In Enron's undoing, the devil's in the details

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By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff | March 13, 2005

''You are there" can be an exhilarating technique for writing about calamity, war, or romance.

But when it comes to unraveling Byzantine accounting scams, the up-close-and-personal approach tends to get you scene after scene of people sending e-mails and scanning paperwork and less-than-gripping moments like ''Andersen's accounting team was flummoxed by Fishtail, the latest LJM2 deal."

In ''Conspiracy of Fools," financial journalist Kurt Eichenwald puts us behind the scenes as Enron Corp. cooks up one fraud after another, then begins to collapse like a house of cards. As the book ends, the Houston energy giant that once ranked number eight in the Fortune 500 has filed for the largest bankruptcy protection in US history (now surpassed by WorldCom Inc.), $60 billion in shareholder wealth has gone up in smoke, and the company's top three executives are facing prosecution.

Eichenwald's vacuum-cleaner reporting yields some memorable vignettes -- screaming matches, boardroom showdowns, noble whistle-blowers, and drunken, despondent outbursts from Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling.

You are in the room when an underling finally confronts chairman Ken Lay with the words no one wants to hear: ''There are two possible outcomes here. One is you look incredibly stupid and look like you did a bad job, and the other is, they try to put you in jail."

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2005/03/13/in_enrons_undoing_the_devils_in_the_details/