The Smartest Guys in the Room

The tenth-anniversary edition of the definitive account of the Enron scandal, updated with a new chapter The Enron scandal brought down one of the most admired companies of the 1990s. Countless books and articles were written about it, but only The Smartest Guys in the Room holds up a decade later as the definitive narrative. For this tenth anniversary edition, McLean and Elkind have revisited the fall of Enron and its aftermath, in a new chapter that asks why Enron still matters. They also reveal the fates of the key players in the scandal.

#8220;The best book about the Enron debacle to date.”
—BusinessWeek
 
“The authors write with power and finesse. Their prose is effortless, like a sprinter floating down the track.”
—USA Today
 
“Well-reported and well-written.”
—Warren Buffett

Autorentext

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind

Zusammenfassung
In this tenth-anniversary edition, acclaimed investigative journalists Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind deliver the definitive account of the fall of Enron, one of the biggest scandals in corporate America history.
 
Meticulously researched and character driven, The Smartest Guys in the Room takes the reader deep into Enron's past—and behind the closed doors of private meetings. Drawing on a wide range of unique sources, the book follows Enron's rise from obscurity to the top of the business world to its disastrous demise. It reveals as never before major characters such as Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, and Andy Fastow, as well as lesser-known players like Cliff Baxter and Rebecca Mark. 
 
It is a story of greed, arrogance, and deceit—a microcosm of all that can go wrong with American business. Above all, it's a fascinating human drama that has proven to be the authoritative account of the Enron scandal. In this tenth anniversary edition, McLean and Elkind revisit the fall of Enron and its aftermath in a new chapter.

Leseprobe

On a cool Texas night in late January, Cliff Baxter slipped out of bed. He stuffed pillows under the covers so his sleeping wife wouldn’t notice he was gone. Then he stepped quietly through his large suburban Houston home, taking care not to awaken his two children. The door alarm didn’t make a sound as he entered the garage; he’d disabled the security system before turning in. Then, dressed in blue jogging slacks, a blue T-shirt, and moccasin slippers, he climbed into his new black Mercedes-Benz S500 and drove out into the night.
 
At 43, John Clifford Baxter, the son of a Long Island policeman, had made it big in Texas. Before quitting his job eight months earlier, he had served as vice chairman of a great American corporation, capping a decade-long career as the company’s top deal maker. Baxter was rich, too—thanks to a generous helping of stock options, a millionaire many times over. But as he cruised the empty streets of Sugar Land, Texas, Baxter was drowning in dark thoughts. Always given to mood swings, he had become deeply depressed in recent days, consumed by the spectacular scandal that had engulfed his old company.
 
Everyone seemed to be after him. A congressional committee had already called; the FBI and SEC would surely be next. Would he have to testify against his friends? The plaintiffs’ lawyers had named him as a defendant in a huge securities-fraud suit. Baxter was convinced they were having him tailed—and rummaging through his family’s trash. Then there was the media, pestering him at home a dozen or more times a day: Did he know what had gone *wrong? How could America’s seventh-biggest company just blow up? Where had the billions gone? *No one, at this early stage, viewed Baxter as a major player in the company’s crash. Yet he took it all personally. In phone calls and visits with friends, he railed for hours about the scandal’s taint. It’s as if “they’re calling us child molesters,” he complained. “That will never wash off.”
 
Desperate to get away, he’d spent part of the previous week sailing in the Florida Keys. Sailing was one of Baxter’s passions. For years, he’d decompressed floating on Galveston Bay aboard his 72-foot yacht, Tranquility Base. But he’d sold the boat several months earlier. When Baxter returned from Florida, his doctor prescribed antidepressants and sleeping pills and told him to see a psychiatrist. He’d called the shrink’s office that day to make an appointment. But when the receptionist explained that the schedule was booked until February, Baxter hung up—he wasn’t going to wait that long.
 
Less than 48 hours later, at about 2:20 A.M. on January 25, 2002, Baxter stopped his Mercedes on Palm Royale Boulevard, a mile and a half from his home. It was cloudy and a bit chilly that evening by Texas standards—about 48 degrees—but the sedan was tuned to an interior temperature of precisely 79. An open package of Newport Lights sat in the center console, a bottle of Evian water in the cup holder. Baxter’s black leather wallet lay on the passenger seat. Baxter parked the car in the middle of the street, with the doors locked, the engine running, and the headlights burning. Then he lifted a silver .357 Magnum revolver to his right temple and fired a bullet into his head.
 
 • 
 
Seven days later, Cliff Baxter’s friends from Enron gathered to mourn. The Houston energy giant’s collapse into bankruptcy had already become the biggest scandal of the new century. Baxter’s death had stoked the media bonfire and tossed a fresh element of tragedy into a bubbling stewpot of intrigue. Enron’s influence ranged widely—from Wall Street to the White House. So feared was this company, so powerful were its connections, so much was at stake that there was open speculation Baxter had actually been murdered—the target of a carefully staged hit, aimed at silencing him from spilling Enron’s darkest secrets. The rumblings had forced the Sugar Land police department to treat an open-and-shut case—Baxter had even left a suicide note in his wife’s car—like a capital-murder investigation, requiring DNA testing, handwriting experts, ballistics studies, and blood-spatter tests.
 
The Texas memorial service took place after Baxter was buried in a private ceremony in his hometown on Long Island. He was laid to rest in a plot he had secretly purchased there just a few weeks earlier, in the throes of his deepening funk. An Enron corporate jet—a remaining vestige of the company’s imperial ways—flew Cliff’s family and a few others east for the funeral.
 
Now it was Houston’s turn. The precise location of the service—the ballroom of the St. Regis, the city’s swankiest hotel—remained a secret until noon that day, at the insistence of Carol Baxter. Cliff’s widow was bent on avoiding the press. She blamed reporters’ intrusions for pushing her husband over the edge. So the 100 hand-picked guests who pulled up to the valet-parking station on this Friday afternoon had been summoned by furtive phone calls just two hours earlier.
 
For 90 minutes, those who knew Baxter—family members, fellow “boat people” from his beloved yacht club, and Enron friends—heard warm stories about his gentler side. There were images of Cliff with his family, Cliff sailing, Cliff fronting his rock band. Baxter was a gifted musician. When police found his body, there were two guitar picks in his wallet. Everyone left the service with a compact disc of his favorite songs, prepared wi…