when people realized how much they had profited,

and how completely artificial

the appearance of this company had been.

News of shredding at Enron raised more questions.

What answers were lost in the torn documents?

20,000 employees had lost their jobs.

$2 billion in pensions and retirement funds had disappeared.

Was Enron the work of a few bad men

or the dark shadow of the American dream?

Lay comes to the story of Enron from very humble roots.

My father was a Baptist minister and,

and he was ordained a Baptist minister

while I was very young probably two, three years old.

Ken Lay was a Baptist Preacher's son in a family

that had been poor all it's life

and he, throughout his life, worked several jobs as a kid

and clearly had in mind that things could be better...

and wanted things to be better.

He had a huge ambition to make wealth for himself.

He told a story later about sitting on a tractor,