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Taking Enron to Task
"There was never any agenda from the outset to go out and get person X," said Leslie R. Caldwell, now in private practice in New York. "Every single lawyer on the task force is an experienced prosecutor who knows when to bring cases and when not to bring cases."
It has been four years since the Justice Department created the task force, bringing together a select group of lawyers from U.S. attorneys' offices around the nation. The unit is itself a symbol of Enron's devastating impact on Houston. Prosecutors there stepped aside in 2002 because so many of them had financial or personal ties to the company.
  From left, Kathryn H. Ruemmler, John C. Hueston and Sean M. Berkowitz are part of the Enron Task Force taking the firm's former leaders to trial. (By Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post) 
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For all its success in dealmaking, the task force's record when it takes cases to a jury has been mixed.
The trial last year of former executives in Enron's broadband Internet unit dragged on for three months under the weight of testimony about the division's technological capabilities. The case ended in a hung jury in July. Weeks earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously tossed out the government's groundbreaking conviction of audit firm Arthur Andersen LLP because of faulty jury instructions. Both cases were prosecuted by the task force, but lawyers involved in the coming Lay trial had little involvement in investigating those defendants.
In the task force's most successful result thus far, in 2004, a Houston jury convicted five former executives of Enron and Merrill Lynch & Co. for taking part in a sham energy deal that helped Enron inflate profits. Each has been sentenced to between two and three years in prison. A sixth official, a former Enron accountant who denied knowing key facets of the deal, won acquittal.
The sprawling case against Lay and Skilling dwarfs anything the government has attempted to date. Last month's guilty plea by former Enron accounting chief Richard A. Causey will help prosecutors to slash several witnesses from their lineup. But the trial still could consume more than four months, featuring testimony about some of the company's faltering business units and the maneuvers Enron's former leaders allegedly used to prop up the company and mislead investors. The trial had been scheduled to begin yesterday, but Causey's plea pushed the start back by two weeks.
The trial's complexity was part of the lure for Kathryn H. Ruemmler, a District-based prosecutor and a deputy director of the task force. "It's an incredible challenge, an extraordinarily complex and large investigation," said Ruemmler. "It's in many ways unparalleled," with intense congressional interest and complications from massive shareholder lawsuits.
Ruemmler, 34, is no stranger to sensitive investigations. She worked in the White House, handling independent counsel issues, including those related to former Pentagon worker Linda Tripp, who famously taped colleague Monica Lewinsky.
The strain that runs through all four lead prosecutors is this: They are ambitious, unusually driven and not at all used to losing.
First in his class at New Orleans's Tulane University, Berkowitz finished among the final 100 for the coveted Rhodes scholarship, although he did not win. In his spare time, he runs marathons.
Ruemmler talked her way into her first big career move while still in law school at Georgetown University, so impressing a partner at the D.C. firm Zuckerman Spaeder LLP with her remarks on a cable television show that she landed an internship on the spot.
John C. Hueston, 41, a longtime prosecutor from Orange County, Calif., has never lost -- not even on a single charge -- in 15 federal jury trials, colleague Wayne Gross said.
