Friday's column: It's not the crime, it's the cover-up
There are certain things that everyone should know by now. First, there's no such thing as a hit man. If one makes himself available to you, don't take him up on his offer, no matter how tempting, to "off" your hated boss or cheating spouse. He is an undercover cop.
Second, and on a similar note, there are no preteen girls trolling the Internet looking for creepy older married guys to date. They, too, are undercover cops.
Third, and most important: it's not the crime, people. It's the cover-up. Seriously. How many times do you have to be told?
Former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling didn't get convicted for creating the byzantine financial structures that generated spectacular "profits" for a company that was not, actually, doing all that well. They got convicted for lying about it.
The Enron case might be unique for its complexity -- pretty much no one can clearly explain what the company was doing, or claiming to be doing, to make its money -- but it's actually got a lot in common with all the other corruption cases you hear about every day.
The script goes like this: Tipster alerts the authorities to some sort of misconduct. Investigation begins. Crooks do all sorts of pathetic, desperate stuff -- hide money in the freezer, create fake paper trails, etc. -- to dodge investigation. Prosecutors find out about pathetic, desperate stuff. Crooks get indicted.
The original crimes, like embezzlement and bribery, are often subtle and hard to prove. But the cover-ups, conducted in mid-panic, tend to be painfully obvious.
The Lundegaard Principle
Jurors' and journalists' eyes glaze over at long explanations of technical violations of accounting standards and reporting requirements. The line between bribe and gift, for example, is not always clearly drawn. But, when you lie about it on your tax forms, that maybe-almost-innocent-sort-of-a-legal-gray-area "gift" starts to look a lot more like a bribe. From there, it's a slippery slope to mail fraud, obstructing justice, conspiracy, making false statements to banks and all the other charges that white-collar criminals -- and your more sophisticated gangsters -- typically end up facing.
You can think of it as the Lundegaard Principle. Jerry Lundegaard, the hapless car salesman played by William H. Macy in the movie "Fargo," begins his descent into crime by embezzling from the car dealership where he works. He thinks of himself as simply borrowing the money to fund some business deals and plans to pay it back before anyone notices it's gone. But, when the business deals fall through, he gets desperate. In trying to cover his tracks, he hatches a plan to have his wife kidnapped so her wealthy father will pay a big ransom. After several disastrous twists and turns, the cover-up ends, naturally enough, with a dead body in a wood chipper. The cover-up always gets away from you.
That's how these things go. Except for the wood chipper part. That only happens in Minnesota.
'Shut up.' That'll be $50,000
If I ever really want to make some money, I'm going to open a "media consulting" firm with an imperious-sounding name and very posh offices. We'll be the people that public figures go to when trouble strikes. And we'll have one piece of advice: Don't comment.
(Yes, I know it looks like I've just given away my big strategy for free, but I'm not worried. No one ever takes advice like that unless they pay big money to get it.)
My firm -- which will be called something like the Pickett Group, only pronounced with a slight French accent -- would have told Jeff Skilling to keep his big mouth shut after Enron's collapse. No testimony before Congress. No appearance on Larry King. And, most of all, no long attempt at explaining everything to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Because it was, quite predictably, Skilling's desire to cover things up, smooth them over and explain them away that, ultimately, did him in.
Like George Ryan lying to the Operation Safe Road investigators and Martha Stewart concocting a story about a "standing agreement" with her broker, Skilling made his own situation infinitely worse by publicly defending himself against charges that he knew Enron was failing and tried to cut his own losses before word got out. He insisted that he'd sold half a million shares of Enron stock on Sept. 17, 2001, because he figured they'd lose value in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Then, when investigators uncovered his original attempt to sell some of the shares -- on Sept. 6 -- he was stuck.
If he'd just crossed his arms and said nothing, the burden would have been on the prosecutors to prove that he'd knowingly done something wrong. In lying, he made it easy for them.
I can only hope -- because these endless public corruption trials are getting deeply boring and seriously depressing -- that the crooked politicians of Illinois will finally take this lesson to heart. If they're not going to stop cheating and stealing, the least they could do is stop lying about it.
