Andrew Stuart Fastow is an American convicted felon and former financier who was the chief financial officer of Enron Corporation, an energy trading company based in Houston, Texas, until he was fired shortly before the company declared bankruptcy. Fastow was one of the key figures behind the complex web of off-balance-sheet special purpose entities used to conceal Enron's massive losses in their quarterly balance sheets. By unlawfully maintaining personal stakes in these ostensibly independent ghost-entities, he was able to defraud Enron out of tens of millions of dollars.
In United States jurisdictions, obstruction of justice refers to a number of offenses that involve unduly influencing, impeding, or otherwise interfering with the justice system, especially the legal and procedural tasks of prosecutors, investigators, or other government officials. Common law jurisdictions other than the United States tend to use the wider offense of perverting the course of justice.
Jeffrey Keith Skilling is an American businessman who in 2006 was convicted of federal felony charges relating to the Enron scandal. Skilling, who was CEO of Enron during the company's collapse, was eventually sentenced to 24 years in prison, of which he served 12 after multiple appeals.
"The idiot defense" is a satirical term for a legal strategy where a defendant claims innocence by virtue of having been ignorant of facts of which the defendant would normally be expected to be aware. Other terms used for this tactic include "dumb CEO defense", "dummy defense", "ostrich defense", "Ken Lay defense", and "Sergeant Schultz defense". The first known instance of the idiot defense was by John Henry Stafford, a lawyer in Jackson, Tennessee who was also known as Yankee John. He used it in the defense of Marlin Heady, a moonshiner. The charges were all, allegedly, dropped.
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room is a 2005 American documentary film based on the best-selling 2003 book of the same name by Fortune reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind, who are credited as writers of the film alongside the director, Alex Gibney. It examines the 2001 collapse of the Enron Corporation, which resulted in criminal trials for several of the company's top executives during the ensuing Enron scandal, and contains a section about the involvement of Enron traders in the 2000-01 California electricity crisis. Archival footage is used alongside new interviews with McLean and Elkind, several former Enron executives and employees, stock analysts, reporters, and former Governor of California Gray Davis.
Nancy Anne Temple is an attorney specializing in accounting liability. She was the in-house attorney for Arthur Andersen, who advised Michael Odom and David B. Duncan about Arthur Andersen policies regarding retention of documents from client engagements. Duncan oversaw the shredding of Arthur Andersen documents concerning their work for client Enron, between October 22 and November 9, 2001. A memo written by Temple played a key role in the conviction of Arthur Andersen on charges of obstruction of justice. That conviction was later overturned.
Thomas Arthur Mesereau Jr. is an American attorney known for defending Michael Jackson in his 2005 child molestation trial, as well as Mike Tyson, Bill Cosby and, in 2023, Danny Masterson, a case in which Mesereau was sanctioned by the judge.
The trial of Kenneth Lay, former chairman and CEO of Enron, and Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO and COO, was presided over by federal district court Judge Sim Lake in the Southern District of Texas in 2006 in response to the Enron scandal.
Simeon Timothy Lake III is a senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. His notable trials include the trial of Enron Chairman Ken Lay and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling.
Kevin A. Ring is a former American attorney and congressional staffer; he served Republicans in both the House and the Senate, including U.S. Representative John T. Doolittle (R-CA). He also served as a counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights Subcommittee.
Kenneth Lee Lay was an American businessman who was the founder, chief executive officer and chairman of Enron. He was heavily involved in Enron's accounting scandal that unraveled in 2001 into the largest bankruptcy ever to that date. Lay was indicted by a grand jury and was found guilty of 10 counts of securities fraud at trial. Lay died in July 2006 while vacationing in his house near Aspen, Colorado, three months before his scheduled sentencing. A preliminary autopsy reported Lay died of a heart attack caused by coronary artery disease. His death resulted in a vacated judgment. Conspiracy theories regarding Lay's death surfaced, alleging that it was faked.
The Enron scandal was an accounting scandal involving Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas. When news of widespread fraud within the company became public in October 2001, the company filed for bankruptcy and its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen—then one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world—was effectively dissolved. In addition to being the largest bankruptcy reorganization in U.S. history at that time, Enron was cited as the biggest audit failure.
Joe Dally Whitley is an American lawyer from Georgia who was the first General Counsel for the United States Department of Homeland Security. He works in private practice at Womble Bond Dickinson (US) LLP and has been named a Super Lawyer, listed in The Best Lawyers in America®, named a ‘’2019 Lawyer of the Year’’, is AV® Preeminent™ Peer Review Rated by Martindale-Hubbell, and listed in Chambers USA: America's Leading Business Lawyers.
Mark Robert Filip is an American lawyer specializing in class action and white collar criminal and regulatory defense. Formerly a partner at Skadden, Arps, he currently practices in the Washington, D.C. office of Kirkland and Ellis. From 2004 until 2008, Filip served as a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. As the George W. Bush administration ended, Filip served as Deputy Attorney General of the United States, and as the Barack Obama administration began he briefly served as acting attorney general.
Daniel M. Petrocelli is a partner at O’Melveny & Myers LLP and the Chair of the firm’s Trial Practice Committee. Petrocelli is known in part for his work in a 1997 wrongful death civil suit against O. J. Simpson, for representing Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling, and for his leading role in defeating the US Department of Justice’s attempt to block the merger of AT&T and Time Warner.
Thomas M. Melsheimer is a trial lawyer and a partner at the international law firm of Winston & Strawn, where he also serves as managing partner of its Dallas office and a member of the firm’s Executive Committee. His trial experience encompasses both civil and criminal litigation. On the civil side, he has tried to verdict cases involving patent infringement, trade secrets, insider trading, antitrust, breach of fiduciary duty, fraud, product liability, and False Claims Act (FCA) violations. On the criminal side, he has tried to verdict cases involving bank fraud, public corruption, copyright infringement, aggravated sexual assault, and kidnapping. His clients include a variety of high-net-worth individuals and notable corporations, including the Dallas Mavericks and owner Mark Cuban, Microsoft, Bank of America, and Texas Instruments. Melsheimer is the co-author of a best-selling book on trial advocacy, On the Jury Trial: Principles and Practices for Effective Advocacy
Andrew S. Boutros is an American lawyer, law professor, and former federal prosecutor best known for prosecuting corporate fraud and cybercrime cases. In 2015, the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association honored him with the National Prosecutorial Award, and he was also elected to the American Law Institute the same year. He is the Regional Chair of Dechert LLP's White Collar practice, where he is resident in the firm's Chicago and DC offices.
Leslie Ragon Caldwell is an American attorney, who served as the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice from 2014 to 2017. She has spent the majority of her professional career handling federal criminal cases, as both a prosecutor and as defense attorney. Caldwell served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of New York from 1987 to 1998, after which she was recruited by then US Attorney Robert Mueller to serve as Chief of the Criminal Division and Chief of the Securities Fraud Section of the United States Attorney's office for the Northern District of California; she served from 1999 to 2002. In September 2017, she became a partner at the law firm of Latham & Watkins, in San Francisco, CA. In late 2022, Caldwell retired from her partnership at Latham & Watkins.
Andrew A. Weissmann is an American attorney and professor. He was an Assistant United States Attorney from 1991 to 2002, when he prosecuted high-profile organized crime cases. He served as a lead prosecutor in Robert S. Mueller's Special Counsel's Office (2017–2019), as Chief of the Fraud Section in the Department of Justice (2015–2017) and is currently a professor at NYU Law School.
Anming Hu is a Chinese-Canadian academic who worked as an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) from 2013 to February 2020 when he was charged with fraud, after which UT suspended him.
