From your post
At the hearings two weeks
ago, a congressman used a culinary metaphor, branding Fastow as “the
Betty Crocker of cooked books.” From snippets of the rise and fall of
Enron’s chief financial officer, a none-too-flattering portrait is taking
shape. A middle-class kid from the New Jersey suburbs who used to
haggle over grades with his high-school teachers, Fastow in later life took
delight in small hustles. Trying to book a table at a trendy Los Angeles
nightspot, he asked for a reservation in the name of L.A. Kings hockey star
Wayne Gretzky. When the maitre d’ called his bluff, Fastow demurred,
“No, I said Duane Gretzky.” Deciding that he wanted to buy a new Jeep
when he moved from a banking job in Chicago to Enron in Houston, he
called Jeep dealers in both cities, conferenced them on the line together and
said, ‘OK, you guys. Fight it out’.” Says a colleague: “He thought that was
the cat’s meow.” Though Fastow’s rabbi calls him a “mensch” and he is
hailed in Houston society as an art patron, he was perhaps more
realistically described by a colleague from his early days at Chicago’s
Continental Bank: “He could be a little unscrupulous in a minor sort of
way,” said this colleague. “As a junior guy he would be willing to do just
about anything to get a deal done. He thought very highly of himself. Take
a person like that, where all those behaviors are encouraged [i.e., to Enron],
and you’ve got a problem.” |
