At a Boston Celtics home game against the New York Knicks in the early ’80s, the crowd of raucous Boston fans had no qualms flaunting their hometown pride. But neither did a young Eliot Spitzer, a native New Yorker and student at Harvard Law School who sat among the season ticket holders shamelessly cheering the Knicks and brazenly booing the crowd’s clear favorite.

“All of a sudden, this one woman turns around, points to Eliot, and says, ‘I’m going to tell [Law Professor] Alan Dershowtiz that you were cheering for the Knicks,’” said Cliff Sloan ’79, a close friend and classmate of Spitzer who attended the game with him. Dershowitz had given Spitzer and Sloan, his research assistants, the tickets.

“For Eliot, it was a true act of principle—or maybe insanity. He just laughed it off,” added Sloan, who is also a former Crimson editorial editor.

Before his rapid ascension to the helm of the New York Governor’s office, before the headlines that dubbed him “The Most Powerful Man on Wall Street,” and before the news pieces that caricatured him as a crusading lawyer with a hidden agenda against influential moneymen, Spitzer was known for his quick wit, confidence, and intellect, say his friends and classmates.

“Eliot is somebody who always gets a kick out of things. He loves to laugh and often gets convulsed with laughter,” Sloan said. “There is this famous series The New York Times ran, and it printed pictures of Eliot, Jim [Cramer], and I clowning around in a photo booth—Eliot actually gave it to them willingly. And that is something very consistent with what I remember from law school: a lot of joking around.”

Largely regarded as an effective, albeit abrasive, executive, Spitzer catapulted to the governorship in 2007 after having served as Attorney General from 1999 to 2006. On March 17, 2007, he resigned in disgrace on account of his connections to an elite prostitution ring.

A COMEDIC INTELLECTUAL

The former governor’s penchant for jokes may have been his method of choice for coping with the high-stress environment of law school.

“Law school is just a tense situation,” said Florrie Darwin, a former classmate and current lecturer at the Law School. “Instead of being unhappy as many people were, Eliot’s mode was just to do what he had to do and deal with the tension by making light of things, using humor as a way of helping everybody around him during the day.”

A quarter-century after he graduated from the Law School, others who know Spitzer more vividly remembered his superhuman work ethic.

As a second-year law student, he rarely produced anything that wasn’t meticulous or submitted on time, said Dershowitz, for whom Spitzer worked on the high-profile Claus von Bülow case.

“I’d give him an assignment at seven at night, and he would have it in at nine in the morning, there in completed form, waiting for me on my desk,” Dershowitz said.

“I remember telling him, ‘Eliot, have some fun. All work and no play makes Eliot a dull boy.’ But I wish he hadn’t listened to me,” he recalled with a laugh.

A HARDENED POLITICIAN’S SOFTER SIDE

Spitzer’s diligence eventually led to a political career centered on aggressively combating organized crime and corruption, first in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and later as the State’s chief lawyer.

Media coverage of Spitzer had oftentimes been critical, Spitzer’s friends allege.

A Wall Street Journal editorial leading up the 2006 gubernatorial election accused him of “denying, dissembling and developing convenient cases of amnesia,” in the face of accusations of abuse in office as attorney general. A 2007 New Yorker feature labeled the then-newly elected Governor Spitzer as an “aggressive personality with an ambitious agenda.”

“During the time that he was [attorney general] he ruffled a lot of feathers, and there were certain groups that felt he was overzealous in his prosecutions, and overaggressive as governor [when] he dealt with Republicans,” Darwin said. “But in all the settings I’ve seen him, I wouldn’t say he has only been ambitious, but rather an empathic and generous guy.”

Both Darwin and Sloan recalled incidents of Spitzer’s “generosity and intense loyalty as a friend.”

When Sloan suffered a heart attack in early 2000, he said that Spitzer left New York the next day during a busy time as attorney general to be at his bedside in a Washington, D.C. hospital.

“It meant a tremendous amount to me and my wife,” Sloan said. “It was reassuring to see him, when all of sudden, I’m in the hospital, an alien in a strange land. That’s the kind of thing he does all the time—that’s the kind of person he is.”

Over the last year, the Spitzer family has endured intense public scrutiny after it was disclosed that the former governor spent as much as $80,000 on prostitutes over a period of several years.

“One of the things that got overlooked in coverage of his family was how close they all are and continue to be,” Sloan said, adding that Spitzer “has had and continues to have a close relationship” with his wife, Silda Wall, whom he met and dated while at the Law School. Spitzer’s daughter, Elyssa A.L. Spitzer ’12, is a Crimson news editor.

REBUILDING AN IMAGE

Initially, the fallout over Spitzer’s personal misconduct seemed to have irrevocably tarnished a political career that many thought would peak at the presidency. But in recent months, the former governor has made forays into the public arena—authoring several columns for Slate Magazine in which he offers insight into the economic crisis, appearing on the cover of Newsweek Magazine in April 2009, and simultaneously fueling speculation that he will attempt a political comeback.

But Dershowitz, Darwin, and Sloan all emphasized that Spitzer—who has been interested in various policy issues since his time at the Law School—should continue to engage in those debates.

“It would be a tremendous loss if he didn’t play an important role in the economic and political future of this country,” Dershowitz said. “And I hope we don’t reject it because of moralistic hypocrisies.”

According to his friends, it’s not just Spitzer’s intellect but his “character” that makes him apt to play an enduring role in public service.

“He is very open, loves to mix it up in terms of thoughts and ideas, and I think one thing that people have sometimes misunderstood is the true secret of his success,” Sloan said. “It’s comical to him when people discuss some elaborate calculus behind his actions because that’s just not who he is. The irony of it all is that he’s been very successful because he genuinely cares about the public.”

—Staff writer Ahmed N. Mabruk can be reached at amabruk@fas.harvard.edu