Word: enronize
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...challenge for Enron was to enter the burgeoning deregulated energy markets without sacrificing its credit rating by carrying too much debt on the books. So Fastow got creative. He tripled his staff, to more than 100, hiring various banking experts and giving them the task of selling and buying capital risk. "They were all young kids, 28 to 32, with great pedigrees, and they started coming up with these fancy derivatives," says Houston lawyer Tom Bilek, who interviewed dozens of former Fastow associates before suing Enron's management. "But Fastow was the boy genius setting all these SPEs...
...people who sat across the negotiating table from Fastow as he pitched Enron's deals, and the people who worked with him, were never as impressed with him as they were with his boss and mentor, Skilling. It was Skilling who provided the strategic vision behind Enron, who transformed its old gas-pipeline culture into a swaggering, rule-breaking, dealmaking cult that ultimately mislaid its analytical skills and perhaps its moral compass. Skilling, a Harvard M.B.A. and former McKinsey & Co. consultant, had a high-wattage intellect that always impressed. Even when he was a student, people who met him knew...
...grades. Hardly anyone at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management can even recall him from his years as an M.B.A. student. The response is similar at Tufts, where he studied Chinese and economics as an undergrad and played a little trombone and tennis on the side. Most Enron employees didn't know who he was until relatively recently. As head of Enron Capital Management--his job in 1997 and '98, when he was named CFO--he wielded his power across a very narrow band. In contrast to the avuncular Lay and the brilliant Skilling, Fastow was a PowerPoint executive...
...hallways, colleagues respected and even feared Fastow's power--but not his presence. A former executive says he was never sure what Fastow was thinking other than how a particular project would affect his career. But, in the words of another former Enron manager, "he was Skilling's fair-haired...
...director of the Contemporary Arts Museum. "She didn't need to move anywhere. She was there." For most of the Roaring Nineties, the Fastows did not play the power couple; instead they lived like other professionals in the West University area and raised two children. They worked together at Enron's finance divisions in the early '90s, before Lea left to focus on the kids. They were just beginning to live rich--they are building a $1.3 million home in the city's old-money River Oaks section--and he tooled around town in a Porsche...