Blogging Enron: The Enron Broadband Story [Kindle Edition]

Cara Ellison (Author), Rex Shelby (Foreword)

Book Description

The Enron criminal cases are among the most important white collar criminal cases in American history. Yet, the tale of Enron Broadband Services (EBS), one of the most ambitious and innovative communications companies of the American dot-com boom days, is largely an untold story … until now!

Blogging Enron: The Enron Broadband Story covers the EBS saga – the company, the people, and the legal events which consumed the lives of so many of its executives. The book is inspired by the hugely popular blog, Enron Online: The Enron Blog, owned by author and blogger, Cara Ellison.

From the Prologue by Cara Ellison:

"This is the first of a series of books ... about the Enron businesses and the associated Enron indictments and trials. I am starting with Enron Broadband Services (EBS). And I bet you are thinking … why EBS?

Well, first of all, EBS is, quite simply, a fun company to explore. It was a classic high-tech start-up that launched near the end of the telecommunications boom of the 1990’s. EBS was a true pioneer in the application of a business model and a group of technologies that have since become the height of success for American technology companies. And many of the key players in the EBS saga have back stories that are truly fascinating.

Perhaps more important for readers interested in the Enron legal cases, the EBS case was the harbinger of things to come for the other Enron cases. The EBS indictment was the first of the Enron indictments brought by the federal prosecutors of the Enron Task Force (ETF). The tactics used by the prosecutors and agents of the ETF in the EBS case are essentially the same ones used against defendants in the other Enron cases ... And, one of the EBS defendants, Rex Shelby, ... fought the Feds for nine years and was the last of the dozens of Enron defendants to settle his legal case. So, with EBS, we have a legal case that spans most of the Enron legal history.

The EBS story is also an eye-opener for anyone who has bought into the simplistic myth of evil Enron executives hatching nefarious schemes to enrich themselves at the expense of employees and shareholders. The story of the EBS business, the EBS executives, and the EBS legal events, so clearly blows holes in that myth that I think it makes an excellent way to clear the mind of the debris of previous shallow assumptions about Enron. Therefore, it is a great place to start in examining the real Enron and the real Enron legal cases."

From the Foreword by Rex Shelby, former Enron Broadband VP of Engineering:

"Thank goodness there is finally a book about Enron Broadband Services! In the countless pages of books, articles, and other writings about Enron, there has been little coverage of EBS. And what has been written so badly misses the mark that it is difficult to even recognize the actual EBS enterprise. Only in Cara Ellison’s Enron Online: The Enron Blog could one find information about EBS that provides a sense of the real enterprise and what actually transpired in the legal events that engulfed so many EBS employees.

Therefore, how fitting that it is Cara Ellison who gives us the first book dedicated to EBS and the EBS legal saga. And how appropriate that Cara makes use of her blog posts to motivate and structure her book. By basing her book on her blog posts, Cara brings the same style and insight to the topic which is the hallmark of her popular blog. In this fascinating book, Blogging Enron: The Enron Broadband Story, Cara ... 'gets the facts right' and she 'demonstrates some real passion about the subject.'

So get ready to be informed and entertained. And if you think you already understand what Enron and the Enron legal events were all about, prepare to be surprised!"

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

ABOUT CARA ELLISON Cara Ellison is a business executive, a writer, and a blogger. Cara’s blogs include Enron Online: The Enron Blog (http://enron-online.com/), the blog that inspired her book Blogging Enron: The Enron Broadband Story. Cara Ellison has lived in Houston, New York, and Washington, D.C. She currently resides in London. In addition to Blogging Enron: The Enron Broadband Story, Cara’s most recent books include the novel, At Any Cost, also available at Amazon. The sequel to At Any Cost is scheduled for release soon.

Product Details

• File Size: 1839 KB
• Print Length: 315 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1941086012
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: Rumble Press; 1 edition (January 12, 2014)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B00HTUYC4O
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray:
  Not Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #641,877 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars I was lucky! January 16, 2014

By L. Sherriff

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

I was lucky! Rex Shelby was not!

Cara Ellison’s fascinating, deeply troubling, but well-written account of the Enron Broadband trials in her new book Blogging Enron, The Enron Broadband Story, will really annoy and should scare the dickens out of you.

It is a story of government lies, a guilty-until-proven-innocent media bias, Big Brother, judicial incompetence, and most importantly prosecutorial misconduct. The bad guys and women were the Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecutors and the biased judge. Until I get evidence to the contrary, I will refer to it as the Department of Injustice (DOI).

Rex Shelby unfortunately became the poster child for the ravages of this abuse. It could have been me.

Rex is about my age. We both have degrees in Math and Computer Science. We both spent time in the Air Force (he reached Captain – I only made it through the second year at the United State Air Force Academy.) But he continued down the technology route where I moved on to the energy and ultimately energy trading business.

Let’s go back to January 20, 2000. It was the annual Enron Analyst Conference (for those that reported on the company in the financial community) at the Hyatt Regency in Houston.

Rex had been with Enron for just a few months (after the acquisition of Modulus Technologies). I had worked for the company for six plus years. I would soon to be appointed Enron Europe CEO in May, 2000 (I was the Enron Europe President and COO on January 20, 2000). We were both hard-working, honest innovators at Enron, like the vast majority of our Enron colleagues.

I made a short presentation (I was one of 19 speakers) about Enron Europe early in the morning (lucky for me the stock did not move much during my talk as this would have put a much bigger target on my forehead.) But despite my inability to “move the needle” on the stock price, it was a day I will never forget. (It increased my net worth substantially. I admit that I care more about putting money in the bank than Rex does.)

About an hour after my presentation, Louise Kitchen who was heading up a big project: “Enron Online”, gave a terrific presentation about an exciting innovation in the energy world. Enron Online was an online trading platform where Enron offered the best price to buy and the best to sell for commodities all over the world. This definitely got the audience’s attention; it moved the needle.

Back to Rex. He had prepared two separate two-minute video presentation for the January 20, 2000 Enron analyst conference in Houston. Only one of the videos was shown. Rex did not make a prepared presentation but was there to host Sun Microsystems executives and then participated in the Enron Broadband Services Q&A.

The Enron Broadband presentation started energizing the room (unlucky for Rex). By the end of the day the Enron stock had risen by 26% - in just one day.

In the next couple of days Rex exercised and sold his vested stock options and I exercised and sold about 15-20% of mine. It turns out that Rex and I would have made much more money if we had waited later in the year when the price hit a peak of $90 on Aug 23. After the Analyst Conference (a year later) the price was in the low $80’s and after the next analyst conference in 2001, I sold another 15-20% of my shares. When the stock price started heading down later that year (remember the dot.com bubble), I started kicking myself for not having sold it all.

I was lucky. Unlike Rex, I was never dragged into the Houston witch trials. I hope that I would have had the courage to hold my head up high with as much perseverance and integrity as Rex and his codefendants. I think I would have. But I will never know for sure – and hope to never find out.

This book does an outstanding job of laying out the government’s abuse of these defendants and all the travesties in the process:
1) The first federal prosecutor on the case John Kroger, admitted in his book Convictions (please don’t bother buying it) that the Bush Administration was pressuring the DOI (that’s not a mistake - remember, I have replaced the word Justice with Injustice) to “get scalps quickly”. In the same book, Kroger said: “Here, the end – the ultimate convictions of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling – appeared to justify our questionable tactics.” In this case “questionable” is a euphemism for dishonest and unethical.

2) The judge was over her head and refused to act as a fair and impartial referee. In Judge Vanessa Gilmore’s first book in 2010 she accurately describes herself as a “Judicial Diva”. I don’t know about you but if I am the defendant in a trial for my life, I want a tough, fair and knowledgeable judge not an opera singer.

3) The notion that the Enron defendants could get a fair trial in Houston where virtually every poll showed that 85% of the population expressed a view that any Enron defendant charged was automatically guilty and should be convicted, was ludicrous. The judge denied the defense motion without comment.

4) I used to think the power of the government to cut deals with some defendants in order to get convictions of others made sense. This book will convince you otherwise. The way the DOI threatened 200 unindicted coconspirators with indictments in order to encourage selective memory and outright lies will absolutely disgust you.

5) The prosecution did nothing to protect the physical evidence of the Enron Broadband Operating System even though the DOI’s major thesis was that it didn’t exist or if it did that it didn’t work very well.

6) The government withheld evidence and sometimes delayed handing over evidence for so long that it became useless for the defense. How effective will you be if you have to screen thousands of emails the night before a big trial?

7) Once the government did not receive a single guilty decision on 200 counts in the trial they were bound and determined to force the defendants to a second trial despite their constitutional protections against double jeopardy. Judge Gilmore would have let them get away with this. The Court of Appeals would have let the prosecution trample the defendants’ rights. Thankfully the US Supreme Court unanimously said “no” in the case of Scott Yeager. This should of been the end of the fight for Rex Shelby but it wasn’t. And it was too late for Joe Hirko who had decided the government would never stop pursuing him and settled for a 16 month prison sentence.

8) The cost of putting on a defense is in the millions and sometimes 10’s of millions of dollars. No money – no defense. It also takes virtually all of the defendant’s time to engage and participate in the process – for Rex Shelby that was nine long years. So unless one is so wealthy can afford not to work for a decade, he is up a creek (in a federal penitentiary) without a paddle. The technical legal term is “screwed”. And of course the way the prosecution draws up the indictments and overcharges everyone, if one is convicted then he/she is facing life in prison. No wonder so many copped a plea. Only about 3% of those indicted by the DOI go to trial – the other 97% are convicted via plea deals.

I hope that if I faced this kind of personal crisis, I would have worked as hard, kept my head as high, and persisted with my underlying integrity that has served me so well as the defendants in this case did. I can’t say that I might not have slipped; but after reading this saga, I have recommitted to those principles.

Thanks Rex Shelby! Thanks Scott Yeager! Thanks Joe Hirko! And thanks Cara Ellison for all the detailed research and caring enough to actually dig into the details, ask the right questions and not going along with the mob. Read more ›

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Unfashionable Truth January 23, 2014

By David Bermingham

Format:Paperback

For those who like their stories black and white, and an easy narrative that if something goes wrong, somebody somewhere simply must be to blame, this is not the book for you. If you like to inform yourself by reading nothing but the mainstream media, then stay away.

It's been far too long, but perhaps the 'true' story behind Enron may finally come out. Now that those prosecutors who made reputations and lucrative careers from abusing the almost limitless power of Government have moved on, and that the statute of limitations has passed such that those people whose silence was bought with the threat of indictment can now speak without fear, maybe the 'other' side of the Enron tale will finally be told.

Over the last decade, there have been but a few voices crying in the wilderness that the accepted narrative )that Enron was a fraudulent house of cards from top to bottom) was just nonsense. One of those voices has been that of Cara Ellison, whose blog has been an extraordinary source of detail, argument and downright good investigative work. Having worked with Enron, Cara knew that the narrative being painted was not one that she remotely recognized, and with the relative luxury of not herself being in the cross-hairs of the prosecutors, she has consistently pointed out the gross injustices being perpetrated by the very public servants that you would expect to be protecting the public from criminality.

What's great about Cara's blog, and her book, is that she tells it as it is. Yes, there were criminals in the courtroom in the EBS trial, just as there were in the trials of Lay and Skilling, the Nigerian Barge defendants, and others. It's just that the criminals weren't standing in the dock. They were the ones conducting the witch-hunt, concealing exculpatory evidence, threatening defense witnesses with indictment if they testified, presenting wholly inaccurate portrayals of events in the sure fire knowledge that a jury of Houstonians was bound to convict.

Except in the case of the EBS defendants, the jury did not convict. Not one defendant. And so the prosecutors did what any self-respecting public servant would do. They had another go. The 400 pound gorilla that is the US Department of Justice is not content with taking on the 10 stone weakling. They have to make sure that he is wearing a blindfold and that his hands are tied behind his back.

The gross inequity of the US criminal justice system is laid bare in this book, and not before time. If you think that all the guys with the badges are on the side of the angels, think again. Read this book and be afraid. Be very afraid. If you think it couldn't happen to you, you're a fool.

Well done Cara, for standing by your guns. And may yours be the crack in the dam that will finally bring the truth about the whole Enron story and the litany of prosecutorial abuse into the public domain. Not before time. Read more ›

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Must Read! January 23, 2014

By Larry Ciscon

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

This is the first book that really delves into the real issues involved in the EBS trial. Often when things go wrong there is a tendency to want to quickly place blame rather than trying to understand the more complex underlying issues. This is the first book on Enron/EBS that even begins to explore the real interactions and processes. And the lessons on how *not* to judge those involved in mishaps/failures is something we, as a society, must learn from. I highly recommend this book.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning!!! January 15, 2014

By V. Witek

Format:Paperback|Verified Purchase

The ordeal that these young men faced when opposing the Federal Government leaves one to wonder just how corrupt our judicial system has become. I followed the trials closely but this book reveals a great deal more than any of the media outlets ever covered. How can any individual regardless of their wealth take on the Feds who have an unlimited amount of resources and ever expect to come away unscathed? I found this book very revealing and it made me wonder how any private citizen can ever get a fair trial against our government when there are political ramifications driving the process. Great book, highly recommended.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating! January 26, 2014

By Janice Ferebee

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

I followed Cara's blog during the EBS trial because of my personal interest in the impact of these indictments on some innocent, hard-working individuals. The book provides the background and details that are needed to tell a complete story of the persistence and integrity required of those who believe in truth when confronted with the disturbing abusive power of government. I highly recommend it!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Well done! January 25, 2014

By William S. Reed

Format:Paperback|Verified Purchase

Thanks for helping the public know the truth. Enron Broadband Services (EBS) created and demonstrated the effective and meaningful use of streaming and other technologies that the world now takes for granted. EBS created the Enron Intelligent Network and it worked. I hope more persons can read this important story and begin to understand that there were many innocent and very creative people at Enron.