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Lea Fastow, Enron's art buyer, gets charged. The wife of Enron CFO Andrew Fastow and six others are charged and expected to be cuffed today (Houston Chronicle):

All but one are expected to surrender to federal authorities this morning and will likely be paraded into the courthouse in handcuffs.

The former executives to be named today are Ken Rice and Joe Hirko, co-chief executive officers of Enron Broadband Services; Kevin Hannon, chief operating officer of EBS; F. Scott Yeager and Rex Shelby, EBS executives; Ben Glisan, Enron treasurer; Dan Boyle, vice president; and [Lea] Fastow, who is married to former CFO Andrew Fastow and was a one-time assistant treasurer of Enron.

By 7:30 a.m., Rice, Hirko, Hannon, Yeager, Glisan and Boyle had surrendered at FBI headquarters on East T.C. Jester. "Prosecuting this guy is like prosecuting a piano player in a whorehouse," said Boyle's attorney Bill Rosch on the steps in front of the FBI building.

Piano players in the whorehouse indeed. What about the proprietors of the joint?

The best we can hope for is that Lea Fastow's indictment is a prosecutorial strategy to get her husband to implicate the twin madams of the best little whorehouse in Texas: Enron CEOs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Hopefully this will happen sometime next year in the period leading up to the Republican convention in New York City, as fresh reminder of the damage these people and their lavish campaign contributions of fraudulent profits did to the office of the presidency.

Lea Fastow was most recently in the news for her $20 million Enron art-buying spree while the company was on the verge of collapse.

Photo by Carlos Antonio Rios from an October 2002 Chronicle story about Andrew Fastow's arraignment.

⇒ Here's a fresh picture of Lea Fastow from this morning, May 1, 2003.

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