Four finds from four mailboxes, 1999 through 2001. What it felt like to sit at a desk at Enron, if the desk happened to be at the company running the largest corporate fraud in American history.
The Prince and the General Counsel
On April 30, 2001, Prince Chuks Okigbo – Director of Project Implementation at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, writing from a free Messagez.com email account – sent an urgent request to James Derrick, Enron’s General Counsel.
The pitch: a group of Nigerian petroleum officials had “over-invoiced deliberately” on government contracts, pocketing $30.5 million in the difference between what was billed and what was owed. They needed a trusted foreign partner to help move the money abroad. They had selected the General Counsel of Enron Corporation.
Derrick forwarded it. His note was three words.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_derrick-j_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2102980“For your file.” The General Counsel of a company that was, at that very moment, running an over-invoicing scheme that would eventually be measured in billions, received a letter from a man proposing an over-invoicing scheme measured in millions, and filed it.
The Prince had misspelled “implementation.” Enron’s SPEs had better spelling but the same basic architecture: fabricated transactions, cooperative insiders, money moved through entities designed to obscure its origin. The difference was scale, and that Andrew Fastow’s emails went through Outlook rather than Messagez.com.
“And Another…..”
On the same day Prince Okigbo wrote to Derrick, Mark Taylor in Enron’s legal department received his own Nigerian solicitation – this one from a Mr. William Eke, Bank Manager of Orient Bank of Nigeria, Lagos Branch, who had $75 million in unclaimed funds from a dead American oil consultant named Barry Kelly. Taylor forwarded it without comment.
Twenty-two days later, on May 22, 2001, Taylor received another one. Dr. Joseph Iza, a “civil adviser” working with the petroleum trust fund, needed help transferring $25 million generated from – the phrase again – “over-invoicing of contracts.” Taylor forwarded it with two words and five periods.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_taylor-m_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2249412“And another…..” The ellipsis of a man who had stopped being surprised. Three Nigerian advance-fee scams hit Enron’s legal department in under a month. The scammers had done their homework well enough to target the General Counsel and his staff, but not well enough to know they were pitching over-invoicing schemes to the greatest over-invoicing operation in corporate history.
The amounts were almost quaint. Prince Okigbo wanted help with $30.5 million. Dr. Iza needed to move $25 million. Mr. Eke had $75 million in a dormant account. Enron’s off-balance-sheet entities, at their peak, concealed more than $1 billion in losses. The Nigerian princes were running the same con at a fraction of the scale, with worse production values, and they at least had the courtesy to offer a percentage.
AOE Tonight
On October 9, 2001, at 4:57 PM, Beth Cherry – a Senior Creative Consultant at EnFORM Technology, an Enron subsidiary – sent a two-word email to a group of colleagues: “AOE tonight?” The game was Age of Empires, the real-time strategy video game. The recipients included Matt Sample, Michael Cherry, Christopher Paxton, John Dunn, Allan Elliott, and Jason Wolfe at Enron.
Matt Sample replied at 10:13 PM.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_wolfe-j_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2139812Five hours between Beth’s question and Matt’s answer. Whatever happened in those five hours left him at his desk at 10:13 PM on a Tuesday, eating P.F. Chang’s delivery and writing in all caps to people who were playing a video game without him.
The date matters. October 9, 2001. Enron’s stock was at $33, already down from its August high of $40, on its way to $0.26 by the end of November. Jeff Skilling had resigned two months earlier. The SEC had opened its informal inquiry a week before. The third-quarter earnings call was scheduled for October 16, when the company would announce a $544 million loss and a $1.2 billion reduction in shareholder equity. The walls were coming in, and the people inside them were trying to organize an Age of Empires session.
EnFORM Technology was Enron’s technology consulting subsidiary, housed in the same orbit of entities that let the parent company look larger and more diversified than it was. Beth Cherry, Matt Sample, and their colleagues existed in the gap between Enron’s public identity as a global energy titan and the daily reality of being tech workers whose friends played strategy games after dinner. The email survives in Jason Wolfe’s mailbox because he was CC’d from his enron.com address. Wolfe, for his part, was also the man whose friend Ashley Landry had appointed herself his wedding consultant four months earlier, researching Sandals Resorts on company time.
Sample’s email has become one of the most quoted artifacts of the Enron corpus. It is usually cited as evidence of the company’s degenerate culture. Read in context, it is something more ordinary: a man who missed game night because he was still at work, performing exhaustion for his friends in the only language their group chat understood.
You’d Better Not Squeal
On November 17, 1999, Sara Shackleton – a lawyer in Enron’s Global Finance group who spent her days drafting ISDA master agreements and credit derivatives documentation – received a Blue Mountain digital greeting card from a friend named Sam, who signed with his AOL handle: Samchawk. The card was titled “I Wont Squeal.” Shackleton replied at 11:51 AM with a stream-of-consciousness letter that covered birthday parties, aging, pet health, real estate, and Atlanta.
SELECT sender_name, body FROM read_pst_messages('zl_shackleton-s_000.pst') WHERE node_id = 2773668“I remember your 40th with Beverly and Helen and the walker (you probably remember the stripper).” The parenthetical is doing the work. Sara remembers the walker. Sam probably remembers the stripper. Two people, two takeaways from the same party, each perfectly in character for a friendship old enough to have its own shorthand.
The email is a document of a particular kind of professional life: one where your personal correspondence ran through your work server because it was the email you checked. Shackleton asked about Leica (a pet), Corky’s (a business), Mr. Casey (another friend or pet), Phoebe and Chloe (her own cats, or dogs, or children – the email doesn’t specify and doesn’t need to). She wrote from an enron.com address, during business hours, about walkers and strippers and Atlanta real estate, and signed off with “Ain’t life grand?”
It was November 1999. Enron’s stock was at $40 and climbing. The LJM partnerships were a year old and still confidential. The Raptors hadn’t been created yet. For Sara Shackleton, at 11:51 on a Wednesday morning, life was in fact grand. The email would be subpoenaed, archived, released by FERC, and indexed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon – not because it contained evidence of anything except a birthday party where somebody hired a stripper and somebody else brought a walker, and a woman at her desk who had the time and the inclination to remember both.
See Also
- James Derrick – Enron’s General Counsel, recipient of Prince Okigbo’s over-invoicing pitch
- Mark Taylor – Enron legal, collected 419 scams like frequent flier miles
- Sara Shackleton – Global Finance lawyer, stream-of-consciousness correspondent
- After Hours – What happened when Enron employees left the building (or didn’t)
- Gallows Humor – When the jokes stopped being funny and kept going
- Enron Bankruptcy – Filed December 2, 2001