Welcome back to Bribb Swindler-Steel. I'm Alexandra Rogge, and today I'm speaking with my guest

in the first part of a two-part interview. We've decided to break this into two podcasts because

we're going to cover two very different topics, each fascinating in its own way.

My guest is an acclaimed author and speaks frequently on white-collar crime and law enforcement.

He's a former finance executive, a mid-level manager, and co-founder of prisonology, which we'll

discuss on tomorrow's podcast. This eclectic professional biography, finance, white-collar

criminal expertise, and prisonology all makes sense when you know that he was one of a small

handful of MCI WorldCom employees and executives to spend time in prison for that company's

massive accounting fraud. The tally in that case ultimately reached

$11 billion in accounting misrepresentations, landing the CEO, Bernie Ebers, a 25-year prison

sentence and the number nine slot on Time Magazine's 10 most corrupt CEOs list, and landing our

guest in prison for 24 months.

Walt Pavlo, thank you for joining me and for your willingness to discuss the accounting fraud

and this time in your life more generally.

Thank you, Alexandra.

Thanks for having me.

And I'm not quite sure that my parents had envisioned such a fine introduction.

You know, in many respects, your story was the scandal before the scandal. You

know, the world really focused on Bernie Ebers accounting fraud, but your story predates that

in many respects. Maybe you can start with an industry primer for us. The telecommunications

business of the late 1990s was pretty convoluted.

Well, if you look at what deregulation did to the telecommunications business, you look back,

...