Conspiracy of Fools

January 10, 2005
This enormous, intimate blow-by-blow of Enron's implosion gets as close to what actually happened, in terms of people making (bad) decisions in real time, as anyone who wasn't there with a concealed video-phone possibly could. Having combed endless documents and interviewed countless principals and peripherals, Eichenwald (The Informant
) presents short declarative sentences (and lots of sentence fragments) that may have run through the heads of men like top executives Skilling, Lay and Fastow as they managed to cook a very large set of books, as well as men like Stuart Zisman, a lawyer in the firm's wholesale division who wrote an early memo titled "Overall Book Manipulation" that stated "the majority of investments being introduced to Raptor are bad ones." Eichenwald's bald depictions ("Skilling sank deeper into depression"; "It couldn't be true, Bauer thought") make for real tension. Collegial meetings at the White House with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and others; charged conference calls with skeptical investors; endless buy-ins, buyouts and acronyms—all are presented in a rat-a-tat style thick with corporate anxiety, keeping pages turning even as the details themselves are numbing. (Luckily, Eichenwald includes a "Cast of Characters" and "List of Deals" so that readers can remind themselves of past carnage.) As an unadorned attempt to get into the heads of some major manipulators, this book can hardly be bettered.

November 1, 2004
The fools here are the folks who ran Enron, as well as those who got sucked up in their shenanigans. From the author of The Informant.

Copyright 2004 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2005
New York Times" reporter Eichenwald has now accomplished with the Enron scandal what he did with the ADM scandal in " The Informant," rendering complex corporate skulduggery in the form of a page-turning financial thriller. Eichenwald carefully details the characters and business shenanigans that led to the demise of Enron, taking with it the respected accounting firm Arthur Andersen and the pensions of hundreds of its workers. Eichenwald puts the scandal in the broader context of an environment of rampant lawbreaking among corporations pursuing aggressive accounting and other business practices that offered huge rewards and incredible risks in the 1990s. The cast of characters includes Enron CEO Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow and extends to political and business figures such as the first President Bush and the current one, President Clinton, Alan Greenspan, Dick Cheney, and Rupert Murdoch. The setting ranges from Houston to Washington, D.C., and Bombay to London. Eichenwald details the internal battles over turf, ideas, and influence as the company hurtled from one outrageous deal to another, all the time ignoring warning signals inside and outside of the firm from accountants, analysts, and reporters. In a convergence of "shocking incompetence, unjustified arrogance, compromised ethics and an utter contempt for the market's judgment," Enron undertook complicated financing structures that transformed it from a company of pipelines and rigs to one of abstract, intangible investments. Once Enron secured permission from the Securities Exchange Commission to change accounting rules more in line with those of investment bankers than oil drillers, the company was on its way, never mind the wildly contradictory nature of its financing strategy. This book compares with " Liar's Poker" and " Barbarians at the Gate " in its breadth and depth of coverage of esoteric corporate culture and financial practices, recognizing the compelling human drama beneath the scandal. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)