https://www.chron.com/business/energy/article/Ski…
Jeffrey K. Skilling, the former Enron CEO who spent the past 12 years in prison for his role in masterminding one of most notorious corporate fraud cases in history, was released from federal custody on Thursday, the Bureau of Prisons said.
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Smartest Guys in the Room is one of my all-time favorite business documentaries and the "I'm fucking smart" quote is legendary.
That said, Skilling and Lay are pieces of shit.
Love that movie. The book Conspiracy of Fools is even better.
Andy Fastow spoke at my Alma Mater some time ago. Some greenhorn MBA student had the gall to ask him how much money he still has. He snapped back with none of your business.
Who says crime doesn't pay. Andy barely did a handful of years in club fed and is now out with however many millions secretly retained and is giving high dollar speeches on ethics to standing room only audiences. Rinse and repeat with Michael Milken, Nick Leeson, Jordan Beltfort, and Steven Cohen. Heck, you can even capitalize on your crime with a big screen blockbuster (Wolf of Wall Street, Rogue Trader, etc.).
Jeff talked himself into a long prison sentence. I have a friend who is a detective. Over drinks one night he said, "Despite what you see on those prime time TV shows, most criminals are indicted in part or entirely based on what they disclose. You can have all the evidence in the world, but the jury takes what the defendant says as gospel." Jeff should have let his high priced legal team do their job.
Andy on the other hand is the epitome of a prisoner's dilemma quadrant. He exercised the 5th and 6th instantly and cut deals in exchange for leniency.
Lou Pai made out the best of all of those guys. He may have actually been the smartest guy in the room.
The gasoline story of him is hilarious.
Him getting divorced and the courts making him sell his shares so he could cash out early and not go to prison for insider trading is the absolute best move anyone in history has ever made.
Then he married a stripper, not a great move but meh.
Terrible person and absolute scum, but very, very sharp.
Yeah, Skilling apparently loves the sound of his own voice and certainly thought his creative accounting made him the smartest one in the room.
I remember going to see the documentary with my husband and a friend of ours. About half the theater gasped aloud during the scene where they played the recordings of the Enron energy traders calling up the utilities and requesting they turn off the power grid... talk about having a serious set of balls... an utter moral vacuum amongst their C-suite and beyond.
Probably the only other scene more fucked up than that [in a documentary with numerous!] was when they spoke to an Enron worker whose pension and retirement monies were tied up in Enron stock who had been unable to unload his stock in a timely fashion because the Enron big-wigs froze the accounts of thousands of lower employees along with investors, making them unable to sell while the big-wigs dumped their own shares.
Skilling, Lay, Pai and Fastow... talk about a corporate 4 horsemen of the apocalypse...letting loose such havoc, bankrupting a Top 10 company, ruining lots of people's retirements... not to mention the ripples of complicitness that included Arthur Anderson and Merrill Lynch.
I used to blame AA for being incompetent until I ended up on the other side of the table.
I've seen a CFO (one who even had prior SEC investigations) outright tell the audit partner how things are going to go. This same CFO showed the partner the RFP that was sent out to the remaining Big 4 firms and made it clear that the board wants to tighten up the professional accounting expenses. The CFO assured the audit partner that he will do all he can to maintain the relationship as things have been going well so far.
Message was clear and the audit partner complied completely with all requests. An asset I thought for sure would have to be impaired was miraculously valued slightly more than book value.
I jumped out of that tinderbox shortly thereafter. CFO was replaced shortly after I left. The new one they have is even more crooked based on what I've heard. I did talk to a forensic accountant/lawyer buddy of mine about possible issues I could run into being part of that team and seeing what I saw. He laughed and said this is little league compared to some of the frauds he's been hired to investigate. Pushing the auditor around for the unqualified opinion is something everyone does. And the accounting firms take the direction in kind. No partner wants to explain to the other partners why a F500 client was lost.
Tinderbox indeed! Sounds like you needed to wear asbestos underwear at that firm and that you escaped unsinged.
Granted, Enron wasn't the only smudge on AA, it was their relationship with Enron that essentially undid them, but they'd also contended with faulty audits for Sunbeam, Waste Management and MCWorldCom, to name a few.
Guy is a legend. He should work for Jimmy Chanos.
Explain. Fastow was the one lining his pockets with PE groups run by him dealing with Enron.
Total scumbag. Shocking to me that people go to jail for selling drugs for longer periods than some of these guys that do way more damage with white collar crimes.
A coworker commented, "Wow, that long!?"
Me, "Yeah, only that long when they took down a top 10 corporation destroying over $40B of shareholder value. Think of the charities, endowments, retirement/college savings, and employees lost jobs that suffered."
Let's not kid ourselves that the execs skilled in offshore deals aren't high fiving on the way to their Cayman banks where the real gravely is saved.
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