Eliot Spitzer resigned as Governor of New York yesterday after a sex scandal put an abrupt end to the political career of a rising star who seemed destined for the White House.

Mr Spitzer, a crusading former prosecutor once known as the Sheriff of Wall Street, said that he would “leave public life” two days after he was identified as Client 9 in a $5,500-an-hour international call-girl ring.

He will be replaced on Monday by his deputy, David Paterson, who will be New York’s first black Governor and the first blind one in US history.

Mr Spitzer, who is married with three daughters, emerged from his Fifth Avenue apartment to announce his resignation yesterday.

“I am deeply sorry that I did not live up to what was expected of me,” he told a press conference, with his wife, Silda, at his side.

“I look at my time as Governor with a sense of what might have been . . . There is much more to be done. I cannot allow my private failings to disrupt the people’s work.

“In the past few days I have begun to atone for my private failings with my wife, Silda, my children and my entire family. The remorse I feel will always be with me.”

Mr Spitzer’s lawyer, a former chief of the prosecutor’s public corruption unit, failed in an attempt to use his resignation as a bargaining chip in negotiations with her former bosses.

The Governor was exposed as Client 9 of the Emperor’s Club VIP call-girl ring after he was caught on an FBI telephone tap setting up a tryst with a “American, petite, very pretty brunette” prostitute named Kristen.

She was identified last night as a failed rhythm-and-blues singer born Ashley Youmans but now known as Ashley Alexandra Dupré.

“I just don’t want to be thought of as a monster,” Ms Dupré, 22, born in New Jersey and now living in New York’s Flatiron district, told The New York Times. “This has been a very difficult time. It is complicated.”

On her MySpace page Ms Dupré said that she had left “a broken family” at 17 and had used drugs, “been broke and homeless”.

“But I made it,” she adds. “I’m still here and I love who I am.”

Ms Dupré travelled by train from New York to Washington to meet Mr Spitzer in an hotel on the eve of Valentine’s Day. An alleged madam was caught on the phonetap asking “Kristen” whether Client 9 had sought unsafe sex.

The New York Post reported that he had asked her to perform oral sex on him without a condom but she had insisted on protection.

Mr Spitzer’s embarrassment was compounded yesterday by a prostitute called Sienna, 22, who told ABC News that he paid her for sex two years ago while he was still state attorney-general, New York’s top law-enforcement official. She said that he tipped her well and “didn’t do anything that wasn’t clean”.

The investigation began when his bank notified authorities of suspicious money transfers to a shell company.

Mr Spitzer allegedly wanted to transfer more than $10,000 to the ring’s front company, QAT Consulting Group, but broke it up into smaller amounts to avoid the bank being required to report it to the Government. The Wall Street Journal said that he made three payments of roughly $5,000 in the spring and summer of 2007.

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