Skip to Content

The Arts Intel Report

A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler
A Cultural Compass
For the World Traveler

Bad Bets

On the list of best-known F.B.I. cases, which includes the 1932 Lindbergh-baby kidnapping and D. B. Cooper’s 1971 hijacking of a passenger plane, there’s an outlier: Enron. The only white-collar crime on that list, the energy giant’s implosion, in 2001, and the subsequent investigation into accounting fraud, shocked the world. Now the two journalists from The Wall Street Journal who broke the story, John Emshwiller and Rebecca Smith, are revisiting the subject for the inaugural season of Bad Bets,The Wall Street Journal’s podcast about big, bad businesses. Emshwiller and Smith will reveal how they came across one of the biggest corporate-fraud cases ever. Speaking with Enron insiders and whistleblowers, they recount how a company worth $60 billion went bankrupt. —Jacob Robbins

Enron C.E.O Ken Lay, 1993. Photo courtesy of Pam Francis/Getty Images.