The DOJ subpoenaed Enron’s email servers in early 2002, expecting to find evidence of fraud. They got that. They also got ring shopping questionnaires, personalized drunk-behavior roasts, a 2,000-word college football screed sent at 1:55 AM, an EVP’s Atkins diet research, and the postmortem from a stadium ejection. Eight finds from seven mailboxes, May 2001 through February 2002.
The Official Third Stage of G
On May 17, 2001, Jennifer Gillaspie – who had left Enron for Reliant Energy – forwarded a chain email called “Alcohol Warning Labels” to a group of friends that included her husband Eric (at Coral Energy), Gerald Nemec (still at Enron), and several others. The generic warnings were the standard viral fare of early-2000s corporate inboxes:
WARNING #4: The consumption of alcohol may make you think you have mystical Kung Fu powers, resulting in you getting your ass kicked.
WARNING #8: The consumption of alcohol may lead you to believe that ex-lovers are really dying for you to telephone them at four in the morning.
WARNING #10: The consumption of alcohol is the leading cause of inexplicable rug burns on the forehead.
WARNING #11: The consumption of alcohol may make you think you are whispering when you are not.
Jennifer didn’t just forward. She assigned them. Each friend got their own diagnosis, by number, with the parenthetical corrections that only come from having seen it happen:
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_nemec-g_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2705636SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_nemec-g_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2345316The generic Kung Fu warning becomes, for Gerald, “the official third stage of G” – a phenomenon recognized enough to have a name. We will never know what stages one and two were. We know Gerald worked at Enron and liked to remind people of it after a few drinks – the “I’m so smart because I work at Enron and you can’t teach this you pauper” line has the ring of a direct quote, not a joke. The rug-burn warning gets reassigned from Eric’s forehead to his ass, courtesy of “a mysterious, moving ramp or stairs.” Jeff does Sinatra and shadow dancing. Gerald counter-roasted Martha – “Baby” – for conspiracy theories about Mexican bars and a hair dryer crisis in Europe. Jennifer conceded the hit but insisted his warnings were generic while hers were targeted.
Three energy companies – Enron, Reliant, Coral – connected by a friend group that drank together in Mexico, traveled together in Europe, and roasted each other via corporate email on a Thursday afternoon. The bars in Mexico. The hair dryer in Europe. The conspiracy theories and the Sinatra impressions. We see only what was written down. The inside jokes are icebergs.
Welcome to the Pleasure of Planning an Event for Your Asshole Friends
November 8, 2001. The Dynegy merger would be announced the next day. Enron’s stock was at $8.41. And a man named Ernesto Martinez – known to his friends as “The Dog” – had made the mistake of volunteering to organize a golf outing.
Dutch Quigley, whose Enron mailbox preserved the thread, wrote Ernesto a welcome letter.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_quigley-d_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2121220The thread spanned 16 emails over two days. The complaints were institutional: Kingwood was too far. There should be a Hooters nearby. Kevin needed a wake-up call for the tee time. A participant with the handle siva66 pointed out that “no one ever had any problems driving to willis to play golf at texas national before.” Mark Molnar, driving in from Tomball, defended Ernesto’s choice. The logistics guy, writing from [email protected], confirmed the final details: “Tee times are at 8:06 and 8:12.”
The email addresses tell the story of a social network that transcended any single employer. Dutch was at Enron. Ernesto was at CPC. Others wrote from AOL, MSN, EV1.net, Yahoo. Enron’s corporate server was just one node in a web of friendships that ran on whatever email address you happened to check most often. The company was nine days from announcing a $1.2 billion equity write-down. The golf outing was Sunday.
Pretenders vs. Contenders
On October 29, 2001 – a Monday – Brian Vassigh, a consultant at Accenture, sat down and wrote a 2,000-word treatise on the state of college football. He sent it at 1:55 AM. The subject line: “Lousyanna State vs. Texas - Pretenders vs. Contenders.”
LSU had just lost to Ole Miss. Vassigh, a Texas Longhorns partisan, had been waiting for this moment. He had prepared.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_lenhart-m_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2263172The email exists in the Enron corpus because Matt Lenhart – witness to the $500 bet, Enron employee, recipient – never deleted it. The bet had been struck at Val’s wedding, “in that little bar in Natchez, Mississippi.” Vassigh spelled “Louisiana” as “Lousyanna” throughout, which was not a typo. He referenced governors, the Sabine River, Jim Rome, and installment plans. He wrote “Man this note is a classic” about his own note, at two in the morning, to a distribution list that included at least two corporate email addresses.
The $500 bet. The wedding in Natchez. The friend whose smack was too weak to warrant a Reply All. A man at Accenture, awake at 1:55 AM on a Monday, channeling a feeling about Ole Miss into something that would outlast both teams’ seasons – preserved not because it mattered to anyone but because it landed in an inbox that the federal government would eventually copy onto a hard drive and release to the public.
From Their Web Page
Louise Kitchen built EnronOnline, the company’s groundbreaking electronic trading platform. As Chief Operating Officer of Enron Americas, she oversaw billions of dollars in commodity trades. On October 15, 2001, she was researching whether she could drink on the Atkins diet.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_kitchen-l_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2105860SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_kitchen-l_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2105828The intended recipient was Liz Taylor. The actual recipient was Abigail Taylor. Two Taylors in the autocomplete. The COO signature block – complete with direct line, fax number, the full weight of Enron Americas – appended automatically to dietary research about yeast-related bloating. Thirty-six seconds is fast enough to suggest Kitchen realized the mistake the moment she hit send. It is also, permanently, too late.
Happy 25th
Three months after Enron filed for bankruptcy, Susan Scott turned 25. Her friend Lisa Gillette was in India. Lisa sent a birthday email. Susan replied with a full debrief.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_scott-s_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2120964The itinerary: dinner group Thursday, Pappadeaux with family, out until 2:30 AM Friday with Emily, up at 6 AM Saturday, kitchen shower and bar shower in San Antonio, out until 3 AM Saturday, brunch in Austin by 11 AM Sunday, home by 10 PM. Three cities in three days for a 25th birthday. “Needless to say i’m exhausted today.”
The second half of the email is something else. First runner-up for a job at Puget. Turned down UBS because “i just need to make a clean break from this place.” Headed to Seattle to interview with a small natural gas company, 450 people, where they seem nice – “which seems to go a long way these days.” That last phrase is doing quiet work. After what Enron put its employees through, “nice” was a hiring criterion.
The postscript – returning the apartment deposit, writing a check for Lisa’s half, dropping it at her mom’s house – is the kind of detail that makes the whole email feel lived-in. Birthday parties and job interviews and apartment deposits, all woven into the same message, sent from a corporate account at a company that no longer existed in any meaningful sense.
Your Friendly Wedding Consultant
On June 5, 2001, Ashley Landry sent Jason Wolfe a questionnaire. The subject line was “you love me.” Ashley worked at EnFORM Technology. Jason worked at Enron. Ashley had taken it upon herself to manage Jason’s engagement to a woman named Beth.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_wolfe-j_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2149060“What is my budget for the ring?” Not “what is your budget.” My. Ashley had absorbed the project completely. She was already working on ring size intelligence through her own channels. She had experience in tropical destination weddings. She had a suggested six-month timeline for guests to save for travel. She signed off with a full corporate signature block – office number, fax, email – beneath the title “Your Friendly Wedding Consultant.”
The next day, she followed up under a new subject line, “Help with wedding plans!” The exclamation point was hers. She had already researched Sandals Resorts and was reporting back on budget feasibility: “I am not talking about real cheap. I told them that a vacation would be around $2000 for just 5 days and additional wedding costs will be at least $1000 if not more.”
Beth had never seen blue water. Ashley was going to fix that. Jason Wolfe’s responses to the questionnaire are not preserved in the corpus. We have only the consultant’s side of the engagement.
CFO’s Day
On November 27, 2001 – four days before Enron filed for bankruptcy – Aaron Martinsen forwarded a satirical memo to Mark Taylor. The memo was written as if from Andy Fastow, Enron’s former CFO, and it reframed Thanksgiving as a holiday for senior management.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_taylor-m_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2541476The satire borrows the cadence of an actual executive Thanksgiving message – the kind Ken Lay had been sending for years – and hollows it out. “No value is received by the company; disclosures are few and spare.” “The possible exceptions are the temptations to perform rationally or honestly.” The structure is corporate boilerplate. The content is an indictment written in the style of a thank-you note.
The real Fastow had been fired on October 24. The LJM partnerships had been public knowledge for weeks. Employees had watched their 401(k)s evaporate while reading about the CFO’s personal enrichment. The line “your loyalty and naivety have sustained me” was not subtle. It was not trying to be.
Martinsen sent it on a Tuesday afternoon, the day before Thanksgiving, to a colleague’s corporate inbox. Four days later, Enron filed for Chapter 11. The “CFO’s Day” memo circulated the way all office satire circulates: forwarded between people who recognized the form, who had sat through the real versions of this kind of message, who understood exactly what was being parodied because they had lived inside it.
Kicked Out of Soldier Field
On the first weekend of November 2001, a group of Enron employees road-tripped to Chicago for a Bears game. They brought their own alcohol. They brought their own bartender. Phillip Love got caught pouring drinks in front of stadium security and was ejected. The group missed the game they had driven to see.
The postmortem arrived Monday morning. Carlos Giron, a friend from New Orleans who worked at Professional Service Industries, sent the group photos from the trip. One was labeled “FYI” – a scan of the stadium’s alcohol policy, forwarded to the offending bartender as remedial reading. The other was labeled “Fucking Fucks.jpg” – a group photo, captioned “for everyone’s appreciation.” The thread unspooled from there.
SELECT subject, sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_love-p_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2108228“The bartender” was not a metaphor. Someone in the group had been assigned to mix drinks from materials carried into the stadium, and Love was the one caught doing it within eyeline of the people paid to stop him. His proposed solution was not to stop bringing alcohol into NFL stadiums. His proposed solution was to relocate operations to the men’s room.
The “Cocktails and Dreams” reply – a reference to the bar in the 1988 movie Cocktail – names what they had been running: a pop-up bar in the bleachers at Soldier Field. Fascetti’s “goose and maverick” line, from Top Gun, suggests the drive back to Houston was its own adventure. The group photo’s filename tells you the rest.
November 2001. Enron’s stock was under $10. The Dynegy merger was being negotiated in real time. The company was weeks from bankruptcy. And a group of energy traders was driving to Chicago, setting up a bar in the stands, and getting thrown out for pouring cocktails in the wrong place. They were, by their own documentation, the Fucking Fucks.
See Also
- Gerald Nemec – Enron trader, stage three drinker, friend group roast participant
- Louise Kitchen – EVP and COO of Enron Americas, Atkins diet researcher
- Susan Scott – Enron scheduler, birthday marathon runner, Seattle-bound
- Matt Lenhart – Witness to the $500 bet at Val’s wedding in Natchez
- Mark Taylor – Recipient of the CFO’s Day satire
- Andrew Fastow – The real CFO, fictional author of the Thanksgiving memo
- Enron Bankruptcy – Filed December 2, 2001
- Dynegy Merger – Announced November 9, 2001, collapsed November 28
- Phillip Love – Enron Net Works, ejected from Soldier Field, golf ball entrepreneur
- Gallows Humor – The darker side of Enron’s email comedy
- Life During the Collapse – When personal and corporate catastrophe shared an inbox