William Lerach, the lawyer who helped recover $7.2 billion for Enron investors and whose “race to the courthouse” strategy led to limits on shareholder suits, was sentenced Monday to two years in prison for paying client kickbacks.
Since I don’t know the criminal case against Lerach backward and forward, I won’t comment on the righteousness of the conviction, only the delicious sense of schadenfreude I feel at seeing this lying, manipulative bastard go to prison. His crimes at Milberg Weiss are nothing compared to the crimes he committed against Enron. Lying through his teeth for any camera that found him, he repeatedly installed myths in the popular conscience that have yet to be lived down (one of the most egregious was his claim that a banker’s box full of shredded material came from the Enron building. It most certainly did not; Enron was never even accused of shredding documents, improperly or otherwise.)
What happens, I think, is that once a certain personality most often found in dirty lawyers reaches a certain level of fame or notoriety or income, they start to believe that they are immune from the rigors of truth. They will tell a jury, for instance, that they can hear an unborn fetus crying to be freed via a Cesaerean birth. Whatever they think the jury – or any important audience – requires, they’ll say it. Screw the facts!
Oh, I do so enjoy the idea of Bill Lerach in prison. Like Al Capone going away for tax evasion (which is in itself a travesty of justice), he might not be going to prison for the real crime, which is what he did to Jeff Skilling, Ken Lay, and the entire Enron Corporation. But he’s in prison, and that’s good enough for me.
Filed under Enron
Tagged as Bill Lerach, Enron
