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When former Enron chiefs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling walk into a Houston courtroom next week to face 42 counts of conspiracy, fraud and insider trading, Charles Prestwood will be watching closely.
Mr Prestwood, 67, who lives with his dog and two horses in nearby Conroe, Texas, worked for Houston Natural Gas, which became part of Enron in 1985. He put in 33 years of hard work for the two companies as a welder and machine operator.
When he retired in 2000 he had amassed $1.3m (£730,000) in life savings. All of it was held in Enron stock. The company management told him again and again that Enron shares were undervalued and the best place to park his money. But even as they told him this, the business was secretly starting to crumble. When it went bust, Mr Prestwood was left with less than $8,000 - about £4,500.
"I had great plans," he said this week. "I wanted to travel, to see part of this good old USA. Now I can't even afford to cross the county line. I don't make plans now. I don't live, I barely exist."
It has been more than four years since Enron collapsed, after its campaign to conceal debts and produce fake earnings through false accounting finally fell apart. The headlines have become less frequent, but Mr Prestwood and countless others like him who lost everything still live with the consequences. Their anger is undimmed.
"I want justice done," he said. He intends to make the hour-long trip to the courthouse at least once during the trial. "I would love to look them in the eye. I'll go to my grave believing they are guilty."
The trial of Mr Lay and Mr Skilling, due to begin on Monday, provides a bookend to one of the most turbulent and sordid periods of American corporate history.
The bankruptcy of Enron in late 2001 marked the beginning of a string of scandals unlike anything seen before. For a year corporate America was awash with lurid stories of fraud and corruption, of executives fooling ordinary investors to make millions of dollars for themselves at some of the most trusted companies in the United States.
The likes of WorldCom, Tyco, Adelphia, Qwest, Global Crossing and Martha Stewart grabbed headlines for all the wrong reasons. After the stock market party of the "anything goes" 1990s, this was one heck of a hangover.
Since then, government prosecutors have secured a string of high-profile convictions, including WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers, Martha Stewart, and Dennis Kozlowski at Tyco, a man whose taste for $6,000 shower curtains redefined extravagance. Arthur Andersen, the accountants and consultancy that had been Enron's auditor, went out of business after a government prosecution. A number of Wall Street banks accused of being complicit in the Enron fraud have paid almost $7bn to settle shareholder lawsuits and hundreds of millions more in penalties.
Now, finally, the men who led Enron are to get their day of reckoning. Daniel Petrocelli, Mr Skilling's lawyer, recently told Fortune magazine that the trial was the "most important, most high-profile, most must-win case that the US government has ever prosecuted."
Barefaced lies
The government alleges that Mr Lay and Mr Skilling conspired with others to hide the company's mounting difficulties through a mixture of complex financial dealings and barefaced lies. Mr Skilling faces 35 counts of conspiracy, fraud and insider trading. Mr Lay faces seven counts of conspiracy and fraud.
The indictment contends that Mr Skilling, 52, spearheaded the scheme. He had worked at Enron since 1990 and was regarded as a fiercely sharp intellect. He took over as chief executive in February 2001 only to resign abruptly that same August. Mr Lay, 63, who had founded the company, resumed the chief executive job after Mr Skilling's departure. The narrower charges accuse him of perpetuating the scam.
The government alleges they had good reason to conceal Enron's true financial state and keep the share price high. Between 1998 and 2001, the years on which the trial will focus, Mr Skilling was paid $14m in salary and gained $89m from the sale of Enron stock he had been awarded. Mr Lay was paid $19m and banked more than $200m from selling shares.
Both men have protested their innocence. Mr Lay, the son of a Baptist minister, recently took to the stage of the Houston Forum, an elite venue in the city, to rail against his government persecutors. He is the victim, he said, of "political and public hysteria".
He told the audience: "Instead of the normal practice of first determining whether a crime was committed and then determining who did it, [government investigators] seemed to be reversing the order by first identifying specific Enron executives as targets and then setting about to see if they could build a case to indict and convict them."
Lawyers for Mr Lay and Mr Skilling had pressed the judge to allow them to move the case outside Texas, arguing that there was still too much anger in Houston for them to receive a fair trial.
The defence is intending to argue that the men were following normal business practice and they have nothing to hide. The best accountants and lawyers in the land signed off the company accounts. They have maintained that any misdeeds were relatively minor ones and were carried out by Andrew Fastow, the former finance chief who has already pleaded guilty to fraud.
"Contrary to popular belief today," Mr Lay told the assembled business leaders in Houston, "I firmly believe that Enron was a great company."
At its peak Enron was the seventh largest company in the US, with a market value of about $70bn. It was also one of the most admired. Mr Lay, who was a friend of the Bush family, had widely been tipped to become energy secretary in the younger Bush administration.
The business was created through the merger of two companies in 1985 and was a supplier of natural gas. In the 1990s it began its transformation into an energy trader, buying and selling gas and power. At the peak of the stock market boom, it attempted to turn internet bandwidth into a commodity that could be traded - it was an empty shell of a business which Enron persuaded Wall Street was worth billions.
The company became a stock market darling, delivering earnings growth of between 15% and 20% each quarter. The company's stock soared.
Sham
The government alleges that the profits were a sham. In many cases, the income it booked was from the sale of assets to so-called special purposes entities - off-balance-sheet companies controlled by Mr Fastow. Those entities had borrowed money to buy the assets, and Enron was liable to repay the loans. According to an independent report, Enron booked $352m in profits in 2000 from the sale of assets to what were effectively its own subsidiaries. Its debt that year was reported as $10bn when it should have been $22bn.
The first sign of trouble was Mr Skilling's abrupt departure. He had been showing signs of strain before he quit, famously calling an analyst who was querying Enron's finances on a conference call an "asshole". He maintains that he left for personal reasons and had no idea about Enron's impending collapse.
But questions were starting to be asked. The company began to unravel. In October 2001, two months after Mr Skilling left, Enron spooked Wall Street by reporting $1bn in losses. Its credit was downgraded to junk status and its shares nosedived. On December 2 Enron filed for bankruptcy. In the firm's last hours, the management authorised the payment of $72m in bonuses to senior staff. Yet as late as September 26, 2001, Mr Lay had been telling staff: "My personal belief is that Enron stock is an incredible bargain at current prices." The third quarter, he said, was "looking great; we're going to hit our numbers". He had recently sold $24m of shares, the government claims.
Seven weeks after the bankruptcy, Cliff Baxter, who had been a vice-chairman at the energy firm, parked his car half a mile from home, put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Mr Baxter was later praised as one of the few in Enron to have voiced concerns about its allegedly dubious accounting practices. In a suicide note left for his wife, he said the "pain is overwhelming".
Prosecutors have so far charged 34 people in connection with Enron's downfall. Sixteen have pleaded guilty to various crimes; five have been convicted.
The trial will set former colleague against colleague. Mr Fastow, who managed to skim $61m from the sham transactions, is the main witness. The prosecution's case was significantly strengthened this month when a third defendant who was due to have stood alongside Mr Lay and Mr Skilling in court, Richard Causey, also agreed a plea deal. The former chief accounting officer will spend between five and seven years in prison depending on how useful he is.
Whistleblower
The government has listed 61 possible witnesses. They also include Sherron Watkins, a whistleblower who worked in the finance department and raised her concerns with top managers months before the deceit became public.
The prosecution is expected to try to keep away from the more complex financial aspects of the case and focus on the more easily understood allegations that the two men lied to cover up Enron's true financial state.
"If the government cannot explain what happened at Enron and why it was wrong in terms a jury of 12 lay persons can understand, then the government will likely fail to obtain convictions," said former federal prosecutor Ross Albert.
Experts are divided over whether anything of the magnitude of the fraud that began with Enron could happen again.
Nell Minnow, a corporate governance specialist at The Corporate Library, the independent researcher and investment rating agency, applauds the reforms that have been brought in as result of the scandals, including new enforcement powers for regulators, an accounting oversight board and rules on the independence of boards.
But she warns against complacency. "There will always be crooks. They will have to be a little cleverer next time, but there will always be scandals. That's just a fact of life. Someone said to me the other day that Enron was an indictment of the American character. I thought, greed, lust, sloth - that's an indictment of the human character."
Irrational exuberance
On March 15 last year Bernard Ebbers lowered his head in a Manhattan courtroom and wept. The former WorldCom chief was sentenced to 25 years in prison for orchestrating an $11bn fraud at the high-flying telecoms company. Mr Ebbers, 63, gave up most of his $45m personal fortune to settle with investors and will probably spend the rest of his life in jail. WorldCom remains the biggest failure in corporate history.
Dennis Kozlowski became a byword for corporate greed after the former Tyco chief and Mark Swartz, the chief financial officer, were accused of looting the company of $600m. A first trial heard of Mr Kozlowski's excesses including a $2m toga party partly billed to the company and the $11m renovation of his New York apartment. At a second trial last year the pair were sentenced to between eight and 25 years in prison.
Martha Stewart spent five months in prison and five in home confinement for lying to investigators over a suspicious share trade. Ms Stewart sold $225,000 of shares in 2001 in drug company ImClone, run by her friend Sam Waksal, shortly before the firm announced bad news. Mr Waksal admitted insider dealing and is serving seven years; but Ms Stewart has had two new TV shows since emerging from prison.
John Rigas, who at Adelphia Communications ran what was the fifth-largest cable TV company in the US, and his son Timothy, finance chief, embezzled $1bn from the business. The senior Mr Rigas, 80, was sentenced to 15 years in prison last June. His son got 20 years. Prosecutors said the two had treated Adelphia like a "private ATM". The father spent $25m of company money on a forest to preserve the view at his ranch.
Wall Street has paid dearly for its involvement in financial scandal. JPMorgan Chase has paid $3.2bn to settle lawsuits related to its involvement with Enron. The first banker to be criminally charged was Frank Quattrone, once the star technology analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston, who was sentenced to 18 months in 2004 for obstructing an investigation into the allocation of shares in stock offerings.
Two former Merrill Lynch bankers have been jailed over a bogus Enron deal. There is fallout to come: Joseph Nacchio, who ran telecoms firm Qwest Communications, was indicted in December for insider trading, accused of illegally selling $101m in shares. Gary Winnick, founder of telecom firm Global Crossing, agreed to pay part of a $325m settlement to investors when it crashed. He has not been charged.
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