ALL BUSINESS:Spitzer Gone,reforms Remain

That may be hard to see now amid the news that the so-called moral crusader was caught on a wiretap after allegedly arranging a meeting with a prostitute. On Wednesday, he resigned as the governor of New York.

Whatever he might have done in his personal life, though, doesn't tarnish that he made the investment environment more open and friendly for individual shareholders. Before Spitzer got involved when he was New York's attorney general, no one knew of the conflicts that existed in stock research or that mutual funds were giving trading perks to wealthy investors and hedge funds.

"He took apart a closed circle that lived on favors and back-scratching," said Barry Ritholtz, CEO and director of equity research at the investment firm Fusion IQ. "Spitzer wasn't coming after Wall Street. He was coming after the bad actors."

Plenty of those actors didn't like that Spitzer who jumped on any opportunity he could to build his national stature shined a bright light on their back-room dealings.

After the dot-com bubble had burst and companies long heralded as corporate America's finest were collapsing under the weight of scandal, Spitzer went into attack mode.

His first targets were the big investment firms that had made so much money during the stock market's surge in the late 1990s. Little did we know that much of it was at our expense.

We would soon learn that their game was fixed: Research analysts were recommending stocks so that their investment-banking colleagues could win more lucrative business from those same companies.

Spitzer subpoenaed e-mails from Wall Street firms and used those messages to build a solid case of how they misled investors.

The findings were shocking, especially for anyone who bought a high-flying Internet stock during the market boom.