MONTAGE blind them. They directed Enron’s traders to branch out into the buying and selling OPEN BOOK of wholesale electricity. Diversification into water utilities and trading broadband capacity soon followed. Skilling, who rose “A Liar’s Biography” to serve as Lay’s number two, exhorted his subordinates to exploit Securities and Ex- change Commission (SEC) and tax rules, An art forger’s success has less to do with “his prowess as a visual artist than with his squeezing every possible advantage from use and misuse of history.” So writes ’91 in “A Liar’s Biography,” the in- the deals he struck at a furious pace. But troduction to his new work, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Enron’s skill as middleman in the natural- Master Forger Han van Meegeren (Harcourt, $26). More from the astonishing tale: gas trade simply failed to translate to other realms. Skilling’s investment gam- t the end of World War II, Hitler and Nazism that, when the occupa- bles didn’t provide adequate cash to fund A shortly after the liberation of tion came, would provide him entrée to the commodity-trading operations, and by , the Dutch govern- the highest level of Dutch collaborators. 1997, profits were declining. ment threw wealthy artist Han van Art fraud, like other Rather than rethink and retrench, Lay Meegeren into jail as a Nazi collabora- fields of artistic en- and Skilling unleashed their chief financial tor, charging that he had sold a priceless deavor, has its own o∞cer, Andrew Fastow, to sell overvalued Vermeer to Hermann Goering during traditions, masters, and underperforming assets to o≠-the-bal- the German occupation. In a spectacu- and lineages. When ance-sheet partnerships, some of which lar turn of events, Van Meegeren soon Van Meegeren en- Fastow himself controlled in a blatant broke down and confessed that he him- tered the world of conflict of interest approved by a somno- self had painted Goering’s Vermeer.The forgery, he joined a lent board of directors. The plan, such as it great masterpiece was a phony. preexisting culture of was, involved “managing” the company’s While he was at it,Van Meegeren also illicit commerce that reported earnings, minimizing its reported admitted to forging several other pic- had thrived in Europe debt, and preserving its pumped-up credit tures, including Vermeer’s famed Supper and America for years rating and stock price. It all worked for a at Emmaus, the pride of ’s while—the deception part, anyway— Boijmans Museum, a painting once An early fake: transforming Lay and Skilling into heroes hailed by the prominent art historian The Lace Maker, a forgery in the of the business press and heroically com- Abraham Bredius not merely as a mas- style of Vermeer, pensated icons of a supercharged, digital- terpiece, but indeed “the masterpiece of ca. 1926. Above, ized economy, circa 2000. of .” When the Han van Meegeren, 1945 You remember the rest. In 2001, Arthur news got out, it made headlines around Andersen, Enron’s auditor-turned-en- the world, and the forger became an in- abler, suddenly “discovered” accounting stant folk hero. In widely reported inter- irregularities related to the o≠-balance- views at the time,Van Meegeren claimed sheet partnerships. Massive charges to be a misunderstood genius who had against earnings and write-downs of turned to forgery only late in life, seek- shareholders’ equity ensued. Its trading ing revenge on the critics who had partners quickly losing faith, Enron col- scorned him early in his artistic career. lapsed into bankruptcy in what Skilling An ancient grievance redeemed; a described as an energy-industry version of wrong put right. It was a wildly appealing a “run on the bank.” Before they shut o≠ tale back in 1945, and indeed it remains the lights, he and Lay personally cashed in quite seductive today. In the Nether- more than $200 million from sales of lands…the story of the wily Dutchman and would continue to thrive through- Enron shares and exercised stock options. who swindled Hermann Goering contin- out the first half of the twentieth cen-

It took the Justice Department more ues to raise a smile. tury, a time when the market for old FROM THE BOOK than three years to sort out the mess and But the forger had one more trick up masters was booming….The picture start the indictment process, critically his sleeve: his version of events turns swindles with which Van Meegeren was aided by Fastow, who turned state’s evi- out to have been extravagantly untrue. involved during the 1920s were remark- dence. The sort-of-repentant ex-financial …Van Meegeren worked for decades able both for their financial scale and for whiz admitted he had distorted Enron’s with a ring of shady art dealers promoting the numbers and types of people in- earnings and enriched himself at the ex- fake old masters, some of which ended up volved.…[H]e knew precisely how to pense of shareholders. Five major banks in the possession of such prominent col- seize on the zeitgeist and turn it to his that allegedly had colluded with Enron lectors as and Baron own ends; to match what people agreed to pay billions to settle civil suits. . All the while, Van wanted to hear with what he wanted Arthur Andersen, targeted by prosecutors Meegeren cultivated a fascination with them to believe. for obstruction of justice, closed its doors.

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