After issuing a vague but heartfelt apology, Governor Spitzer yesterday evening was said to be on the brink of resigning from office amid allegations that he arranged to meet with a $4,300-a-night prostitute in the nation’s capital on the eve of Valentine’s Day.

A top aide to the governor said Mr. Spitzer had not made a decision, but lawmakers and administration aides were bracing for the downfall of New York’s most powerful Democrat.

Sources say a resignation could be linked to an agreement with federal prosecutors in which the governor would step down and avoid criminal charges.

RELATED: The Emperors Club Complaint (pdf) | Text of Spitzer’s Statement

The disclosure threatens to abort the political career of one of the most promising Democrats of the new generation, a square-jawed man who rocketed to the statehouse after earning national acclaim as attorney general and pledging to tame a wayward state government with the same arm-twisting swagger he honed as the “Sheriff of Wall Street.”

Mr. Spitzer’s brief but stormy governorship has often collided with controversy that overshadowed an agenda that had not fully taken form. Yet the news of the governor’s link to a high-priced prostitution service left even the most wizened lawmakers slack-jawed and his administration in a state of devastation.

If he resigns, his lieutenant governor, David Paterson, 53, a wise-cracking former state senator of Harlem who is legally blind and African American, would assume office as the 59th governor of New York and serve out the almost three years remaining in Mr. Spitzer’s four-year term.

Top aides to Mr. Paterson were already preparing for a transition last night, a legislative source said.

At 6 p.m. at the State Capitol Building, grim-faced aides emerged from a brief meeting during which they were told that the governor had not resigned.

Before about 100 reporters at his New York City headquarters, Mr. Spitzer, 48, made a brief statement at 3 p.m. and refused to take questions.

“Today I want to briefly address a private matter. I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family and violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong. I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public, whom I promised better,” Mr. Spitzer said.

“I do not believe that politics in the long run is about individuals. It is about ideas, the public good, and doing what is best for the state of New York. But I am disappointed that I failed to live up to the standard I expected of myself. I must now dedicate some time to regaining the trust of my family,” he said.

He was joined arm-in-arm by his wife of 20 years, Silda Wall, a North Carolina native whom he met while they were students at Harvard Law School.

A man believed to be Mr. Spitzer was described in excerpts of transcripts of phone calls that were intercepted in the course of a federal investigation into the prostitution business.

A federal affidavit unsealed last week suggests that Mr. Spitzer, who has three teenage daughters, paid for a prostitute to come from New York for a rendezvous in Washington, D.C., in room 871 of the Mayflower Hotel in the evening hours of February 13.

The affidavit indicates “Client-9,” whom investigators said was Mr. Spitzer, spent $4,300 on a “pretty brunette, 5 feet, 5 inches, and 105 pounds.” At one point, he offered to get more cash at an ATM, the affidavit says.

While the managers of the service have been charged, none of the women or their patrons has been accused of criminal wrongdoing.

Immediately after the encounter, the prostitute said in a recorded phone call that the client “would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe — you know.”

The document indicates that Mr. Spitzer had a long-standing account with the company, Emperors Club VIP, which advertised online as an escort service and investment service.

After making his statement, the governor immediately exited his office suite and was driven to his Upper East Side home, which was surrounded by reporters last evening, according to an aide. He has no public schedule today.

The governor’s announcement drew immediate calls for resignation from state Republicans. His party allies, including Senator Schumer and Speaker Sheldon Silver, refused to stand behind him but said they awaited further word from him.

“We’re going to take the high road and let everybody else beat the s— out of him,” a Republican senator of Brooklyn, Martin Golden, said.

If he resigns, Mr. Spitzer would leave behind a fractured state government, facing shrinking tax revenues, an alarming deficit, and an unresolved budget, on top of an unfulfilled agenda that administration officials had thought was just beginning to gain traction after an ill-conceived policy initiative to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

His potential exit could jeopardize his party’s drive for power in the Senate. Republicans, who control the chamber, have spent the better part of Mr. Spitzer’s term bickering with the governor and accusing him of using the state police as a political weapon against the Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno. The Spitzer administration faces three ongoing investigations into those allegations.

While his announcement left his staff devastated, his enemies — many of whom Mr. Spitzer accumulated as attorney general when he convened high-profile conflict-of-interest investigations into Merrill Lynch, AIG, and other big-name firms — rejoiced.

Footage reportedly showed brokers on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange breaking into applause.

Mr. Spitzer informed his senior staff individually, by phone, and in person of his link to the prostitution service starting at 8 p.m. Sunday evening, an aide said.

Mr. Spitzer, who entered the headquarters on Third Avenue at around 2:30 p.m., was described by an official as “unhinged.”

“We’re absolutely devastated,” the aide said. “You could not have picked a less likely person to be in this situation.”

A former top aide to the governor told The New York Sun that “Eliot doted on Silda,” and that the governor affectionately called his wife Sil.
Ms. Wall, a former white-collar lawyer, took on largely symbolic initiatives as first lady.

In recent months, however, aides close to the governor said she had begun to play a greater advisory role. She was most heavily involved in promoting New York tourism and a program to make the Executive Mansion in Albany more energy-efficient.

The aide said Mr. Spitzer would often open a top drawer and take out vacation photographs of him and his wife on a skiing trip or on the beach. The aide said Mr. Spitzer would look deeply at the pictures and then put them away.

Other aides interviewed by the Sun said they had not seen any evidence or signs of Mr. Spitzer, the son of a multimillionaire real estate developer, straying from his marriage. To his friends, he embodied the ideal of a straight-laced Princeton and Harvard-educated lawyer who wore only starched white dress shirts and ate turkey sandwiches for lunch.

“I think he’s a man of tremendous integrity. We’re all saddened for him,” the creator of Mr. Spitzer’s 2006 advertising campaign, James “Jimmy” Siegel, said. “I think he’s very much in love with is wife. I believe that. He’s human. I know he loves his wife. This is a mistake that is out of character for who he is.”

As attorney general in 2004, Mr. Spitzer staged a press conference to announce the arrest of 18 people connected to an escort service operating in New York City that served as a front for a prostitution ring.

“This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multi-tiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer, who oversaw the investigation, said in a statement at the time. “It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring, and now its owners and operators will be held accountable.”

Mr. Spitzer yesterday was slated to meet with Edward Cardinal Egan in Albany to discuss abortion rights legislation. He was also supposed to deliver a speech before Family Planning Advocates of New York defending the bill.

The Sun reported yesterday that prosecutors specializing in government corruption cases are leading the investigation into the prostitution service, suggesting that the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan have evidence that a public official hired a prostitute.

Federal prosecutors last week unsealed a criminal complaint charging four people with running Emperors Club VIP, which is alleged to have employed more than 50 high-end prostitutes, some of whom commanded up to $5,500 a night.

The criminal complaint describes phone calls intercepted by the FBI of several clients of the prostitution service. The men are only identified as clients one to nine.

The complaint said that “client 9” left a deposit with the prostitution service to cover an Amtrak ticket for the prostitute to return to New York from Washington.

Mr. Spitzer was in Washington to testify about the bond insurer crisis at a Capital Markets Subcommittee hearing in Washington February 14. He flew down to the capital with his insurance superintendent, Eric Dinallo, and another administration aide, Martin Mack, deputy secretary for intergovernmental affairs.

The governor’s alleged conduct may have violated the Mann Act, which forbids the transportation of prostitutes across state lines for the purposes of sex.

Mr. Spitzer’s role in procuring the train ticket could tempt any of the several federal prosecutors based between New York and Washington to try to charge the governor with conspiring to violate the Mann Act. The law, from 1910, was also known as the “White-slave traffic act,” and is rarely used anymore.

Federal prosecutors generally do not prosecute the men who patronize prostitutes.

While on the phone with a woman who booked engagements with prostitutes for Emperors Club, “Client-9” discussed payment and said in answer to a question, “Yup, same as in the past,” according to the criminal complaint.

After serving two terms as attorney general, Mr. Spitzer was elected governor in 2006 by a landslide with 69% of the vote against Republican John Faso.