> The good ole days when fraudulent execs still went to jail
Well, not one guy. Lou Pai cheated on his wife with stripper Melanie Fewell who was also married. He was known in the Enron offices to enjoy Houston area strip clubs. But in a first for him, he knocked Melanie up over the course of the affair. Pai's first wife and mother of his first two children Lana Lee learned about it and started divorce proceedings. To satisfy asset division as part of their divorce terms, Pai sold $250M worth of Enron stock just months before it crashed and Enron went bankrupt. Pai then married Fewell. Pai was briefly the largest(? maybe top two?) private land owners in Colorado, and his ranchland included Culebra Peak, one of CO's 14ers.
In 2008 he settled a civil suit alleging insider trading brought by the SEC. The settlement was $31.5 and does not include an admission of the SEC's claims. He was barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 5 years.
Lou landed on his feet. He and Melanie are still married. They and their daughter seem to be big figures in dressage, running Canaan Ranch and the Bred in the USA Syndicate, which seems to be a syndicate of 14 breeders. Maybe someone who knows horses can explain exactly how big a deal they are; they might not be much after all.
https://www.usef.org/us-equestrian-teams/athletes/natalie_pa...
Lou Pai is an American role model, I love that he used divorce as a tool as the breadwinner. It is advertised as a failure mode, societally, and doubly so for the person that accumulated assets. Helped me realize to take a second look at the system at the level lawyers operate at
SEC only went after him because the movie came out
I think our current commissioner was working at the SEC at that time, I wonder what he thinks of it
You gotta think that maybe he was playing chess, not checkers, when he conceived his daughter. The perfect way out.
He was having sex with strippers in the club's VIP, a feature that's often denied as existing, meeting more visually and sexually attractive, younger, more feminine women in that route, with a nice bankroll.
The utility of his prior lifestyle had diminished, he didn't need a dual income household and he certainly didn't want it.
He was bored of it, the university pipeline straight to running a corporate VC arm full of corporate climbers that want to prove how they fit in male dominated spaces with masculine behaviors. The representation of that was and is completely contrived - for any guy with options - and he went along with it because people told him to in the DC area, and that's who his peers were. Assortative mating that he realized was not serving him and he wasn't poor enough to need it.
I wouldn't say the conception was planned, he was just having fun with his favorite stripper, but pouring gas on himself at the gas station to mask her sent was.
Now, he retired his whole bloodline, after making a bloodline at all with his favorite stripper, giving her the dream of ponies, horses, and seemingly living happily ever after. I never followed up on his daughter being an adult now, but the privilege of pursuing dressage because of the father's successful indiscretions is fascinating.
I'll definitely aim to replicate, it looks far more appealing than upper middle class assortative mating does, with all the failure modes reappropriated as exception handling. I'll just avoid the first marriage, and refine the journey with trusts more effectively in such a wild wealth disparity and power dynamic, but also keep the divorce court ordered insider trading immunity in my back pocket.