Word: houstons
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...smell the fish sticks from lunch in Sherron Watkins' 60-year-old house near downtown Houston, see the framed pictures of the family vacation and the baby in bunny ears and even one of her country-crooning second cousin, Lyle Lovett. Things have been so hectic, Watkins apologizes, that the Christmas ornaments haven't been put away yet. The daughter of two educators, Watkins grew up in nearby Tomball, where she worked the cash register at the family grocery store and began saving her money. By 1982, she'd picked up two accounting degrees in Austin and quickly found...
...week that executives at Andersen, the accounting giant that enabled Enron's every move, fretted about the arrangement but saw the chance to double their fees if they just kept their heads down. And now that the party's over and the damage control is in full swing from Houston to Chicago to Washington, just about everyone who helped create this mess is busy pointing fingers, scapegoating the other guys, firing the lower-downs and diming out the higher-ups. Last week what was once envisioned as a new kind of company resembled little more than a circular firing squad...
...tale of Enron's collapse, Watkins is the closest thing to a hero in sight. When she goes out for coffee, strangers stop to give her "attagirls" and ask for her autograph. She still goes to work each day at the company's headquarters in downtown Houston, where the tilted logo out front has yielded Enron a new nickname: the Crooked...
...hearings next month. Few in business have ever fallen so far so fast: the man who once could raise Cabinet officials with a single telephone call and rated the only one-on-one meeting with the Vice President on energy policy last year can't show his face in Houston for fear of reprisals...
...news media, it is "Enron whistle-blower" Sherron Watkins, even though Watkins never really blew a whistle. A whistle-blower would have written that letter to the Houston Chronicle, and long before August; Watkins wrote it to Ken Lay, and warned him of potential whistle-blowers lurking among them. (She quotes one of them as lamenting, "We're such a crooked company...