Wife of Enron's Ex-CFO Reports to Prison

HOUSTON - - Lea Fastow, the wife of former Enron Corp. Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow, recently began serving her one-year sentence in a downtown Houston federal lock-up for a misdemeanor tax charge.

Fastow, 42, a former assistant treasurer of the energy trading company, is the second former executive to go to prison since Enron collapsed in a welter of accusations of fraudulent bookkeeping in December 2001.

Her plea bargain resulted from prosecutors' ultimately successful efforts to persuade her husband to plead guilty and begin cooperating with the Enron investigation.

Fastow recently turned herslef into the federal detention center in downtown Houston, said Maria Douglas, a spokeswoman for the prison. Her husband was not present.

She had been given a deadline to turn herself in to the prison, just blocks from Enron's headquarters.

The Houston federal detention center is a considerably more restrictive prison than the one her lawyer, Mike DeGeurin, had requested. DeGeurin did not return a call seeking comment.

The stark 11-story building houses both male and female inmates of differing security classifications, so the rules for all inmates are stiffer.

The former assistant treasurer at Enron pleaded guilty on May 6 to filing a false income tax return, for which U.S. District Judge David Hittner gave her the maximum sentence of a year.

She was initially charged with six felony tax and conspiracy counts, but those were dropped by prosecutors as part of the plea bargain with the Fastows. She left the company long before it collapsed, and the charges stemmed from her actions after leaving.

The U.S. Justice Department's Enron Task Force had pressured the couple for more than a year, charging that Lea Fastow was complicit in her husband's schemes to reap millions for himself while hiding Enron's ballooning debt and manipulating its earnings.

She eventually admitted submitting an income tax return that did not include profits her family received from her husband's off-the-books partnerships.

The Fastows initially pleaded guilty on Jan. 14 in a coup for prosecutors eager to push their investigation higher up the corporate ladder. Less than a month later, prosecutors had indicted former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling with Andrew Fastow's assistance on 35 fraud and insider trading counts.

Last week, prosecutors got to the top of the ladder, indicting former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ken Lay with 11 counts of wire, bank and securities fraud and making false statements to banks. He was charged alongside Skilling.

Both men have pleaded not guilty and are free on bond awaiting trial.

Former Enron treasurer Ben Glisan, who reported to Andrew Fastow while at Enron, was the first former Enron executive to go to prison. Glisan pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge in September and was sentenced to five years in prison.