A just verdict

Many Americans - particularly those who lost their jobs and savings - have wondered whether those multi-billion dollar corporate big shots, with their expensive big-time lawyers, would ever be made to pay for their white-collar crimes. These crooked captains of high-tech proudly took credit for the astounding growth of some of the most phenomenal companies in U.S. history, then shamefully tried to duck the blame for their firm's precipitous collapse.

One such person was Bernard Ebbers, former chief executive officer of WorldCom, which started out as a small Mississippi long-distance firm and quickly grew into one of the world's largest telecommunications conglomerates, valued at $180 billion in 1999.

Then, as the '90s tech bubble burst, came the fall. Stories began to surface of WorldCom mismanagement, incompetence, cooked books - and not long after, bankruptcy. Ebbers was charged with nine counts of accounting fraud, involving $11 billion, the largest such fraud in U.S. history. After eight days of deliberations, a jury convicted him on all nine counts.

Such verdicts are always appealed, but the chances that Ebbers' conviction will be overturned are slim. At age 63 and facing a sentence of up to 85 years, the once-high-flying billionaire almost certainly will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Although Scott Sullivan, WorldCom's former chief financial officer, copped a plea and testified against his ex-boss, and Ebbers took the stand to rebut him, The Wall Street Journal reports that jurors said they didn't believe either man. Instead, they relied on the common-sense notion that a hands-on CEO such as Ebbers obviously knew what was going on right under his nose.

Ebbers contended he didn't understand accounting, and left all that kind of work to Sullivan and other subordinates, but his "aw-shucks" defense, as court observers called it, simply didn't fly with the jury.

This must be scary news for other former tech kingpins awaiting trial, such as Ken Lay of Enron and Richard Scrushy of HealthSouth Corp., both of whom are reportedly planning the same kind of defense as Ebbers. They may be rethinking their defense strategies now.

In any event, despite all their billions and the best lawyers in the land, it looks as though there is a measure of justice for captains of tech who scam the public, rip off shareholders and plunge thousands of their unknowing employees into joblessness and sometimes destitution.