SOULLESS — An Enron Story
Editorial Note…
This piece is written by Dorothy Lancaster McCoppin. Dorothy is the best lawyer I know, and happens to be my wife of some 51 years. This work is not fiction. It is a culmination of over 19 years of lived experience, as Dorothy toiled away deep inside the behemouth known as Enron, working for the interstate natural gas pipelines from August 1, 1986 to September 1, 2005 (see the Enron Timeline here). During these years of hard work, Dorothy rose from a new attorney for Transwestern Pipeline Company (TW) to Vice President and General Counsel for Florida Gas Transmission Company (FGT), in between, working for Northern Natural Gas Company (NNG) and a number of other joint venture pipelines. For years, I have encouraged Dorothy to put her Enron experiences on paper, and, at the ripe young age of 75 she has finally agreed to finish the work she started back in the 1990s. What you will see is a first hand account of how an innovative corporation with a bright future gradually succumbed to a soulless culture of corruption. As editor, I have encouraged Dorothy to be candid about her Enron experiences but not name names, except for the publicly known players in the drama. (Enron waived its attorney-client privilege during the course of the Enron bankruptcy, in light of the numerous federal, Congressional, and various state attorney generals’ investigations, FYI.) So, sit back and enjoy a truly amazing story!
— John T. McCoppin III, Editor, McCuration.com
Chapter One — In The Beginning
On Auugust 1, 1986, I went to work for Enron Corp., newly renamed from HNG/InterNorth (following the 1985 acquisition of Houston Natural Gas Corp. by InterNorth Inc.). I was initially assigned to TW and FGT but was instructed first to expeditiously draft and file an abandonment application for TW, relating to a number of compressor units. In the world of interstate natural gas pipelines, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) regulated all rates and services, and had to approve the installation of and removal/abandonment of facilities, under the authority granted to it under the Natural Gas Act of 1938 (NGA). On my first day on the job, while culling through a number of files to complete a chart to be filed with the application (showing a description of the facilities to be abandoned, under what authority they were installed, and their location), I discovered a number of discrepancies — facilities authorized at one location were no longer at that locaation but had been moved, apparently without any FERC authority. I searched for more filings but found none. When I called the VP of TW operations to ask how he could have moved them, he proceeded to explain, from an engineering standpoint (and completely misunderstanding my question), that these units were “skid-mounted” and were easy to relocate! I then had to inform my boss, TW’s general counsel, Cheryl Foley, that it appeared TW had violated the NGA, the civil penalties for which, at that time, were $500 per day of the period of violation. Since the units had been relocated (some of them several times) over a period of years, the total penalties could be well over $1 million. By the end of the third day at Enron, I was in my third assigned office ((i) in a hallway in the Legal Dept. in the HNG Bldg. at 1200 Travis St., in Houston, (ii) the Legal Dept. library in HNG Bldg., and (iii) an office on the 47th floor in the newly opening Enron Bldg., at 1400 Smith St.), with a third assigned phone number. I later wondered if I should have seen my first few days at Enron as a precursor of what was to come…