Author, Reader, Thinker
You are in the middle of lunch hour traffic and dive into your purse for your Blackberry to take a picture of something that has nothing to do with Enron but sounds like the name of the former CFO, even though you’re screwing up the entire traffic pattern by slowing down then speeding up.
And then afterword, you think to yourself that was so worth it.
Andy Fastow was the fussiest of all Enron executives. He spent lavish sums on his clothing. In most pictures, he’s put together very well – typically in greyish suits and very subdued ties. Personally, I always wanted to see him in a very black suit with maybe a deep blue tie, but that does not appear to be his style. To his credit, blue shirts also do not seem his style.
Because he spent so much on clothing, and because he seemed to have a style, it was odd for him to show up at Jeff Skilling’s and Dr. Lay’s trial two days in a row in the exact same grey suit and tie. I can’t figure that one out.
Anyway, he is a good if bland dresser – though his shoes are always screamingly perfect. Love his shoes. Every time.
Here he is in a darkish suit with a tie that has yellow flecks in it. This is the Andy Fastow version of “outrageous.” Looks good but I think the tie is just barely crooked.
This is the same day but for some reason the light is different and the suit looks darker. I like this one better.
Very elegant.
This appears to be his favorite tie. The orange is actually attractive, and looks terrific next to that dark jacket. But the pattern makes me think his wife’s cat threw up on him before he left that morning. Check out the various times he’s worn it though (and yes, they’re all taken on different days):
I like seeing guys in suits (shut up, Evan) but Fastow actually looks better, I think, in casual wear. There is something “casual” about his frame. I don’t quite understand what this factor is, but Andy’s got it. Despite all that money spent on beautiful suits, he looks smashing in a polo and khakis.
WalletPop offers the strangest bit of Fastow trivia:
But wasn’t it just a few years ago that now infamous Enron chief financial officer Andy Fastow was dyeing his hair with gray highlights to achieve a level of gravitas, and convince people that he deserved such a powerful job in spite of his young age?
I have never heard of that. I’ve read everything there is to read. I’ve talked with people who have known him his whole life, people who worked with him and nobody has ever mentioned this. Furthermore, in the earliest pictures of him, his hair was not grey. It seemed to go grey pretty naturally. If it’s true, his stylist deserves a lot of credit.
I would completely discount it except for the fact that Andy Fastow was a crazy motherfucker, and I would not put it past him to do something crazy like that. Still, I wish I could discover the origins of this rumor.
[Preface: I've discovered 257 drafts of various documents in an unused folder. This post was one of them. It appears to have been written over a year ago. ]
While perusing the excellent Houston’s Clear Thinkers blog, I came across this post which asks the provocative question: did Andy Fastow forge Rick Causey’s initials on the Global Galactic agreement?
Using the testimony of an Arthur Andersen accountant, Skilling’s attorneys got the former partner to admit that the so-called Causey initials did not appear to be like other known Causey initials. The [Skilling] defense did not have a handwriting expert review the samples, but I found the testimony of the AA accountant compelling nonetheless.
But the relevance of this is pivotal to the question that led me to Kirkendall’s blog in the first place: why didn’t the prosecution put Causey on the stand? Had Causey testified it seems like he’d have been in a strong position to refute or confirm the controversial Global Galactic agreement.
The Task Force originally said that the Global Galactic agreement did not “relate to Skilling but implicated Causey and Fastow.” However, when on the eve of trial, Causey pleaded guilty to a single count unrelated to Global Galactic the Task Force shifted its allegation of Global Galactic conspiracy from Causey to Skilling.
I can not pretend to know the timeline or the inside story of Andy Fastow’s interrogation by the FBI – the interrogations that produced the Fastow Notes. However, I would not be at all surprised to see that Fastow did not recall meeting with Skilling about the Global Galactic agreement until Causey pleaded guilty; this sort of detail is exactly why it’s critical that the Fastow Notes are released to Skilling’s defense.
During the trial, the Task Force introduced a document that was supposedly written by Fastow in the Spring of 2001 which were talking points to discuss with Skilling. In the document it spells out, “Global Galactic.” Under oath, Fastow admitted he never gave or showed the document to Skilling.
This isn’t the only wonky document. During trial, the government introduced this masterpiece, “Additional Agreements Between Enron and LJM/AF”. It is dated “September 2000″. It’s best not to be too specific about these things after all, so just the month and date work beautifully for this purpose. This document has a very glamorous past. Fastow claimed he destroyed the original in the summer of 2001. What was happening in the summer of 2001? Not much. Skilling left the company that August but otherwise, money was being made, all was well; it seems a strange time to destroy the document, but whatever.
Anyway, apparently a second copy (Rick Causey’s copy?) ended up in an envelope in a safe-deposit box that Fastow and his wife kept at a bank. Fastow said he had no idea how it ended up in a folder holding his Enron employment agreement.
Lea Fastow claimed to find the envelop in April 2004 when she checked the safe deposit box. That was the same month she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor tax crime, ostensibly for helping launder the dirty Enron money, for which she would serve a year in the federal detention center in Houston, Texas. For her plea, the government dropped six felony counts pending against her.
Fastow said his wife put the envelope on his desk, but he didn’t look inside the folder until about a month later. He immediately gave it to his attorney, who gave it to the government. And then it ended up in court, sparkly clean and dazzling.
To me, it just seems a bit too convenient. My personal opinion is that he created the document when he needed something to show the feds in order to plea out.
Who knows. The whole Global Galactic story is just too ridiculous for words. The CFO is conspiring with the CEO, the CFO makes notes – two copies! – doesn’t actually show the notes to anyone, loses one copy, doesn’t know how the other ended up in a safe deposit box and it miraculously fingers the bad guy, while also saying – BEFORE THIS DOCUMENT SHOWED UP – that he had never talked to Jeff Skilling about the Global Galactic document.
Oh, and he’s committing several major felonies and writes it all down. And saves the paperwork. And initials it. And gets the Chief Accounting Officer to initial it too.
Honestly. If Andy Fastow were ten years old, telling you this story, you’d send him into time out and take away his television privileges for making up such a stupid, poorly-constructed lie.
In my opinion, the Global Galactic agreement never existed. It was just one more of Andy Fastow’s phony shell games.
The day before, Bethany McLean had interviewed Jeff Skilling for an article she was writing for Fortune Magazine. In the interview, Bethany began to get into some issues that Skilling was not – at that exact moment- prepared to talk about. “I have six minutes,” he said, “before I have to be in another meeting.” But he volunteered to send accountants and other finance executives to New York to help Bethany understand how Enron made its money. Bethany replied that she was going to run the story with or without his help and Jeff replied that he believed it was unethical to run the story without allowing Enron a chance to answer the questions McLean was raising. Bethany accused Skilling of then saying that Fortune only wanted to “throw rocks at the company.”
On February 15, 2001, Mark Palmer, head of publicity for Enron, and CFO Andrew Fastow flew to New York. In Smartest Guys In The Room Bethany complains that they were in a small, dark conference room – though they were in her office, and ostensibly she could have found a more suitable place for the meeting. She says that at the end of the two-hour meeting, as others were packing up to go, Andy Fastow said to her, “I don’t care what you say about the company. Just don’t make me look bad.”
Since Bethany McLean is the only source for the quote, it’s difficult to take seriously. Like the “throwing rocks” comment, these remarks don’t sound like the people they are attributed to.
Oddly, Bethany McLean has never revealed what was said about the company in that meeting, and if Mark Palmer and Andy Fastow were any help in clarifying her confusion over Enron. Like most of Bethany’s career, the substance just manages to get… left behind.
On January 14, 2004 Andrew Fastow and his wife Lea Fastow accepted plea agreements in exchange for their cooperation in the prosecution of other Enron defendants. Lea Fastow, a former Assistant Treasurer at Enron, pleaded guilty to signing a tax return which did not report her husband’s ill-gotten gains. She served a five month prison sentence at a Houston federal detention center.
Andrew Fastow’s sentence, according to the plea deal, was ten years with no possibility of a shorter sentence. When he testified against Jeff Skilling and Dr. Lay during their trial, the prosecution made a special point of emphasizing the fact that Andy Fastow had nothing to gain by lying about the former Enron chiefs, since his ten-year sentence was not negotiable.
Yet when Andy Fastow was finally sentenced, he was given six years in a federal prison in Louisiana. Prosecutors feted Fastow, praising his openness, his good, unsullied testimony, even his courage. The judge then sentences him to six years.
There is a postscript to the Andy Fastow prison sentence. During Jeff Skilling’s April 2, 2008 oral argument at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, Assistant US Attorney Doug Wilson stood before the justices and said, “Andy Fastow’s character made him a good candidate for a shortened sentence” while Jeff Skilling – the man who had given up seventy million dollars during his employ with Enron, who was ready to liquidate his net worth to assist the company in those final flailing weeks – was portrayed as an evil villain.
Yet Wilson’s remark was curious for another reason. He removed law from the equation and substituted the Task Force’s judgment of “character”. I think if you look at the men and women who were prosecuted for crimes at Enron, most of them were the kind of people you would want to babysit your kids and feed your dog while you’re away on vacation. They’re good people, and hardworking people. Andy Fastow is the only person who springs to mind who doesn’t fit the template.
It is a sad truth of our justice system that sometimes good does not prevail.
I found an old interview with Cliff Stricklin, a Task Force prosecutor in both the Skilling/Lay trial and the Broadband trial. The comment about Fastow caught my attention:
On former Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow:
I can’t say I enjoyed my time around Andrew Fastow as much as with (two lower-level employees). I didn’t identify with him as much. But this guy is clearly one of the smartest people I’ve ever been around in my entire life . . . the defense was licking their chops, “Blame it all on Fastow.” It didn’t work because of his demeanor on the stand. He would say, “I stole? We stole.” That’s a lesson I’ve learned. You can make mistakes, big mistakes, be vilified by an entire country. That doesn’t matter to him because he knew he made mistakes, fessed up and took responsibility for his own actions.
I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: everyone at Enron was shockingly, incandescently, radiantly brilliant. Fastow was smart – he was just incompetent. But I have to smirk when I read that he fessed up and took responsibility for his own actions. In fact he was manipulated by the Task Force into saying whatever they wanted him to say, and that was proven by the Fastow Notes. His story changed over time, he contradicted himself as well as his so-called co-conspirators and was so feted by the prosecution that they managed to reduce his sentence from a “guaranteed” ten years to six, which will equal about three when its all said and done.
As for the allegation that the defense tried to blame it all on Fastow, Fastow was implicating them in criminal activity! They had to answer that allegation. Fastow started out as a guy who skimmed a little from a few transactions to being the scapegoat for the entire collapse of the company. The prosecutiondid that, not the defense. The defense in fact was shocked that the company collapsed, even with Andy Fastow’s theft.
This a subtle rehetorical game, and it’s tiresome and would be silly if it didn’t have such grave consequences.
An article about a bailbondsmanwho slept in the bunk next to Andy Fastow in federal prison has made me incredibly sad. Louis Marcotte said he and Fastow split the bathroom detail, cleaning toilets and showers for about 150 men on their floor. The article didn’t give any insight into how Fastow is doing, but the thought of Fastow cleaning toilets actually struck me as profoundly tragic.
I’ve written numerous times about Andy Fastow, trying to make sense of him. He’s a puzzle to me, even when I think I understand a certain decision he made or a certain facet of his personality, I have never felt like I can say a-ha! I understand Andrew S. Fastow!The only bit that I feel confident about is his intelligence. I believe him to be very bright, even if he was incompetent. I believe him to be a generally good guy who just went off the rails somewhere. Meaning, I don’t believe he is evil; that’s too convenient an excuse for his behavior.
I do believe he deserves a much longer sentence than the one he received, particularly in light of Jeff Skilling’s massive 24 year sentence. But the thought of him being in prison makes me dolorous. All that potential – gone. He had been given every advantage and he threw it all away.
Had things been different… if he hadn’t stolen money and put Enron at risk, if he hadn’t lied about Jeff Skilling and Dr. Lay… There are a million better ways it could have gone. A million different endings to the story.
Instead, he is cleaning toilets in Louisiana and sleeps away from his wife and children every night.
That’s how the story ended.
For now.
He will, of course, be out of prison very soon. And he can start over. He takes his mysteries with him back into the real world – while his ultimate victim, Jeff Skilling, bears a punishment he did not earn.
October 1, 1999
CFO Andy Fastow was featured in CFO magazine. In Conspiracy of Fools the story of how this article actually came to fruition is actually quite humorous. I believe very few things in that book, but one thing that has the ring of truth to it is the story of how Andy Fastow campaigned, cajoled, bullied, and pleaded to be featured in CFO. He asked several underlings to find out how to get him in, and after months and months, somebody finally got Andy Fastow noticed by CFO magazine. He went to Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay and asked for quotes. Skilling said, “We needed someone to rethink the entire financing structure at Enron from soup to nuts… We didn’t want someone stuck in the past, since the industry of yesterday is no longer. Andy has the intelligence and the youthful exuberance to think in new ways. He deserves every accolade tossed his way.”
And this will make you weep:
“Retaining a high investment grade rating was critical to the success of our energy franchises,” Skilling says. “If we were downgraded, we could lose critical market share in North America.”
Dr. Lay is not quoted in the article.
October 1, 2001
The office is pretty quiet. Since V&E has given their preliminary report that says Enron’s accounting is fine, things have settled considerably. The financial officers have made the decision to unwind Raptors but they haven’t announced it yet. Fastow meets with Dr. Lay and some others including Rick Causey and Mark Frevert in the afternoon, but nothing appears to have been urgent about that meeting.
By all accounts, this was the lull before the storm – which was just fifteen days away.
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