Wall Street Crime And Punishment: Bernard Ebbers And WorldCom's Seriously Wrong Numbers

Does crime pay?

Wall Street Crime and Punishment is a weekly series by Benzinga's Phil Hall chronicling the bankers, brokers and financial ne’er-do-wells whose ambition and greed take them in the wrong direction.

Among the mightiest of the high-profile corporate executives that dominated the headlines in the 1990s and early 2000s, Bernard Ebbers physically stood out from his peers — the 6-foot-4 head of WorldCom was dubbed the “telecom cowboy” thanks to his sartorial preference for jeans, cowboy boots and a 10-gallon hat.

Ebbers also stood out from his peers for tightly holding on to Luddite practices as the digital age dawned. He famously refused to communicate with his workforce via email. Even worse, he stood out thanks to a prickly personality that quickly seethed when confronted with unpleasant news. A 2002 profile in The Economist defined him as “parochial, stubborn, preoccupied with penny-pinching … a difficult man to work for.”

But ultimately, Ebbers stood out for being at the center of what was (at the time) the largest accounting fraud in U.S. history, which was followed by the harshest prison sentence ever imposed on a corporate executive for financial crimes.

A Man In Search Of Himself: Bernard John Ebbers was born Aug. 27, 1941, in Edmonton, Alberta, the second of five children. His father John was a traveling salesman and his peripatetic profession brought the family down from Canada into California, where he jettisoned his sales work and became an auto mechanic. The family later relocated to Gallup, New Mexico, where Ebbers’ parents became teachers on the Navajo Nation Indian reservation.

The Ebbers clan was back in Canada when Ebbers was a teenager and Bernie (as he was commonly known) came into adulthood unable to determine a course for his life. He attended Canada’s University of Alberta and Michigan’s Calvin College before accepting a basketball scholarship to Mississippi College. But he was the victim of a robbery prior to his senior year that left him seriously injured and switched his attention from playing to coaching the junior varsity team.

Ebbers graduated in 1967 majoring in physical education and minoring in secondary education. He supported himself during his college years by taking on a variety of odd jobs including a bouncer and milk delivery driver. He married his college sweetheart, Linda Pigott, after graduating and landed work teaching science to middle-school students while coaching high school basketball.

But Ebbers didn’t stay very long in the school system. When his wife received a job offer as a teacher in another Mississippi town, the couple relocated and he found work managing a garment factory warehouse. By 1974, he tired of working for others and responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking a buyer for a motel in Columbia, Mississippi.

Ebbers’ approach to running a hospitality establishment sometimes bordered on the eccentric. He would distribute bathroom towels at the front desk and require guests to return them to avoid being charged for taking them. Nonetheless, he found a niche in hospitality management and by the early 1980s he owned and operated eight motels within Mississippi and Texas; he also picked up a car dealership that also proved profitable.

Calling Out Around The World: Ebbers might have remained in the Mississippi hospitality industry had it not been for the 1982 breakup of AT&T Inc.'s T monopoly on the U.S. telephone system. This created a seismic shift in the telecommunications world by enabling other companies to begin reselling long-distance telephone services.

In 1983, Ebbers and three friends met at a diner in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to consider the feasibility of pursuing this newly opened opportunity. Ebbers theorized that having control of his long-distance calling services could benefit his motel business. In the days before mobile phones, guests in lodging establishments in need of long-distance calling would either have to feed handfuls of quarters into payphones or make calls from their rooms, which usually came with extra fees.

Ebbers and his pals decided to get into the telecommunications business with Long Distance Discount Services, which they established in 1985 with headquarters in Jackson, Mississippi, with Ebbers as CEO.

Carl J. Aycock, a Mississippi financial advisor who was among the early investors in LDDS, would later laugh at the unlikelihood of Ebbers running a telecom company.

“The only experience Bernie had before operating a long-distance company was he used the phone,” Aycock quipped in a 1997 interview.

Maybe Ebbers did not possess an encyclopedic knowledge of telecommunications technology, but the good fortune he enjoyed in the motel business transitioned to this unlikely setting. Within four years of its launch, LDDS was being publicly traded.

Within 10 years of its opening, LDDS took on an almost Pac Man-style persona of gobbling up telecom firms in sight of the company, acquiring more than 60 different telecommunications company. By 1995, the company renamed itself LDDS WorldCom.

Many of the company’s acquisitions were on the small side, and the company was never considered a major player in the telecom industry until its $720 million acquisition of Advanced Telecommunications Corporation in 1992.

The unlikely acquisition came with Ebbers’ ability to outbid industry titans AT&T and Sprint Corporation, both considerably larger players in this field.

The one unfortunate development during this time was the end of Ebbers’ marriage in 1997. He remarried in 1999 to Kristie Webb.

In February 1998, Ebbers’ company launched its acquisition plans for CompuServe from H&R Block Inc HRB.

This transaction was followed by an astonishing spin of assets: LDDS sold the CompuServe Information Service portion of its acquisition to America Online, while retaining the CompuServe Network Services portion of the business. AOL simultaneously sold LDDS WorldCom its networking division, Advanced Network Services.

In September 1998, LDDS WorldCom sealed a $37 billion union with MCI Communications, which created the largest corporate merger in U.S. history. The combined entity became MCI WorldCom, and for Ebbers it seemed that the sky was the limit — except that Ebbers’ ability to soar in the corporate skies resulted in an Icarus-worthy predicament.

See Also: The full Wall Street Crime and Punishment series

A Little Out Of Touch: One year after the CompuServe and MCI deals, Ebbers’ company boasted an 80,000-person workforce, a market capitalization of roughly $185 billion and its shares were trading at a peak of nearly $62.

At the peak of the company’s success, Ebbers granted an interview to The New York Times aboard his 130-foot yacht, which he berthed in the resort town of Hilton Head, South Carolina. He claimed that the secret of his success was “not as complicated as people make it out to be,” adding that he surrounded himself with experts who advised him on which moves to make.

“I’m not an engineer by training,” he said. “I’m not an accountant by training. I’m the coach. I’m not the point guard who shoots the ball.”

But as the company grew larger, Ebbers penny-pinching behavior during his early motel management days became more extreme. WorldCom executives would later complain that Ebbers stopped providing free coffee within their offices and directed security guards fill the water coolers with tap water.

And for the head of a telecommunications company, Ebbers was curiously distrustful of cutting-edge tech developments. He refused to communicate via email and would not carry a pager or a cell phone. He would explain his actions internally by repeating “That’s the way we did it at LDDS,” and in a 1997 Business Week interview about this behavior he claimed that “when you come to the table with a (physical education) degree like I do, you don't know a lot about the technical stuff.”

While Ebbers’ arms-length distance from personal technology could have been attributed to a zany quirk, there was another problem that couldn’t be happily shrugged away. As the company expanded, operational problems began to permeate the multiple divisions. Ebbers would become impatient or worse when confronted with problems, to the point that he would angrily demand that he only wanted to be addressed with good news.

In retrospect, Ebbers’ refusal to acknowledge that his company was growing too fast and too large proved to be a fatal flaw, especially when the corporate culture began to manufacture good news in lieu of reporting problems. As a result, Ebbers’ XL-sized business empire was sustained by taking on massive amounts of debt and highly improper accounting.

Detour Off The Cliff: The first cracks in this corporate story began in October 1999 when MCI WorldCom — which had become the second-largest long-distance telephone company in the country — announced a $129 billion merger with Sprint, the third-largest telecom carrier. Within nine months of this announcement, the merger was canceled in the face of pressure from U.S. and European regulators who feared a telecom monopoly would be born from this union. MCI WorldCom walked away from the failure by renaming itself as WorldCom.

With the rise of the new millennium came the fall of the dot-com industry, and almost any company that had a tech-related aspect found itself taking a financial tumble. When Ebbers’ company tried to cut corners and save money, it turned into an act of self-immolation.

Worldcom’s network systems engineering division exhausted its annual capital expenditures budget by November 2000, with a senior manager ordering a halt to processing payments for network systems vendors and suppliers until the beginning of 2001.

The company’s chief technical officer, Fred Briggs, then ordered all of the labor associated with the capital projects in the network systems division to be booked as an expense rather than a capital project — and his directive was shared with other divisions in the company.

A WorldCom budget analyst named Kim Amigh in the company’s Richardson, Texas, office recognized the legal ramifications of intentionally mischaracterizing capital expenses and lodged a protest against the order. The directive was canceled and so was Amigh — three months after his action, Amigh was abruptly laid off from the company.

But Vice President of Internal Audit Cynthia Cooper learned of Amigh’s findings and picked up his trail. Her department began combing through WorldCom’s accounts and found $2 billion that the company claimed in its public filings was spent on capital expenditures during the first three quarters of 2001 — except that the funds were never authorized for that purpose and were clearly operating costs moved into the capital expenditure accounting as a way to make WorldCom look more profitable.

Cooper could not find anyone in the WorldCom leadership ranks to explain the $2 billion discrepancy. Most executives said it was a “prepaid capacity,” a meaningless term which they couldn’t define when pressed by Cooper.

And Cooper was not alone in her suspicions. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission could not fathom how WorldCom continued to claim robust profits during the dot-com period while its competitors were operating at a loss, and it sent forth a “Request for Information” to learn the secret of its success.

Adding to this chaos were Ebbers’ personal financial woes, which became exacerbated during to dot-com crisis by margin calls on his WorldCom shares, which were tanking as the economy plummeted into a recession.

To alleviate his monetary pain, Ebbers borrowed $50 million from WorldCom in September 2000 — and then borrowed again and again. By April 2002, Ebbers was $400 million in debt to WorldCom and the board of directors demanded his resignation, which he provided.

In June 2002, WorldCom acknowledged its earnings reports contained $3.9 billion in accounting misstatements, with the figure later adjusted to $11 billion. In July 2002, the company declared bankruptcy and was delisted from public trading. Also during that month, Ebbers was called before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services to explain what happened. He pleaded the Fifth Amendment.

Road’s End: The efforts to bring Ebbers to trial got off to a weird start when the State of Oklahoma jumped the gun with a 15-count indictment, only to drop its charges in favor of federal prosecution.

Ebbers was indicted in May 2004 on seven counts of filing false statements with securities regulators plus one count each of conspiracy and securities fraud. Ebbers agreed to testify on his behalf, which many observers later considered to be a major mistake because he came across as evasive and unconvincing when insisting WorldCom’s downfall was solely the fault of his subordinates and that he was ignorant about how his company worked.

“I know what I don’t know,” Ebbers said during his trial. “To this day, I don’t know technology, and I don’t know finance or accounting.”

Ebbers was found guilty on all counts and was sentenced to 25 years in prison, the longest sentence ever handed down in U.S. history for a financial fraud case against a corporate executive.

He remained free on bail while fighting to overturn the verdict, but the conviction was upheld in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in July 2006. Two months later, he drove himself in his luxury Mercedes-Benz to a low-security Louisiana prison to begin his sentence. Two years later, his wife Kristie successfully filed for divorce.

After 13 years behind bars, Ebbers was granted a compassionate release on Dec. 21, 2019, due to a deteriorating state of health that included macular degeneration that left him legally blind, anemia, a weakened heart condition and the beginnings of dementia. He returned to his home in Brookhaven, Mississippi, and passed away on Feb. 2, 2020.

In defining his rise to the top, Ebbers harkened back to his basketball days by insisting, “The coach's job is to get the best players and get them to play together.” But in explaining his fall from grace, Ebbers forgot that the core of coaching is accepting responsibility for the team’s performance and he blamed his “best players” for not being able to “play together” while absolving himself from their errors.

Said Ebbers when confronted with his ultimate failure as the corporate equivalent of a coach: “I didn't have anything to apologize for.”

Photo: Bernard Ebbers’ mug shot following his 2003 indictments in Oklahoma. Photo courtesy Oklahoma County Sheriff's Department.