As my bro’ said, “He got off easy.”
From the story here’s the quote I love:
Lay also defended his extravagant lifestyle, including a $200,000 yacht for wife Linda’s birthday party, despite $100 million in personal debt and saying “it was difficult to turn off that lifestyle like a spigot.”
That’s why poor people stay poor, I guess: They can’t turn off that spigot of a lifestyle.
UPDATE: Andrew Cohen thinks we’re being too hard on Kenny Boy.
What happened at Enron–what happened to the tens of thousands of people impacted by it– was truly awful. But it wasn’t just Lay, or Skilling for that matter, who are responsible. The failure at Enron was a system-wide failure of corporate America. It was a failure of lawyers and accountants and public-relations officials and market analysts. It was a failure of judges and lawmakers who watered down securities law. In short, it was the failure of a great many people, whose culpability is both known and unknown, but who, unlike Lay, will be able to spend another day, another week, another month, another year on this Earth. I don’t call that a case where Lay “got off easy. I call that yet another tragedy in a story that has been filled with them.
But judging from the 99 comments, few agree with him.