Y’ever think that maybe, just maybe, the Feds checked into it a bit? Do you think this was handled like a sitcom? “Oh, Ken can’t come to the phone right now. Why? Uh…uh…because he’s dead. Yeah, that’s the ticket, he’s dead. Yeah, it was a great loss. Uh huh, I’m sure the kids will appreciate that. Gotta go!” Hangs up. “OK, Ken you’ve got to pretend to be dead when my parents come over!”
Do you think they just took his family’s word that he died? Stipulated that a medical examiner might take a bribe, how do you find that medical examiner and make sure that your bribed medical examiner is the one who does the autopsy? Where do you dig up a corpse that looks like Lay?
It’s one thing to just disappear, and leave a suicide note behind, it’s another to leave behind a dead body that law enforcement officials will swear is you after you’re gone. What incentive does the bribed examiner have to stay bought? Why not just pocket the money and write the truth?
And this notion that Ken Lay was well connected. WAS. Rich and powerful CEOs of multibillion dollar companies are well connected. Convicted felons who bankrupt their companies and defraud everyone out of billions are persona non grata. Why would, say, George Bush do any favors for Ken Lay? When Ken Lay was a billionaire executive Governor Bush would bend over backwards to do him favors…because Lay was in a position to do him favors in return. What favors was Lay gonna do from behind bars?
That’s the thing. This guy did have lots of enemies, so I think it’s safe to assume he was surrounded by friends, family & security. Yet he keeled over just like that? Did anyone see it happen? Did anyone try to help? Resusitate him? Get him a frickin’ aspirin? Anything?
Or did everyone just sorta turn away, start tapping their feet and glancing at their watches?
“It’s ok dad, it’ll all be over in a couple minutes.”
“Call… 9…1… 1…!”
“Don’t worry pops, just a little bit longer, and you’ll, er… I mean “we” will be ok.”
“Please… help… me…”
“We’ll always remember you fondly dad.”
Wow, there’s thinking outside the box for you. Did you ever stop and think that maybe the Enron management weren’t the only ones who knew what was going on? That maybe someone else outside of Enron was helping to funnel all this cash out? That Ken Lay KNEW he was eventually going to get caught, but that he would have a parachute waiting for him when he jumped off that burning blimp?
“Are you sure we can get away with this guys? I mean, an aweful lot of people are going to be angry…”
“Fuh-get about it, Ken. We gots it aaaaall taken care of. You just swindle those bills…”
These powerful groups of men have BILLIONS of dollars at their disposal, not just the whole Enron crap because that’s chump change compare to what these groups are worth, and do you think that they don’t take care of their own kind? That they figure out a way to get everybody paid off and everything set up so that these paid off people are the ones who will be handling his death?
Of course you do, that would involve waaaaay to many people (you say) and be waaaaay to difficult to set up (for someone like you).
WHOOPS! MY BAD!!! Lemme rephrase that for you smarty pants, it should read: “I’m sorry if everybody can’t…” and so on and so on until we get to the end where it ends with, “but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.”
Forging a U.S. Passport, setting up an alternate identity, secretly transferring hidden funds to that identity, coming up with a dead body to be cremated, paying off several hundred people and/or thousand people for their silence and/or complicity, etc. etc. These are things that sound easy in practice, but in reality are staggeringly difficult.
There seems to be a general belief at play here that Lay had huge amounts of wealth and the means to secret it in the last redoubt somewhere. The FBI and the Department of Justice have teams of forensic accountants to detect exactly those sorts of shenanigans, and they do not screw around. In the Fastow case a three month continuance was granted so that the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI’s forensic accountants could sift through the millions (literally millions) of documents related to the case. He was under more scrutiny than a proctology patient with an auditorium full of interns. You think a guy like that is going to vanish without a trace? You think the administration wants to be caught helping him escape with his alleged millions to Argentina? There’d be so many federal crimes involved it’s make Watergate look like a water park. Permanently sneaking him out of the country with any kind of fortune intact under the noses of the whole federal government would be, in terms of fesability, just inside of landing him safely on the sun.
Which brings us to the next question:
Then why just not indict him to begin with and save the enormous expense of the trial, for both Lay and the government? During the Fastow trial everyone was wondering why Ken Lay seemed to be getting off without an indictment, but nobody was exactly calling for his blood on the front pages yet. It could have continued that way indefinitely; people would wonder why the Department of Justice never pressed charges, but they can just claim there wasn’t enough evidence to make a case. Nobody can force them to indict anybody.
Look, everyone imagines high profile federal cases to be sexy, glamorous tales of intrigue and deception, but in truth they’re pretty mundane and a bit boring. There’s just not a lot of cloak and dagger stuff going on. People under federal indictment would certainly like to disappear without a trace and retire to lives of secret leisure, but it just doesn’t work that way.
OMG. Where did you come up with THOSE numbers? All of a sudden I feel the urge to invent something to punch someone in the face over the internet… :mad:
I’d certainly hope I didn’t, even accidentally. I’m being facetious with the numbers, of course, but the fact remains that there are a huge number of people involved with the Enron prosecutions, some of whom presumably take their oaths to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States seriously. These are people who make it their lives work not to be duped by criminal defendants. How do you propose they were silenced? Were they bought off? Threatened? Shown incriminating photos?
Oh, for crying out loud. If the billions that Enron defrauded is “chump change compare to what these groups are worth”, then why do they bother with a massive consipiracy to make fucking chump change?
There is no planet in this solar system where a billion dollars is chump change. The richest men on the planet are only worth a few tens of billions, depending on the daily ticker price for Microsoft and Berkshire Hathaway.
If you want to assert that the real powerbrokers have such vast wealth that they can set up Enron and make Lay a patsy while giving him a golden parachute in Paraguay, well, why the fuck do they even bother? Why allow the whole thing to happen in the first place? Why not just pick up the phone and order George Bush to shut the whole investigation down?
The other thing you don’t seem to understand is that Enron never had billions of dollars in cash. It was all done with mirrors, they were losing money hand over fist, they didn’t steal that money for themselves because it never existed! Remember the movie “Fargo”? Remember how Jerry Lundegaard would fax over smudged invoices to GMAC, make customers pay for “truecoat” they didn’t order, give cars that he didn’t own to his partners in crime, cooking up the kidnapping scheme so he could pay off his previous frauds, stuff like that?
That’s what Enron was doing. They didn’t hoover up vast sums of money and hide it under the mattress, they LOST vast sums of money and cooked the books so no one would find out how badly they’d screwed up. Yeah, yeah, they stole money too, but the amount they siphoned off for themselves was peanuts compared to the amount Enron lost…and all that money is traceable. Even the CEO can’t order a suitcase filled with a million dollars cash and stuff it under his mattress, he has to be more clever than that because the cash draw has to be accounted for, SOMEONE has to sign the withdrawl slip at the bank. So you do things like have the corporation buy your buddy’s company for many times its actual worth, you get the board to vote you a huge bonus, etc.
If you allow that the Illuminati are powerful enough that the Enron investigation is just a smokescreen, well, why do they even bother with the smokescreen?
Some evidence, any evidence at all, would be a good start. All you have is conjecture, which is a nice place to start, but if this happened the way you claim there should be some evidence somewhere, right? I can come up with dozens of hypothesis (the mob had him killed, just like JFK) but until you have something to hang it all on, you’re still in the realm of wacky conspiracy theorists. What you’ve presented so far doesn’t even raise my eyebrows yet. You have a guy, under heavy stress, convicted of a major crime and facing jail time, who dies of a heart attack. On the face of it, that sounds pretty logical. Nothing else you’ve presented holds together as well as that simple story.
Done what? There’s already been an autopsy. Who should be investigating this besides the officials who have already done so. Is there any evidence, any at all, that they didn’t do a good job?
Um, the guy died after years of trial, stress, and anxiety, and basically had his fortune wiped out. Sounds like the system worked, granted, after the fact.
That isn’t how it works. Could Lay have faked his death? Incredibly unlikely, but possible. Could he have been murdered by someone? Slightly more likely, but still not exactly expected. Could his heart have burst as his conciousness ascended to the aether, meataphysically transformed into the new avatar of Mammon? You can’t prove it didn’t.
When you’re proposing something unlikely, something contrary to availiable evidence even, you must present evidence for your assertions. Saying something could be so is insufficient. Until you can give me something: An irregularity in the autopsy, evidence of corruption of the medical examiner’s office, a shadowy confession, a credible witness to the murder or continuing life of Ken Lay, something, anything. Until then, we have a perfect reasonable explanation of a heart attack, and evidence to support it.
Yes. If you drop dead before sentencing, you too may get away with stealing millions.
Come on, man. Lay’s sudden death offends my sense of justice too, and I’d be interested on any dirt he had on the government or other businesses. But none of that means that his death is anything but what it appears.
You mean the folks in California who got overpriced electricity bills because Enron was manipulating the supply were allowed to make their payments with play money?
What? Why would they have to be bought off? Ken’s dead to them, unless they’re pals, then they already got his new cell phone number. Pay off only those who need to, tell everybody else Ken is dead. The guys who performed his autopsy? Paid off. People who took the body away? Paid off. Anyone I can’t think of off the top of my head but need to be? Paid off. Anyone else is in the dark.
No I don’t. I’m just a guy who doesn’t strongly believe Ken is dead, and knowing what we know about rich people and how they love to pay people off and not go to prison, I’m saying before they burn the damn body they should show us his face!!! For as much money as he was responsible for losing (BILLIONS) he owes us at least ONE more public appearance.
CAN I GET AN AMEN??? Damn, all I want to do is see the face. You should be asking for as much yourself, instead you want to dribble over all the little things. BRAVO, you may have let the man get away. Bravo to Ken, too, for playing all these damn dupes. I can only hope that people don’t give a damn about anything if I’m in charge of my own billion dollar enterprise.
I see. The police are generally very suspicious of coincidences, but Dopers are to accept them at face value at all times. Yes, that’s the very picture of cynical intelligence examining things logically.
All of a sudden I feel the urge to invent something to punch someone in the face over the internet… :mad: