Extravagant, driven, daring, reckless--in many ways, Enron mirrors its hometown of Houston. Like oil-well gushers on the prairie, both rose from nowhere, the former to become a $100 billion Fortune 500 favorite and the latter the nation's fourth-largest city. Here, if you could dream it, you could make it happen. That's what made the collapse of the company so hard to believe. Last December, 5000 souls lost their jobs, not to mention their life savings and homes, as Enron's stock dropped from $90-plus a share to pennies. Then the unthinkable unfolded: Enron declared bankruptcy--the biggest in U.S. history. Hundreds of lawsuits followed, accusing the energy giant of off-the-books accounting, insider trading and bilking shareholders and employees. "Enron was a hall of mirrors inside a house of cards--reporting hundreds of millions of dollars of phony profits each year, while concealing billions of dollars of debt that should have been on its balance sheet," read one suit, filed by the board of regents of the University of California, one of many institutions to be affected nationwide. "Enron has turned into an enormous Ponzi scheme--the largest in history." Though the dream has dried up for the former energy firm, whose execs pleaded the fifth as paper shredders worked overtime, its most gorgeous employees have found that full disclosure is the way to go. They happily lost their shirts in what has come to be known as our pink-slip pictorial. "I've had a couple of tough breaks," said Carey Lorenzo, a former New York City sales rep, who echoed the sentiments of our other models. "What happened to Enron was a valley in my life, but Playboy is definitely a peak. I do believe in the adage 'What goes around, comes around,' and it's definitely my time to get a little bit back. If you surround yourself with goodness, it'll come. I'm going to ride this 15 minutes of fame and try to make it a million hours." The same boldness that drew Lorenzo and another nine of Enron's most lovely to Enron has led them to shed, not shred, for Playboy.
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Like Enron itself, Playboy's exploits in Houston received plenty of attention. Secret Service men surrounded the Playboy photographers, who were victims of bad timing, bringing a mass of electronic equipment to a hotel just as Vice President Dick Cheney was arriving for a dinner with Saudi Arabian crown prince Abdullah. Given his druthers, perhaps Cheney would have preferred meeting our energy industry representatives to eating dinner with foreign oil dignitaries. Our models certainly had no place they would rather be. "I'm afraid to go to sleep because I don't want to wake up and find out my dream is over," says Shari Daugherty, one of the self-dubbed "Hotties of Enron."
