Showdown With the Crooked 'E'

It took a four-year investigation by the largest group of white-collar prosecutors and investigators ever assembled. The trial itself lasted over four months. But in the end, it took less than six days for a remarkably unified jury to conclude that former chief executives Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling built Enron Corp. into a financial house of cards and concealed its weaknesses from the public.

It was a dramatic end to a financial tragedy that cost thousands of Enron employees their jobs and pensions and robbed millions of shareholders of their investments. And two men who were once lionized for pioneering the development of energy trading and transforming a sleepy utility into the seventh-largest company in the United States now face the prospect of spending the rest of their lives in federal prison. Sentencing is scheduled for, of all days, Sept. 11.

Although Lay and Skilling together spent nearly $70 million on their defense, jurors said the executives were done in by their own testimony, in which they revealed themselves to be too focused and in command of detail to have missed the complex transactions used to inflate Enron's profit and hide its burgeoning debt. Even jurors who started out sympathetic said they came to believe that the Enron executives enriched themselves while forsaking employees and investors. And now that Lay and Skilling have been convicted, the government is likely to seek forfeiture of their assets, which recently were valued at more than $60 million.

Both men vowed to appeal their convictions. The possible grounds include the judge's refusal to move the trial out of the hostile environment of Enron's hometown and the government's refusal to grant immunity from prosecution to a number of defense witnesses. But legal analysts said they face long odds in winning reversal from a notoriously pro-government U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

This was the highest-profile criminal case brought by the government in response to a wave of corporate accounting scandals and bankruptcies that followed the stock market crash of 2000. Even before this trial, prosecutors had won guilty pleas or convictions in cases involving several hundred top corporate executives. But an acquittal of Lay or Skilling would have given impetus to corporate critics who argue that the government has gone too far in regulating corporate behavior and criminalizing what were nothing more than bad business decisions. Last week, those critics were mostly silent.