ENRON REVISITED

A year after the collapse of Houston's most notorious corporation, D.L. Groover checks in with the Enron web master in this first of a series on gays and lesbians at the energy giant

The two iconographic tilted E logos, the backdrop for countless television stories, quietly disappeared in November from the entrance to Enron's Smith Street tower. They were carted away to be auction fodder.

Behind the reception desk, a ghostly E outline is all that remains of a third symbol. In September, another 5-foot logo sold at public auction for $45,000. The former energy giant, once America's seventh largest corporation, desperately strives to maintain some sort of life support as it drops unnecessary ballast to lighten its fall. Even the name Enron is destined for elimination.

Last December, Enron spectacularly imploded with a blitz of massive layoffs, billions of dollars lost to investors, and employee pension funds vanishing overnight. Another corporate stalwart, accounting firm Arthur Anderson, has gone down in flames because of its unscrupulous practices in helping Enron defraud investors, and other brand-name corporations are under federal investigation for their role in abetting Enron's deception and greed. A great deal of blame for Enron's collapse rests with a gay man and his lover, Michael Kopper and William Dodson.

A protŽgŽ of Enron's chief financial officer Andrew Fastow, Kopper, known as "one of Andy's boys," was instrumental in setting up convoluted and illegal off-balance sheet "special purpose entities" for himself and other company bigwigs, whose sham partnerships were easily hidden from Wall Street analysts and credit rating agencies. With Star War-inspired names like JEDI and CHEWCO, these businesses, concealing more than $700 million in Enron debt, remained off the books, and therefore off the radar of government watchdog regulators. Kopper's very orientation was integral to these schemes. He could list his lover, Dodson, as an investor, and no one in a regulatory capacity would be aware that they were, in fact, spouses. Kopper thus used society's outmoded discrimination to reap millions with his fraud and deception.

Kopper's reign of riches lasted but two years. Under the harsh light of the Justice Department's eight-month investigation into the Enron downfall, Kopper squealed, the first executive to do so, pleading guilty to wire fraud and money laundering. Cooperating with the government, Kopper agreed to pay back $12 million of his ill-gotten gains and currently is plea-bargaining to keep Dodson out of jail stripes. Kopper's boss, Fastow, has since been indicted. Sources familiar with the case suggest that criminal action remains likely against other top Enron executives, particularly former CEO Jeff Skilling and chairman Ken Lay.

In its heyday, Enron employed a workforce numbering at least 21,000 worldwide. When the giant fell, the Houston office was hit hardest, with 2,500 handed pink slips and out on the street without notice. Although there are no published figures, by all accounts Enron employed a good percentage of gays, mostly closeted. A conservative workplace to be sure, its nondiscrimination and same-sex partner health-care policies, while never highly touted, were a valued part of the life at Enron.

In the first of a series, OutSmart inquires into the lives and careers of gay Enron employees since the meltdown. Some individuals still work there. Some have moved out of Houston to find work elsewhere. Others have had no luck at finding another job.

Brandon Rigney is a gay ex-Enron employee, the former corporate web master of enron.com, the company website. After he lost his job, he started 1400smith.com, a website for the Enron unemployed. Rigney eventually moved to San Francisco. With hits dwindling, he shut down the site two weeks ago.

"For me, Enron was such a great company to work for," Rigney said from his new home in San Francisco. "So many smart people, so much autonomy-the prestige employer of all Houston. I didn't see myself working anywhere else except there.

"When I was laid off, what bothered me the most in the end was that I was suddenly cut off from people I had been spending 10 to 12 hours a day with, and I didn't know their e-mail addresses or their phone numbers. So when the layoffs started looming, I threw together this website so all the thousands of people could stay in touch."

Out of the closet his entire career, Rigney said he never felt repressed or stigmatized at Enron. Yet he was always surprised at work to find his gaydar operating at full tilt.

"It was unmistakable, that place was full of queens," Rigney recalled. "But it wasn't a big issue. There just wasn't any talk of it officially. However, part of Enron's own policy, above and beyond what the feds require, is that sexual orientation was part of Enron's equal opportunity statement. There wasn't a gay employees' organization, which I thought a little bit odd that such a large company didn't have one. But at Enron it was all about the work. It was all about maintaining your place, advancing your interests, staying afloat, and not getting chewed up by somebody else. Anything that distracted from the work probably was not going to appeal to most people. There were a few gay organizations like a running club and a cycling club, but there weren't too many things like that going on. And it's not that the management wouldn't have endorsed it, because senior management liked to think of themselves as a little bit progressive. But in the end, people were just so ambitious and so goal-oriented there, that probably accounts for it."

And what was his reaction when he learned that Michael Kopper was gay?

"It just goes to show that ambition and dishonesty and everything else are equally as prevalent among gay people," Rigney said. "It's in that grand tradition of that group of people at Enron. If anything, it shows just how democratic and orientation-blind Enron was. Sure, you're gay, so what? You can be in the inner circle, and you can benefit from this. At that level it's hard to conceal your life. You're working 12-hour days with them, sitting in conference rooms all night, hammering out deals, and it's going to come up that it's a guy who called, not your wife."

Fortunate for him, Rigney was, in his words, a "lazy investor" and never got around to buying any Enron stock, though pressed to do so by his friends. After the collapse, he therefore had the money to get out of town.

"It was accidental. I had people telling me, 'Man, you're an idiot, you need to buy some of this.' I just lucked out and didn't get ruined."

After six months of not finding work in Houston and observing former coworkers without prospects, Rigney made the move to the West Coast. He now does contract work, but hasn't found full-time employment.

"The word in the Enron community is that a lot of people are working way beneath where they were at Enron for less money, or they're just not working at all," he reported. "They've decided to go back to school, or they're sitting it out. I privately think that a lot of people left town.

"I had always thought about moving to San Francisco and finally acted on it. The bay area is the center of technology and design, the areas I work in, I wanted to live in a cooler climate, and I'm a gay man. I wanted to find a relationship in a much bigger dating pool than in Houston. Also, I was thinking that if I get away, I'll probably hear a lot less about Enron."

In California, where Enron manipulated the energy market to drive up prices, Rigney did not find complete respite." Everyone out here knows about Enron," he said. "You can stop a homeless person on the street, and they know the name Ken Lay. The vitriol and hatred of Enron here in California took me by surprise, how deeps it runs.

"I'm disappointed that Enron is still the butt of all these jokes and still used as the object of a simile, like 'This is bad, but it isn't Enron,' but I'm not especially bitter, because I didn't lose all my money and I had a very good run there.

"But a lot of people are angry and hold Ken Lay responsible for everything that happened-you know, the captain of the ship. We may never know the truth about all this. We may never know who knew what when. But my God, like Teapot Dome and the robber barons, are we going to hear about this for the rest of our lives?"

In January, we visit other former Enron employees, including Glen Dickson, who remained in Houston and started a new business.