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In today's episode, Ed takes us down memory lane to one of the biggest business fraud cases of the 20th century.

Enron was a company that was the product of two major gas businesses that merged together with a vision to change how the world viewed work culture and how to make money with wild result.

For much of much of the 90s, Enron was the future of corporate mentality and high morale among employees with tons of opportunity and even more prospects of striking it rich in the world of negotiating deals between natural gas sellers and buyers. As the years went by, Enron continuously dropped earnings reports that showed nothing but success, year over year growth, and a cash flow that would never end. As a result, Enron got rich, its executives got rich, investors got even richer, banks were happy to lend Enron money, and its employees were excited in what they sold.

There was one catch though...

...No one knew exactly how Enron was making any money! And that was done by design.

As you'll see in this episode, Enron's CEO Ken Lay, and his two conspirators Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow, quickly turned an honest company of limited (but honest and stable) growth to a company on a meteoric trajectory unlike anything else in American history. However, it was done by bending the rules, flagrant fraud, hiding figures, and implicating CPA firms in piles of shredded documents.

All of us have made some financial blunders in our time, but few in humanity have successfully railroaded a billion dollar publicly traded company into the ground quick like Lay, Skilling, and Fastow did. In a few short months in 2001, These three men went from millionaires to Federally convicted felons. We may be stressing over a missed credit car payment, but at least we didn't cost the life savings, retirements, and careers of over 100,000 men and women who were oblivious to all the craziness that was taking place on the 50th floor of Enron's corporate headquarters in Houston, Texas.

For pictures and show notes, check out The Day's Dumpster Fire website

Some other episodes Kara and Ed have put together that follows a similar "corporate greed and fraud" theme where business leaders prioritized money over literally EVERYTHING ELSE:

Therac-25

Boston Molasses Flood

I Love the Smell of Lead

Thalidomide

Outro Music Credit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdNYSTbPuL0&list=PLfP6i5T0-DkKlAN_qDvZ3nJwsdKRmrxI_&index=

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

Check us out on the ol Instagrams!
https://www.instagram.com/thedaysdumpsterfire/

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Ed is back for another "recent" historical dumpster fire in which a chemical that manufactures a chemical necessary for nylon production explodes in the largest non-WWII explosion in British history. They Nypro Flixborough chemical facility was built in the late 60's to be a sleek, state of the art facility that turned an extremely flammable substance called cyclohexane and turn it into caprolactam. Caprolactam is one of the key ingredients to making nylon which is a ubiquitous substance found everywhere in the modern era. Without nylon, everything from clothing to car parts to kitchen utensils and even surgical implants would be impossible.

On paper and in the minds of the workers and their families, the Flixborough facility was the wave of the future and offered a means of a modern livelihood... until one of the massive reaction tanks that turns 20 tons of cyclohexane into caprolactam develops a crack and could potentially result in an explosion that could destroy the entire complex.

In this case, the dumpster fire isn't the crack, or what managers refused to do that often results in dumpster fires, but it's what the managers DID do that caused so many problems... or one big one!

Take a listen and hop on over to the Day's Dumpster Fire website for show notes, sources, and pictures of what happened to this facility and how it affected an entire community in the English countryside.

Some other episodes that were mentioned in this episode that you might find interesting are:

Nuclear Power Plants

Victorian Bread Making

The Boston Molasses Flood

Byford Dolphin Incident

The Deepwater Horizon Incident

All of the above episodes have something common with the Flixborough Chemical Fire. Send Ed and Kara an email at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com when you notice the connection or what they all have in common? In other words, what often gets in the way of safety, sound practices, engineered solutions, and quotas in manufacturing that turns into a dumpster fire or contents for this podcast?

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

Check us out on the ol Instagrams!
https://www.instagram.com/thedaysdumpsterfire/

Send us Fan Mail

In today’s episode, Ed is back with a dumpster that can be traced back to the last decade instead of the last century. Kara’s monumental time travel into the Great Depression that changed America forever left off with the nation as the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world. While that’s pretty comforting to thin, about as an American, for those outside America, that wealth is a bull’s eye for those with the skills to “hack” into it.

Therefore, Ed is going to talk about the greatest bank heist in world history: the Bangladesh Bank Heist of 2016. This is where some very creative and skillful hackers put together a plan to rob the Bangladesh Bank and subsequent United States Federal Reserve of nearly $1billion! The heist itself only took a night to implement, but the plan dated back to the end of October 2014 and for over a year, these hackers hatched a plan so creative, detailed, and ambitious, any notion of failure was out the window. Even if failure did rear its ugly head, which happens often in this show, the hackers would still walk away with tens of millions of dollars.

In this episode, Ed will explain:

Part 1. What electronic banking is, how it’s different from banking in the 1800s, the pros and cons of electronic banking and how it changed the landscape of bank robbing.

Part 2. What happened on that fateful February 6th, 2016, day when office workers of the Bangladesh Bank arrived to work, only find that computers and one special printer weren’t working.

Part 3. The origins, identification, and the plan to steal nearly $1 billion in a single night. The elaborateness of this plan will blow you away!

Part 4. The execution of the plan on February 5, 2016, and how things went right from the beginning and how a misspelled word nearly brought the entire operation down.

Part 5. The outcome, who the hackers were, the nation state actors in play, and how does this affect your life.

Be sure to check The Day’s Dumpster Fire website of the complete catalog, detailed show notes, and Kara’s artwork.

Some other episodes you will like:

Episodes 41 & 42 – America’s Involvement in the Vietnam War

Episode 9 - Therac-25 Fire: a great episode that is computer themed much like this episode, but with the twist of what can happen when the computer can't keep up with the human user and people are getting zapped.

Hey before you go!

If have ideas for future episodes that you want Kara and Ed to look into, email them at thedaysdumpsterfire@gmail.com. They would love to hear from you!

You can also send them a text message by clicking on the link at the top.

Be sure to head on over to www.thedaysdumpsterfire.com for the ever growing library of historical dumpster fires.

Check us out on the ol Instagrams!
https://www.instagram.com/thedaysdumpsterfire/