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Enron Tragedy Only Scratches the Surface of Corporate Greed Oliver Stone's 1987 movie, "Wall Street", now seems like mere child's play compared to the corporate greed exposed by the Enron scandal. You need look no further if you want a comprehensive account, as New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald uses his masterful investigative skills to assemble a "War and Peace"-level account of the most significant corporate downfall of recent American economic history. What Eichenwald does well is provide the domino-like detail of the unethical and illegal activities that seem so preventable on the surface. The intricacy of the corruption shows the entangled culpability of Enron's senior management team in lucid terms, even though the complexity of the company's corporate structure baffled individual investors, stock analysts, government regulators and journalists for months, even years. The author interviewed more than one hundred of the players, and the rest, documented in over forty pages of source notes, reflects a heavy reliance on interviews by FBI agents, federal grand jury testimonies as well as those in front of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, all kinds of media coverage, even personal diaries. He takes a chronological approach to all this, perhaps his only recourse since much of this scandal has yet to be played out in the courts, in particular, the projected trial of Ken Lay is not scheduled to open until this fall. All this corroboration makes for an intriguing though sometimes overwhelming mix of creative accounting, prosecutorial decisions, undisclosed sex scandals, troubled marriages and greed in its most naked form. Eichenwald does not paint a portrait of simply villainy, which has already been done in other books such as Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's "The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron". Instead, he takes a more logical perspective in outlining a tragedy inhabited by people smart enough to know how to maneuver around the rules but not wise enough to understand why the rules had been written in the first place. That's why the author does not finger Lay completely but rather zeroes in on chief financial officer Andrew Fastow and president Jeffrey Skilling. The author recognizes the shared culpability of the chief Enron executives on their way to increased personal fortune, a well-traveled road judging by James Stewart's illuminating book about Michael Eisner and the Disney executive team in his recent sizzler, "Disney War". Perhaps the Enron precedent prevented a similar scenario being played out in the Magic Kingdom. Regardless, Eichenwald believes that new cycles of corporate corruption will be exposed on an even grander scale than Enron, a sobering thought when one considers the nation's current economic malaise. There are a gallery of relative villains to consider from the institutional investors on the make for increasing profits, the Republican-dominated congressional majorities willing to look the other way to maintain their corporate backing, government regulators blindly committed to deregulation without considering the consequences and a dynastic U.S. President who comes from generations of wealth. It's a bleak outlook but one that the author spells out pretty clearly.