Enron and the Good News

For all my cynicism, I had to laugh when I heard the good news today. Kenneth Lay and Jeffery Skilling were both found guilty of a total of 29 criminal counts. [MSNBC] I figured with all their money and expensive defense teams that they would walk. They haven't been sentenced yet, so I'm going to hold off on the big celebration until I'm sure they are going to prison for at least 25 years each.

This reminds me of an interesting question that a friend posed to me a while back. We were watching the Sopranos on DVD, and discussing corporate crime (since we were working on a project about it). He asked who I thought was a worse criminal, Tony Soprano or Ken Lay? I couldn't give a real answer at the time, but I think I'll give it a shot now.

Tony Soprano is a murderer, extortionist, and just generally not a good person. The thing about the mafia that he runs is that the only people he is really hurting are other criminals. If people weren't illegally gambling, he wouldn't have to break their legs for not paying their losses. If the unions weren't corrupt, they wouldn't have the phony construction contracts. If other hitmen didn't kill his men, he wouldn't have to put a price on their heads. While there are some things the Soprano family does to innocents (extort protection money from businesses, etc.) the meat and potatoes comes from other people who are just as crooked and criminal as them.

Kenneth Lay is the prime example of the corporate criminal. Just imagine how many people's lives were ruined by Enron. How many people lost their jobs, their pensions, their nest egg that they had spent years working hard to build up? These people were totally innocent, and they didn't make a single dime off Ken Lay's little scheme. All they did was work hard, and lose everything. On top of that, how much more damage was done to them when they lost a solid job and had no income until the next job? How many families were destroyed, or how many people committed suicide?

I can't make a decision on who is the worse criminal, but the comparison is hard to make. Does the fact that the Soprano family only commit crimes where "bad" people are the victims make them morally superior to Kenneth Lay whose victims were all innocent working people? I can't make that distinction. What I can say, is that they both deserve to put in prison for a long time. Hopefully, that is the case for Ken Lay, but not for Tony Soprano. It would totally kill the show if Tony was in jail.