career came tumbling down, Spitzer ducked criminal charges: Garcia, the US attorney, said that since Spitzer hadn’t used any public money to pay for his dalliances, there was no basis for bringing charges against him.

While the Emperor’s Club had been around since 2004, Hollander only joined up around January 2007, about the time when, according to the FBI complaint, she had a clandestine meeting with Brener and Suwal in a minivan near Grand Central Station. (She had reportedly been looking for extra money to support her burgeoning holistic-nutrition consulting business.) She booked encounters with clients in cities like New York, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Los Vegas and Miami. From June 2007 to January 2008, the government alleged she’d been paid a paltry $4,870, compared to the ring’s trackable profits in excess of $1 million.

Hollander never had any interaction with Spitzer, but because of Client 9’s prominence she was caught up in the publicity storm that followed her and her cohorts’ arrests and the revelation of his identity. She was released on $250,000 bail. Her fiance, Lance Syrlin, insisted she thought she was ‘only booking models for events like car shows,’ The Times reported. He told the New York Post that Hollander was ‘wholesome,’ a ‘good soul, beautiful person’ who ‘ didn’t know the name of her employer until recently.’

Federal judge Deborah Batts may have agreed, saying that Hollander had played a ‘minimal’ role in the scandal (prosecutors had even reportedly rebuffed her offer to turn state’s evidence in exchange for a plea deal) and sentencing her in November 2008 to a year of probation ‘ despite prosecutors from Garcia’s office seeking six months of home confinement.

Hollander’s lawyer, Michael Farkas, told reporters that she was ‘eager to resume her health practice and continue helping others.’ But she wasn’t able to leave behind her newfound celebrity status as quickly as she might have liked: Just a week after she was sentenced, she was back in the news in a New York Post story bearing the screaming headline, ‘Hooker Aide In Snow Job.’ In July 2008, months after her arrest, she got a job as an administrator at an upstate yoga retreat run by actress Uma Thurman’s mother under the name Tania Robyn Cyrlin.

‘We’re extremely troubled to learn of her problems only now, and especially troubled that she withheld what’s clearly pertinent information about her background,’ Birgitte Thurman told the Phoenecia Times. ‘Clearly, had we been aware, we might have hired someone else,’ she told the paper. ‘She was referred to us through contacts in [New York] as a capable administrator, and it’s an unfortunate situation for everyone since she’s been doing a very good job for us.’

Apparently capable enough to keep her job despite the unwelcome attention, she is still listed on the retreat’s website as its manager.

From Bartle Library Stacks to the Halls of Power

Michael Garcia, the man who let Spitzer off the hook(er), graduated from SUNY-Binghamton 11 years before Hollander ‘ in 1983, the same year as alumni office darling Billy Baldwin ‘ with an English degree from Harpur College. He went on to get a master’s from the College of William and Mary and his juris doctorate from Albany Law School.

He was a federal prosecutor from 1992 to 2001, and his star was on the rise. In 2002, he was named acting commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. In 2003 he was appointed Assistant Homeland Security Secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement by President George W. Bush. He was appointed to what is widely considered the pre-eminent federal jurisdiction in the nation: U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he served from from 2005 to 2008, retired after the election and now works in private practice.

As a young assistant U.S. attorney in New York, he prosecuted some of the nation’s most high-profile criminal cases ‘ including the first World Trade Center attack in 1993, the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and a thwarted 1995 plot to plant bombs aboard 12 American airliners. He brought down four sitting New York state lawmakers: Spitzer, Queens Assemblyman and racketeer Brian McLaughlin, another Queens Assemblyman and influence-peddler Tony Seminerio, and Bronx State Senator Efrain Gonzalez, who was caught funneling public money to a mistress in the Dominican Republic. One of Garcia’s last moves on the job was to launch an investigation into whether the financial instruments that helped bring down the world economy in the latest recession were illegal.

His office was already watching Wall Street in 2005, and that’s when he crossed paths with Stan Shpigelman.

The Inside Man

Shpigelman, a Ukrainian immigrant who had settled with his family in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, had been one of the School of Management’s most promising graduates of 2004 (the end of my freshman year). He was one of around 20 students with ‘sterling’ GPAs chosen during their sophomore year to be groomed for jobs at Wall Street’s top finance firms. But by April 2006, Stan was in federal court on charges of having leaked secrets to two co-conspirators who would go on to illegally make $6.7 million from their schemes. I didn’t even know about the story until a reporter for the Boston Globe e-mailed me, asking whether I knew anything about Stan and if I could find out more. (What do you want? It was spring break.)

Shpigelman had been an analyst in the mergers and acquisitions unit of Merrill Lynch, providing him access to what Garcia’s office would call ‘the most valuable information there is on Wall Street.’ He was accused of passing along tips on six pending mergers and acquisitions over a 10-month period to masterminds David Pajcin and Eugene Plotkin soon after he started at Merrill Lynch in 2004. Shpigelman would spill his insider secrets ‘ through what his lawyers would call ‘a combination of false promises, deception, intimidation and flattery’ on the part of Plotkin and Pajcin ‘ in strip clubs and Russian bath houses. They promised him a big payday if he kept cooperating and threatened dire consequences if he stopped.

But Shpigelman was merely the most lucrative of many cogs in Pajcin and Plotkin’s scheme machine. Pajcin recruited his stripper girlfriend to try and ply secrets from the financiers she danced for. The two hired a guy off Craigslist to get a job driving a forklift at the Wisconsin printing plant of Business Week so he could steal copies of the magazine before it went public; he’d then read Pajcin the ‘Inside Wall Street’ column while sitting in his car, as stocks it mentioned favorably often gained market value that could be traded on. A high school friend of Pajcin’s, apparently aware of his pal’s scheming ways, fed him secrets from a grand jury investigation of fraudulent accounting at Bristol-Meyers Squibb. And Pajcin and Plotkin used accounts of friends and family, including Pajcin’s computer-illiterate retired underwear seamstress aunt in Croatia, to increase their holdings.

It all finally came apart when the feds noticed the Croatian underwear lady was set to make over $2 million from trading Reebok shares in days leading up to and immediately after the announcement that it would be bought out by Adidas-Salomon. They found Pajcin and got him to squeal, and soon they had Stan.

By all accounts, Stan had been quiet, frugal and hardworking, so the accusations against him came as a shock to the School of Management professors he had worked most closely with, and whom I spoke to that April.

‘He was one of our brightest students, very hard working, very academic. He was a very diligent, very bright kid,’ said Srinivasan Krishnamurthy, an SOM professor who had advised Shpigelman’s independent study of the finance industry. ‘It cannot be him,’ that’s the first thing I thought.’

SOM Dean Upinder Dhillon, who had personally gone to bat for Stan when recruiters had come around, was equally surprised. ‘It’s stunning, shocking ‘ use whatever word you want. We’re in disbelief,’ he said at the time. ‘When you know somebody well, and you don’t have any idea of something like that happening, it’s a whole range of emotions.’

‘Where he was, you’re at the pinnacle of success,’ Dhillon said. ‘This is the peak of achievement as far as individuals are concerned, as far as success goes. It is ironic that you can go from there and then you fall so low.’

But Dhillon withheld final judgment, even if Shpigelman had been convicted in the lurid court of public opinion. ‘The justice system has yet to take its due course,’ Dhillon said. ‘We have to give Stan his due course.’

His day in court came when he pleaded guilty to one count of insider trading in exchange for a lighter sentence; Stan got off with even less time since, prosecutors admitted, he wasn’t at the center of the plot. Stan’s defense attorney argued for home restriction instead of incarceration, saying he was too frail to go to prison and that being home with his family would rehabilitate him just fine. But in the end, the federal judge on the case said that an example needed to be set for other young analysts in his position and sentenced him to 37 months.

As Spitzer said in that now-ironic ethics lecture in 2003, ‘Those who cross the line are now finding out, that ultimately, it comes back to haunt you.’ Let’s hope today’s Binghamton students and alumni ‘ and for that matter the administrators who aim to take the university in a new direction in the wake of the basketball implosion ‘ have learned well to heed those words. Otherwise, it’ll only be more bad news for Binghamton.