“Bubba — Meet Kenny Boy”

It was a bad day for Enron bigwigs Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling who will forever leave behind their years of limos and enter a new life where if they travel they’ll be handcuffed and likely ride in a group on a bus with people who aren’t clad in the finest suits.

The jury’s verdict: guilty. The likely result: many long years behind bars in a place that won’t resemble a posh Houston country club.

Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, the chief executives who guided Enron through its spectacular rise and even more stunning fall, were found guilty today of fraud and conspiracy. They are among the most prominent corporate leaders to emerge from a wave of scandals that marked the get-rich-quick excesses and management failures of the 1990′s.

But Enron was special: a company that came crashing down, decimating investors, employees whose pensions and dreams of the future vanished overnight, and leaving in its path proof that California’s monster energy “shortage” prices of early 2001 were stage-managed by people connected with the Texas company. (The energy bill of yours truly tripled). MORE:

The eight women and four men on the jury reached the verdicts after a little more than five days of deliberations. Mr. Skilling was convicted of 18 counts of fraud and conspiracy and one count of insider trading. He was acquitted on nine counts of insider trading. Mr. Lay was found guilty on six counts of fraud and conspiracy and four counts of bank fraud.

The conspiracy and fraud convictions each carry a sentence of 5 to 10 years in prison. The insider trading charge against Mr. Skilling carries a maximum of 10 years.

Both men are expected to appeal. Judge Simeon T. Lake III, the judge in the case, set sentencing for Sept. 11. Until then, the two men are free on bail. If they lose their appeals, Mr. Skilling and Mr. Lay face potential sentences that experts believe will keep them in prison for the rest of their lives.

Mr. Lay frowned and tried to comfort his wife, Linda, who sat next to him in the front row and dabbed at tears with a tissue. Mr. Skilling, who had few family members in attendance, reacted with little emotion as the verdict was read, briefly searching the audience’s faces and later striding confidently alone out of the courtroom ahead of his lead lawyer, Daniel Petrocelli.

“Obviously, I’m disappointed,” Mr. Skilling said as he left the courthouse, “but that’s the way the system works.”

Even so, the system may be a bit easier for them than others people whose kids can’t put their houses up for millions in bail. The Boston Herald:

Do you get the feeling that Real People – you know, the kind of people who make up juries – are fed up to their eyeballs with corporate schemers like Enron’s Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling?

After a trial that took nearly four months, the federal jury in the Enron case took six days to find former chairman Lay and his hand-picked CEO Skilling guilty of multiple counts of conspiracy and fraud. For employees who lost their jobs, for shareholders who lost their savings, it is surely a bittersweet victory.

Lay and Skilling will get perhaps their last summer in the sun (they don’t get sentenced until Sept. 11). Such is the cushy world of white collar criminals.

And what did jurors find most damning? According to the Washington Post, it was Skilling and Lay themselves: executives and super-sellers who this time weren’t addressing brownie-point-seeking underlings or prospective customers wowwed by their aura of smooth success and confidence.. This time, the pitch didn’t work:

Jurors in the Enron trial made it clear that it would have been better for former executives Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling if they’d kept their mouths shut and stayed off the witness stand.

Speaking shortly after a federal judge read their verdict, jurors said Lay’s indignant outbursts while testifying in his own behalf made him seem “that he very much wanted to be in control — he commanded the courtroom,” said Wendy Vaughan, a Houston business owner.

“He was very focused, but he had a bit of a chip on his shoulder that made me question his character,” she said.

As for Skilling, who spent days explaining the tedious financial inner workings of the once high-flying energy company, the jurors couldn’t understand how he could know so much about that and not be aware of illegal business maneuvering, whether or not he was responsible for it personally.

“Skilling was supposed to be a hands-on individual,” said Freddy Delgado, an elementary school principal. “It’s hard to believe a hands-on individual wouldn’t know what was going on.”

“When he got on the stand and knew what a [technically complicated] chart was and how it worked, we knew he was involved,” Delgado said.

The “I didn’t know what was happening” defense didn’t work because jurors felt they got a glimpse of who these men really were. This time they couldn’t sell artificial snow to a guy living in an igloo in the North Pole.