The shenanigans perpetrated in and around Enron could supply enough fodder for a Ten Most Wanted list all by themselves.
For the moment, though, we'll focus on innocent-until-proven-guily Andrew Fastow, former chief financial officer and ringleader of the inlaw-until-proven-outlaw gang of paper rustlers.
It all started innocently enough, what with Fastow, the oil patch's boy wonder of 'rithmetic, turning Enron into "a master of creative financing," according to a 1999 issue of CFO magazine. Certainly, Fastow found creative ways to supplement his paycheck; as managing member of the general partner ("pardner," perhaps) of LJM2, he entered into no fewer than 16 different side deals with Enron in 2000. All at arm's length, no doubt. (The Washington Post estimates he raked in more than $50 million in stock sales and fees over 1999 and 2000 alone.)
But the once-lauded creativity smells a lot like fiction these days, now that Enron's rickety storefront of special purpose entities and off-balance-sheet items has collapsed from a $60 billion-plus market cap into a pile of cow chips.
We were charmed by the cowboy mystique of WorldCom boss Bernie Ebbers when he rode into town a few years ago. Little did we realize, though, that WorldCom's hometown of Clinton, Miss., is no closer to frontier life than, say, Chicago.
We thought we were getting a plain-spoken leader. A man who shot from the hip. A man whose handshake sealed his promises in stone. A self-reliant man who needed no charity to find his way in the world.
Instead, we got Borrowin' Bernie, a man who hit the dusty trail leaving $7 billion in allegedly overstated earnings, $400 million in company loans and a market cap headed straight to zero.
It's one of those business-school cliches from the California Gold Rush: It wasn't the miners who got rich, but the sharpies who sold them their picks, shovels and Levi's jeans.
That's where Jack Grubman fits into this picture: The people who bought what he was saying rode WorldCom down to pennies per share, while the stock hawker himself -- downright friendly with bankers and part-time rancher Bernie Ebbers -- earned annual salaries tallied up in tens of millions.
There's gold in them thar hills. For the guy who sold you the map, that is.
Nacchio is like the white-hatted hero rescuing a damsel from certain death at the hands of hostile Indians, only to carry her with him a few minutes later as he rides his horse off a 200-foot cliff.
Yes, in 1999, when Nacchio's Qwest disentangled U S West from its planned takeover by Global Crossing -- a telco that has since vaporized -- Nacchio did U S West a favor.
But the size of that favor seems smaller every day. Qwest's shares have fallen from $40 to a little more than a buck over the past two years. And though the well-paid Nacchio insisted Qwest's books were whistle-clean, Qwest now admits that maybe $1.4 billion in revenue since 1999 isn't all it's cracked up to be.
Frontier towns weren't exactly an Equal Rights Amendment hotbed. But as you know from the movies, there was always at least one woman in town.
She was hard as nails -- she had to be, given the rough-and-tumble nature of Way Out West. But underneath that brusque exterior, all she wanted was what womenfolk everywhere wanted: a warm fire, cozy domesticity, vintage quilts and dolls for her daughters hand-crafted from simple household materials.
So is it any wonder that Martha Stewart seems to have fallen in with a bad crowd?
It isn't that the jury is still out on Martha; it's that it hasn't been impaneled yet. We know that in late December Stewart sold $180,000 worth of stock in ImClone, then headed by her buddy Samuel Waksal; what we don't know is whether Waksal or someone else gave Stewart advance word of impending bad news at the biotech firm.
Either way, the general public gets to share Stewart's pain. Shaken by the stormcloud of bad publicity hanging over Stewart, shares in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia have fallen 57% since the stock sale story broke. Talk about a bum steer.
Grasso, chairman and CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, and Zarb, the former chairman and CEO of Nasdaq, are the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of the stock markets. Or the Barnum & Bailey, at the very least.
Under this duo, the stock market became entertainment -- the key to our downfall. In Times Square, Zarb established the Nasdaq MarketSite, a faux trading-floor theme park destination across the street from World Wrestling Entertainment's New York headquarters.
Downtown, Grasso turned the NYSE into a street fair, recruiting underwear model Stephanie Seymour, aging rocker Rod Stewart and Olympic skater Kristi Yamaguchi to ring the opening bell, and letting Krispy Kreme set up a donut bakery on Wall Street. Viva Las Vegas!
Grasso, the Big Board's ostensible role model, suffered a wee bit of embarrassment recently from the revelation he didn't disclose his ownership of deferred stock of shareholder-suit-magnet Computer Associates, of which he has served as a director. But hey, that's showbiz.
Once again, beware of folksy types bearing homespun wisdom. We draw your attention to the Brain of Baltimore, the Oracle of Orioles, the Clairvoyant of Crabtown, the Chooser of the Chesapeake: Bill Miller.
Yes, Bill Miller, the stockpicker in charge of the Legg Mason Value Trust and long-running beater of the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index.
We have nothing against Miller beating the S&P or silently crowing about it in his mock-modest way. All those hedge fund sharpies on Park Avenue deserve the comeuppance that Miller has meted out.
No, Miller's sin is mislabeling his product to a degree that would embarrass the most shameless patent-medicine salesman. Here's a guy who two years ago averred that America Online, Dell and Amazon.com were value stocks.
In the Wild West state of mind, folks can be awfully dismissive of the niceties of the city folk back east: The government. Taxes. Numbers in general.
No one seems to embody this distrust of tax collectors, generally accepted accounting principles and other authority figures more than Dennis Kozlowski, ex-CEO of modern-day conglomerate Tyco International. Kozlowski has become the epitome of tax evasion, not only for his corporate patronage of the minimalist revenue-collection policies of Bermuda, but also for his alleged avoidance of levies on his personal art collection and various forms of unreported compensation -- $6,000 shower curtain included -- received while he helicoptered about as Tyco's pilot.
Another lousy role model: Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen, the grad student who convinced hundreds of thousands of Americans, if not millions, that they should quit their current job or ditch their educational plans to start working at an Internet-based startup and take much of their pay in stock options.
Just as bad, Andreessen convinced millions of investors that sinking money into companies populated by negligibly hygienic twentysomething programmers was indeed a commendable investment strategy. We all know how that story ended.
Doerr -- the uber venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who was an early backer of Netscape -- shares in the guilt. More dangerous than a salesman who sells only snake oil, Doerr and his confederates hawked patent medicines of dubious value to unwary investors over the past few years. Sure, Kleiner Perkins nurtured defensible investments like America Online and Amazon.com. But those successes, unfortunately, gave an imprimateur of respectability to a rafter of turkeys such as HomeGrocer, WebMD, NextCard, Chemdex, Excite@Home, Egreetings Network and drugstore.com.
You already know that in every western, there's at least one avaricious politician caught up in a conspiracy against the Little Guy. This time around, an endless supply of statesmen are jockeying for the starring role.
If we must single one out for this honor, we'll pick Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, a man who has fought tirelessly for companies' right to understate the ultimate expense of stock options -- those equity awards that were supposed to make millionaires of us all but in practice simply made the rich among us richer.
It isn't just the longevity of Lieberman's tireless crusade for the big guy that impresses us; it's his continued insistence, despite increasing evidence to the contrary, that stock options are making the rank and file wealthy.
Have a varmit you'd like to see on the 10 Most Wanted List? Send us an email at mostwanted@thestreet.com.
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emember the last scene in Shane, when the noble gunslinger rides off into the sunset while the little boy begs him to come back? Well, imagine how that kid would feel if he discovered that Shane had ridden off with $200 million of shareholder money.
