Verdicts Drive Home Lessons of Enron

They tried to act as if nothing was wrong. They blamed the short-sellers. They said it was business as usual and if it weren't for the press, they would still be in business.

And for their lies, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are going to spend years and years in prison.

It took a special kind of conspiracy these two concocted, one that routinely hid how bad business was. These two knew that Enron had nowhere near the earnings power they bragged about. In fact, its business was no better than a regular utility. So it made up earnings, made them up by the hundreds of millions of dollars.

The press did play a role: It exposed these shenanigans and got the rigging to the upside stopped. The government played a very small role, coming in after the robbery was over.

These men deserved jail more than any of the others who have come before us, whether they be from Adelphia or Tyco or WorldCom.

Unfortunately, though, the lesson of these prosecutions has been lost on some, the crowd that backdated options. That's a subtle form of book-cooking, and a major form of greed.

But it shows that most of corporate America had already forgotten what Lay and Skilling and Ebbers and Kozlowski had done.

This verdict serves as a reminder to the next generation of execs that crime doesn't pay, especially when it takes place in the boardroom seat.

Oh, and just to be sure there's no question about where I stand: I hope these guys go away for a long time. The rest of their lives? I don't know, I like to save that for heinous physical crimes.

But long stretches in bad prisons after the greed and the destruction of so many people's life savings?

Seems just about right to me.

At the time of publication, Cramer had no positions in the stocks mentioned.