To many of their former colleagues, Mordaunt's and Glisan's closeness to Fastow's suspicious transactions makes things look even worse. "To many of us, this looks and smells like a bribe," said one Enron former employee. "'I' -- Fastow -- 'will give you money, you shut up.' Or put another way, 'Here is the payoff for helping me set up the structures that helped me rake in more than $30 million.'" The two weren't merely "Enron executives," the former employee says, "they were the treasurer and one of the top lawyers in the company. And both of them worked on LJM-related deals. That is what makes it sickening."

The accusations highlight the personal betrayal many Enron executives feel. After Mordaunt and Glisan were fired last November, their former colleagues spent much time trying to figure out how it all could have happened.

Mordaunt, according to a current Enron executive, "was very tight with Andy [Fastow]. Andy was responsible for making her managing director, and she would have done anything for him." Nonetheless, as a lawyer, Mordaunt should have known better, the executive said. "Given his connection with LJM, which was dicey at best and at worst probably illegal, I personally would have stayed far away from it. But you never know how Andy spun it to her."

After working as Fastow's top lawyer, Mordaunt later served as chief counsel for EBS, an Enron subsidiary set up specifically to handle another complex partnership, code-named Braveheart. In Braveheart, Enron sold 10 years' worth of future revenue from a broadband interactive television deal it was setting up with Blockbuster. Although the deal itself never went past the testing stage, Enron booked $110 million worth of revenue for selling off those future, never-to-be-realized earnings.

Glisan also played a key role in Fastow's division, a former Enron executive noted: "All the deals we did had to go through Glisan and get his approval because of the impact on funds flow." The former executive, like others affiliated with the firm, said that he once had a positive impression of Glisan and was surprised to learn that he had been an LJM investor.

To some current and former Enron executives, the transformation of respected managers like Mordaunt and Glisan represented a major shift in the company ethos. "In my opinion this all goes back to when Jeff Skilling took over and Enron ceased being an energy company and we became an earnings company," said one former executive, referring to Enron's metamorphosis into a company that focused more on highly complex financial-derivatives trading than on actual commodities.

In 1997, Skilling became the company's president and chief operating officer. Press accounts of Enron's rise traditionally gave him credit for Enron's increasing focus on complex financing schemes and risky leaps into such areas as bandwidth trading, an enterprise that ended up costing the company hundreds of millions of dollars.

Skilling was "all hype," the one-time executive says. "Everything he did was to hype the stock. And they had this need to create complex financial dealings to hide all the things going wrong.

"Once we became an earnings-focused company, that was the beginning of the end." The former executive said he's still unsure whether recently resigned CEO Lay knew everything that was going on. "But that doesn't excuse him. Captain Joe Hazelwood didn't know that the guy was going to run the Valdez into the reef. But he was Captain Hazelwood. It was his ship."

The company's business practices changed under Skilling, this former executive said. And so did the attitudes of managers like Mordaunt and Glisan -- and Lay, for that matter. Keeping the stock price up, at all costs, became the order of the day, even if that meant telling employees all was fine, when in fact the company's situation was rapidly deteriorating.

"[Lay] lied to us starting in August," said the former executive. "He lied to us." In August, Lay went before the company and announced that Skilling was resigning for personal reasons. In an all-employees meeting, Lay told a touching tale about why Skilling felt the need to leave the company.

Skilling, Lay said, had recently visited the Teesside Power Station, Enron's gas-fired power plant in northeast England, where an Aug. 8 explosion and fire had killed three Enron employees. "It shook him up so much he realized how much he had sacrificed with his own family," one executive recalled Lay saying. "And he wanted to spend more time with his kids." Lay then told the company more lies, according to the executive: that Enron had just enjoyed the best quarter in its history; that it was going to be more friendly to Wall Street; it was going to simplify its accounting practices; there were no other people other than Fastow involved in the shady partnerships.

"About two weeks later, the news came out about Ben Glisan and Kristina Mordaunt," recalled the executive. Soon afterward, the company was told that "we would have to restate our earnings for the past five years."

Then came the news that executives like Lay had been dumping their stock for years while simultaneously telling stockholders and employees that all was fine and the stock would soon bounce back. In hindsight, few Enron executives believe that Skilling's departure had anything to do with the Teesside Power Station tragedy.

"Lay got in front of the entire company and just lied," said the executive, who has lost his life savings. "I feel like a schmuck."

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