Eliot Spitzer was spotted walking up Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan last week, eyelids pink with weariness, shoulders stooped, and—strikingly—all alone.

Barely anyone in the lunchtime crowd looked twice at the disgraced former governor as he trudged past the headquarters of Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and other banking giants he had once impaled on a prosecutorial lance.

That same day, Andrew Cuomo—Spitzer's successor as New York's attorney general—had a lieutenant whip off letters to J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Wachovia alerting them they were in his sights. He was fresh from negotiating billion-dollar agreements with UBS and Citigroup over the promotion of auction-rate securities, the letters said, and he wanted more.

Today, the attorney general announced that J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley have agreed to buy back more than $7 billion in auction-rate securities and pay $60 million penalties.

It is Cuomo's turn in the crusader limelight, and despite rough edges and ambition reminiscent of his predecessor, he's winning acclaim for his focus, flexibility, discipline, and consumer-friendly results (which eluded Spitzer as top lawyer for the state) that often sets a national agenda. 

"He seems to really put investors first," says Jacob Zamansky, a securities lawyer specializing in cases against brokerage firms and a critic of the reimbursements clients received in Spitzer's landmark analyst and mutual fund trading settlements. "Spitzer seemed more interested in photo opportunities than in getting real reform."

A lawyer at a bank that has negotiated an auction-rate settlement says the comparison is specious because the circumstances and cash pools involved are widely disparate. But he agrees with Zamansky that Cuomo's team has been defter negotiators than Spitzer's rough-riding team of prosecutors.

"There's less complaining from the industry people about zealots and bullies," Zamanksy said. "You have to be reasonable with the firms, and I think the Cuomo people get credit for that."

Cuomo's approach to the auction-rate mess, in which investors have been blocked from cashing in securities that brokers had promoted as equivalent to cash in the bank, is illustrative. Cuomo in recent days squeezed agreements from UBS and Citigroup to buy back $26 billion of securities from clients and to pay New York and other state regulators $250 million in fines. Merrill Lynch—pressured by Cuomo and even more so by his Massachusetts counterpart—has volunteered to pony up $10 billion to make its customers whole.

But when Morgan Stanley chimed in last week with an offer to redeem a mere $4.5 billion of auction-rate bonds from clients, Cuomo was having none of it.

"Too little, too late," a Cuomo spokesman said.

Cuomo is flexible, admirers say, but no pushover.

There are other nuanced differences.

Spitzer's posse of top lawyers was smart and brash—and tightly harnessed by their politically ambitious and temperamental boss. Cuomo's quieter crew of long-time prosecutors tends to share a mutual respect for each other and little political loyalty to their boss. Few had ever worked with Cuomo before, but many have worked with each other.

Cuomo's chief of investor protection, David Markowitz, 37, who has been central in the auction-rate investigations, for example, helped crack a complex insider-trading scandal two years ago as assistant regional director at the Securities and Exchange Commission office in New York. And he knew Benjamin Lawsky, now Cuomo's special assistant and deputy counsel, who as an assistant U.S attorney in Manhattan was lead prosecutor on the criminal case that brought convictions of employees from Goldman Sachs, Merrill, and Morgan Stanley.