Enron Jury Saw Story Defense Missed

HOUSTON — Kenneth L. Lay was in no hurry to update his Internet site Friday.

The home page, with its red, white and blue piping and its formal portrait of the disgraced Enron Corp. founder, remained a digital time capsule of the moment when the verdict was still pending, when Lay could still spit defiance at the government's attacks on his character, when he could still write: "We firmly believe that the jury will see through this."

Instead the jury saw through Lay and former Enron Chief Executive Jeffrey K. Skilling, finding them guilty Thursday of conspiracy and fraud charges that could put the two men behind bars for much of the rest of their lives.

The jurors, working people all and many in positions of substantial responsibility, compared their own working lives with those of the defendants and, perhaps surprisingly, found they had some things in common.

True, most of the jurors' desk calendars for a week in February 1999 probably didn't read: "Davos, Paris, London, Mumbai," as Lay's did. But the trappings didn't keep them from understanding the fundamentals of Lay and Skilling's jobs and the culture at Enron.

And that was a big problem for the defense.

During closing arguments last week, Daniel M. Petrocelli, Skilling's top lawyer, said the trouble with the government's case was that "they don't have a story to tell. There is no story here."

The prosecutors, he said, couldn't build a narrative around the supposed conspiracy at the core of their case. When did it start? Where was it hatched? Who was in on it? In place of a story line, Petrocelli said, the government offered "a hodgepodge of issues -- a little broadband statement here, a little retail resegmentation here, a little spec trading over here. What kind of a case is that?"

Yet the jurors seemed to find a powerful story in the Enron trial, as did others touched by the energy company's collapse.

Not that it was an easy tale to grasp. Juror Wendy Vaughan, a small-business owner, likened it to "a puzzle with about 25,000 pieces dumped onto the table."

For John E. Olson, Enron was a story about overreaching.

Olson didn't testify during the four-month trial, but some of his warnings were mentioned. As a natural-gas industry analyst for what is now Credit Suisse First Boston, Olson got to know Ken Lay in the late 1980s, when Enron was about to transform itself from a tortoise into a hare.