AFTER THE FALL

by D.L. Groover

Three gay men who survived the collapse of Enron reflect on life and career since the Bloody Monday of a year ago

The fire sale of Enron memorabilia has included a revolving disco E, limousines, power plants, and tacky key chains and lapel pins. But the ruins from the collapse of America’s seventh-largest corporation and largest energy trading company continue to burn. The smoke clogs federal and state courts. Indictments, accusations, and the ubiquitous denials will continue for years as prosecutors stamp out the embers from Enron’s conflagration of deception and greed.

The truth about the fall of Houston’s 20-ton gorilla may never be completely known, but many more heads will roll before it all plays out. So far, more than two dozen books have detailed Enron’s implosion, with another due out early next month: Power Failure, co-written by Houston journalist Mimi Swartz and Enron whistle-blower Sherron Watkins, with our community’s Pokey Anderson as research assistant.

In bankruptcy proceedings, Enron limps along, selling off assets that a few years ago were the company’s crown jewels. Since “Bloody Monday” of December 2001, when the ax fell and 401(k) plans evaporated without so much as a “sorry” from management, we wondered what had become of the gay workers—the ones who haven’t already copped a plea, that is.

In the second installment of our Enron series, we talk to three gay men: Two are former employees, and one still works for the corporation. All have ridden out the worst storm of their business lives. Though battered from the experience, they have all become stronger, even philosophical.

“When you work for a big company, you just don’t think it can happen to you.”

Glenn Dickson, once a director in the retail risk-management group that sold long-term energy contracts to such premiere American outlets as Compaq and IBM, saw the writing on the wall at 1400 Smith months before the December firings.

“They were laying people off all year,” he recalled recently. “They tightened the spending, started to cut excess costs, and aggressively weeded out people. Everybody felt they were on pins and needles. All the people who got fired all year long got their full severance packages. Then all of us who got fired on Bloody Monday didn’t get jack. Everybody assumed we’d get our packages. No one had any concept that you could get thrown out with nothing from a big company like that. Talk about the rug being pulled out from under you.”

More fortunate than most, Dickson had planned for years to start his own company. He used the same methods that served him well at Enron and applied his commercial real-estate knowledge to residential real estate. He started Complete Property Services, a management firm, two months after being laid off and had his first client by the end of February 2002.

“If you’re willing to take some risks as an entrepreneur, you can really make up for lost time,” he said.

Still, the first year has been rough. Dickson has exhausted his savings, hasn’t had a salary since Enron, and operates out of his home. Even so, he said getting fired has been the best thing that has happened to him, although he misses the corporate environment.

“I was totally out there and comfortable,” he said. “Everybody knew and nobody cared. It was obviously of no issue in the company. I was put in increasingly visible and influential roles, and nobody gave a flip, just the way it ought to be.

“It was a young, attractive employee base. I continually marvel at the physical beauty of the people who worked there. You were old if you were over 35.”

This emphasis on youth, though, was responsible for Enron’s downfall.

“The company rewarded aggressive people who were smart, so you had 32-year-old vice presidents running around,” Dickson said. “I think that was the Achilles heel of the company.

“The young, never-been-battle-tested-type managers that tended to run the place were go, go go, how fast can we get it done, innovation, try new things, the world is my oyster. And there wasn’t a lot of thought to the long-term and how we were actually going to deliver what we sold. Sales was doing its thing, risk management was doing its thing, and operations was doing its thing, and it created a lot of confusion. That became a cycle that spiraled cost-wise completely out of control. The accounting gimmicks made it look like we were making progress.”

But now, a year after his lay off, Dickson is his own boss.

“I thought when I got to Enron I had it made. I feel safe now. My biggest drive to do this was to never be fired again.”

“These days, you either have so much work that you can’t see straight, or you have no work.”

For the foreseeable future, Larry Pardue has a job. He survived the massive firings, as did 2,500 others, and continues to work as corporate secretary for Enron’s international holdings.

“The sad part is to walk through the company,” Pardue said. “It’s toxic. Believe it or not, there are still people there who are disillusioned, thinking that we’re in something other than liquidation.”

Under a new corporate policy, Pardue works nine-hour days, nine days in a row, to tie up the increasingly unraveled threads of what is left of the mighty company. He said he has enough work to keep him busy for three years.

“I don’t suspect the estate will be around that long, with staff at least. But given the amount of companies that we still have, it’s going to be awhile. Of course, we’re all at the mercy of the creditors, so no one can say for sure.”

Pardue has been at Enron four years, but sometimes slipped into past tense as if he was already gone.

“It was a wonderful place to work. It’s sad what’s happened. I love my job. I love the work. It’s just that we’re all working ourselves out of a job as fast as we can. That’s the irony of it all.

“Things happened the way they happened, but it was a wonderful place, gay or otherwise. That never really became an issue. I never saw any kind of discrimination, any kind of backlash, or anything. It just didn’t matter. Everyone was on a high, just as anyone would be not knowing there was a time bomb ticking away.”

Eventually, Pardue’s job will end. Piece by piece, all the holdings will be sold, liquidated, merged, and Enron will be no more.

“I don’t even have the energy to look for a new job,” Pardue said “By profession, I’m a university professor. I taught Spanish at Rice and the University of St. Thomas. I haven’t taught in about a year. I would like to get back to that. There’s certainly no money in it, but then anyone who’s teaching isn’t during it for that reason.

“Corporate America has changed. Either you’re cut out for it and thrive on it, or it’s just a bunch of crap. I’m not that type of person who can expend things and people for the sake of money.

“Those who got us where we are today may have been bright, but there’s a big difference in those who are bright and won’t sell out for anything and those who are truly the best they can be in the field. It’s all about caring, about the experience, and doing the right thing. It’s sad that someone like Kopper [Andrew Fastow lieutenant Michael Kopper, an openly gay man] can be led down a path all for greed.”

“All I saw was a nightmare ahead of me.”

Robert Hall is emphatic. He quit before he got fired. Actually, he left Enron twice, only to come back and leave again. But when he was there, he improved the lot of every gay employee. Through his influence on Enron’s diversity council, sexual orientation and domestic-partner benefits were added to corporate policy, both implemented without hassle. He now works in Columbus, Ohio, for Enron rival American Electric Power and wants to get that corporation up to speed on same-gender issues.

“I was with Enron for 13 years,” Hall said in a recent phone interview from Columbus. “I did a little bit of everything, from being a market rep on the pipeline side to running the office for the marketing arm. My last job was VP of energy operations.

“It was a good place to work. If you got yourself out there and were looking to do something different, they gave you the opportunity.”

Enron was also open to gender politics, as Hall found out when he became one of the founding members of the diversity council, which had been created to deal with the large numbers of Chinese, Japanese, and Indians hired after Enron acquired vast holdings in Asia. This effort focused on internal community relations (displaying a menorah in the lobby at Hanukkah along with the Christmas lights, for example). There was an issue that the council hadn’t considered. But Hall had.

“Enron didn’t have a sexual discrimination policy,” he recalled. “This was back in 1999. I challenged them on it. We wrote up a new policy, took it to HR, they took it to the board, and it immediately got added in.

“A year later, about the time Vinson & Elkins [the law firm] were offering domestic-partner benefits, I went back to the diversity council and said, ‘Look, we’re their biggest client. If they can take the money that we’re giving them and pay health benefits for domestic partners, then Enron should do it, too.’”

When Enron was preparing to bid on a lucrative deal with San Francisco, Hall was also aware that the California city had passed a domestic-partner ordinance that precluded the city from doing business with any company that didn’t provide such benefits to its unmarried employees. Without DP benefits, Enron would be out of the competition.

“That got brought up through the diversity council, went through human resources, through the board, and the management approved it,” Pardue said. “Pretty rapidly there, we did two major steps forward. We were on a roll.

“Once we got sexual orientation and domestic-partner benefits in the organization, we kind of went on our way. If somebody finds out I’m gay, and they don’t like me because of that, it’s not going to affect my career here at Enron.

“That was one of the things Enron brought to the energy business: a broader view. It wasn’t the good-ol-boys’ system anymore. People could succeed as long as you worked hard and did your job. It didn’t matter who you spent the night with.”

Pardue now works for a company without a sexual-orientation policy or domestic-partner benefits. “We do have a diversity council,” he said. “I’ve submitted my name. We’ll see if it’s as accepted now as companies were in the past.”

Hall survived the bankruptcy filing in December and stayed in Enron’s marketing and retail group until April. He quit for three months, then returned to Enron as a transportation rep on the pipeline. He stayed two months until AEP called. Now AEP has shut down its energy trading division and has begun to lay off employees.

“I’m not sure what my status will be,” he said. “I think I’m employed for a while. Of course, that could all change tomorrow. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in this process is that there’s no stability. Every day is a new day.”

Groover interviewed former Enron web master Brandon Rigney for the December OutSmart. In the February issue, we visit with Pokey Anderson, researcher on the latest Enron book, Power Failure.

If you have any comments about this article, please email them to letters@outsmartmagazine.com.