Word: enronize
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What the public would perhaps most like to see is Enron's top executives do some jail time. So far, only one of them, former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow, is facing criminal charges, for conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering (he denies wrongdoing). Ex-chairman Ken Lay is expected to be charged with insider trading before long. But lengthy prison sentences for white-collar crimes are rare...
Prosecuting former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, widely seen as Enron's mastermind, will probably be the trickiest case. Skilling was so sure he had committed no crime that he waived his right against self-incrimination and testified before Congress that "I was not aware of any inappropriate financing arrangements." Prosecutors may try to nail him for perjury, and they have reportedly widened their probe to investigate his role in Enron's broadband venture...
...words like 'Get this structure to work' when he knew the only solution was to break the rules. But he never said, 'Do it,'" says a former employee. Pretending it was all a game helped too. A videotape of a 1997 party surfaced this month, showing Skilling joking that Enron could make "a kazillion dollars" through an exotic new accounting technique. It was close to true, and not so funny. --By Daren Fonda, with reporting by Deborah Fowler/Houston and Sean Scully/Los Angeles
...Saturday morning in December, TIME brought Coleen Rowley of the FBI, Cynthia Cooper of WorldCom and Sherron Watkins of Enron together to talk, for the first time, about their parallel experiences over the past year. The women had never met before, but over breakfast they compared stories and marveled at the similarities: their motivations for exposing the flaws of their institutions, their shock at having their secret actions exposed and then condemned in some quarters, and their enduring love for the ideals of their workplaces. They also discovered they shared much in their personal lives, and they enjoyed cheering...
WATKINS: I wouldn't not do it. [But] what I really failed to grasp was the seriousness of the emperor-has-no-clothes phenomenon. I thought leaders were made in moments of crisis, and I naively thought that I would be handing [Enron chairman] Ken Lay his leadership moment. I honestly thought people would step up. But I said he was naked, and when he turned to the ministers around him, they said they were sure he was clothed...