How many diamonds is your hooker?

I wanted a more creative headline, but "Eliot Mess," "Ho no!", "Addicted to love Gov" and "Spitzer swallows" were all taken, and "Spitz likes tits" wasn't creative enough to justify the profanity. Or was it? As for "Spitz's ditz," that just makes unfair assumptions about this "Kristen." Especially since the Emperor's Club site says their ladies are well-educated.

In any case, I figured it was only proper to provide my own pun-filled take on the ins and outs of the Spitzer scandal. I'll preface this by saying I feel really badly for his daughters and his wife, but I'm assuming none of them read harbatkat so I'll soldier on.

If anyone's unfamiliar with the situation because they have apparently been living in seclusion this week, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer on Monday was implicated in a high-end prostitution ring. Spitzer's involvement was discovered after his bank filed a "suspicious activity report" because he had broken up a $40,000 transfer into a bunch of smaller transfers and then asked the bank to remove his name from the transactions.

Investigators were expecting to find fraud -- kickbacks, bribes, etc. What they found instead, through an investigation of financial records and court-approved wiretaps, was that he'd transported a prostitute named Kristen from New York to D.C. when he was on a business trip there.

It gets even ickier because Spitzer was apparently in D.C. to testify Feb. 14 before a congressional subcommittee that hadn't invited him to testify. He apparently had to convince the subcommittee to let him speak on Valentine's Day. Knowing this, his wife has to stand behind him at the podium throughout this ordeal, seemingly showing her support in both his apology and his resignation.

In 2004, he signed into a law a bill raising the penalties for patronizing a prostitute. And transporting the prostitute to D.C. is a violation of the Mann Act, a 1910 law that made it illegal to transport individuals over state lines for the purposes of prostitution.

According to the New York Post, he has spent $80,000 over as long as 10 years on these services. His most recent transactions have been with Emperors Club VIP, an international prostitution ring that rates its ladies from three diamonds up to seven diamonds. Ratings are based on the "individual education, sophistication, and ambiance created by each of our models," according to the site, which has been taken down.

Spitzer's girl, Kristen, was probably a three-diamonder, since she cost $1,000 an hour (He paid $4,300 for two hours, but he's just a good tipper). Hourly prices range from $1,000 for three diamonds to $3,100 for seven diamonds. Salon has a good story on it, cum-plete with rates and screenshots from the site (I told you to expect bad puns).

According to an AP story, Kristen was warned about Spitzer's shenanigans:

The agent said she had been told the client "would ask you to do things that ... you might not think were safe ... very basic things,'' according to the papers, but that Kristen responded by saying, "I have a way of dealing with that ... I'd be, like, listen dude, you really want the sex?''

And if you're so inclined, you can access a broken-up version of the page through Internet Archive, a free service that provides old versions of Web sites that have been taken off the Web. Just type www.emperorsclubvip.com into the "Way Back Machine" search box and choose a date. Warning: it can be slow.