Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story

From Barnes & Noble

With the pacing of a Grisham thriller and the probing intelligence of first-rate journalism, Conspiracy of Fools exposes the hubris, deceit, and corruption at the heart of one America's most devastating financial scandals. Though there are plenty of Enron tell-alls and exposés to choose from, we give this one the nod because of New York Times scribe Kurt Eichenwald's dazzling ability to capture the human drama lurking within the scandal. Put this alongside Barbarians at the Gate and Liar's Poker as a classic about corporate crime.

Barbara Ley Toffler

Eichenwald has masterfully depicted the devastating results of that lost love of purposeful work. He also has given us a fine example of what love of the job can produce: a dynamite book. Kurt Eichenwald clearly loves what he does.
— The Washington Post

Charles R. Morris

Two questions arise: How could financial and investing professionals have been so badly gulled? And behind all the Potemkin-village financial reports, what was actually going on at Enron? The first question may be one for aficionados of mass hallucination, but Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools brilliantly answers the second … Conspiracy of Fools is a splendid achievement. Mr. Eichenwald has an encyclopedic grasp of a watershed business collapse, and has turned it into a gripping read, a true tale for our times.
— The New York Times

Barron's

MAGNIFICENT... written in the manner of a breezy crypto-thriller and told from the viewpoint of a fly on the wall-or at times, a devil on the shoulders. The style makes gripping reading... readers looking for a fact-filled companion to one of the all-time greatest Ponzi schemes will find everything they're expecting here, along with compelling prose and remarkable insights.

Newsday

A RIVETING NARRATIVE... Eichenwald, a reporter for The New York Times, is becoming known not just for his strong newspaper reporting, which has won him two Polk Awards, but for turning stories of corporate crime into books that read something like John Grisham novels.

New York Post

If it's an inside look at corporate malfeasance you're after, look no further than Conspiracy of Fools, the story of Enron and Kurt Eichenwald, who previously aimed his investigative pen at Archer Daniels Midland with The Informant, now on the Hollywood drawing board.

US News & World Report

After reading Kurt Eichenwald's Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story, you will wonder how it was possible no one heard the din of voices crying out in the wilderness of Enron's ruinous financial schemes.... The hefty book, an outgrowth of Eichenwald's three years covering the scandal for the New York Times, offers a timely reminiscence as the trials of former Enron chairman Ken Lay and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling approach.

Bookpage

Although Enron's story is more convoluted than a Medici revenge plot, Eichenwald... spins out the essential facts in quick, colorful scenes. He recreates the dialogue of the principal characters as convincingly as if he had been at their elbow taking notes.

Booklist

A PAGE-TURNING FINANCIAL THRILLER....This book compares with Liar's Poker and Barbarians at the Gate in its breadth and depth of coverage of esoteric corporate culture and financial practices, recognizing the compelling human drama beneath the scandal.

Details Magazine

Only this white-collar-crime reporter for the New York Times could turn the Enron scandal into a book that reads like a Joel Schumacher script (starring Gene Hackman as glad-handing Ken Lay?). . . Eichenwald's style, which worked so well in The Informant, carries the day.

Publishers Weekly

This enormous, intimate blow-by-blow of Enron's implosion gets as close to what actually happened, in terms of people making (bad) decisions in real time, as anyone who wasn't there with a concealed video-phone possibly could. Having combed endless documents and interviewed countless principals and peripherals, Eichenwald (The Informant) presents short declarative sentences (and lots of sentence fragments) that may have run through the heads of men like top executives Skilling, Lay and Fastow as they managed to cook a very large set of books, as well as men like Stuart Zisman, a lawyer in the firm's wholesale division who wrote an early memo titled "Overall Book Manipulation" that stated "the majority of investments being introduced to Raptor are bad ones." Eichenwald's bald depictions ("Skilling sank deeper into depression"; "It couldn't be true, [Anderson partner Tom] Bauer thought") make for real tension. Collegial meetings at the White House with Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and others; charged conference calls with skeptical investors; endless buy-ins, buyouts and acronyms-all are presented in a rat-a-tat style thick with corporate anxiety, keeping pages turning even as the details themselves are numbing. (Luckily, Eichenwald includes a "Cast of Characters" and "List of Deals" so that readers can remind themselves of past carnage.) As an unadorned attempt to get into the heads of some major manipulators, this book can hardly be bettered. (On sale Mar. 8) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The fools here are the folks who ran Enron, as well as those who got sucked up in their shenanigans. From the author of The Informant. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A chatty, overly long, but highly readable account of the collapse of Enron and the reasons the energy empire fell. New York Times reporter Eichenwald (The Informant, 2001, etc.) is careful to separate what is reliably known from what can only be inferred in the Enron affair. Still, the narrative is rich in implication. Early on, for instance, Eichenwald ventures that top executive Andy Fastow threatened Enron head Ken Lay with some sort of exposure on being fired: "Had his chief financial officer, a man he had trusted implicitly, really been a crook all along?" Eichenwald quickly cautions that there's much more to the collapse of Enron, an energy-trading firm that traded in many intangibles besides, than simple lawbreaking: "Shocking incompetence, unjustified arrogance, compromised ethics and an utter disregard for the market's judgment all played decisive roles." But then we're back to crime or criminally stupid behavior: Here Enron execs are playing fast and loose with "squirrely numbers," trying alternately to show profit where none existed or to hide profit, but sometimes paying far more tax than the law required; there they're making incredibly poor investment decisions ("Skilling worked his jaw. . . . Seven billion dollars invested to earn $100 million in profits. Hell, if they had stuck the money in a bank account earning three percent, the earnings would have been higher!"). All the while, Lay hovers above the scene, merrily joining George W. Bush's inner circle while apparently never quite grasping what was happening inside his own corridors of power-and placing trust in bad lieutenants, some of whom were "secret participants in Fastow's schemes," others of whom were simply bad.Interestingly, toward the end of the book, one of the few good lieutenants to emerge earns sidelong praise from Lay-namely, Sherron Watkins, the whistleblower who helped establish federal cases against the company and author of an early insider account of the debacle. There's a certain guilty, craning-to-see-the-accident pleasure in these pages, which could have benefited from a careful trimming. Likely not the last word on the Enron affair, but also likely to endure as a standard account.