An Enron employee's goal: 100 interviews

Charlie Prestwood, a former Enron employee, gushed when TheDeal.com’s Yvette Kantrow called him. “You’re my 97th interview!” he exclaimed. Prestwood wants to be interviewed 100 times by different media outlets so that he can tell the story of how his $1.3 million retirement nest egg went up in flames with Enron went down.

The beginning of the Enron trial is bringing out other former Enron workers who are more than happy to be interviewed in the media.

Executive Editor Kantrow writes: “For the media, that means making what is essentially the saga of corporate fraud newly meaningful to a public that at this late point in the scandal cycle has had its fill of accounting discrepancies, off-balance-sheet shenanigans and other business arcana. With no truly outlandish tales of executive greed to fall back on — no chichi shower curtains or urinating statues here — the media requires something else to serve as a symbol of the sure-to-be-dry legal proceedings in Houston. What it needed, it seems, is a victim. And it found a pretty gosh-darn perfect one in Charlie Prestwood.”

Read Kantrow’s entire column here.