Dan Rice

On the morning of Wednesday, March 12, reporter Dan Rice was riding shotgun in the WNBC “Chopper 4” helicopter, roughly 2,000 feet above then-Governor Eliot Spitzer’s apartment on the Upper East Side, when he noticed something strange.

For the past half hour, Mr. Rice and his ace Norwegian pilot Lars Andresen had been hovering above Manhattan, along with a handful of other news choppers, waiting for Mr. Spitzer to emerge from his apartment at 80th Street and Fifth Avenue. At the time, the governor was on the verge of stepping down. And the plan was to provide aerial coverage of Mr. Spitzer’s drive to his office on Third Avenue near 40th Street, where he would presumably deliver his resignation speech.  read more »