Welcome back to bribed swindler steel. I'm Alexander Raggi, and I'm speaking today with an award-winning investigative reporter, a 20-year veteran of Fortune magazine, and the tenacious and talented author of The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron.

This book about the collapse of Enron was made into an excellent documentary that was

ultimately nominated for an Academy Award.

The author is also written about Victor Kozani, the Pirate of Prague, and recently back in the

news, about the EB-5 visa program that permits wealthy foreign investors to fast-track

U.S. green cards. Peter Elkind. Thank you for joining me. Good to be with you, Alexandra.

This is sort of an interesting time to be revisiting this story. The Enron scandal dates back

more than 15 years. It was really 2001, 2002, a time when Enron and WorldCom and Tyco were all mentioned together

as evidence that corporate misconduct was rampant. Enron is still used as a synonym for fraud,

but I think we could use a refresher on the story.

Enron stood out among all of those big scandals as the sort of gorilla of them all, because it was

sort of a crossover hit.

It was a business scandal that made the front pages. And it did so partly because of all the

political connections that company had with the Bush administration and suspicions that

it affected politics as well.

Right. Houston-based organization at the time, it was the beginning of the end, it was number seven on the Fortune 500.

And then what?

It was like a year and a half later they were in Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Yes, and the other striking thing about it is that it was not just a company that was big,

but it was also a company that was wildly acclaimed.

Fortune Magazine named it the most

innovative company in America for, as I recall, five years in a row. And as it turned out,

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