ALBANY – A Democratic candidate for governor, Eliot Spitzer, yesterday allowed that he sometimes will “shake the cage a little bit” in his “passion” to prosecute important investigations, but denies making a threat alleged by a former Wall Street executive.

Ex-Wall Street executive John Whitehead, now the head of the state Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, made the accusation in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal in December. He accused Mr. Spitzer, the state attorney general, of threatening him in a private telephone conversation eight months earlier. The state Republican chairman, Stephen Minarik, has called for an investigation. He said the claim shows that Mr. Spitzer, with large leads in the polls and high job approval ratings, lacks the temperament needed of a governor.

“The public appreciates that I and my office have done the job aggressively and with passion over the last seven years, and as a result we have demonstrated that occasionally it is important to shake the cage a little bit, to challenge the status quo that is fundamentally broken, and results speak for themselves in those areas,” Mr. Spitzer said yesterday. “The tenor of individual conversations are sometimes heated and sometimes people misconstrue,” Mr. Spitzer said. “But we have pursued our cases with vigor and passion and, we believe, properly and to good effect.”

Mr. Spitzer referred to his investigations that reformed conflicts of interests on Wall Street and in the insurance industry nationwide that hurt consumers. Companies agreed to settlements totaling almost $6 billion and adopted reforms in settlements that resulted in embarrassment and some terminations of top executives.

According to Mr. Whitehead’s notes taken after the conversation, Mr. Spitzer allegedly said: “I will be coming after you. You will pay the price” for publicly criticizing Mr. Spitzer’s investigation of an ally, insurance magnate Maurice Greenberg. Mr. Spitzer has accused Mr. Greenberg of misleading investors of American International Group Incorporated through improper accounting. Mr. Greenberg has suffered an embarrassing fall from AIG amid widening federal and state probes of accounting irregularities at the world’s largest property and casualty insurance company.