Skilling and Dent

[PK]

Jeffrey Skilling and Jim Dent draw strength from SMU brotherhood




12:46 PM CDT on Friday, May 19, 2006
By MICHAEL GRANBERRY / The Dallas Morning News


During his darkest moments, the collapse of his company and the scandal that followed, Jeffrey Skilling still had time to perform a good deed, one his critics might say is rich with irony.

Eight months ago, the former Enron CEO invited into his River Oaks mansion in Houston a college fraternity brother who had just been released from prison. Four months later, Mr. Skilling, 52, would begin his own trial in federal court in Houston.The man he helped was former Dallas sportswriter Jim Dent. A bestselling author convicted of a felony, Mr. Dent says that Mr. Skilling, whom he met when they were freshmen at Southern Methodist University, helped turn his life around.

Sent to prison in 2003 for repeated drunken-driving violations, Mr. Dent was given an 8-year sentence shortened by parole. When parole board members told him he needed a Texas address for reassignment – or face six more months of incarceration – Mr. Skilling was the first to volunteer, despite his own deep troubles.

"He was the first to raise his hand and say, 'He can be paroled to my house,' " says Mr. Dent, 53, who spent more than a decade covering the Dallas Cowboys for The Dallas Times Herald. He's also the author of five books, including The Junction Boys, which became a movie on ESPN.

"Here's a guy facing 28 federal counts. Here's the guy who had more at risk than anybody, and he's the one who stood up for me," Mr. Dent says. "That tells you a great deal about this person."

Mr. Skilling's attorney, Daniel Petrocelli, will not let his client discuss Mr. Dent in public. "He was just helping out a friend," Mr. Petrocelli says.

Mr. Dent says he and the defendant have never discussed the Enron case.

"We've gone out and taken long walks," Mr. Dent says. "And we've talked about some of the strain he's going through. We have been very, very careful not to discuss anything concerning the case or anything concerning what his fate might be. Because we don't want to bring me into it."

And yet, the night before the trial began, Mr. Dent walked from the guest quarters behind Mr. Skilling's 9,215-square-foot home, where he has stayed rent-free since Sept. 20, to give his buddy a pep talk.

" 'Walking into the courtroom, you're going to face a lot of fear,' " he says he told him. " 'It's going to rattle you, because all of a sudden, losing is not an option. Be brave and be strong and, hopefully, everything will work out OK.' ... If you've never been in a courtroom and you're facing serious time, it can drive you crazy."

It is of course a much different "crazy" than they reveled in at SMU, where they were headstrong kids as full of themselves as they were their own lofty ambitions.

Each made his way into Beta, a kind of Animal House refuge for alpha males. SMU's Beta Theta Pi chapter opened its doors in the fall of 1971 to a 40-member pledge class that numbered more than one CEO-to-be, an aspiring cardiovascular surgeon who's now nationally renowned and a Hunter Thompson-like sportswriter whose devotion to "Miller time" served as the prelude to a devastating addiction.


Connections

At this point, I feel the need for self-disclosure: Jim Dent is a friend of mine and has been since 1971, when I, too, was a student at SMU. My first cousin Jay Granberry was among the Brazos County prosecutors who sent Mr. Dent to prison.

My small-world connections end with Mr. Skilling, whom I know only as most people do – by reading about him. We were never introduced by Mr. Dent, or rather "Jimmy," the freshman I hired while serving as sports editor of the SMU Daily Campus as a sophomore.

Mr. Dent's bond with the Chicago-area kid known as "Rocky" Skilling was forged in his mysterious "other life," during wild nights and weekends on the roof of the Beta house.

The Betas knew how to party, but despite being among the zaniest Greeks on campus, they were equally proud of having the highest grade-point average of any such group at SMU.

"There were some serious Animal House party guys, and that's a fact, but it's not necessarily the truth," says fellow Beta Frank M. Roby, 52, the CEO of Holmes Murphy Texas, a firm of insurance brokers and consultants. "I was one of several who taught Sunday school as a student at SMU, and believe me, you couldn't do that if you were up late partying on Saturday night."

Mr. Skilling was so serious, Mr. Roby says, that he was given a second nickname of A.B., "All Business."

Whether they were Animal House wild or serious-minded students, "what we all had in common at the end of the day," Mr. Roby says, "was our fraternal relationship, which has always been a very strong bond."

So the problems facing Mr. Dent and Mr. Skilling represent a shared crisis for the pledge class as a whole.

"Dozens of our guys wrote hundreds of letters, and several Betas drove or flew down to visit Jim in prison," Mr. Roby says. "And more, I believe, would have gone, had they known they could have."

Mr. Roby says he has not discussed with Mr. Skilling why he took in Mr. Dent as a boarder, "but if hadn't been Jeff, it would have been somebody else in our pledge class," he says. "Somebody would have stepped up and made it happen."

Even so, a few members of Mr. Dent's circle thought Mr. Skilling's gesture a bit unusual.

Doug Marcella, 52, who sells commercial real estate in San Antonio, knew both men at SMU, where, as a freshman, he lived next door to Mr. Dent. He was not a Beta, but was friends with the woman who became Mr. Skilling's first bride and the mother of his children. (Mr. Skilling now lives with his second wife.)

Mr. Marcella says he's surprised that the guarded Mr. Skilling would take in a parolee, even one he's fond of.

"I thought it was a little bizarre," Mr. Marcella says. "I thought it was a little off-the-wall, but then you're dealing with two guys who are a little off-the-wall themselves."

He laughs and says, "I don't think I would have made that same gesture to Jim Dent. I was shocked when it happened. What I'm saying is, 'What was the upside for Skilling?' Everyone says Skilling is always looking out for himself, but this is the most unselfish act I can possibly think of."


The bond

"Jeff and I were always serious-minded about the things we were doing," Mr. Dent says. "But at the same time ... we both enjoyed the social life."

Numerous stories have described Mr. Skilling as having a Dent-like tendency to drink too much, or to let his anger flare out of control. Two years ago, a federal judge ordered Mr. Skilling to stop drinking and undergo alcohol treatment after a drunken scuffle outside a New York bar.

So, I ask my friend: Did Mr. Skilling take him in because he identifies with him? By throwing a life raft to a fraternity brother struggling with alcoholism and the aftereffects of prison life, was he trying, psychologically, to extend one to himself?

"I think probably the easiest or the best thing to say is that he identified with the pain and the struggle I was going through ... and felt compassion for me," Mr. Dent says. "Can we leave it at that?"

I remember Mr. Dent as a writer with investigative talent, so I feel compelled to ask about another irony. What about the thousands of innocent people who lost billions of dollars – in some cases, their life's savings – because of Enron's malfeasance? Where's the accountability for that? Isn't this precisely the sort of company Jim and I would have loved going after when we were muckraking together?

"You'll have to be the one to say that, in your own words," he says. "I cannot say that."


Different paths

After college, Mr. Dent covered the Cowboys for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and then took on the same assignment for the Dallas Times Herald in 1980. Aggressive reporter, rhythmic writer, he was the Wild Man from Hell when it came to after-hours carousing. I'm one of many who marvel at the fact that he's still alive. Stories about his exploits have fueled his image as the Robert Downey Jr. of Texas sportswriters.

So it's no surprise that he and Mr. Skilling have, as Mr. Dent says, "traveled seriously different paths."

But the Betas' band-of-brothers bond was never tighter than after Mr. Dent's arrest in Las Vegas, Nev., on June 12, 2003. Warrants in Texas turned up, and although he'd never injured himself or anyone else while driving drunk, Texas wanted him back. Extradited from Nevada to Brazos County, he didn't find out until 33 months later that he was the subject of voluminous e-mails on a loop known as "the Beta wire," which contained the link: "Dent in trouble."

"Here come all of these messages, 'We've got to do something, we've got to get him a lawyer. Somebody's got to go visit him. We've got to rally around this guy.' And the leader of the whole thing was Skilling," Mr. Dent says. "Reading through those, it brought me to tears."

Because the gesture was "so extraordinary," Mr. Dent says it's putting his recovery on the fast track, making him determined "not to screw up." He goes to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings once a week and says he has only himself to blame for the drinking that put him in prison. He says he's sorry for the hundreds of people he hurt but thankful to be alive to apologize.

While staying at his second of four prison units, he often had to defend himself against gang members less than half his age, who were amazed he had the nerve to fight back.

"I came to be known as 'the old white guy' who would fight," he says with a laugh.

It's a different fight now, of course, and, he says, much harder.

"I have stayed home a lot of nights," he says. "For Jeff's sake, I had to make damn sure I didn't get into trouble."

Eight months is long enough to impose on anybody, he says, so he's looking for his own place. He just received an advance for his soon-to-be-published sixth book, The Mighty Mites, about a legendary football team at a Fort Worth orphanage in the era of the Great Depression.

It's great to be writing again, he says, if only to be free of the fear.

"The scariest moment? When I walked into the penitentiary for the first time," he says. "I wasn't in the county jail anymore. I was in the big leagues. They started doing strip searches. They cut all my hair off. They sprayed me for bugs. They demoralized me and dehumanized me and made me feel like ... "

So, his prayer is that his ever-loyal "brother" will be spared the same humiliation, no matter what the rest of the world has concluded about him.

"I will always be indebted to him for what he did for me," Mr. Dent says. "He's a lot more than what the public has seen."


Staff Writer Bruce Nichols in Houston contributed to this report.


E-mail mgranberry@dallasnews.com