If I were Ken Lay, worth tens or hundreds of millions, I'd have set a plan, in case I was convicted, to get out of the country in a way that would allow George Bush to just forget about me. I don't trust Bush, Lay's friend. I had feared that Bush would pardon Lay, but that would have been awkward. This little slight of hand would make it much easier. All Bush has to do is tell his little sock puppet, Gonzalez not to check it out closely. "Let the death pass."
If I were Ken Lay, I'd wait until a big news day, like today, with the MSM going nuts covering the firecrackers, trumped up to be missiles, that the Koreans unsuccessfully fired off.
If I were Ken Lay, I'd arrange to seem to have died. This is a very criminal, detestable man who ruined the lives of thousands. I would certainly expect that he has the capacity to arrange for someone to be killed, in a way that looks like a heart attack, or find a person willing to commit suicide, who looks enough like him, who might even get the same dental work, in exchange for a gift to his family.
Call me paranoid. If the body is quickly cremated or whisked away, if they don't do an extremely thorough autopsy, then my little walk into fantasyland will take on more meaning, more reallity.
Bottom line-- they better make sure that it's Lay, using whatever tests are necessary. And they better NOT allow cremation or removal of the body.
By the way, there's another idea buzzing around today-- that Lay might, in an effort to reduce his sentence, have been negotiating to spill the beans-- to testify so others could be prosecuted. And now Kenny's dead. Maybe he was killed. Paranoid? crazy. Well, it's already happened to another Enron exec.
Cliff Baxter was found shot dead in his car, shortly before he was supposed to provide evidence against others. Here's the CBS report on this. Lay was a dirty, crooked guy with loads of crooked connections, all the way up to Bush. It's reasonable to be suspicious about this death.
