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Conspiracy of Fools
From an award-winning New York Times reporter comes the full, mind-boggling story of the lies, crimes, and ineptitude behind the spectacular scandal that imperiled a presidency, destroyed a marketplace, and changed Washington and Wall Street forever . . .
It was the corporate collapse that appeared to come out of nowhere. In late 2001, the Enron Corporation--a darling of the financial world, a company whose executives were friends of presidents and the powerful--imploded virtually overnight, leaving vast wreckage in its wake and sparking a criminal investigation that would last for years. But for all that has been written about the Enron debacle, no one has yet to re-create the full drama of what has already become a near-mythic American tale.
Until now. With Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald transforms the unbelievable story of the Enron scandal into a rip-roaring narrative of epic proportions, one that is sure to delight readers of thrillers and business books alike, achieving for this new decade what books like Barbarians at the Gate and A Civil Action accomplished in the 1990’s.
Written in the roller-coaster style of a novel, the compelling narrative takes readers behind every closed door--from the Oval Office to the executive suites, from the highest reaches of the Justice Department to the homes and bedrooms of the top officers. It is a tale of global reach--from Houston to Washington, from Bombay to London, from Munich to Sao Paolo--laying out the unbelievable scenes that twisted together to create this shocking true story.
Eichenwald reveals never-disclosed details of a story that features a cast including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul O’Neill, Harvey Pitt, Colin Powell, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alan Greenspan, Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, Jeff Skilling, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone. With its you-are-there glimpse into the secretive worlds of corporate power, Conspiracy of Fools is an all-true financial and political thriller of cinematic proportions.
It was the corporate collapse that appeared to come out of nowhere. In late 2001, the Enron Corporation--a darling of the financial world, a company whose executives were friends of presidents and the powerful--imploded virtually overnight, leaving vast wreckage in its wake and sparking a criminal investigation that would last for years. But for all that has been written about the Enron debacle, no one has yet to re-create the full drama of what has already become a near-mythic American tale.
Until now. With Conspiracy of Fools, Kurt Eichenwald transforms the unbelievable story of the Enron scandal into a rip-roaring narrative of epic proportions, one that is sure to delight readers of thrillers and business books alike, achieving for this new decade what books like Barbarians at the Gate and A Civil Action accomplished in the 1990’s.
Written in the roller-coaster style of a novel, the compelling narrative takes readers behind every closed door--from the Oval Office to the executive suites, from the highest reaches of the Justice Department to the homes and bedrooms of the top officers. It is a tale of global reach--from Houston to Washington, from Bombay to London, from Munich to Sao Paolo--laying out the unbelievable scenes that twisted together to create this shocking true story.
Eichenwald reveals never-disclosed details of a story that features a cast including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul O’Neill, Harvey Pitt, Colin Powell, Gray Davis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Alan Greenspan, Ken Lay, Andy Fastow, Jeff Skilling, Bill Clinton, Rupert Murdoch and Sumner Redstone. With its you-are-there glimpse into the secretive worlds of corporate power, Conspiracy of Fools is an all-true financial and political thriller of cinematic proportions.
768 pages, Hardcover
Published March 14, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
December 7, 2007
Conspiracy of Fools is the fourth Enron-related tale I've read (Smartest Guys in the Room, Enron: The Rise and Fall, and Anatomy of Greed being the other three). In it, Eichenwald does a decent job of combining the best of the three others, as if he poached some from each. Conspiracy reads as a novel, combining facts and details with (presumably) fictional conversations. The sometimes outrageous discussions between characters left me feeling that Eichenwald embellished a little too much, and at 600+ pages, the embellishment could be great. He often leaves out the nitty gritty details best described by Smartest Guys in the Room, and relies too much on dramatics, like in Anatomy of Greed. And unlike Smartest Guys (by far the most well written and complete chronicle of the rise and fall of Enron), Eichenwald has a definite bent to his story, almost insisting that Andrew Fastow was entirely to blame, while painting Jeff Skilling as a basket case whose emotional baggage blinded him to any wrongdoing, and Ken Lay as a social and political juggernaut with blinders on. Other former Enron executives, like Richard Causey and Rick Buy, take far too little blame for their roles in the special purpose entities that ultimately drove Enron under. Conspiracy of Fools is a fairly entertaining, however one-sided it may be, read despite dragging on...and on...and on. Smartest Guys in the Room, and the documentary based on the book, are much more highly recommended.
November 24, 2007
A corporate culture of greed, a focus on fast profits, a few bad eggs, and a ridiculous lack of board, executive, and accounting oversight combined to turn Enron into a catastrophic failure.
The most interesting thing for me was that a few Enron employees were aware of what was happening, but either didn't want to speak up, or spoke up and were ignored (sometimes repeatedly).
While I was reading, I wondered whether the shenanigans would have been exposed earlier if data was made available to all Enron employees for scrutiny, and a process was in place for employees to take up concerns. The alternative structure (which led to Enron's downfall) was a system of trust between Enron and Andersen (who audited but also consulted for Enron), and Enron's execs and board. The Andersen guys faced pressure to let some of Enron's accounting misdeeds slip by for fear of jeopardizing huge consulting revenue. And the board would rubber-stamp crooked deals because the execs had signed off on them.
All in all, a worthwhile read... the first two or three hundred pages were interesting, and at times dry, but the last two hundred pages flew by.
The most interesting thing for me was that a few Enron employees were aware of what was happening, but either didn't want to speak up, or spoke up and were ignored (sometimes repeatedly).
While I was reading, I wondered whether the shenanigans would have been exposed earlier if data was made available to all Enron employees for scrutiny, and a process was in place for employees to take up concerns. The alternative structure (which led to Enron's downfall) was a system of trust between Enron and Andersen (who audited but also consulted for Enron), and Enron's execs and board. The Andersen guys faced pressure to let some of Enron's accounting misdeeds slip by for fear of jeopardizing huge consulting revenue. And the board would rubber-stamp crooked deals because the execs had signed off on them.
All in all, a worthwhile read... the first two or three hundred pages were interesting, and at times dry, but the last two hundred pages flew by.
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February 5, 2009The Enron story remains the same, no matter how many times it's retold. In matters of style, at least, Conspiracy of Fools trumps the other books on the subject. Critics' pens dangle like swords of Damocles over the cinematic scenes that are central to the book's appeal: Can dialogue be recounted so accurately after 20 years of echoes? Maybe not. But 40 pages of detailed source notes buy Eichenwald some relief from the red ink. There are nitpicks: Enron executive Andrew Fastow comes across as a less rounded character than Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay (both of whom were interviewed extensively for the book), and Eichenwald pays little attention to analyzing why the gross misconduct was able to occur. But Eichenwald's keen storytelling ability carries him across these speed bumps.
This is an excerpt from a review published in Bookmarks magazine.
July 28, 2007
This book was awesome! It's a nonfiction book about the Enron scandal that reads like a suspense novel. I could hardly put it down. It was amazing to me just how much Enron was able to get away with before the whole house of cards came crashing down.
I had to read some of the technical stuff more than once to understand it, but even getting just the gist of it was fine. Taking the time to understand the sleights of hand that occurred makes the whole thing even more amazing, however.
Great book on a fascinating subject.
I had to read some of the technical stuff more than once to understand it, but even getting just the gist of it was fine. Taking the time to understand the sleights of hand that occurred makes the whole thing even more amazing, however.
Great book on a fascinating subject.
November 3, 2007
The countries best business writer, who also wrote the amazing The Informant gives the definitive account of what happened at Enron. The accounting explanations in here can get a little hairy (because what was going inside Enron’s accounting was pretty bizarre) but it is still a fascinating read. I don’t know what is more bizarre, that these dudes thought they could get away with what was basically an elaborate shell game, or that they did get away with an elaborate shell game for so long.
If you’re into business books, this is a must read.
If you’re into business books, this is a must read.
April 4, 2017
Rating - 9.8
An absolutely riveting read on the rise & collapse of Enron detailing conversations that you would not expect to be included - Eichenwald has Dan Brown appeal & is both very thorough & engaging
A damning expose on corporate greed within the US business landscape in the '90's & Fastow blows you away; Suspicious that Lay knows more than portrayed - he isn't the idiot that he is painted as
An absolutely riveting read on the rise & collapse of Enron detailing conversations that you would not expect to be included - Eichenwald has Dan Brown appeal & is both very thorough & engaging
A damning expose on corporate greed within the US business landscape in the '90's & Fastow blows you away; Suspicious that Lay knows more than portrayed - he isn't the idiot that he is painted as
September 21, 2012
(4.0) Great recounting of the Enron train wreck, can't believe this all actually happened.
You'll note I'm borrowing a lot of this from a comment I made earlier... ;)
The interesting thing is that these guys weren't the smartest in the room (see: The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron and accompanying movie). Some of them were very creative, but on the whole, Fastow and his cronies were unbelievably stupid, naive, ignorant. It's unbelievable they weren't even aware of things like interest rate risk, currency exchange risk, hey, even discounting future earnings to compute current value. Okay, they were greedy, but then how in the world did the board, Lay, Skilling not see these people were incompetent? (It's interesting that many underlings, auditors, analysts saw their incompetence, saw the writing on the wall, many yelled vocally, most lost their jobs or were reassigned).
Head in the sand is one thing, this is ripping your own eyeballs, ears and nose out to avoid sensing the crimes being committed every month leading up to earnings announcement. I mean, in most cases Wall Street firms at least rip someone else off. These Enron guys were just blatantly running the company into the ground with the financial shenanigans that just shuttled money around, burning fees left and right to fix each quarter's earnings. It's just shocking. Really surprised Lay didn't bail out sooner when they were on top of their game...and just handed it over to Skilling.
I guess from Smartest Guys, I remember more about Enron's retail power group and the California power crisis/es: mostly how Enron helped orchestrate them. Starting to see more of that where I am now in the book. That's more of the behavior I was expecting: dirty, rotten, unethical, somehow legal, ripping everyone else off to benefit Enron (and thus their own bonuses). But obviously, these silly off-balance-sheet shell companies are what brought Enron down, so clearly there was a lot of that going on.
Anyway, this is a fantastic account of how things progressed. Really reminds me of Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves, which was similarly in-the-minute through a crisis (also very long).
That's two good ones from Eichenwald (definitely read The Informant: A True Story if you like reading about incompetent greedy corporate thieves), so I'm becoming a fan. :)
You'll note I'm borrowing a lot of this from a comment I made earlier... ;)
The interesting thing is that these guys weren't the smartest in the room (see: The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron and accompanying movie). Some of them were very creative, but on the whole, Fastow and his cronies were unbelievably stupid, naive, ignorant. It's unbelievable they weren't even aware of things like interest rate risk, currency exchange risk, hey, even discounting future earnings to compute current value. Okay, they were greedy, but then how in the world did the board, Lay, Skilling not see these people were incompetent? (It's interesting that many underlings, auditors, analysts saw their incompetence, saw the writing on the wall, many yelled vocally, most lost their jobs or were reassigned).
Head in the sand is one thing, this is ripping your own eyeballs, ears and nose out to avoid sensing the crimes being committed every month leading up to earnings announcement. I mean, in most cases Wall Street firms at least rip someone else off. These Enron guys were just blatantly running the company into the ground with the financial shenanigans that just shuttled money around, burning fees left and right to fix each quarter's earnings. It's just shocking. Really surprised Lay didn't bail out sooner when they were on top of their game...and just handed it over to Skilling.
I guess from Smartest Guys, I remember more about Enron's retail power group and the California power crisis/es: mostly how Enron helped orchestrate them. Starting to see more of that where I am now in the book. That's more of the behavior I was expecting: dirty, rotten, unethical, somehow legal, ripping everyone else off to benefit Enron (and thus their own bonuses). But obviously, these silly off-balance-sheet shell companies are what brought Enron down, so clearly there was a lot of that going on.
Anyway, this is a fantastic account of how things progressed. Really reminds me of Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis — and Themselves, which was similarly in-the-minute through a crisis (also very long).
That's two good ones from Eichenwald (definitely read The Informant: A True Story if you like reading about incompetent greedy corporate thieves), so I'm becoming a fan. :)
November 20, 2007
Of course, we all remember the Enron meltdown of fall 2001 even if at six years' remove it's hard to remember exactly what went wrong with the company. Eichenwald spells it out quite simply at one point: Enron became more devoted to reporting profits than actually making profits. Conspiracy of Fools uses a "fly-on-the-wall" technique to reconstruct events, arguments, and even the food people were eating and the chairs they sat on. This dissection of corporate corruption makes clear that there were plenty of instances when Enron could have righted itself but that a combination of willful blindness and managerial incompetence made this less and less unlikely, leading up to the day when Enron's CFO (brought in to clean up the damage left by his self-dealing predecessor) discovers that the company has no record of when its bills come due. Although it's some 600 pages long, it's a surprisingly quick read-- mostly because it's a collection of dialogue scenes, few of which are longer than two or three pages, stitched together with longer scenes of exposition. You may not be quite clear-- unless you're an accountant-- about how all the off-the-books transactions that eventually doomed Enron actually worked, but don't worry: most of the company's accountants weren't all that clear, either.
May 20, 2008
This book was masterfully orchestrated by Eichenwald. At first I was skeptical about how he obtained his information about thoughts and other personal things that would seemingly be included only in first person. After finishing the book I found the answer to this mystery and it lies in the prologue, the explanation of data sources. Judging by the amount and types of documents that were used, this type of relationship with the characters involved in the Enron scandal could have easily been forged by Eichanwald. These documents included personal journals kept by many of the people involved. If someone had a thought that was included in the book the author had a source to back it up with. That is why this book was, in my mind, an orchestrated masterpiece. Check out his notes.
April 2, 2012
An excellent rundown of what happened during Enron's meteoric "rise" and then the catastrophic fall. The hubris of all involved is quite compelling. One quibble - it has a bit of that "smugly looking back at the past" perspective that makes the reader more comfortable that they would never do this. The real horror here lies in the fact that most people would go along with what happened, if they were even aware enough to catch it at all. The thriller pacing and aloof asides discount this aspect. Still well worth the read and I would chip in some dough for Eichenwald to do an update (the book ends prior to the major players sentencing hearings).
October 10, 2023
Does incompetence count as a crime? Certainly in public office there's a much lower bar, owing to its status. And certainly in the local scene there should be other mechanisms in place. But what about at the large corporation to multinational level, where there are both private and public-facing situations? Certainly culpability and crime is not spread evenly across the cast of characters here, but I suspect incompetence runs inversely with crime in the Enron case. Conspiracy of Fools is more dramatic than its counterpart All the Devils Are Here, but both are great narratives of the Enron debacle. Now if only lessons are indeed learned from this....
April 17, 2011
This almost 700 page book went by quickly - absolutely brilliant book. What an incompetent group of management and executives of Enron - unbelievable. This book was like a financial thriller, better than John Grisham's novels, definitely a movie material. Now what am I going to read after this? Too bad that people at m office, who got this book as free gift from the author for going to the fraud detection conference about 3 weeks ago, do not read books. I didn't go to the conference, and one of them gave me this book thinking I'd love it. She was so right.
March 2, 2017
If you like Schadenfreude, you'll love this book. It's almost 700 pages of it.
The story of the collapse of Enron also made me feel anger, sadness, zero sympathy, and ultimately depression. Because these arrogant, aggressive people are probably not unique in American business. They just got caught.
The story of the collapse of Enron also made me feel anger, sadness, zero sympathy, and ultimately depression. Because these arrogant, aggressive people are probably not unique in American business. They just got caught.
September 15, 2007
One of the best business profile books I've read. It gives you a very good impression of not only *what* was going on inside of Enron at the time, but the mood and feel of the place as company management started to realize that they might have a problem.
Highly recommended
Highly recommended
May 9, 2008
It works. It's a way of taking a historical event and putting some personal faces on it and stories into it. And it's a great reminder of what happened, and a good look inside an event that we all remember from the outside.
August 30, 2012
This is a big book - but it Is a fast read because of interesting subject matter and being well written. I had previously read Smartest Men in the Room, so much of the material was repetitive with that book - but instill enjoyed it.
October 6, 2007
Less sensationalistic review of the idiocy at Enron.
May 6, 2008
Excellent account of the Enron story! Reads like a novel.
June 8, 2011
More accessible than Smartest Guys in the Room, excellent on audio, very comprehensive researching by Eichenwald.
April 9, 2012
The story of Enron - Geoffrey Skilling (CEO) went from Time magazines CEO of the year to a 25 year stretch in prison. $100M not much use now! Excellent
March 30, 2013
A should-read company profile for knowledge workers, managers, directors, C-levels, and entrepreneurs.
Want to Read
March 8, 2017#
January 3, 2022
Enjoyed this, though put it down a few times before picking it back up. Reads like a good thriller.
Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews