Enron and my daddy

My sister called me Friday night and told me to go see the documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room. “It reminded me a lot of Daddy” she said. Two days later my friend Emily called and asked me if I wanted to go to the theater and see Enron. Truth is if she hadn’t asked me I never would have gone to see it. Truth is my sister was right, it reminded me a lot of my dad.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room is about the men (and they were all men) that built and created the downfall of one of the United States largest firms. They cheated their stock investors and manipulated stock prices.

My father was a stockbroker from when I was six years old until I was fifteen. He first started as a salesmen for Dublin Securities and worked his way up until he became a vice-president. When the Federal Securities and Exchange company came in and effectively shut down Dublin Securities my father opened up a new company called Mid-West Investments which was Dublin Securities but under a different name and in a different location.

Some similarities between the movie and my daddy.

Intelligence and Ego: Like the film my father and his colleagues were very intelligent, the smartest men I have ever met. They also had the ego to boot. I remember asking my dad if his boss the president and owner of the company Red Eyerman would end up going to jail. My father responded “No honey, he is too smart to ever go to prison”.

Trips and Risk: In the movie they showed clips of dangerous trips the executives would take. They would show the high-risk activities the executives would engage in while traveling. It was the same with Dublin Securities. My dad and his colleagues would often make weekend trips to Las Vegas and gamble hundreds of thousands of dollars, and do crazy things like go sky diving. Up and coming stock brokers would compete with each other to be invited on these trips. Sometimes the company would offer competitions that if you sold the most stock you could go on a paid trip with the VP’s. My dad, would sometimes take us on these trips. My family went everywhere on these trips from Lake Tahoe to Rome.

Addictions: The film mostly addressed the stripper obsession of one of the executives. At Dublin Securities the obsession wasn’t just strippers and prostitutes but cocaine too.

Suicide: As the securities exchange committee came in on Enron one of their executives committed suicide by gun shot to the head. The exact same scenario happened at Dublin Securities. I went to the funeral of my dad’s colleague and friend who had committed suicide by gun shot after the securities exchange investigation had begun.