By Al Lewis - Business Columnist - Denver Post
Mickey, a bookie based in Costa Rica, says the odds were stacked in favor of a conviction for Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling from the beginning.
Mickey Richardson, chief executive of the wagering website BetCRIS.com, started taking bets in February as the Enron trial began. Back then, his website put the odds at 1-to-35 for a conviction for Skilling and 1-to-30 for a conviction for Lay. As the trial progressed, the odds more than doubled.
“Our clients were rushing to place their bets, and they were only putting their money down on ‘guilty,”’ Richardson said.
So Wednesday, Richardson closed the books because the odds for conviction reached 1-to-100 for Skilling. That means gamblers had to bet $100 to win $1. It was 1-to-80 for Lay.
Never would I have put the odds so high. Lay and Skilling put on a defense so audacious that it might have created doubts for jurors suffering through 16 weeks of mind- numbing blubbering.
“There was no crime at Enron,” defense attorneys argued.
I could not believe my ears when I attended opening arguments in the Houston trial. I’d seen the Enron movie. I’d read parts of the books. The defense went against all I thought I knew:
More than $68 billion in stock value disappeared virtually overnight. Thousands of employees lost their jobs and pensions. Power failures roiled California. The nation’s largest accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, was forced out of the business. Sixteen former Enron executives, including former chief financial officer Andrew Fastow and former chief accounting officer Richard Causey, entered guilty pleas for cooking the books.
And yet none of this was criminal?
“They’re still trying to hide the weenie.”
That’s what former Enron executive and whistle-blower Sherron Watkins wrote with author Mimi Swartz in their 2003 book, “Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron.”
Watkins wrote that she learned about weenie-hiding while working at Arthur Andersen. The term referred to audit clients that would not come clean as well as “generalized acts of corporate or political obfuscation. … Michael Milken tried to hide the weenie at Drexel. Bill Clinton was the grand champion weenie-hider of all time. Hiding the weenie, in Sherron’s mind, never worked out. Even so, people kept trying.”
Lay and Skilling kept trying too.
Enron failed, they claimed, because of short-sellers, vicious journalists and a downturn in the stock market after 9/11 that created a cash-flow crisis
Published: 2006-05-26
Bettor's enjoyed a good week with many favorites winning, especially in baseball. Sunday alone in baseball there were 13 defined favorites which won, so with results like that bookmakers generally have a tough time of it.
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2007-01-03 | permalink
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