Between November 2001 and January 2002, the Enron email corpus preserves what the official record never could: what people actually forwarded to each other when no one in compliance was looking. Four items from four separate mailboxes, each capturing a different register of the dark comedy that plays out when a $63 billion company becomes a punchline.
The Cave Memo
On November 26, 2001, six days before Enron filed for Chapter 11, a trader named Brett Lawler forwarded a satirical office memo to Eric Bass on the West Power trading desk. The memo had nothing to do with Enron. It was written as if from Osama bin Laden to his associates, covering the mundane indignities of cave-based office management: scorpion sweeping schedules, hygiene after meals, the theft of labeled snacks.
The memo had been making the rounds on personal email since September. An MSN Explorer footer on the original confirms it traveled through Hotmail accounts before landing in the Enron system. By late November, the people forwarding it were no longer just processing one national catastrophe. They were processing two. Lawler sent it to Bass at 6:30 in the morning, two weeks after Enron restated $586 million in earnings, while the merger with Dynegy was collapsing in real time. Whatever the Cave Memo meant in October, by Thanksgiving week it was something else: proof that the forward button still worked, that the inbox was still there, that you could still send something dumb to a friend before the market opened.
The razor scooters. The motivational cat poster. The Cheez-Its. And then the last line – the security patrol to find American infiltrators: “Omar, Muhammed, Abdul, Akbar, and Richard.” Someone on a trading floor about to evaporate thought this was worth sharing at dawn.
“A Little Humor on a Very Bad Day”
On January 25, 2002, Dorothy McCoppin – known as Dot – forwarded a SatireWire.com piece to Enron employee Teb Lokey with the note: “Here’s a little humor – to brighten your day!” The subject line she chose was more revealing than the article itself: “KMART – A little humor on a very bad day.”
The piece combined two corporate disasters that had converged in January 2002. Kmart was filing for bankruptcy. Arthur Andersen was under investigation for destroying Enron documents. The fictional premise: Kmart hired Andersen as its new auditor, and Andersen found “no records of company finances whatsoever,” thereby eliminating the evidence of Kmart’s losses.
The satire’s kicker was a line about Andersen executives not returning calls because “they were only allowed one phone call, and they had already made it.”
What the subject line knew and the article didn’t: January 25, 2002, was the day Cliff Baxter was found dead in his car in Sugar Land from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Baxter had been Enron’s vice chairman. He had resigned the previous May. He had recently been named as a potential witness in the congressional investigation.
Dot sent her email at 9:10 PM. The news about Baxter had broken that morning. “A very bad day” was doing a lot of work.
The Shredding Joke
This is the one that belongs in a glass case.
On January 4, 2002, a Houston banker named Schroeder at Credit Agricole Indosuez sent an email to a group of friends scattered across the city’s professional class – a lawyer at Andrews & Kurth, another at Baker & McKenzie, an Enron employee named Darren Giron, and an Arthur Andersen auditor named Randy G. Kruger Jr. The subject was lunch. The real subject was roasting Kruger.
Michael Shaw at Andrews & Kurth offered a correction: “It’s actually ‘When 2 + a possible 2 in the distant future definitely equal 4 in this fiscal year.’” The group knew enough about Enron’s accounting to write the jokes, which tells you something about what Houston’s professional class understood and when.
Five days later, on January 9, Schroeder followed up, escalating: “Certainly all of you can stop shredding documents for 5 minutes to respond.”
Kruger – the actual Arthur Andersen employee, writing from [email protected] – replied forty-three minutes later:
Three days after Kruger typed that sentence, the Department of Justice opened its criminal investigation into Enron. Andersen’s document destruction was already national news. The firm would be indicted in March and convicted in June, effectively ceasing to exist. Kruger’s joke is the kind of line that a prosecutor would put on a slide deck, except it was never entered into evidence because it was just a guy trying to schedule lunch with his friends.
By January 13, the humor had curdled. Kruger wrote to the group at 12:44 AM:
The midnight timestamp. The defensive tone. The pivot from joking about shredding to insisting he didn’t know about the shredding. The thread preserves the exact moment when a running joke between friends became something a person might need to explain to a lawyer.
They still went to lunch. January 24, 11:45 AM, Ninfa’s in the tunnel system under the JP Morgan Chase Tower at 600 Travis Street. Nobody recorded what they talked about over enchiladas, but the email thread ends with Schroeder confirming the reservation. Whatever Kruger was feeling by then, he showed up.
The entire thread exists in one place in the corpus: the mailbox of Darren Giron, the Enron employee in the friend group. Giron never wrote a single message in the chain. He just received them. His silence preserved everything.
The Golf Ball Arbitrageur
Phillip Love worked at Enron Net Works. In mid-January 2002, while the company was in bankruptcy, the FBI was circling, and 4,500 of his colleagues had been laid off, Love discovered a market inefficiency: Enron-branded golf balls were selling as collector’s items on eBay.
The company store was still open. A four-sleeve set of Enron-logo Pinnacle balls cost $16.50. On eBay, a single sleeve was fetching $25 to $40. At the high end, one sleeve sold for $64. Love did what any good Enron trader would do: he identified the spread and began executing.
That was a January 17 reply to his friend Mike Jillard, who had sent Love some Enron golf balls in a care package along with a prediction:
His mailbox contains 23 emails documenting the complete lifecycle of a micro-business: sourcing from the company store, pricing strategy, auction management, PayPal receipts, fulfillment logistics, customer relations, and competitive intelligence. His wife Ashley handled shipping from their garage. His PayPal ran through her email address. On January 23, while attending a UBS meeting offsite – Enron was still, technically, a going concern – Love emailed Ashley with fulfillment instructions:
A man toggling between restructuring meetings and eBay order fulfillment, signing off with “Love you” to the wife running his warehouse. The margin on four sleeves bought at $16.50 and sold individually at $25 or more was somewhere between 225% and 1,450%, depending on the auction. These were Enron numbers.
Love was also protective of his brand. When a competing seller with the handle “charboneau89” copied his product photo for a rival listing, Love sent a cease-and-desist:
An Enron employee, in January 2002, asserting intellectual property rights over a photograph of golf balls bearing the logo of a company under federal investigation. The instinct to protect margins was, apparently, institutional.
His colleague Randy Bhatia kept sending him eBay links to other Enron merchandise with the commentary one would expect:
Buyers across the country were satisfied. Ron Bennett at Warren-Walker School in Henderson, Nevada, confirmed delivery: “Golf balls arrived in fine shape, please leave positive feedback!” Tuan Murray in Lake Charles, Louisiana, paid $15.50 for a sleeve. Eric Schroeder in River Grove, Illinois, paid $29.75.
The company was dying. The golf balls were moving.
See Also
- Eric Bass – West Power trader, Cave Memo recipient
- Phillip Love – Enron Net Works, golf ball entrepreneur
- Cliff Baxter – Vice Chairman, died January 25, 2002
- Arthur Andersen – Enron’s auditor, convicted of obstruction
- Enron Bankruptcy – Filed December 2, 2001