Just The Blue

The trading floor was the epicenter of the surging, noisy shrine to power and commerce that was Enron Corporation. It was my favorite place to be, right in the heart of it. In the nexus. Times Square. Ground Zero. Right there. It was a long, hot draw on the crack pipe, the energy of it still pulsing in my body hours later.

I was standing near my friend’s workstation, trying to absorb the whole juju of the place, burn it into my neural grooves so I could remember it later, so I would never, ever forget it. It was the atmospheric equivalent of 7-Up, fizzy, with energy jazzing through the architecture, animating even the molecules that danced in the super-charged air.

Then the energy changed suddenly. Like a hard wind coming in over the water, pressure lowering as if a jet plane had just zoomed through the room. You could feel the approach of something big. A strange new intensity burned. Voices rose. A wake moved through the room. I turned my head and I saw him. A handsome man with light brown hair. He wasn’t tall, but he had an amazing, vivid physical presence. All the energy in the room, all that pulsing, writhing excitement seemed to originate right there, from him.

“Who is that?” I asked.

My friend laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

I shook my head.

“Jeff Skilling.”

I had just come from school and so was dressed inappropriately. I was wearing a blue jean skirt that barely covered my butt and a black t-shirt. Flat shoes. When his eyes found me, I felt that he must surely be wondering why I was so out of place. If he noticed at all, he didn’t indicate it. His eyes – Enron blue, the blue of the building, the blue of the letter E – just smiled vaguely and turned to answer someone who had approached him.

Something so special about him. Power, I thought. That’s what power looks like.

I went home that night to an empty house. The contrast to the screaming intensity of the trading floor made my room thrum with vacancy. I undressed and collapsed into soft, overlaundered, alien bedsheets and dreamed of something vast and deep and very blue.

Well, not the something.

Just the blue.

Enron Play Gets Second Chance In Chicago

It appears that Lucy Prebble’s Enron will get a second chance at success in Chicago. Reports indicate that the show will appear on January 2012 at the Timeline Theatre. I’ve looked up the show times, and was unable to buy tickets (they aren’t on sale yet). Yes, I will go see it this time because though I fear this is more anti-Enron junk, I am curious.

Incidentally while I’m there I can check out the Enron Liquids Pipeline Company:

And I love the fact that Arthur Andersen is still operating below the radar.

Jeff Skilling Plays Paintball

This is from John Bloomer’s FBI Form 302. As I was reading, it just struck me as absurdly funny and horrible at the same time. So random. I have trouble imagining Jeff Skilling playing paintball for some reason. Ken Rice? Yup. Rex Shelby? Sure, why not? Even Ken Lay – I can see it.

But not Jeff. I don’t know why that is, exactly. He is a funny guy, he likes to play, he is not opposed to physical activity. But something just cracks me up when I try to imagine him playing paintball.

Rock on, Jeff.

Oh, and I hope he shot Bloomer right in the face.

Enron Broadband Services Org Charts: How John Bloomer Fit In

September 1999 org map
Feb 2000 org chart

You’ll notice that in September, Rex had all technology under him and Berberian and Palmer were under him. Then when Bloomer came in, he was put in the SWAT team which is temporary, then he finds problems and gets Cox to fight for him and Yeager agrees.

Then by February of 2000 Bloomer is his own department and has a lot of people — 50 people or so. He goes from nothing to 50 people and all product development in 4 months. (See the Phoenix Meeting Notes from March 2000 that outlines his roles and responsibilities.)

The government said that Yeager was somehow responsible for not standing up or for things not working at the Analyst Conference 2000. Contrast that to Bloomer’s responsibilities and people in the unit. The government completely excused him because he was a gov witness.

During the same time frame, Yeager could fire a secretary and did have a budget for up to 5 people in the 2000 budget. He did not hire people but he would get people handed to him, train them on the strategy and hand them off to other departments. That was part of his role so they would understand the strategic vision of the company, and he was good at it, so it was a good thing.

But Bloomer was the one with clout. He took it from Shelby and Berberian, he bad mouthed them, he made himself the key guy and he did have authority to hire and fire a bunch of people to get the job done.

A small sidebar discovery: Bloomer wanted to web cast via the EIN using Media Cast, the training being developed by John Hay (Yeager was Hay’s resource for help in that initiative). (See this email from Bloomer. Why would he want to do this if it did not work, if it was a farce? If the software did not have QOS? Does he want to prove to everyone in the company that his product does not work so he will do a webcast of it?

Curious.

John Bloomer Hates Rex

John Bloomer was one of Bill Collins’ email buddies (and Sherron Watkins! Just wait until I post those!) and he and Collins would conspire like Roman senators about how to get rid of Rex Shelby. They were constantly trying to eject him from EBS – it was a mission, just another task on his Things To Do list. Exhibit 1 is an email from Bloomer to Joe Hirko.

Enron: Ten Years Later Presented By David Pope

David Pope is scheduled to give a presentation about Enron on March 1.

Enron 10 Years Later: An Insider’s Perspective
FEATURED SPEAKER:
David Pope, President & CEO
Niska Gas Storage Management LLC

I’m torn about this. David Pope is a legitimate Enron executive but he was not actually in the Houston office during the relevant years, so this feels a bit opportunitistic to me. However, I expect many of these to spring up this Autumn, when the official ten year anniversary of the collapse is observed. You can be Sherron Watkins, for instance, will be up in all our grills.

To his credit, I’ve not seen David Pope give talks before about Enron. On the other hand, how relevant is it now – some ten years later?

PRESENTATION

When Dave Pope’s Company, Canadian Gas Marketing, was purchased by Enron in 1992, he joined America’s favourite company. Enron was voted by Fortune Magazine as America’s Most Admired and Most Innovative company from 1995-2000 – the five years before its spectacular crash in 2001. During his nine years there, Dave had the opportunity to witness its explosive growth in both Canada and Europe. As VP of its Gas Marketing and Trading group based in London, Dave saw the workforce grow from less than a hundred to over 3,000 employees in five years. “Up or out” was the corporate slogan that saw the bottom performers let go year over year, while the best performers were rewarded handsomely. A culture of competitiveness was pervasive, and all the while the stock price soared. Today, the former CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, is in jail, and Enron is synonymous with corporate fraud. Dave will share his thoughts on corporate culture and Ethics at Enron, and the responsibility he believes lies with leaders of all organizations.

Today Dave Pope is President and CEO of Niska Gas Storage Management LLC, a New York publicly listed company.

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

David F. Pope

David Pope is President and Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board, the board of directors of Niska Gas Storage Management LLC and the board of supervisors of Niska GS Holdings US, L.P. and Niska GS Canada, L.P., the parent of Niska Gas Storage Partners LLC (“the Company”). Mr. Pope has been the President and Chief Executive Officer since June 2006.

Prior to his current role with the Company, Mr. Pope served as the President of Seminole Canada Gas Company since 2002, and prior to that held various positions in the natural gas industry since 1980. In 1992, Mr. Pope began his employment with Enron Corporation after it acquired Canadian Gas Marketing, a company Mr. Pope founded in 1989. He worked for Enron Corporation as Vice President of its gas marketing and trading group from 1992 until March 2001, nine month’s prior to Enron Corporation’s filing of a voluntary petition for Chapter 11 reorganization with the U.S. Bankruptcy court in December of 2001.

Mr. Pope has served as a director of GEP Midstream Finance Corp., or GEP Midstream, and as a director of Gibson Energy ULC, or Gibson Energy, between 2008 and 2010. Mr. Pope has a bachelor of Engineering in Chemical Engineering from McGill University in Montreal and Quebec, and has worked in the natural gas industry for his entire career.

Moronic Journalist Makes Up Crap About Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay

Another day, another idiot. This time, it is one shilling a book called “Willful Blindness” and it’s described thusly:

In “Willful Blindness” journalist and businesswoman Margaret Heffernan asks, “Why, as individuals, companies and countries, do we so regularly look at the mirror and ask how, ‘How could we have been so blind?’ “
When she asked people about the concept of ‘willful blindness,’ they gave examples on their own – abuse, divorce, Ponzi schemes, subprime mortgages. “Almost everyone mentioned the Iraq war and global warming: big public blunders caused or exacerbated by a reluctance to confront uncomfortable facts.”

So this book is basically a giant dumping ground for leftist politics. Got it. Oh and by the way, global warming? Not a man-made thing. Moving on.

She was first introduced to the term when writing a play for the BBC on the failed energy company, Enron.

I just want to savor that thought for a moment. Writing a play for the BBC about Enron. Hm. Has anyone ever seen this play? I can’t imagine why it isn’t a household name… which isn’t even mentioned in the article.

The legal description for the term “willful blindness,” as described by the judge, was: ‘You are responsible if you could have known, and should have known, something that instead you strove not to see.’

What judge? Judge Lake? In the jury instructions, Judge Lake said “willful blindness,” meaning ignorance of a conspiracy, doesn’t count as ignorance if it was intentional. “You may find that a defendant had knowledge of a fact if you find that the defendant deliberately closed his eyes to what would otherwise have been been obvious to him … Knowledge can be inferred if the defendant deliberately blinded himself to the existence of a fact.”

I am not sure that Lake used the explicit term “should have known” and I am almost certain he never said “strove not to see.” But this is just Enron, so I guess it’s okay for journalists to be sloppy with their work.

In the case of Enron, (Chief Executive Jeffrey) Skilling and (Chairman Kenneth) Lay could have known, and had the opportunity to know, just how rotten their company was.”

Really? How about some proof. How about actually giving us an example of “just how rotten their company was”? And for that matter, when was the opportunity to know given to Jeff and Ken Lay? Andy Fastow said that he kept his deceit hidden from Jeff Skilling. What was Jeff supposed to do, audit his own CFO for no reason whatsoever?

She doesn’t bother to give examples or proof. Why bother, it’s just Enron, right? Everybody “knows” that was rotten. No need for facts or anything.

What If EBS Had Survived?

What If EBS had not been pulled down by the Enron bankruptcy?

There would have been a big clash between the bandwidth traders who thought that was the future and the apps over the Net group who believed that was the future — Kevin Hannon, the consummate trader, and Scott Yeager, the prime evangelist for apps over the Net, would be at each other’s throat. Rex Shelby would attend the meetings, suggest EBS spin the apps over the Net into a separate business unit (which he really did). When the traders refused, Rex would leave EBS (cordially and on good terms), contract to use the EIN to launch an apps over the Net business, and become disgustingly successful.

(Note: The Modulus people actually developed a presentation to ECI in 1998 [before the acquisition] titled “Changing the Rules of the Industry: It’s the Applications, Stupid!”. So my “what if” scenario for Rex is really not so far-fetched.)

John Bloomer would have gotten fired and then prosecuted for stealing EBS technology (which he actually tried to do). Bill Collins would have gotten fired and ended up in an asylum when EBS turned out so successful. Joe Hirko would have become the CFO when Johnathan Schwartz of Sun was offered the CEO job. Larry Ciscon would be offered the CTO job, but would leave to create an Android-like operating system for Rexoogle.

Rexoogle being the name of Rex Shelby’s venture.

David Berberian and Mark Palmer would launch Rexoogle smartphones long before the iPhone. Ellis Giles would work with Ciscon to create the first fully functional tablets, called the RexTab.

Rexoogle headquarters would be located outside Fredericksburg, TX along a large flowing creek. The office space would be a strange combination of the sublime and the bizarre. The employees have a lot of say in what goes on, so the interior is quite eclectic. The carpet in the huge open, meandering lobby (which has lots of places to sit and drink coffee) is a shade of blue so beautiful that people are starting to spend too much time there without consciously knowing why.

Larry has a huge photo of his souped-up Mini Cooper on his door. The car contains the slogan, “Rexdroid Operating System — Lean, Mean, and Blazing Fast!”

During the annual May Day party on the Rexoogle grounds, Rex is showing a visiting reporter the site of a famous Texas Ranger/Comanche battle on the banks of the creek. In his enthusiasm for the topic, Rex slips on an exposed tree root and tumbles head-first into the creek. He pulls himself out, with a big smile on his face. Unfortunately, the reporter snaps a photo which then makes it into newspapers all over the country with “clever” headlines such as:

“Is Rex Shelby Too Wet Behind the Ears to Lead Rexoogle To Industry Domination?”
“Is Rexoogle Swimming Against the Current with their ‘Apps over the Net’ Concept?”
“Can Rex Shelby Keep His Head Above Water as the Competition Lines Up Against Rexoogle?”

And, of course, the gossip blogs:

“Beautiful Reporter Pushes Software Playboy into the Creek!”
“Terrorist Reporter Tries to Drown Texas Entrepreneur!”

Enron As Pseudoscience, Part Two

In response to this post, I got an email from an Enron exec. The subject line is “Email pattern red alert!”

I can tell by the changing patterns of our email traffic that you are nearing bankruptcy! LOL!

I wrote back:

Oh No, I think your CEO is about to resign for personal reasons!

I love how all these “scientific” and even judicial lessons are never actually applicable to either Enron or real life.

Ally McBeal and Enron

I was living in DC when Ally McBeal ended. It was May of 2002 – a weird time. The entire east coast was experiencing a kind of collective Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and ever so often a news segment about Enron would flash through it. I had never been so into TV as I was at that time. It began as a way to get some information about 9/11, learn about Osama bin Laden, figure out if we were going to war or not, catch a few minutes of the updates about the collapse of Enron Corporation and basically zone out. Slowly I began to change the channel off CNN, feeling guilty as I did so, and it was during this hazing time, that Spring of 2002, that I began to watch Ally McBeal. It was at the end of the series – but I didn’t care. It just took one episode to catch me. If it can be said to be “about” anything, it was about the fact that Ally McBeal would never have the one person she loved more than any other. Ally and Billy had grown up together, then gone to law school together. He then moved away. Ally assumed when he returned, they’d get back together because, well, they just fit. A perfect click.

He returned with a beautiful blonde wife, Georgia, and all three ended up working at the same law firm. Ally tried to move on with her life. She dated. She even got serious with a few people. But Billy was her One. Then one day, in court, he dies.

Incidentally, if you can watch that scene without crying, you are dead inside.

Ally, again, goes on with her life. She is full of aching, unrequited love, but she’s an optimist. She tries hard. The law firm becomes her family – and rarely in TV history have I loved supporting characters so much. They were loopy, memorable, and warm. But what I remember most is that when Ally decides to leave Boston and go to New York for her daughter, there was a searing ache in my chest not for Ally but for her friends at the law firm where she worked. She is what made that company special, and after she left, it became – in my imagination – just another law firm full of bloviating morons.

I think maybe Enron was like Ally’s law firm at the end. I think the old guard who had made it so special had gone, and so the place seemed to have lost a little of its shine. No matter what had happened, it would never be like it was.

I try to imagine what it would be like today, if the bankruptcy had never happened. I go all muzzy. It’s hard to say. I like to think it would still be thriving and the people there would be inventing. The fact that I don’t really think that might be a failure of imagination. I think it was that perfect mix of personalities and timing that made it so special. It is difficult to play with the timeline, but imagine if it was today that Jeff Skilling announced his departure from Enron. Enron Broadband Services would be making money. Even as every other department fell apart, EBS would have made money. It would be like Apple today. Can you imagine?

Enron saddens me for the same reason Ally McBeal saddens me: something good was not realized because of forces that couldn’t be countered. It was nobody’s fault and there was nothing anyone could have done to prevent it. It just had to collapse the same way 9/11 had to happen eventually. In retrospect, doesn’t it seem like 9/11 was fated? Do you even remember a time when we weren’t at war? Likewise, I try to imagine a thriving Enron, and though I love the executives who worked there, and I respect them and think they are brilliant, and I would want them on my team… I just think they were too small to do anything more than stand there and take it. I can barely stand to look at their pictures now, the ones taken before the collapse, before everything went to hell. Their faces look so innocent; they can’t sense the tension in the distance.

Anytime I start to wonder “Why” in the cosmic sense, I bump into Godel very quickly. Those questions of fate and destiny always leave me more irritated than calm, and I find that I am just better off not thinking along those lines. I am, after all, a practical girl and I see the world in terms of physical things: torn veils of spider webs. The lower wisdoms evade me.

But sometimes I can’t help it. Sometimes against my better judgement, I stubbornly demand to know WHY. Why did Jeff Skilling have to go to prison? What good is that doing anyone, especially himself? And Ken Rice and Kevin Hannon and Rick Causey and the NatWest Three and the Nigerian Barge defendants and, oh God, the Broadband Three and the others – - why? They’re good people. Why them, and not the petty, backstabbing, criminal people who get away with things? Why is life so goddamn unfair?

That is a child’s question and I don’t ask it often. But sometimes I look around and I think of the things that I am personally losing – like Ally McBeal – for no reason I can quite name. It’s not another woman whose tires I can slash who has stolen my boyfriend. It’s just this shifting, perspective-less, entity that has no name, we just feel its consequences. It’s the thing that makes me wake up shaking in the middle of the night, reaching for him. It’s the thing that makes me want to cry when I get those notes that ask, “What happened to So-and-So.” Because the sad fact is, nothing happened to them. They’re the same damn person. They’re still beautiful and funny and sweet and calm. They still have their whole lives intact. They might have changed in some microscopic way – most are very jaded by the justice system, for instance – but they are the same person. All this stuff was for NOTHING. It means nothing. The collapse of Enron, the prosecutions, it means absolutely nothing just like 9/11 means nothing. A lot of things changed – but it ultimately means nothing at all.

The triumph is in the fact that it means nothing at all. They are the same people. The same names, the same sweet souls, the same goodness. I cry sometimes when he tells me he loves me, for the same reason I wept when I learned of magnitude of 9/11.

Because, ultimately, this is where the nothing led. This is where we found ourselves. Alive together.

The Enron Emails As Pseudoscience

It seems to make some intuitive sense, that scientists could look at the frequency, contacts, and content of emails sent through an organization and come up with a formula, a pattern, the hidden gem in all of it that would explain why Enron collapsed. Since there were no smoking guns in the emails, perhaps it was understandable that the search for one moved not to what was said, but who said it to whom, and how frequently. But that desire to know is not an excuse to be sloppy – which is exactly what happened with the Enron dataset.

The latest is this article, published on a site that calls itself Science Alert.

Changes in an organisation’s email traffic are a potential predictor of looming crises, an analysis of emails leading up to the infamous demise of Enron Corporation has found.

Researchers from the University of Sydney’s School of Civil Engineering analysed more than a quarter of a million emails from the now defunct energy, commodities and company, spanning three and a half years leading up to its 2001 bankruptcy.

The researchers found changes in emails patterns, a representative gauge of an organisation’s communication networks, started changing in the 12 months leading up to the company’s demise. Around this time, staff began interacting more frequently within small groups of peers more rather than relying on messages emanating from the company’s upper echelons.

I wonder if this might be the natural result of cliques becoming closer? Or the fact that Enron had done some consolidating — perhaps organizationally people were just closer together than they were before. And even if it was true, what does that indicate?

“We found it went from a highly centralised network to a largely decentralised and distributed system,” says Professor Liaquat Hossain, co-author of Understanding Communication Network Cohesiveness During Organisational Crisis.

“We saw structural changes in email communications in the 12 months before the crisis intensified as its CEO Jeff Skilling resigned and it started reporting earnings losses.

An earnings loss was reported in October 2001 (I am thinking of the write-down here, since Enron didn’t have an actual official quarterly earnings loss). It was also the time when Andy Fastow departed the company after having been unable to rally the confidence of Wall Street, and fudging the numbers of his compensation from LJM. So common sense says there would be plenty to talk about, and you probably wouldn’t go to your boss with your gossip.

But there are other reasons to increase conversation too. I am just confused why an increase in emails is associated with bad things.

Maybe I’m being too critical. I just think this is silly. Where is the science in this? What do we know from this study that we didn’t know before?

“As Enron approached disintegration in late 2001 more people communicated with their colleagues and at a higher frequency. During this peak crisis period, there was also a jump in the number of cliques forming within the company. This increase in communication is consistent with organisational theory that purports cohesiveness is greater under conditions of great anxiety.”

Professor Hossain says the paper’s findings suggest changes in communication patterns can predict potential crises in an organisation.

“If an entity’s email traffic is monitored – without breaching privacy – we think it’s possible to detect from changes in communications patterns perceptions of an emerging crisis. By identifying this early an organisation is better able to reshape its strategy in order to prevent a perceived crisis evolving into a debilitating one.”

Hm. Well who is going to be responsible making sure that emails are within “acceptable” boundaries? And what happens when they do increase? Do you demand an internal audit? Do you assume something has gone awry merely because coworkers are sending emails among each other?

I think this is a pseudoscience – a carnival trick, another way to indict Enron for something it didn’t do.

Why

Enron was onto something when its advertising executives came up with the slogan “Ask Why”. Why is confrontational, it doesn’t let you off the hook. It is a question that goes directly to your ethical, moral center and demands explanations.

Principles serve as beacons to show people how to behave in order to live out your individual values. The question why imposes itself into the matrix with every single decision.

Example: “I won’t steal” is a principle that you can revert to when you’re confronted with the decision to steal or not. But to be most effective, each principle must be consistent with your values, which requires you to ask Why. Is the reason you won’t steal because you feel empathy for the person you might have stolen from? Is it because you fear being caught? By asking Why, we refine our understandings and the development of our principles to make them more inline with our core values.

Enron’s usage of that as one of its slogans (another was “Endless Possibilities”), speaks directly to Enron’s capacity for deep reflection and serious pursuit of excellence by using unwavering principles as its guideposts.

Benton Campbell Joins Latham & Watkins

Former ETF prosecutor Ben Campbell has joined Latham & Watkins, the revolving door firm where his compatriots, the indiscriminate blowjob purveyor Kathy Ruemmler and premature ejaculator Sean Berkowitz have worked (Sean Berkowitz is still collecting paychecks from the firm while Rummler has since returned to government work.) Campbell will be a partner in the firm’s New York office.

Law.com says:

Campbell, 44, stepped down as the top federal prosecutor at EDNY almost a year ago after the Obama administration appointed current U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch to the job. But Campbell chose to stay on as a senior assistant U.S. attorney for the remainder of the year to mentor young attorneys in the office and take his time deciding on his next move.

“I’ve known Loretta for a long time and she was tremendously gracious in letting me hang around to figure out what I was going to do next,” says Campbell, who officially resigned from the office in January and announced he would be joining a law firm, which he declined to name, in February.

Ultimately, Campbell decided to accept an offer from Latham, and reunite with several former Justice Department colleagues at the firm. As part of the Justice Department’s Enron Task Force–he joined the team of star prosecutors investigating the collapse of the energy giant in 2003–Campbell had worked under former prosector and task force director Sean Berkowitz, who joined Latham in November 2006.

In early 2006, as the task force’s work began winding down, Campbell moved to Washington, D.C., to serve as chief of staff to then associate attorney general and current Latham partner Alice Fisher. Fisher joined the firm in the fall of 2008.

Campbell says Fisher and Berkowitz played a part in his decision to join Latham, as did three old friends who also are partners at the firm: New York office litigation chair Richard Owens, white-collar and government investigations cochair Catherine Palmer, and litigation partner Barry Sabin in Chicago.

“I looked at [Latham] very closely when I was in law school and thinking about becoming a summer associate, but wasn’t able to make everything work out,” Campbell says. “So it was nice to come back and see that the things I liked about the firm then were still present.”

The diversity of Latham’s integrated practices and the firm’s global reach were big draws, Campbell says. “The world has really changed a lot over the past 20 years, and while global integration is a bit of a buzzword, it’s also true,” he adds. “And there’s not a lot of rigidity between folks in one area or another, which kind of mirrors my experience at the [Justice] Department.”

With over 2,000 attorneys, Latham ranks as one of the largest law firms globally, according to The National Law Journal’s NLJ 250 annual headcount survey. The firm had gross revenues of $1.8 billion in 2009 and average profits per equity partner of $1.9 million, according to the most recent Am Law 100 survey of the top grossing firms in the U.S.

Campbell started looking at firms last May after Lynch was officially sworn in as U.S. Attorney. He says he was advised in his search, which picked up in earnest in August, by Andrew Regan, cofounder and partner at Empire Search Partners. Campbell notes that it took a while to decide whether to reenter private practice or stay in government. In the end, the choice rested on Campbell’s desire to broaden his skill set.

“I’ve worked with a lot of people who came back to government from the private sector and invariably they’ve had a more developed set of skills and perspective in certain areas,” he says. “They could bring additional thoughts to whatever problem we were confronting, and that made me conclude that a stint in private practice might be something that could be good for me.

Born in Iowa, Campbell obtained his law degree from the University of Chicago. As a summer associate at Sidley Austin in the early nineties, he shared a secretary with Barack Obama, according to this March 2010 profile in the New York Law Journal, a sibling publication.

Campbell went to work at Kirkland & Ellis after law school, but in 1994, began his career as a federal prosecutor. In October 2007, Campbell was appointed interim chief of the EDNY by former President George W. Bush, succeeding Roslynn Mauskopf after her confirmation as a federal judge in Brooklyn.

As he looks forward to private practice, Campbell reflects on the opportunities he’s had as a public servant.

“I was really lucky in the [Justice] Department to do a lot of great stuff,” he says. “If my public service career was to end today, I’d be very happy with how it turned out.”

In Re: Enron, Campbell has a mixed reputation. Some Enron defendants say he was okay, but I think he showed his arrogance during Rex Shelby’s cross examination. He began the examination on the topic of Shelby’s 302.

The first time he asked Shelby, “This is what you said, right?”, Rex replied, “I took notes of the interview and brought those to the stand with me. If you don’t mind, I will take a look at my notes so I can tell you exactly what I said about that topic.” This seemed to take Campbell’s breath away, and the trial was paused while they passed out copies of the notes to the prosecution team. Cambell, strangely, tried to claim that Ed Tomko, Rex’s attorney, must have written the notes (I guess he thought an engineer cannot write), which gave Rex the opportunity to tell the jury that he did not even have an attorney when he talked to the FBI agents. Campbell tried a few other questions around the 302 without success and so had to move on to another topic.

I wish I could say that Campbell copied this strategy from Berkowitz, who seized on a spontaneous unguarded moment to question Skilling about his jury consultant. Alas, the Broadband trial happened before the Skilling trial. But I guess it is a common tactic: seize the moment. In this case, it made Campbell look like an ass and ultimately backfired.

Today In Enron History

February 14, 2006, Ken Rice, CEO of Enron Broadband Services, testified against Jeff Skilling.

Here is his testimony:
Feb 14
Feb 15
Feb 16 – Part 1
Feb 16 – Part 2

It is curious that the premature ejaculator Sean Berkowitz starts out questioning Rice about EBS. It is true that CEO of Broadband was the last position Rice held at Enron, but this was the SKILLING trial. The federal prosecutors were so gun shy after their failure with the EBS trial that the Skilling attorneys actually got the prosecutors to stipulate that nothing about the actual EBS technology in 1999 and 2000 would be talked about by them at Skilling’s trial. So Berkowitz launches, first thing, into the technology – against the agreement. This was something he did routinely. The reason of why Jeff Skilling resigned on August 14 was also known to the prosecution. They stipulated that they wouldn’t ask about his motivation at trial, and yet as soon as the agreement was reached, the ETF breeched it.

Torture and Plea Deals

The discussion about Skilling and KSM reminded me of a point I meant to expound on from the article about Forbes using the Nigerian Barge name in vain in which I wrote:

The same people who say that torture is wrong are inevitably the same ones who think there is nothing untoward about plea deals. There simply is not logical distinction between them.

I’ve never heard of a prosecutor using physical torture to get a defendant to sign a plea deal, but I think that’s because Americans, in general, don’t require torture. If you want to get a defendant to plead guilty, there is a vast array of tools at your disposal. You can, for instance, force him to spend all his money defending himself until he runs out of funds (Rex Shelby). You can threaten to send him to prison, where he will rot while his children grow up without a father (or mother) (Ken Rice, Kevin Hannon, Paula Reiker, Mark Koenig, Ben Glisan, David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew, Giles Darby). You can put leverage on the spouse (Lea Fastow). You can make him believe that he has no honest chance at acquittal because you have the power to get in front of the media, tell the story you want known, and know that most people will simply take your word for it because you’re an Assistant US Attorney and you wear a flag pin on your lapel. With these kinds of tools, waterboarding someone isn’t necessary. Americans are civilized people. The thought of being apart from our children is usually enough to make us tremble.

Terrorists do not care about their own lives or the lives of their children. They will happily strap a suicide belt upon a six year old, let him blow himself to smithereens, and then thank Allah for the pleasure. This kind of nihilism requires something more than just threats to work. Thus, you have waterboarding, which might suffice to flush out a few answers to questions you have about illegal activities.

But the people who despise torture – however mild it might be (and I do think waterboarding is mild; I’ve volunteered to do it) – also see nothing wrong with plea deals. Those who fret over the terrorist’s mental health think nothing of the mental health of folks who are forced into plea deals. We wrongly assume that because he signed the document, he’s guilty. Sometimes he is grudgingly praised for that, told he is “taking responsibility for his misdeeds.”

But nothing can be farther from the truth. Plea deals are the product of months (sometimes years) of slow, grating torture. The defendant is usually broke, terrified, exhausted or merely ready to sacrifice himself for his family.

98% of cases are settled with plea deals. Do you honestly believe that these people are right 98% of the time? Are you right 98% of the time? I sometimes hear prosecutors brag that they have a 100% conviction rate – as if that’s something to boast about. It’s easy to have that kind of statistic – all you have to do is pressure the defendant to take a plea deal. Voila. Reputation made.

Trials are scary, expensive things. They are difficult on the defendant but oftentimes, particularly in the Enron cases, tougher on the families and friends. The Enron defendants were strong, independent and innocent. But they’re also big silly sweet family men, and all you have to do to get them to conform to your wishes is threaten that their children will grow up without them. Bam. They’re your slaves.

Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay and others in the Nigerian Barge case and Broadband who rolled the dice and ignored the threats and went to trial have my eternal respect and friendship and compassion. They are unusual. The fact that they made it through a trial makes them the exception in American jurisprudence. Their resolve to fight for their justice and their families is what they are being punished for. It’s certainly not some violation of “honest services.”

Those who scream so loudly about the strategies employed at Gitmo are wrong should be consistent and recognize that plea deals are exactly the same thing in a civilian setting.