Barring those with an exceptionally short attention span, anyone who reads me will know that I am a HUGE fan of baseball. Several family vacations have specifically centered around the sport, including one where I "sacrificed" an AL baseball hit off of the bat of Ken Griffey, Jr. in batting practice at Milwaukee County stadium into the cornfield in Dyersville, Iowa, in the year 2001 as a "sacrifice" to the Gods of baseball in hopes the Yankees would lose the series (they did). And so, it was slightly puzzling to me in the year 2000, as the Houston Astros unveiled their new, state of the art stadium, named after one of the corporate giants in Houston. At the time, I was quite puzzled; I had never heard of "Enron", and could not imagien a connection to baseball that would lead to them paying to name the new stadium.
What a difference a few years can make.
Today, the jury in the trials of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling returned guilty verdicts for each, pretty much guaranteeing that these men who dined on caviar and sipped champagne a few short years ago will soon be settling for mystery meat and cheap coffee.
While I have become quite jaded overall, I am personally quite happy with the verdict. The fraud of the company these two men headed almost singlehandedly brought the stock market to a collapse from which it is just now recovering. Retirement funds were lost and the average joe lost faith in the stock market, feeling they had been duped by their brokers.
I personally hope that this criminal finding can lead to a civil suit against the two men, to return just a portion of their assets to the retirement funds of the employees and investors from whom they effectively stole large quantities of money.