Meeting Andrew Fastow: Part 1

By Adam Turteltaub
adam.turteltaub@corporatecompliance.org

A couple of weeks ago the SCCE was exhibiting at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE) Asia-Pacific Conference in Singapore.

Andrew Fastow was one of the keynote speakers — the ACFE has a long tradition of inviting convicted fraudsters to speak.

I was very eager to hear him speak.  Having read Kurt Eichenwald’s fascinating book on Enron, Conspiracy of Fools, I had very strong opinions about Fastow and his complicity in the fraud there.  I was eager to hear what he had to say for himself.

I didn’t, though, expect to spend an hour making small talk with Fastow the afternoon before his speech.

As we stood around talking, the utter normality of him surprised me.  He was dressed like so many other attendees in khaki pants, a dress shirt and a blue blazer.  He talked about his kids, what he is doing now – helping law firms and hedge funds identify irregularities in accounting of companies they are considering making investments in – and fighting the jet lag from the long trip to Singapore.  It was all very normal chit chat.

About the only thing unusual about him is that he sometimes makes a little whistling noise when he says an “s”.

In sum, there was nothing about him that said in great big neon letters:  CFO of the Biggest Corporate Scandal in US History.  Convicted Felon.

It was a great reminder that there is no easy way to pick out someone who is doing something wrong.  The bad guys look a lot like the rest of us, and just because someone has a couple of kids, a spouse, and seems like everyone else, there’s no guarantee he really is.

In my next blog post, I’ll share what Andrew Fastow talked about in his keynote.

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