Roger Stone socked it to Eliot Spitzer

Roger J. Stone Jr. has spent most of his adult life engaged in what some call “aggressive campaign tactics” and others call “dirty tricks.”

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Perhaps it’s no surprise then that Stone, a Republican, has claimed a possible connection to the downfall of former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Stone nemesis and a Democrat.

The Miami Herald reported Friday that a lawyer for Stone wrote the FBI on Nov. 19 passing along a tip from Stone that Spitzer had engaged the services of “high-priced call girls” while in Florida.

The letter said that Stone learned this information from “a social contact in an adult-themed club.” It also said that the governor had paid “tens of thousands of dollars” for the services of prostitutes.

And in a detail that has taken the Internet by storm, the lawyer added: ”It is also my client’s understanding from the same source that Gov. Spitzer did not remove his mid-calf length black socks during the sex act. Perhaps you can use this detail to corroborate Mr. Stone’s information.”

FBI representatives had contacted Stone earlier. However, he said he is not sure why they wanted to speak to him. He didn’t hear back from the FBI on the Spitzer letter.

He told The New York Times that he doesn’t know whether his information helped link Spitzer, who resigned on March 12, to the prostitution ring.

There have been different reports as to what triggered the Spitzer investigation.

Officials have generally said that the investigation began after banks reported suspicious transactions in Spitzer’s accounts. They did not respond to press inquiries about the Stone letter.

Stone’s involvement in the story does lend fuel to the argument that Spitzer’s political opponents were behind the investigation that led to his resignation.

Stone has dogged Spitzer since the former New York State attorney general was elected governor in 2006.

And for a while, he was on the staff payroll of Joseph L. Bruno, the majority leader of the New York Senate. Spitzer’s office had been on the attack against Bruno, a Republican, and Stone was there to help them fight back.

However, the Republicans let Stone go after he allegedly left a threatening voice mail for Spitzer’s father, Bernard.

The call ended with the line, “The fact that your son is a pathological liar will be known to all.” Stone has denied making the call.

Stone cut his teeth on the art of aggressive politics working for the Nixon re-election campaign in 1972. He remains loyal to the memory of the disgraced former president and has a tattoo of Nixon on his back.

Stone has worked beside some of the legends of hardball politics, including the late Lee Atwater, a Republican strategist.

And he was a partner in a firm with Richard “Dick” Morris, who was a key strategist for former President Bill Clinton. He also founded a lobbying firm in Washington with Charles R. Black Jr., a lobbyist who is now a key adviser to the McCain campaign.

Black has worked on many campaigns, perhaps most famously for the 2000 George W. Bush presidential campaign.

The outcome of the election between Bush and Al Gore remained undecided when Stone organized the so-called “Brooks Brothers Riot” in Miami. Well-dressed Republicans demonstrated in the streets and helped shut down the recount.

On Monday, the Times wrote that Stone saw Spitzer’s fall as about “hypocrisy and not sex.”

“I am not one to criticize anyone else’s sexual habits,” he continued. “And I have never held myself out as a ‘family values’ Republican.”

Probably so. In 1996, the Enquirer reported that Stone and his second wife frequented swingers clubs. Stone denied the allegations, but he lost his unpaid position as an adviser to then- presidential candidate Sen. Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican.

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