On the heels of his indictment and earlier extraordinary NY Times interview, the Houston Chronicle reporter Mary Flood interviewed former Enron Chairman and CEO Ken Lay on Friday on a wide range of topics relating to the indictment, his initial court appearance, and his post-Enron life.
On the indictment, Lay made the following observations:

He said he didn’t lie to Arthur Andersen accountants in an October 2001 meeting about how big a financial writedown hit the company might have to take for overpaying for a water company. He said the accountants gave him the numbers and told him what was going on.
Lay said he can’t be accused of misrepresenting the health of Enron’s retail business because he thought it was fine. He said there were legitimate business reasons for taking a wildly unprofitable section of the retail business and merging it into the profitable wholesale section, and it wasn’t meant to hide losses.
And he said he did not feel he deceived employees when he told them to buy Enron stock in September 2001 and said he’d recently purchased some himself, while never saying he’d sold six times as much stock as he’d bought.
“I don’t suppose I even thought about it,” Lay said of mentioning the $24 million in cash he’d taken out of the company in trade for Enron stock, but telling employees about the $4 million in stock he bought. “I don’t think it’s deceptive … but the (government) tries to spin sinister thoughts and motives around things,” he said.

And how did Mr. Lay pass the time in the holding cell between arriving at the federal courthouse on Thursday and his initial court appearance?:

. . .Lay started chatting with a couple of other men in his holding cell.
The two, in green prison garb and leg irons, were charged in the smuggling ring deaths of 19 undocumented workers in Victoria.
“One young man said: `I think I saw you on TV last night,’ ” recalled Lay, who had surrendered that day and was awaiting a court hearing so he could be freed on bond.
So for the next three hours, the former CEO and two alleged human smugglers talked. Defendants from other holding cells soon chimed in.
“A couple even asked me for investment advice,” Lay said with a laugh.
His response: “Well, I’ve not really thought much about that recently,” said Lay, who lost hundreds of millions of dollars after Enron’s collapse.

As noted before, Mr. Lay’s campaign to defend himself publicly is highly unusual in a criminal case of this nature. However, the public perception of anybody associated with Enron is so negative that Mr. Lay and his attorneys have apparently concluded that Mr. Lay has little to lose by attempting to persuade at least one potential juror that his management failures at Enron were not criminal in nature. All attorneys representing Enron-related defendants will be watching the upcoming trial in the Nigerian Barge criminal case closely to evaluate whether it is possible for a defendant tainted with the Enron association to receive a fair trial in this highly anti-Enron environment.
Meanwhile, The Economist — which has been providing some of the most insightful coverage of the Enron affair — notes that Mr. Lay’s defense theory of being an avuncular grandfather who was betrayed by underlings may be hard to prove:

In truth, though, Mr Lay was never the simpleton he now makes himself out to have been. Four years ago, in an interview with The Economist, he revealed an aggressive and somewhat dark management streak. In reply to a question about Enron?s perceived arrogance and disdain for the law, he pointed to what he considered another great firm unfairly maligned by ignorant critics as arrogant: Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment bank that?like Enron?rose quickly from obscurity to market dominance during the junk-bond boom of the 1980s, only to implode amid charges of wrongdoing. Mr Lay gushed about the brilliance of Michael Milken, Drexel?s star trader, who ended up in jail. Mr Milken (a ?dear friend?) was accused of being arrogant, he said, but was just being ?very innovative and very aggressive?. Prosecutors will no doubt argue that the fraud at Enron was a direct result of Mr Lay?s push to make the company just as ?innovative? and ?aggressive? as the defunct Drexel.

In the meantime, the Lay Endowed Chair in Economics at the University of Missouri remains unfilled.