Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story (Hardcover)

by Kurt Eichenwald (Author) "Ken Lay settled into his black Mercedes 600 SL, easing out of his reserved parking space at the Huntingdon condominiums..." (more)
Key Phrases: Ken Lay, Wall Street, Andy Fastow (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Enron was a $100-billion-a-year company in October 2001--America's seventh-largest. The Houston-based energy firm enjoyed warm ties with newly installed President George W. Bush. Earnings were up 26 percent from the previous quarter, while Fortune magazine had named Enron the country's most innovative company six years in a row. Less than two months later, Enron filed for bankruptcy in the biggest corporate failure in history. Enron became synonymous with the greed and fraud of the go-go high-tech stock bubble of the late 1990s--the worst of a series of spectacular corporate collapses that also took down WorldCom, Tyco, and Global Crossing.

What went wrong? Veteran New York Times financial journalist Kurt Eichenwald does an epic job of telling Enron's story in his 742-page tome Conspiracy of Fools. Eichenwald, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, also authored The Informant, an acclaimed account of a vast international price-fixing scandal at Archer Daniels Midland. Conspiracy of Fools tells the Enron tale with a cinematic narrative style, relying almost exclusively on scene and dialogue to bring his account to vivid life. We see how federal regulators opened the doors for the Enron fraud early on when they let the company loosen up its accounting rules and essentially cook its books. We read how Enron bullied Wall Street firms into issuing favorable reports about its share price by threatening to take away lucrative banking fees. Eichenwald also reveals how Enron manipulated electricity prices during the California energy crisis of 2000. Eichenwald's book is less successful in situating the Enron debacle in its wider context--the cycle of market speculation that reached a historic summit in the dot-com bubble. Was Enron just a cautionary sign of the greed and lack of ethics of a few bad apples, or was it more symptomatic of an entire market system? That may be a debate for another book. --Alex Roslin

From Publishers Weekly
This enormous, intimate blow-by-blow of Enron's implosion gets as close to what actually happened, in terms of people making (bad) decisions in real time, as anyone who wasn't there with a concealed video-phone possibly could. Having combed endless documents and interviewed countless principals and peripherals, Eichenwald (The Informant) presents short declarative sentences (and lots of sentence fragments) that may have run through the heads of men like top executives Skilling, Lay and Fastow as they managed to cook a very large set of books, as well as men like Stuart Zisman, a lawyer in the firm's wholesale division who wrote an early memo titled "Overall Book Manipulation" that stated "the majority of investments being introduced to Raptor are bad ones." Eichenwald's bald depictions ("Skilling sank deeper into depression"; "It couldn't be true, [Anderson partner Tom] Bauer thought") make for real tension. Collegial meetings at the White House with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and others; charged conference calls with skeptical investors; endless buy-ins, buyouts and acronyms—all are presented in a rat-a-tat style thick with corporate anxiety, keeping pages turning even as the details themselves are numbing. (Luckily, Eichenwald includes a "Cast of Characters" and "List of Deals" so that readers can remind themselves of past carnage.) As an unadorned attempt to get into the heads of some major manipulators, this book can hardly be bettered. (On sale Mar. 8)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 768 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; Complete Numbers Starting with 1, 1st Ed edition (March 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767911784
• ISBN-13: 978-0767911788
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6.4 x 2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (146 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #44,067 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

105 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good storytelling, March 27, 2005

By	eclectictastes "eclectictastes" (Columbus, OH USA) - See all my reviews

Kurt Eichenwald provides an entertaining story for those of us who are familiar with the name Enron but unclear about the specifics .

Eichenwald presents his story as a Greek fable in the John Grisham and Scott Turow mold. The reader is introduced to protagonists Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and the Andy Fastow as the story's villain.

Although the book makes good storytelling, anyone who has read earlier books about Enron has to be skeptical about Eichenwald's sympathetic portrayal of Lay and Skillings and their supposed lack of knowledge about the stealing, lawbreaking and abuse that occurred under their watch. One can't help but wonder how Lay, who has a Ph.D in economics, could be so clueless about all the things that came to light about his company as it imploded. Skilling comes off as a sobbing, emotional wreck. It's a mystery how he ever attained the rank of CEO at a Fortune 500 company. I strongly suspect that both men served as major sources for this work.

Fastow is only a too familiar character to anyone who has worked in an office as the imcompetent, dishonest but scheming employee who charms the higher ups and climbs on the back of others to achieve power. But as with most work environments, Fastow couldn't achieve his crimes without the arrogance, disorganization and willful ignorance of his supervisors.

Another problem with the book is the author's retelling of various conversations and thoughts of most of the principal characters. Unless each source was keeping journals of the events as they unfolded, it's highly unlikely that the author's interpretation could be totally accurate.

59 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Superbly written; hits the fear and greed concepts in spades, April 13, 2005

By	R. Shaff "Velocipede" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Anyone following the tragic Enron saga knows the plethora of books that have hit the streets. However, after reading many of them, CONSPIRACY OF FOOLS is probably one of my favorites. And, while I do agree with other reviewers' comments about Eichenwald's intense focus on Fastow as the puppet master, I can't help but think this is not too far from the truth. If, on the other hand, you haven't had the opportunity to catch up on this abomination, two other books are very worthy of mention: 24 DAYS by Rebecca Smith and John R. Emshwiller, and THE SMARTEST GUYS IN THE ROOM by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind (by the way, Bethany McLean receives high mention in CONSPIRACY as the tenacious young reporter who was not afraid to take on these power brokers).

Very simply put, I love Eichenwald's style. He has taken a subject, which can be extremely complex and dry (i.e. special purpose entities), and has provided the reader with a basis to understand how they were initiated, what they were "designed" to do, and where they failed miserably. And, while a novice to structured finance and accounting may not walk away from the book totally schooled on SPEs, one cannot say Eichenwald failed to explain the general basics. Further, Eichenwald has not created a historical rendering of events; rather, he has created a historical novel, of sorts. The book reads more like a novel and less like a business/non-fiction book.

Two of the more interesting features in this book are Eichenwald's "Cast of Characters," and "The Primary Deals," both of which occupy the forward section of the book. The "Cast of Characters" is no less than six pages (I didn't count the actual characters, but I'd bet there are in excess of 100). This "Cast" is Eichenwald's attempt to shortcut the incredible level of descriptive detail it would take to introduce each new character, their place in relation to Enron, their role, and interaction with other characters. Although it is daunting as a precursor to beginning the first chapter, it is telling in the breadth of individuals and firms this fraud touched (not to mention the thousands of employees, many of whom lost all their retirement savings). Perhaps as, or more, important than the "Cast" is "The Primary Deals." These pages list the deals structured by Fastow et al, which effectively took Enron down. If I could impress upon a reader to focus on the "Deals" before starting the book, rest assured that the reader will have a greater comprehension of the schemes and internal cabals that took down a Fortune 50 company.

As the title of my review suggests, fear and greed dominate this book and the Enron story. This can be immediately evidenced by the incontrovertible activities inside (and outside) the company that are absolutely unethical and illegal (read: fraudulent). And, though these acts weren't totally hidden, the twin powers of fear and greed kept anyone/everyone from stepping up until it was too late (even whistleblower and ostensible heroine Sherron Watkins is not totally clean, in my opinion). The poster children for Fear: the Houston partners of Arthur Andersen (of course, greed was just as powerful here). The Houston AA partners were so fearful of losing Enron as a client that they turned the other cheek to obvious accounting infractions and fraud...even when their own Standards Group was telling them to run! As to the poster children for Greed: the cast is ponderous, but Andy Fastow and Michael Kopper are the Kings of Greed. Through their simple, yet complex collusion, they robbed Enron, its creditors, and investors of close to $100 million. Perhaps more egregious however, is their part in devising such incompetent and fraudulent SPEs, which ultimately were nothing more than shell games.

In the end, Eichenwald is laser-focused on Fastow, and Kopper to a lesser degree. This has caused other reviewers a bit of heartburn in the sense that Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are presented as intelligent, yet "empty-suited" lackeys. I'm not sure I agree with Eichenwald's overview of Lay and Skilling however, it doesn't detract from the story Eichenwald tells. And while Eichenwald's poisonous pen was aimed at Fastow, honestly, I couldn't agree more. Fastow was quite simply a con man. He wasn't qualified to be the CFO of a small, private company, much less a Fortune 50 company. He lied, manipulated, stole, and cheated...all this from an executive who has the trust of thousands of investors. There was nothing but failure in the cards.

CONSPIRACY is a great read and one much less stuffy than expected. The only reason I didn't lay 5 stars on this books was the perceived imbalance of blame that, in this reviewer's opinion, should have been laid at the feet of Lay and Skilling.

40 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An AMAZING story, March 14, 2005

By	JM DC "Josh" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

I was lucky enough to get one of the early copies of this book, passed to me by a friend who insisted I would enjoy it. I was skeptical, to say the least. The Enron collapse was never a story that I found all that interesting and I seriously doubted I would want to read a book this long about it. Then, I read the first page. And the next. And the next.

Boy, was I wrong. It is so hard to explain what this book is. It is a thriller, like a Grisham novel. It is exciting and intriguing and outrageous and funny and tragic. The only thing I disliked about it was that I lost several nights sleep as I tried to race to the end. I cannot praise this book enough. It is an amazing accomplishment.