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paragraph it mentioned some attached bank statements. Beard thumbed through the pages and found the records. He studied them for an instant.
    Wait a minute
.
    He scanned the records again, fearful he had made some mistake. No, there was no doubt. He glanced over at Woytek.
    “Dave, come here,” he said. “Take a look at these.”
    Woytek strolled over and skimmed through the statements. They were from Eastern Savings Bank, in the name of the oil-trading division. Nothing seemed surprising; the discovery of that account had set off the investigation. With an almost imperceptible shrug, Woytek looked at Beard, waiting to hear what he was missing.
    “These are the same statements we already have from the bank,” Beard said. “But this copy has been altered.”
    “You’ve gotta be kidding me. Show me our copy.”
    Beard fished through his briefcase, pulling out an almost-identical set of the statements. Woytek laid the pages side by side with the records from Borget.
    Unbelievable. The
statements were from the same account on the same date, but the numbers were different. The original records showed hundreds of thousands of dollars sloshing in and out. In this new copy, those transactions had simply disappeared. Woytek held Borget’s records up to the light. No lines. No shadows. No telltale signs anywhere of an alteration. Somebody had put a lot of effort into this.
    Woytek chuckled. These traders were planning to defend themselves to Lay—
using dummied-up records?
This meeting was going to be even more interesting than he had thought.
    “Well,” he said, looking up, “that settles it. Those two are gonna be fired
today.”
    As the two auditors spoke, they saw Lay and Rich Kinder, Enron’s general counsel, walking toward Seidl’s office. Woytek and Beard gathered up their papers and stood to greet them. Everyone immediately followed Lay into the office and took a seat around the conference table.
    After some chitchat, Lay opened things up. “Well, we know why we’re here. So, Lou, why don’t you go ahead?”
    Borget handed out copies of the memo with the attached bank records. “As everyone’s aware,” he began, “questions have been raised about some of the trading operation’s financial transactions. We want to go through them so that you know why these were done. I think everyone will be very satisfied with what they hear.”
    Borget and Mastroeni took turns laying out the story. Because of their huge profits in 1986, they explained, company managers had asked them to find a way to shift income into 1987, the current year; that way, Enron would have a jump on hitting its profit projections.
    “Now, we were told to get that done using whatever legitimate business practice we could,” Borget said, moving his hands as he spoke. “So we set up a system that’s used by lots of other trading companies.”
    The idea was to conduct twinned trades that canceled each other out, known as a “book-out” or a “net-out.” So, Mastroeni explained, they tracked down three trading companies—Isla Petroleum, Southwest Oil & Commodities, and Petropol Energy—that wanted to boost their 1986 earnings. Then, that December, Mastroeni and Borget entered into trades that gave profits to the competitors and losses to Enron. The plan was to reverse the trades in 1987, with Enron gaining the profits and the three others getting the losses. All the parties would walk away even and with exactly the resultsthey wanted. The Eastern Savings account had been opened as a precaution, Mastroeni explained, to hold the money until the trades were completed. But since it was in the company’s name, Mastroeni said, he had transferred the money to personal accounts, ready to be returned to Enron once the 1987 trades were conducted.
    “How many other transactions have you guys done off the books?” Woytek asked.
    “This is it,” Mastroeni replied.
    As the traders’ words tumbled out, Woytek breathed deeply.
This is the stupidest