A convicted Manhattan madam who served as an informant in the federal probe of Gov. Spitzer‘s liaisons with prostitutes was being whisked back home to Brazil last night, The Post has learned.
Handcuffed and shackled, Brazilian bombshell Andreia Schwartz – who pleaded guilty last January to state drug and prostitution charges – was quietly brought into her country’s Midtown consulate by federal authorities yesterday to fill out deportation paperwork.
Schwartz had once worked for Emperors Club VIP – the escort service that supplied Spitzer with his $4,300-a-night hooker, “Kristen.”
But she left to launch her own brothel based in a West 58th Street apartment – among whose clients was allegedly Time Warner Chief Financial Officer Wayne Pace.
The prostitution enterprise led to her arrest in 2006.
She accepted a guilty plea in state court that gave her immunity from federal prosecution and a sentence of time served in return for her agreement not to fight deportation.
But although she was officially sentenced on Feb. 4, she mysteriously was kept in town for more than a month – before her departure on the very day that Spitzer resigned.
In their complaint against Spitzer, federal prosecutors said they learned in 2006 from another law-enforcement agency of a woman who had worked as an Emperors Club escort.
That woman was Schwartz – and she became a “confidential source” for the federal authorities probing Spitzer, The Post’s sources said.
Although she had no knowledge of Spitzer’s patronage of Emperors, she provided the paper trail that linked the governor to the hooker ring, according to the sources.
The feds got access to the paychecks she got from QAT Consulting, the shell company that owns Emperors.
They were already investigating Spitzer’s moving thousands of dollars worth of checks to QAT – but until that point they hadn’t realized that QAT and Emperors were the same entity.
Neither federal nor state officials could be reached for comment.
Schwartz’s lawyer, Anthony Lombardino, asked whether his client had been part of the Spitzer probe, said, “I don’t know the answer to that.”
Flanked by two federal officers, Schwartz was escorted into the Midtown consulate at about 11:30 a.m., where she spent 45 minutes filling out the official deportation documents.
She had turned in her passport earlier.
No charges were ever brought against Schwartz on allegations that she had been ferrying bags of cash to and from Brazil and was involved in a mob-tainted, ultimately unsuccessful, $350 million bid to buy a floor of The Plaza hotel.
Additional reporting by Carolyn Salazar