TL: In my first question I mentioned the John Grisham-type press spin your publisher is going for. Random House even assigned you an editor who has edited mystery novels by best-selling authors like Patricia Cornwell and Dean Koontz. What audience did you have in mind when you were writing your book? And do you think the future of financial journalism hinges on the ability to captivate readers in the manner a great suspense novel does?


KE: It’s so funny. I think that a lot of people would think that I would be offended that they’re trying to cast this as a thriller, trying to cast this as a true Grisham novel. Actually, it was my idea. I kept noticing that the things I was covering were very similar to the things he was writing in his books. I eventually saw an interview Grisham did with a newspaper and he said that he gets all of his ideas from the newspapers. And I figured that this guy is read by everybody, and how many people read me? I don’t know how many. But he’s on to something. He’s right. These are really thrilling stories and they can be told be in a really thrilling way. And there is nothing about our job — our job is to deliver information to people — there is nothing about our job that says that that information delivery has to be a painful or unpleasant experience.


So in looking at it, I thought, John Grisham has cracked the code, he’s just doing it with fiction. If I invested the time and the effort to do the amount of reporting that I’ve been talking about, then the same thing is achievable. People will be able to go into these worlds, they’ll be able to see what goes into a corporate fraud. I’ve been writing about corporate fraud for 18 years. And I know it is an unbelievably fascinating world. But it’s so hard to convey if you’re going to spend your time talking about accounting rules, security laws, and people’s eyes glaze over and they want to move on. Instead, I take the narrative, I take the people. I’m also trying to say that these are not evil human beings; these are not the spawn of Satan who have just gone off and decided to rip off the world. These are human beings, these are normal — well, not normal — but these are the kinds of people that populate corporate American.


You will see how the decisions are made. What are the impulses? Is it greed? Sometimes. Is it envy? I think more times than not. Is it arrogance? I think that is more times than not. Is it stupidity? Yes. Is it mixture of all of them? We in the press tend to play far too much on caricature. People have said to me, “Were they crooked, or were they stupid?” And they can’t handle it when I answer, “Yes.” It’s this mentality of you’re either one thing or another, you can’t possibly be both. While I think in our human experience, we recognize a single person can be ugly but beautiful, a single person can be brilliant but stupid, a single person can contain far more character types than we can convey in a 1,000-word news article. So when it’s described as a Grisham thriller, when its described as being novelistic, that was my intent.


Who my audience is? I’m not writing for people who want to know the intricate rules of accounting. They might end up knowing that, but that is not who I’m writing for. I’m writing for people who are flying on airplanes. I’m writing for people who are on the beach, for people who can’t get to sleep at night and want to read a good book. Ultimately, by writing it in the style I’m writing it in, by delivering them something that they will enjoy, hopefully, I am conveying the critical information to a far wider audience that I would have otherwise.


TL: Without pressure from the financial press would Enron have fallen?


KE: That’s one of those “If things were the different, would they be the same?” questions.


To me, the amazing thing about Enron isn’t that it collapsed, it’s that it stayed up as long as it did. I think Enron would have collapsed eventually in any event. You’ve got to bear in mind that what came out in the fall of 2001, for a financially stable company, for a financially strong company, that should have been a hiccup. Today, AIG is facing far worse stuff in the newspapers than Enron did in the fall of 2001. But nobody is talking about AIG going under, because it is a financially strong company. That is what has always been so amazing to me about Enron …. When you actually look at the company and pull it apart, you realize that the combination of incompetence and crookedness is what drove it under. The incompetence created a balance sheet — a financial foundation — that could not withstand a bump in the road ….