Like Mr. Nguyen, Mr. Ng was well-positioned to dole out corporate secrets, prosecutors said.
Mr Drinkman and Mr Kalinin specialised in penetrating network security and hacking into corporate systems, prosecutors allege, while Mr Kotov specialised in trawling through the data looking for information worth stealing.
Yesterday at his trial on charges that he "looted" the Tyco corporate treasury, prosecutors played the video of Kozlowski's $2.1 million party/board meeting on the Italian isle of Sardinia, and despite the gaudy price tag, the affair looked dull more than anything else.
"This was a veritable playbook of corporate fraud," the prosecutor, Roslynn R. Mauskopf, said.
Now the judge — a former corporate attorney and prosecutor who had a reputation for being tough on sex offenders — is facing a firestorm of criticism, with many accusing him of giving preferential treatment to a rich, white defendant who was a star athlete.
Some lawyers worry that, in their current pursuit of corporate big fish, prosecutors might be tempted to abuse the plea-bargaining process to secure damaging false testimony from smaller fry.Far worse injustices occur daily within America's legal system.
Unlike many other corporate scandals, where prosecutors have indicted the company and allowed executives to walk away unscathed, there is little doubt that current or former Enron officials will be charged if crimes are discovered.
In many ways, it has resembled other criminal cases against high-ranking corporate executives, with prosecutors and defense lawyers sparring over whether arcane accounting procedures were used to deceive investors and banks about the company's finances.
Mr. DePaola, Mr. Melofchik, the site safety supervisor, and a third defendant, Mitchel Alvo, the director of abatement, ignored the removal of a 42-foot section of the standpipe as they rushed to finish the abatement work on time to protect the corporate bottom line, prosecutors argued.
Indeed, despite the conventional wisdom that juries cannot understand complex corporate fraud cases, prosecutors have not lost a significant case since the recent wave of fraud trials began with the conviction of the accounting firm of Arthur Andersen in 2002, prosecutors and defense lawyers say.
