Sherron Watkins: The Party Crasher

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The independence streak came from her mother. Harrington, also a deer hunter and flayer, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin magna cum laude with dual degrees in education and accounting. She taught high school business and authored sample problems for McGraw-Hill textbooks on the side. When Watkins was 14, her parents divorced. While they weren't the first Tomball couple to split up, it was a move radical enough that their church had refused communion to another divorce. But Harrington was hardly fazed. "I am going up there and kneeling, and I dare them not to give me communion," she told Watkins at the time. The minister did not pass her by.

After the divorce, money grew tight. Her mother stopped buying ice cream and began limiting the kids to one pair of shoes each. At 16, Watkins started working the register at her uncle's market and helped put herself through the University of Texas at Austin, where, taking her mother's advice, she earned a degree in accounting. The older she got, the more claustrophobic Tomball seemed. "I had the feeling that the world was happening elsewhere," says Watkins.

She took an accounting job at Arthur Andersen and, after a stint in the Houston office, put in for a transfer to New York City. There she developed a taste for summers in the Hamptons, playground to Manhattan's elite, and winters swimming with stingrays in the Caribbean. Before long, she sounded like any other perpetually irritated New Yorker, haranguing cabdrivers who took the long way home to her small Upper East Side apartment. "New York kind of toughens you up for people doing the right thing," she says. "It almost makes you call bulls___ faster."

Such impudence, while a virtue in New York, was less appreciated when she returned to Houston in 1993 to take a job with Enron. Her mother noted the new attitude. And while Watkins rose quickly through the ranks and was thought of as whip smart, she earned an equally well-deserved reputation for lack of tact. Poised and pleasant with clients, Watkins often barreled right through her colleagues. They nicknamed her the "Buzz Saw." One boss pulled her aside and said, "Sherron, you kind of cut people off at the jugular. There they are bleeding at the neck, and then you decide it was rude, but it's too late, you can't stop the blood flow."

By the time Watkins arrived, Enron was fast shedding its image as a staid natural-gas-pipeline company. Trading chief Jeffrey Skilling and his financial whiz, Andrew Fastow, wanted to build a nimble, "asset-light" firm that could exploit deregulating markets for energy, water, weather derivatives, broadband capacity and anything else that could be turned into a commodity. The strategy spawned explosive growth. By 2000, Enron was the seventh largest company in America. The '90s were fat times for Enron, and the corporate culture oozed in excess. The company rented ski condos in Beaver Creek, Colo., and stocked each with a personal chef. Christmas parties were multimillion-dollar, black-tie affairs with ice sculptures.