Since the vast majority of the SNEDBlog contributing authors work in banking, I thought they may find Fortune’s behind-the-scenes look at the story of Eliot Spitzer interesting.

It seems a SAR brought down “Client #9″:

In July 2007, North Fork Bank vice president Adam Brenner got a peculiar phone call from his branch’s most prominent client, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Brenner’s private-banking office, on Madison Avenue and 49th Street in Manhattan, catered to wealthy New Yorkers, many of them involved in real estate. It prided itself on service.

“Is there a way to wire money where it’s not evident that it’s coming from me?” the governor asked. Brenner referred the matter to his superiors. They wouldn’t make this anonymous wire transfer, even for the governor. It was against all sorts of banking regulations.

But the bankers noticed that the governor’s desired recipient — a company called QAT Consulting — also had its account at a North Fork branch. They would make an intrabank transfer instead, anonymously. Even so, the incident clearly required reporting. Any unusual money transfers were supposed to be disclosed to banking authorities on a Suspicious Activity Report, known as an SAR. This was Banking 101 — everyone at North Fork took an online course about it his first day on the job.

Politically prominent people received extra scrutiny because of their susceptibility to extortion or corruption. Spitzer’s transaction generated an unusually detailed and lengthy SAR, which the bank sent to FinCEN — the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department with offices in Detroit.

There the SAR was entered into a database accessible to federal, state, and local law-enforcement agencies. FinCEN typically received more than 3,400 SARs a day. The North Fork filing would remain buried among them, unnoticed for months.

From this point on the article, which is actually an excerpt of an upcoming book, goes into some of the more sordid details of Spitzer’s affairs.

And then it takes a turn for the obnoxious, as the author seems to come to the conclusion that Spitzer’s a good guy and was a victim of evil Republican scheming.

The author, unlike babies, but like Barack Obama, cannot seem to tell the difference between good and evil.

Eliot Spitzer made his career by destroying other people.  (Some of them deserved it, some didn’t.)  And when he was rewarded for his efforts by ascending to the position of Governor of New York, the state’s highest elected office, he broke the law. Repeatedly.

And the coward used his friend’s name to do it.

He betrayed everyone in his life, from his family, to his staff, to the voters who elected him.

I don’t care who leaked the information that brought him down.

There is only one villain in the story of Eliot Spitzer, a point that seems to be lost on Fortune editor-at-large Peter Elkind.