Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [92]
He finished his lunch and walked out to his PGE work truck, on his way south to test some cables in Lake Oswego.
SECRETARY OF THE ARMY Thomas White could tell Tim Ramsey that building a house in Florida isn’t all that easy. The former chief of Enron Energy Systems has had his share of problems with the waterfront mansion he is constructing in Naples, Florida. The city’s building code prohibits walls higher than three feet. Gates and gateposts are limited to six feet. White wanted to build a six-foot-nine-inch wall with a ten-foot gate, but the city council reacted as if he were going to string a chain-link fence around his 15,145-square-foot mansion.
Council members complained about White’s “fortress mentality”—as if this were not the beach home of the secretary of the Army. They also told the architect hired by White to lobby the council that most houses in Old Naples have no gates, and nobody in the city has a fence as tall as the one White planned to build. How humiliating. Here the secretary of the Army is building a $5 million residence, only to be treated as an arriviste, lacking the aesthetic sensibility shared by residents of the elegant island city.
It got worse. Weeks later the secretary was subject to the most disrespectful questioning from a Los Angeles Times reporter, who insinuated White was building a house in Florida because the state’s bankruptcy laws will protect him from shareholders who would take him to court with claims against the millions he earned during his eleven years at Enron. “That is one cockamamie theory,” the angry secretary said. “I mean, really, people ought to get a life.”
White’s beachfront house in Naples wasn’t the only real estate deal that created problems for him in 2002. In March he ordered the pilot of the Defense Department jet on which he was traveling to stop in Aspen, Colorado, where Enron stars Ken Lay and Rebecca Mark have winter getaways. The purpose of the layover was to allow the secretary and his wife to sign the papers on a $6.5 million, three-story house they were buying there. Secretary and Mrs. White—and their son and daughter—also planned to squeeze in ten days on the ski slopes. After eleven years living with all the comfort an Enron executive is accustomed to, you could hardly expect Mr. and Mrs. White and the kids to scramble for open seating on a Southwest Airlines flight. Nor does the Army secretary spend all his time at tony vacation spots. The Vietnam veteran and West Point graduate actually works in Washington. Despite his fondness for slumming with the troops on run-down Army posts across the United States, he’s not exactly living in MOQ—married officers quarters. In June 2001 Secretary White purchased a $5.2 million Washington penthouse, just a place to hang his helmet when he’s in town.
Good thing Secretary White is not buying a home in California or Oregon, or he could find himself signing legal documents that have nothing to do with real estate. The attorneys general for both states are looking into the role he played in Enron schemes that caused rolling blackouts during the summer of 2001 and resulted in residents of California paying the highest electric bills in the state’s history. The schemes created an electricity shortage but not a money shortage. The money flowed like high-voltage electric current from the pockets of small-business owners and consumers to the bank accounts of Enron and its executives.
There were some “unintended consequences” of Enron’s “gaming” the California electricity market. Ask eighty-four-year-old Nate Annas, who had to stock up on battery-operated lamps and canisters of oxygen so he could continue breathing. The rolling blackouts shut off power to the ventilator in his room at the Sommerville Senior Living Center in San Jose. Annas has emphysema, and by May 2001 he had already been through one rolling blackout, with