(Photo: Patrick McMullan )

Former New York Stock Exchange board member Ken Langone says he wasn’t surprised erstwhile NYSE chairman Dick Grasso, whose $187.5 million retirement package he’d approved, got to keep the loot on appeal. The case helped cement Eliot Spitzer’s reputation as the Sheriff of Wall Street when he was state attorney general, but the judges said the pay package was none of the state’s business, after the exchange became a public company in 2006. Even so, “I think he earned every nickel,” Langone says of Grasso. “I would vote the same way I did then. This man did a lot for us.” Langone says he foresaw Spitzer’s ruin, too. “The prostitutes? Who the hell knew about that? But you knew he’d self-destruct,” he says. “He ought to be held accountable, whether it’s with the stock exchange or with the prostitutes.”

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