HOW COOL IS SHE . . .

From today's New York Times ...

PUBLIC LIVES: Tough and Capable (Even of Spelling Habeas)
By JAN HOFFMAN

Just about everywhere you look these days, there's Eliot Spitzer, the New York State attorney general, starting a swordfight with yet another industry. He's drawn blood from securities analysts, investment bankers, mutual fund managers, insurance brokers and, on behalf of restroom attendants, restaurateurs. Next up, the wind has it, are some major record labels. The very mention of his name rattles chief executives (and gladdens the hearts of white-collar defense lawyers).

What you don't see is the very smart, very tough and rather short woman who's got Mr. Spitzer's back.

That would be Michele Hirshman, whose name rarely appears in print and who is Mr. Spitzer's first deputy. Since 1999, she has been the person whose office adjoins his, who is briefed with him or in his stead and has complete license to argue with him. She's the one who challenges, advises and signs off on the investigations that catapult regularly into the headlines. For the 600 lawyers in the state attorney general's 15 offices, Ms. Hirshman is gatekeeper, teacher and moral and legal authority. She even double-checks the news releases for accuracy.

So what kind of person can we expect from a woman whose pre-Spitzer career was spent mostly as a high-level federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, nailing corrupt police officers and politicians? Whose résumé, at 46, still says of her B.A. from Rutgers College: "Summa Cum Laude with Highest Departmental Honors in History, Rank 1/1564, G.P.A.: 4.0"? No-nonsense, buttoned-up, careful, humorless, possibly even dour?

But here's Ms. Hirshman, in her Lower Manhattan office, giving a tour of her tchotchkes. "I'm a little superstitious," she is saying, holding up engraved beads. "My mother-in-law gave them to me during the Transit P.B.A. trial" - involving union officials and lawyers at New York City Transit who were charged with racketeering.

"I call them my 'girl beads,'"she says. "The first one says 'clarity.' I used to carry my girl beads in my pocket every day to court, and on the days when my suits didn't have pockets, I'd lend them to the female F.B.I. agents. Once in a while the male F.B.I. agents got to play with the girl beads, too."

Now she's pointing to an inscribed photo of Pierre N. Leval, who was then a federal district judge, for whom Ms. Hirshman clerked fresh out of Yale Law School. Ms. Hirshman, who turns out to be warm and even effervescent, talks quickly, with highly animated hands and features, abbreviating sentences with "buhbuhbuhbuh" rather than "yadda-yadda." She recounts that during her first week with Judge Leval, he said to her gravely, "This is how you spell 'habeas.'" Laughing at herself, Ms. Hirshman seems unusually self-effacing for someone whom even defense lawyers grudgingly describe as extraordinary. "You know how I had spelled it? 'Habeus.'"

At this moment, Mr. Spitzer, a thin, angular man who all but shoots off electrical sparks as he bursts in, borrows her for a consultation, tossing off, "Michele is the one and only indispensable person is this office!"

Who better to run the office of an elected state attorney general than the inimitably capable Ms. Hirshman. She has respectable credentials - in her final years as a federal prosecutor, she was chief of the public corruption unit, leading, among other cases, the exposure of 19 New York City police officers in the 30th Precinct in Manhattan for narcotics and extortion offenses - and no apparent desire to enter politics.

SHE has her priorities. During Mr. Spitzer's investigation of stock analysts, "I was interviewing Sandy Weill" - that would be Sanford I., the former chief executive of Citigroup - "and I had to leave early to take my son to Hebrew school for a special event. It's very bad not to show up when your kid is expecting you!" (Ms. Hirshman is married to Russell G. Pearce, a professor at Fordham Law School, and they live in Brooklyn with their two sons. Because of conflicting schedules, she says, family dinners don't happen, but around 9:30 Monday through Thursday nights, the four of them gather for what they loosely define as "Torah study.")

"People always say, 'How do you feel with him as a boss?'" says Ms. Hirshman, referring to Mr. Spitzer, a seemingly constant presence in local and even national headlines. "Hey, he's smarter than I am, he works harder than I do, and he treats me well."

Oh, come on!

She relents. "I give better summations than he does."

In Ms. Hirshman, Mr. Spitzer found an extremely bright and hard-working lawyer with a longstanding commitment to (as her father, a college administrator, and mother, who ran laboratories for Planned Parenthood, taught her): "Leave the world a little better than it was before."

As an investigator, prosecutor and supervisor, she has long maintained: "You must believe the person is guilty, that you can prove it, and you do prove it. And those questions should keep you up at night. And if you can't sleep, then you shouldn't prosecute that person. People who exercise power should do so carefully, fairly and sensitively. Because you are ruining that person's life, so you better be right."

And what of the occasional criticism that Mr. Spitzer's cases gallop onto turf that belongs to other authorities, like the Securities and Exchange Commission?

"I believe that if you have evidence of wrongdoing and the law authorizes you to address it, you should," Ms. Hirshman says. "And you don't have an obligation to tell the S.E.C. about it first."