Ignorant & Poor?

When Ken Lay shows up this week to testify before Congress, the disgraced former chairman of Enron should know how to handle a hostile crowd. Even his current employees, after all, are calling for his head. Just a few weeks ago, Enron employees tell TIME, the Houston-based energy-trading company brought in an outside consulting firm to conduct a series of focus groups with some of the remaining workers on how to reinvigorate the sagging firm. One of the first steps, six out of eight people indicated in one session, should be to get rid of Lay.

Before the company officially went bankrupt, Lay, who had earned admiration for his unpolished, affable manner, had lost his loyal fan base. In late October--a day after Enron acknowledged that the SEC had opened an investigation of its accounting practices--Lay tried his best to raise the spirits of his downtrodden workforce. At a company gathering caught on videotape, the son of a Missouri minister promised that there wouldn't be any layoffs and that Enron would rise again. For once, though, the rank and file weren't drinking Ken's Kool-Aid. As one disgruntled worker put it, in a statement that Lay chose to read aloud: "I would like to know if you are on crack. If so, that would explain a lot."

Not enough, surely, to satisfy members of Congress. An army of legislators, lawyers and federal agents is bearing down on Lay with the threat of both civil and criminal charges. They all want to know why he seemed to be touting Enron stock and simultaneously selling his own shares--while knowing that the firm he had turned from a staid pipeline operator into an innovative energy-trading giant was imploding. Investigators for plaintiff lawyers tell TIME they are looking into allegations that investment bankers helped top executives like Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling (who is also supposed to pay a visit to Capitol Hill this week) put so-called collars on their stock options so they would not lose money, no matter how low the stock sank.

Lay's dubious defense strategy was foreshadowed by his wife Linda in an ill-conceived appearance last week on NBC's Today show. She claimed that her husband was hoodwinked by nefarious underlings and that the proof of his innocence is that he and his family are now near bankruptcy. "If those people had come back to him and told him there was anything wrong, he would have stopped it and fixed it," Linda Lay declared. "There's nothing left. Everything we had mostly was in Enron stock."

When he appears before the Senate Commerce Committee, Lay is expected to argue, as his wife did, that he relied on the counsel of legal and financial experts, who told him there was nothing illicit or unethical about hiding billions of dollars of Enron's debts in off-balance sheet partnerships that ended up inflating the company's reported earnings. To prove his point--and show how much he believed in the company until the bitter end--the man who has collected some $200 million in compensation over the past three years will try to explain how he is now flat broke. An internal Enron probe released Saturday night blamed the company's demise on a wide range of executives and auditors but went easy on Lay.