The government said [former Enron CEO Jeff] Skilling and his wife, Rebecca Carter, had drinks at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, where they were staying on the night of April 8.
Around midnight, they went with two men to a cigar bar called Bar & Books on the Upper East Side, where Skilling was at first friendly to a married couple and their friend who sat nearby.
They had several rounds of drinks and Skilling invited them to visit his River Oaks home, even saying he "would fly them down to Houston and provide them with their own maid," according to the report.
Skilling picked up a $171 bar tab for the group and they continued drinking with others reciprocating, the government said.
But Skilling turned hostile after several hours of drinking, falsely accusing several patrons of being FBI agents, the report said, and accusing them of using someone "as a decoy to lure (him) into lowering his guard."
The government reports that around 3:30 a.m., the bar manager asked Skilling and his party to leave. Outside, Skilling tried to forcibly remove the front license plate of a car parked near the bar to "gather `proof' " about the identity of the people he thought were agents, the prosecutors said.
The report says that when a woman started to get into that car, Skilling tried to stop her and attempted to lift her blouse, claiming he was looking for a wire. Another patron pushed Skilling away from the woman and a scuffle ensued.
One patron's nose was cut and Skilling grabbed his wife, who was using a crutch because of a foot ailment, knocking her over. The motion said that while he was at the hospital, Skilling admitted it was he who inadvertently toppled his wife.
Several people called 911. When police arrived, they found Skilling's wife sitting in the street. Skilling, who had chased the people he scuffled with, was stopped a block away.
A police report from that night indicates Skilling was "irrational and highly uncooperative" and "possibly suffering from paranoid delusions," accusing people of being "FBI agents stalking him," according to the document.
"At one point, Skilling went to middle of the street, put his hands behind his back and began talking to the sky, asking if FBI cameras were capturing what was happening," the government papers say.
Police sent Skilling in an ambulance to a hospital, along with his wife.
At the hospital the morning of April 9, Skilling's blood alcohol level was 0.19 -- nearly twice the legal driving limit of .10 in many states, the government report notes.
Prosecutors say Skilling's later accounts of the events, as told through his lawyers, were incorrect, showing he was not willing to be truthful even when sober.
Skilling's lawyers previously told reporters that Skilling and his wife were attacked by two men who knocked her down and rendered her unconscious.
It's indicative of Skilling's egomania that the FBI would monitor him when they can't even monitor Saudi Arabians in flight schools.
Half the cells in our federal prisons are filled with drug offenders, while this idiot is free to cover a $171 bar tab, fly strangers to Houston and even "provide them with their own maid," which sure sounds like a coded offer to me.
Enron was of course one of the most generous and visible supporters of Bush-Cheney 2000. The thieving, hateful, paranoid Jeff Skilling is the sort of person who profits when a fellow thief is in power.
The anti-Wal-Mart sentiment has gone beyond simple protest to become a social phenomenon. Outrage against the store is politically energizing neighborhoods. It is introducing neighbor to neighbor - in a sense, binding the communities that opponents of the retailer argue Wal-Mart would destroy.
Wal-Mart, a symbol for many of consolidation and globalization and capitalism, has become the national ink-blot test. How people feel about Wal-Mart speaks as much about them, where they are in their lives and what they value as it does about the store.
"It's a reflection of the world we live in," said James Hoopes, a professor at Babson College in Massachusetts and a prolific business history scholar.
Hate of Wal-Mart cuts across all geographic and demographic areas, from inner cities to rural towns to affluent suburbs.
For some people living in small towns, Wal-Mart has become a symbol of their dying heritage. For others living in urban cities, Wal-Mart is the hand of homogenization on their once unique neighborhoods. For still others living in booming suburbs, Wal-Mart epitomizes the growth that threatens to destroy the tranquility people moved there for.
"The movement against Wal-Mart these days I think has made Wal-Mart the most reviled retailer in America," said Al Norman, a prominent anti-Wal-Mart activist.
Wal-Mart is just a convenient symbol of a much larger problem. But that doesn't make it any less responsible for the communities it tries to decimate with its predatory practices, not to mention its aesthetic evils.
Now if you want to read a really sickening story about Wal-Mart, you will have to go to Respectful of Otters.
See also this big profile of the Wal-Mart phenomenon in The Economist: 'According to A.T. Kearney, Wal-Mart's three-biggest sources of cost advantage are low corporate overheads, the efficiencies of its supply-chain and, above all, its low labour costs. A newly hired “associate”, as Wal-Mart calls its employees, could earn as little as $8 an hour, some 20-30% less than unionised workers at rival supermarkets. Union members might also have benefits, such as health-care insurance.'
The job discussions were initiated by Druyun's daughter, Heather McKee, herself a Boeing employee for whom the company had created a position two years earlier after her mother contacted a senior Boeing executive. McKee sent a series of encrypted e-mails negotiating her mother's potential employment to a senior executive of Boeing, court documents said. The senior executive met Druyun at a private conference room in the Orlando airport and offered her a job a month before she recused herself from decisions involving the Air Force and Boeing.
When the meeting ended, court documents said, the executive told Druyun: "This meeting really didn't take place.''
The senior executive was not named, but Druyun named [former Boeing chief financial officer Michael M.] Sears when asked by the Judge with whom she was negotiating her potential employment at Boeing. Sears has not been charged and has denied any wrongdoing. Druyun and the Boeing senior executive conspired to cover up their discussions before Druyun eventually admitted them to an investigator for Boeing, court documents said.
More from FindLaw: 'Druyun and her daughter declined to comment after the hearing, but Druyun's brother, Edward Lofton, a Catholic priest in South Carolina, said the deal on her daughter was critical for Druyun. "It's been very painful for her," he said.'
So Heather the encrypted matchmaker walks away uncharged (and still works at Boeing!), but also off the prosecutorial hook is Michael Sears, the now-discredited author of a book on management and business ethics that was to have been published in February 2004.
Can't get enough of that military procurement corruption? More about the Druyun saga here, here, and here. Perhaps we can get Edward Lofton, Druyun's priest brother, to lead us in prayer for the safe return of all the money that has vanished from the US Treasury thanks to his sister's lack of a conscience.
The objective of one war was neglected in order to start another unrelated war. So not only was the Iraq war a hollow farce but the war in Afghanistan was too, because of the distractable caricature of leadership that calls itself the Bush White House.
An Interview With Ned Davis -- It's at critical junctures that we want to know what the proprietor of Ned Davis Research in Venice, Fla., is thinking. We evidently called the right guy last week, because that's exactly where this master of market history and technical analysis thinks the market is at the moment.
[...]
Q: What do you make of the economic numbers? A: My underlying view is there is too much debt and there was never any buildup of savings during the recession, so there is really no pent-up demand. The consumer isn't in a position to do much. That is what all the bears say. Then I sit and look at the money supply and I see that when mortgage refinancings are booming and tax cuts or tax refunds are hitting, the money supply explodes. If you put a lot of money in people's pockets, they are going to spend it. We saw that in the middle of last year. The second half of last year was the best half since 1984, or maybe 1981, when there were tax cuts. It's a guarantee that if you give tax cuts or refunds, there will be surging growth. Is it sustainable? I don't think it is. March is going to be strong. April is going to be strong. It is going to be May or June before we know if the economy is slowing a bit and, by that time, there will have been two Fed meetings already.
[...]
Q: How does the war in Iraq factor into your outlook, since it seems to be worsening? A: Personally, it makes me sick to my stomach. From a contrarian standpoint, though, it is probably the one thing out there that has kept people from getting really manic and crazily bullish here. The uncertainty is going to weigh on the market. Every week, you say, "Oh my God, what is going to happen next?" We certainly didn't go there to fight a religious war, but somehow when you start killing Muslims, other Muslims see us as a Christian army, and that is very ugly. I don't want to overdo it because during the Vietnam War, we had plenty of bull and bear markets. Wars don't necessarily drive markets. But we don't need this extra uncertainty.
Q: If we have a Democratic president elected this fall, what should we expect from the market? A: The stock market has actually done better under Democrats than it has under Republicans. Even better than a Democratic president has been gridlock. The explanation for that is neither party can do too much damage and it's just checks and balances. I'm not sure that a Kerry victory is really going to shock the market, especially because the polls now show he has got a chance. And it is still going to be a Republican Congress. In 1960, we had a bouncy first part of the year and then the market rallied in the middle of the year. When it looked as if Kennedy had a chance, the market went straight down until the election and then headed straight up for the next 12 months. It had totally discounted that a guy with the initials JFK from Massachusetts would win. That could be a pretty good pattern for what might happen if Kerry wins. Election years are normally bouncy early in the year and then the market takes off. From August to November there is a very dramatic difference if the incumbent wins or the incumbent loses. If the incumbent wins, it goes straight up. When the incumbent loses, the market goes down. In August, after the conventions, you can make a pretty good bet on the stock market. If it looks like Kerry is going to win, the market is going to go down after August.
