ENRON Charges against top officials prove to be slow in coming

White-collar crime probes can be complex, a Justice spokesman says.
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
DALLAS -- The prison doors at Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institute in Minersville, Pa., recently slammed shut on ImClone Systems founder Samuel Waksal. In late September, Dennis Kozlowski, the former chief executive of Tyco International, will stand trial for grand larceny and other charges.
But for Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, the men who oversaw the once highflying Enron Corp., life so far has been free of handcuffs. Skilling continues to spend time with his family. Lay is working at a business start-up.
Neither faces any criminal charges nearly two years after Skilling resigned as chief executive. His departure was the beginning of a sudden downward spiral for Enron that ended with a bankruptcy filing at the nation's seventh-largest company and a sprawling federal investigation.
The Justice Department pronounces itself "very satisfied" with the work of its Enron Task Force, which has secured indictments of 19 former executives at the Houston-based energy trader.
Critics, meanwhile, use words such as "disappointment" and "dead end."
Criteria for success
The lack of top-level indictments underscores the difficulties facing federal prosecutors in one of the most complex white-collar crime cases in history, several former U.S. attorneys say. And it raises doubts about whether the public -- and thousands of Enron employees, shareholders and creditors -- will ever see justice served.
"The success of the task force will hinge largely on how successful they are at bringing criminal charges against those at the top of the corporate structure," said Robert Mintz, a former federal prosecutor who is now a white-collar criminal defense lawyer at McCarter & amp; English in Newark, N.J. "The government has sort of lost the momentum."
To be sure, an indictment against Skilling or Lay could come any day.
Some Houston lawyers say they're hearing rumblings that criminal charges soon will be filed against Skilling, who resigned as Enron's CEO Aug. 14, 2001, just six months after he took the job. Neither Skilling's lawyer nor the Justice Department would comment on the matter.
And the 19 former Enron executives who have been indicted include Andrew Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer.
Too slow?
But the pace of the investigation raises eyebrows among some former federal prosecutors.
"What have they been doing for 18 months?" asked Jacob Frenkel, a former U.S. attorney and Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutor. "The little they have to show for it to date is the reason it has to be perceived at the highest levels of Justice as a disappointment."
"The tea leaves suggest that they are having difficulty moving up the chain of command," said Kirby Behre, another former federal prosecutor now in private practice.
The Justice Department ardently defends the work of the Enron Task Force, a group of eight to nine federal prosecutors and two to three dozen FBI agents. The team has been toiling on the case in Houston and Washington, D.C., since January 2002.
"These are very complex investigations," said Justice spokesman Bryan Sierra. "It involves poring through volumes of paperwork. Traditionally, white-collar investigations can take years."
The task force has secured the indictment of Fastow on 99 counts ranging from obstruction of justice to money laundering.