So, as Peter Lattman reports, most recent Enron Task Force director Sean Berkowitz is the latest in a long line of former Task Force prosecutors who parleyed prosecuting unpopular Enron executives into a more lucrative career than government work.
Berkowitz led the team that obtained convictions against Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay, but his main attribute as the Task Force director is that he was not as bad as his predecessor, Andrew Weissmann, who was primarily responsible for the economic and human carnage of putting Arthur Andersen out of business and of sending four Merrill Lynch executives to prison for over a year before their utterly unjust convictions were vacated and, in one case, reversed.
However, one interesting item about Berkowitz arose shortly after the Lay-Skilling trial when the New York Magazine reported that Berkowitz was having a whirlwind romance with Bethany McLean, the co-author of the original Enron expose’, Smartest Guys in the Room.
Inasmuch as McLean had covered the trial for Fortune magazine, both Berkowitz and McLean were careful to state publicly that they didn’t start dating until after the conclusion of the trial.
However, several reporters who covered the trial confided to me after the romance became public that they had suspected something was up between the two during the trial because of how chummy they had become.
All of which reminded me of something that occurred at an early stage of the Lay-Skilling trial. Taking a page from this earlier post that criticized the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of the trial, lead Skilling lawyer Daniel Petrocelli sent a letter to the Fortune editor pointing out the rather clear conflict of interest that McLean and her Smartest Guys co-author, Peter Elkind, had in covering a trial in which they had a vested interest in the outcome.
As this Talk News Biz post relates (the entire letter, published by Fortune on March 2, is here, but you have to scroll down), Petrocelli noted as follows:
It is ironic that so much of Elkind and McLean’s criticism of Enron has been based on their claimed outrage about a conflict of interest at Enron. These two have an obvious financial interest in having the trial — or at least the public’s perception of the trial — turn out consistent with the one-sided and ultimately cartoonish depiction of Enron and my client in their book and in the so-called documentary to which they have lent their names and other support.
To which the Fortune Editor — presumably not yet aware of the budding Berkowitz-McLean relationship — replied self-righteously as follows:
Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean are journalists of the highest reputation, as well known for their integrity as they are for their knowledge of Enron. While they have certainly chronicled the failings of the company and its management, they have neither a rooting interest nor a financial interest in the outcome of the trial.
Yeah, right.
