In Spitzer’s office, hours of drudgery, moments of ‘gotcha!’

By KATE KELLY
The Wall Street Journal
October 27, 2004, 10:09 AM EDT

One of New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer’s investigators was perusing a stack of subpoenaed documents in a Manhattan office last month when he let out a yelp, slammed down his coffee and sprinted down the corridor.

The find, people in the office recall: a Marsh & McLennan Cos. employee’s e-mail soliciting a fake bid from an insurance company to help Marsh steer business to a favored provider.

The sleuth: Craig Winters, a 27-year-old intern.

Breathless, he appeared in the 23rd-floor office of his boss, Matthew Gaul, to show him the evidence. “I was like, ‘Oh my God,’ ” says Mr. Winters, a second-year New York University law student.

Weeks later, Mr. Spitzer sued Marsh, accusing the world’s biggest insurance brokerage of bid-rigging. That led to the dethroning of its chief executive on Monday and set the stage for an overhaul of the industry’s way of doing business.

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