Between October 23 and December 20, 2001, Enron’s stock fell from $16.41 to functionally zero. The emails from this period that survived are not the ones about Raptor or LJM – they are about lunch, skiing, saying goodbye, and passing around the company’s own obituary.
The Lunch Offer
On November 26, 2001 – the Monday after Thanksgiving, five days after Dynegy walked away from the merger that was supposed to save everything – Richard Shapiro received an email reply to a message he had sent with the subject line “My future.”
Not “Enron’s future.” His future. He already knew.
The reply came from Patrick Oxford, a partner at Bracewell & Patterson, one of Houston’s most connected law and lobbying firms. It was sent at 12:02 AM on Sunday night, which is either very late or very early depending on how you think about it.
Oxford’s sympathy was genuine. It was also operational. Dorothy Barnes already knew. The assistant had been briefed. This was not a man reaching out on impulse at midnight. This was a recruitment outreach wearing a sympathy card. A VP of Government Affairs at one of America’s largest companies was suddenly available, and Bracewell & Patterson did not become one of Houston’s premier firms by being slow to recognize talent on the market.
Shapiro’s original outbound email – the one titled “My future” – is not preserved in the corpus. Only Oxford’s reply exists. But the subject line tells you everything about where Richard Shapiro’s head was at on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2001: he was a senior executive at a company that had just lost 95% of its value, writing to a powerful Houston lobbyist, and the thing he wanted to talk about was himself.
He stayed at Enron through late December. His calendar shows Quinn-Gillespie lobbying calls on December 10 and December 17. Conference calls about California energy policy. Meetings with Steven Kean’s government affairs team. He was still working the phones for a company that no longer existed in any meaningful sense. One of his last emails forwarded a message to [email protected]. He was setting up the next desk.
Dad From Arizona
Paul Lucci was a natural gas originator in Enron’s Denver office. Early thirties, single, into fantasy football and weekend trips to Wyoming. He did Powder River Basin gas deals and San Juan Basin proposals. The week before Thanksgiving, he and his buddies at El Paso Corp and Western Gas were forwarding around a Mastercard “priceless” parody about taking your son to his first NFL game. The joke was off-color. The chain was the kind of thing that circulated on every trading floor in America in 2001.
Six days later, Lucci’s father replied to the thread from his AOL account.
The date was November 26, 2001. The stock had closed at $4.01. Dynegy had walked. The SEC was investigating. Congress was scheduling hearings. And a father in Arizona gave all of that exactly one sentence before moving on to weather, skiing conditions, and his son’s love life.
The AOL address – [email protected] – dates the father generationally. The email reads like every parent email ever written: a stream of consciousness where the biggest corporate scandal in American history gets equal billing with the rain in Oregon. The P.S. about Mike and Frank’s bounced emails is the kind of detail that makes this feel less like a historical document and more like something you’d find on your own phone.
There is no response from Paul Lucci in the corpus. We don’t know if he went skiing. We don’t know about his love life. We know his father signed off “dad & Kathy” and wanted him to drop down and visit.
Goodbye and Best Wishes
On December 20, 2001 – eighteen days after Enron filed Chapter 11 – Terrie James sat down and wrote a farewell email to Steven Kean, the Executive Vice President of Public Affairs and Government Relations. Kean was one of the most senior executives still in the building, and he was leaving.
She remembered his body language from what must have been years earlier. A man standing during a phone call. The kind of detail that can only come from genuine recollection, not performance. And that sentence – “You made Enron more than a company, you made it a cause” – carries a weight James may not have intended. The passion that made Enron a cause was the same passion that made twenty thousand people work brutal hours for stock options that went to zero. The infection metaphor is uncomfortably apt.
Kean forwarded the email to himself before replying. He was preserving it. He wanted to keep this one. Then, twelve minutes later, he wrote back.
“My Enron.” In quotes. Possessive. Kean was already distinguishing between the Enron of the headlines – fraud, bankruptcy, destroyed pensions, congressional hearings – and the Enron he had experienced. The company where a woman remembered him standing during a phone call. The one worth saying goodbye to.
It was 5:27 in the evening on one of Steven Kean’s last days at 1400 Smith Street. He could have walked out. Instead he sat at his desk and wrote a twelve-minute reply to a subordinate’s farewell note. Draw your own conclusions about what that means.
The Article That Went Viral
Six weeks before bankruptcy, Texas Monthly published its November 2001 cover story: “How Enron Blew It” by Mimi Swartz. Subtitle: “Enron’s Cutthroat Culture.” Swartz co-authored Power Failure with Sherron Watkins, but in October 2001 she was just a magazine writer, and the piece was one of the first detailed public narratives of what was going wrong.
The article hit 39 mailboxes in 69 copies across three days. The forwarding pattern maps the social architecture of Enron itself.
PR caught it first. Meredith Philipp, on the communications team, sent it the evening of October 23 to Karen Denne, Ann Schmidt, and Vance Meyer. By the next morning, Karen Denne had forwarded it to Jeff Dasovich in government affairs. Craig Buehler became a distribution hub, pasting the full article text – thousands of words – into multiple emails rather than forwarding a link. He wanted to make sure people could read it even if the server went down. That is the behavior of someone who thinks the information matters enough to preserve.
From there it moved to the pipeline side (Shelley Corman to Lynn Blair), the trading floor (Randall Gay blasting it to five recipients at once), and across the Atlantic to Enron’s London offices, where Angela Connelly sent it to Lara McKinney, who sent it to the EOL Product Control Group. Enron’s European employees were reading their own corporate autopsy while sitting in the Broadgate offices.
The commentary gradient tells its own story. The PR team forwarded without comment – they had likely seen it in advance. Everyone else had opinions:
“Talk more offline” is the phrase of someone who recognized things in the article that were dangerous to discuss on company email. McLaughlin knew the servers had memories.
Matt Lenhart and Phil Polsky both reached for the same word independently: “dramatic.” Lenhart wrote “it is a little dramatic.” Polsky wrote “a bit dramatic, but a good story nonetheless.” This is the Enron way of processing bad news. Not wrong. Just dramatic. A company in free fall, reading the first draft of its own obituary, and the consensus review is that it’s a touch overwrought.
The opening paragraph of the Swartz article, preserved in the bodies of a dozen forwarded emails, describes the Enron lobby:
“THE ENRON SKYSCRAPER NEAR THE SOUTH END OF HOUSTON’S DOWNTOWN feels like the international headquarters of the best and the brightest. The lobby in no way resembles the hushed, understated entryways of the old-fashioned oil companies, like Shell and Texaco nearby. Enron, in contrast, throbs with modernity.”
– Mimi Swartz, “How Enron Blew It,” Texas Monthly, November 2001
Within six weeks of those words reaching 39 mailboxes, the lobby was empty. The inspirational flags Swartz described – “congratulating Enron on its diversity and its values” – came down. The “preposterously fit” people moving “intently, like winners” moved on to other elevators.
Vince Kaminski got his copy from Anthony Mends, with a note: “Vince, I have not heard from you for a while. Here is an article you might find interesting.” The head of research received the article not as an urgent corporate intelligence item, but as a reason to reconnect. Even the autopsy was a social occasion.
See Also
- Richard Shapiro – VP Government Affairs, one of the last people working the phones
- Steven Kean – EVP Public Affairs, recipient of “my Enron”
- Sherron Watkins – Co-author of Power Failure with Mimi Swartz
- Vince Kaminski – Head of Research, received the Texas Monthly article as a social gesture
- Jeff Dasovich – Government Affairs, early recipient of the Texas Monthly chain
- Matt Lenhart – Found the article “a little dramatic”
- Enron Bankruptcy – The event that frames all four emails