The case that the government took against WorldCom was directed at CEO Bernie Ebbers, saying that he knew of and orchestrated the fraud between 2000 and 2002. Ultimately, the lower level accountants and managers implicated in the case received nominal sentences for their cooperation; even Scott Sullivan, the CFO whom the judge describes as the “architect” of the fraud, got only five years for his invaluable testimony against his boss. Ebbers, who was 63 years old at the time, received a sentence of 25 years and ends up being incarcerated in a medium-security prison. Cooper spends a long time detailing WorldCom’s origins and impressive development under Ebbers. It’s clear that she liked him, even after the whistle was blown. I got the sense that she feels he got screwed over a bit, that the man behind the curtain, Sullivan, got off more lightly than he should have.
For her part, Cooper was named one of Time’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002, along with the other Whistleblowers, Coleen Rowley of the FBI and Sherron Watkins from Enron. Cooper resigned from MCI in 2004 and now travels, speaking to corporations, students and other groups about her experiences.
Extraordinary Circumstances is a very absorbing and entertaining book. Being a straightforward narrative, it’s a fairly quick read. Cooper does a decent job explaining all the accounting principles involved so that those parts -- which are necessary to explain the fraud -- kept my focus. I was less interested in the anecdotal bits about her home life: she's a good Southern girl, we get it already. What it comes down to, however, is that it took an enormous amount of courage and strength of character for Cooper to have taken on the corporate Goliath she did. “Extraordinary circumstances” indeed -- pretty extraordinary woman.
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