Other Cuomo lieutenants who earned their spurs with the New York federal prosecutor include the deputy attorney general for criminal justice, Robin Baker, a veteran of several terrorism prosecutions; the deputy attorney general for social justice, Mylan Denerstein; and Cuomo's chief of staff,  Steven Cohen, who, after his public-service stint, defended high-profile corporate clients like Enron and ImClone Systems. Cohen, who helps manage the attorney general's 780 lawyers, also was the court-appointed independent monitor for Deutsche Bank as part of Spitzer's hallmark global research analyst's settlement. 

Another top Cuomo aide—his economic justice deputy, Eric Corngold—developed a wide following among younger lawyers in his 16 years with the U.S. attorney's office in Brooklyn and has lured some of them to his new gig.

Corngold—after securing some of the first options-backdating indictments, in the Symbol Technologies case toward the end of his Brooklyn term—recently ignited Cuomo's office with a courtroom victory against Dell Computer for deceptive computer-repair insurance and financing programs and was involved in the investigation of UBS's auction-rate practices.

It certainly wasn't personal magnetism that drew these lawyers to Cuomo, though they are a tribute to his ability to delegate. Much of the credit for the talent goes to a transition committee led by a former New York attorney general, Robert Abrams, that says it worked largely independent of the attorney general.

Throughout his career, the 50-year-old Cuomo has exhibited little of the brash charm that helped Spitzer, one year his junior, turn New York's attorney general's office into a national platform and stepping-stone to his brief tenancy in the New York governor's mansion. Cuomo is better described as dogged, a perfectionist, and focused (some say obsessed)—organizational traits that served him relatively well as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Clinton administration and as political aide to his father, Mario, the former New York governor and silver-tongued icon of liberal Democrats. They were not political virtues, however, in his failed bid to nab New York's Democratic nomination for governor in 2002.

As attorney general, Spitzer won renown for creating his battles. He sniffed out biased research on Wall Street that had gone unremarked for decades (shaming the S.E.C. in the process), confronted mutual fund trading abuses, took on questionable insurance-industry practices and pursued what he called excessive executive pay by battling former New York Stock Exchange chief executive Dick Grasso.

Cuomo often follows the headlines. His widely publicized investigations of the mortgage and student-loan industries were launched well after the crises surfaced, and he has been competing with Massachusetts' top securities regulator, William Galvin, for bragging rights to auction-rate prosecutions.

But he's also taken his office in new, populist directions—winning agreements from social-networking site Facebook and internet service providers Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint on restricting sexually explicit material; prosecuting pharmacy benefits managers for switching prescription drugs without informing patients; chastising the Spitzer administration for its jihad against a political rival in the state senate; challenging local municipalities for abusing state pension money and—repudiating one of Spitzer's most prominent crusades—deciding not to challenge a court decision that allowed Grasso to keep his $139 million pay package.

When Cuomo unveiled his top departmental appointments, he vowed to monitor Wall Street with the same grit as Spitzer, but quickly cautioned reporters that the atmosphere on Wall Street was less confrontational. Now that the credit crisis has infected credit cards and other student and consumer loans, it is back near the top of his agenda—revealing an admirable, or some would say highly political, flexibility. As the Washington Post has noted, Cuomo has all but abandoned the priorities of gun control and health-care fraud that he highlighted when he took office.

Cuomo also has been criticized for being too accommodative. He came on strong early this year in attacking government-sponsored mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for failing to ensure that home-pricing appraisals were honest, but accepted a settlement in March that extracted little but a code of conduct on appraisals that some say could result in higher consumer costs. He also pursued the hot-button issue of lax bond-rating-agency standards, but his June settlement with Moody's Investors Service, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch Ratings focused solely on residential mortgage-backed securities—weak tea, some critics say, when the agencies' overoptimistic ratings have infected the world economy and caused billions of dollars of losses for banks and investors.

But Cuomo's realpolitik approach may prove more beneficial to consumers than Spitzer's prosecutorial zeal.

"He's simply been more effective," Zamansky says.