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I started looking for the grocery store scandal story that I had read months ago and ran across this 2003 story about Mrs. Fastow from Business Week Online:

On May 1, federal agents handcuffed her and charged the Houston heiress with helping Andrew orchestrate one of the most notorious white-collar crimes in history. She's accused of wire fraud, money laundering, and filing false income-tax returns.

According to the government, the socialite belonged to a small group of loyalists who executed the complex schemes devised by Andrew Fastow to inflate Enron's performance and enrich themselves. She is accused, essentially, of serving as a stand-in for her husband -- wiring money, cashing checks, and handling financial housekeeping matters that the Enron CFO didn't want his fingerprints on. Lea's story, pieced together for the first time by BusinessWeek from internal corporate documents, government investigations, and more than two dozen interviews with friends and co-workers, is unique. No heiress has ever been charged with such complex financial fraud. She and Andy, who earned more than $60 million from 1997 to 2000, are the only husband-and-wife team implicated in the current round of corporate scandals.

So she get a year and her husband gets a couple of years in a mental health facility. Skilling,who was never charged with anything like that and who was cleared of any insider trading gets 24 years. That sounds fair. /s

Right.

As I said, the Feds never wanted Lea Fastow, they wanted Lay & Skilling, the guys that they thought had lied directly to investors. The only way to do that was to get Andy Fastow to cooperate, & the only way to ultimately get that cooperation was to threaten Fastow with Lea's indictment. But the sword cuts both ways - Lea's charges were then reduced to obtain Andy's assistance.

Don't forget that Skilling was convicted on conspiracy to commit securities & wire fraud, along with numerous instances of lying to shareholders and/or analysts. And one should keep in mind that most of the underlying transactions, in and of themselves, were not illegal. It was the failure to disclose the transactions, and lying about them, that led to the securities & wire fraud charges.

Fastow will do almost all the 6 years, I don't know why you keep insisting that he'll do 2 years only.

So she get a year and her husband gets a couple of years in a mental health facility. Skilling,who was never charged with anything like that and who was cleared of any insider trading gets 24 years...

That probably just scratches the surface. Go back to some earlier financial scandals in the SW and you'll see them involved there, too.

Ground Zero of the banking scandal that brought down so many in our area, as well as other parts of the US, was Continental-Illinois. Guess where both Lea and Andy worked at the time.

They may have been too small-time to get caught, but perhaps they learned their lessons well there. There are all kinds of ant trails from there to "here" and a handful of people also known (well) to Ken Lay and probably to Skilling, too.

Then there was the S&L scandal which brought an entire financial industry to a close. Lea's family was intimately involved there (as were many Houston small fry, too). Most of them are honest as the day is long - I've worked with some and been friends with some, been to seders with some, but a couple of them aren't. Not sure where she fits or where Andy did.

Those trails even go back to the Sharpstown scandal and Watergate - in fact, it was Watergate that invoked the grocery and SEC investigations.

It would be easy to say that anyone in big business in TX/OK might've been touched by all of these (I was) - but when they just keep *happening* to several key players, it seems to be more than a coincidence.

They do have some powerful players on their side (L&A) - a well known subset of one of our most powerful allies.