After Hours Lou Pai's at his favorite Gentleman's club in
town in Houston, and he's already downed quite a few drinks. He's already spent several hours with
his favorite, let's call her, personal companion for the night. But he has a huge problem on his
hands. You guessed it, it’s because he’s still married! Normally the average cheater would think
it’s a big problem that they completely smell like whomever they’re doing the cheating with.
But this time, the smell isn’t the big issue.
Lou will just go to a gas station and rub some gasoline on himself before going home.
That was his go to move to cover any suspicious scents up by spilling gas on himself for the
umpteenth time. The big problem now is that he found out his lady friend is pregnant.
Lou Pai Lou Pai is a Chinese-American who made a
fortune from working with the now-defunct energy company Enron Energy Services. Pai came to the
United States when he was just two years old and his family settled in Maryland. As a child,
he was considered a math prodigy and he eventually earned a bachelor's and
a master's degree from the University of Maryland. Pai soon started working
at Enron and quickly rose through the ranks to become a high-ranking executive.
Enron In 1987, Lou Pai left the SEC
to go and work for Enron. At the time, Enron was a small regional energy supplier. Pai quickly rose
through the ranks at Enron and quickly became the CEO of a subsidiary called Enron Energy Services.
At the time Pai became the CEO of that subsidiary, Enron was experiencing extraordinary growth.
The company's business was booming, and things were going as well as they possibly could.
Pai was a generally introverted, and reclusive person. Very soon,
he became known as the invisible CEO because of his introverted personality. Despite being
introverted, he had a penchant for living a lavish lifestyle. And that lifestyle would
eventually come to symbolize not only Pai but the executive management of Enron in its totality.
In the end, Enron would face serious money problems,
and a fine tooth comb would be used to comb through all of Pai's excesses.
Enron Energy Services Enron Energy Services,
the subsidiary that Pai had control over, was Enron's retail unit. The business of the EES,
as it was called, was to sell gas and power directly to homes at a market price.
The company wanted to displace the pseudo-government entities that sold
power to people and wanted to offer that same energy at a reduced price directly
to customers. The company spent a lot of money on advertisements, as it needed to
convince people to pool their energy needs directly and purchase them from Enron.
However, the implementation of this strategy was a monumental disaster. Within just five years,
the company blew through $500 million in expenses without generating any significant income.
Despite the failure of Enron, Lou Pai was having the time of his life. As a CEO of the company,
he earned around $100 million in salary over five years. He also
received a lot of valuable Enron stock that was worth hundreds of millions.
Extracurriculars So what did Lou Pai do with all the
money he was making from the Enron sinking ship? Well, the gentleman spent it at gentlemen’s clubs,
as was appropriate for a gentleman. Despite being a reclusive man, Pai came alive at night.
He frequented his magical clubs as often as he could and was quite fascinated by
the dancers in them. He was so fascinated by these clubs that he visited them every night,
and often had meetings in them. After the meetings, Pai would even treat
the best-performing salesmen to special encounters with the dancers in the club.
Pai didn't just go to the clubs to watch dancers. He also made sure to spend lavishly on them. The
dancers often didn't believe that Pai, a reclusive and introverted man, was such a
powerful CEO. So he spent a lot of money on them to prove that he was indeed powerful and wealthy.
Pai sometimes even took these dancers to his high-rise offices to show off,
and the club parties would continue at Enron's offices late into the night.
However, Pai had a wife, and wives typically don’t like exotic dancers,
so Pai didn't want HIS wife to find out he was spending time learning how to dance in special
dance clubs. So he did what any reasonable and properly adjusted man would do; he went
to gas stations and poured a little gasoline on himself before going home. He reasoned that this
would get rid of the dancer's scent on him and that his wife wouldn't notice a thing.
Judging by how often he frequented these clubs, we have one thought and one bit of advice: 1. Pai’s
wife must’ve thought he was REALLY bad at putting gas in his car that had horrible gas mileage,
and 2. Pouring gas on yourself when potentially dealing with an angry woman isn’t a good idea.
Eventually, Pai’s adventures at these clubs blossomed into a full-on affair,
or magical romance, depending on your perspective, with a dancer named Melanie
Fewell. As luck would have it, Melanie Fewell was also married. And had two kids.
Things got messier for Pai when Miss Fewell got pregnant, and Mrs. Pai eventually found out about
her husband's extracurricular activities. This time he couldn't hide a baby bump with a gasoline
scent. Mrs. Pai wasted no time suing for divorce, and Pai found himself in a precarious situation.
And things were about to get even worse for Pai because why not. Around the same time,
Pai was dealing with his marital headaches, the higher-ups at Enron were discovering
Enron Energy Services massive failures and Pai's dancing expenses that were so
vast the reports ended up on the desk of Enron boss Kenneth Lay.
While Pai wasn't exactly fired from the company,
Enron advised him that things wouldn't go on so smoothly if he stayed on as CEO.
So Pai made what must have been the hardest decision in his life.
He left Enron. At the time it must have felt like he was making a huge mistake,
but time would prove that he'd made the best decision of his life.
Divorce The divorce was hard on Pai.
His wife had evidence that he'd cheated, and she was going to get every penny she could get in the
divorce settlement. The case was so expensive for Pai that he was forced to sell all of his Enron
stock to pay his divorce settlement. Despite being in such a difficult situation, Pai was
still quite lucky. At the time he was selling his Enron shares, they were around peak value.
Enron's all-time stock share price value was about $90, and Pai managed to sell
all of his stock for an average price of $72 apiece. At the end of the day,
he made around $250 million from selling his shares.
Pai paid his wife, Lanna, a lump sum of tens of millions of dollars. He also had to forfeit
his Houston mansion, a Houston condo, and a $3 million home in Hawaii as part of the settlement.
Left with no wife, no job, and a pregnant mistress, Lou Pai felt like there was only
one thing he could do; marry the dancer carrying his baby and move to Colorado.
By the time Pai was settling down in Colorado,
a few things were happening over with his former employer. Pai had left Enron in June of 2001,
but just two months later the entire company was in trouble. The share price
was tumbling down a hill, and in October Enron had lost two-thirds of its value.
At this point, the CEOs of Enron were all selling their shares while telling employees
that every little thing was going to be okay. By November of that year,
a single Enron share was worth just a dollar. By December of that year, the company had been
exposed as a huge multinational fraud, and was eventually filing for bankruptcy.
If Pai had just delayed selling his stocks for a few months,
he would have been left smelling like gasoline and dancers,
holding an empty bag of Enron shares, and could’ve possibly been facing criminal charges.
Pai Mountain When he got to Colorado, Pai bought
the Taylor Ranch for $23 million. The ranch was so big that for a short while, Pai was the second
largest landowner in Colorado. The ranch even had a mountain, and locals began calling it Mount Pai.
Pai approached the purchase of the property very carefully. He didn't buy the land at
once. Instead, he bought the entire ranch incrementally. He first purchased 23,800
acres of the southern third of the ranch for $6.9 million in cash. He also swapped real
estate worth $2.6 million in Texas for it. Two years later, he completed the purchase.
This means that Pai had started purchasing the land even before
his wife found out about his affair and he had to leave Enron.
Unfortunately for Pai, the property was a subject of intense controversy. Before Pai bought it,
it'd been used communally by a community of ranchers. These ranchers expected the
same unreserved access they'd had to the land, but Pai was having none of it. If the ranchers
had all been exotic dancers, he probably would’ve considered it. But they weren’t.
Instead of giving them access, Pai decided to beef up security. He fenced out the ranchers
better than every other previous owner, and employed people to patrol its perimeter.
Aside from that, he diligently pursued trespassing complaints
in the courts. But the issues surrounding the land couldn’t be easily disposed of.
Court The ranch had been part of a
larger portion of land ceded to the United States after the México-America war. Unfortunately,
the legal rights surrounding the land as a common area nearby ranch owners were never spelled out.
By 1960, the land was purchased by North Carolina lumber magnate Jack Taylor. The legal rights of
surrounding ranchers to use the land were in legal obscurity by the time Taylor bought it. However,
Taylor knew that the locals believed that they had some claim to the ranch.
Unfortunately for the villagers, Taylor didn't believe in those rights and he
tried to secure the ranch as his private domain. The efforts of Taylor to restrict
the locals from the land triggered a feud that went on for decades.
Taylor went to court several times, and the state and federal courts affirmed his right to secure
his property. However, the local government wasn't too enthusiastic to enforce the court's judgments.
In the end, it was the judgment of Taylor's neighbors that mattered the most. One night
in 1975, a bullet ripped through Taylor's roof and shattered his ankle. That was the straw that
broke the camel's back, and he left Colorado soon after. He never returned to the ranch and
ran operations there from North Carolina. The person who pulled the trigger was never caught.
In the 1980s, Jack Taylor breathed his last breath, and his child, Zachary Taylor- yes,
just like everyone’s favorite presiden-, permitted the locals use of the land. However,
Zachary only allowed limited access, and this negatively impacted the agrarian
industry in the county. Losing access to pastures forced many local ranchers
to either pack up or drastically reduce the number of their herds.
In due time, Lou Pai started buying up the land little by little. For a while,
Pai and Zachary Taylor had a legal dispute over the extent of logging that Zachary had allowed
on the ranch before selling. However, the dispute was soon settled and Pai had everything he wanted.
He had all of the ranch, his pregnant mistress, and a fortune in Enron stock sales in the bank.
Ulterior Motives But instead of just
settling into the ranch and keeping a low profile, Pai made some important moves. Zachary had hoped
that Pai would offer the villagers even more access to the land, but that wasn't to be.
When a policy consultant tried to talk to Pai and come up with a plan that would make
it easier for villagers to access the ranch, she was rebuffed. It appeared that Pai was
quite secretive about his plans for the ranch, and those plans didn't involve access for villagers.
Pai was so secretive that his team told the analyst not to even mention
Lou Pai when discussing plans for the ranch with them. It was clear that Pai
wanted to hide his involvement with the property.
Pai's first course of action was to resurvey the land and ask neighbors
to prove their boundaries — all at their own expense. In a few cases,
some of the neighbors lost areas of the ranch that they'd had access to for generations.
Pai also employed construction workers to build bigger fences that secured the ranch
completely. Some of these fences are alleged to have cut right into the property of other people.
Of course, the ranch management denied these claims and argued
that they were simply maintaining old fences.
Local Problem Before long,
the locals realized that Pai was an even worse owner than Jack Taylor. During Taylor's time,
they could always find different ways to get on the property. However, Pai's fences made
that practically impossible. There was no access, and that was the end of the story.
There were also rumors that Pai wanted to divert water from major streams, impound them,
and then sell them through a private water marketing company owned by Enron. He also
planned to purchase water and land rights from his neighbors to complete his domination of the area.
At the same time, the locals continually got into heated arguments with the ranch
hands Pai employed. These arguments ranged from accusations that hunting
activities were being stifled, to arguments over hiking rights.
While a lot of people accused Pai of being a bad neighbor,
they also admitted that he'd started the work of restoring the forests in
the ranch. Interestingly, Pai also showed some willingness to help the community.
It was said that he had a soft spot for young people and seniors and was
willing to help the community by donating to worthwhile programs. However, that was where
his generosity stopped. He was never willing to discuss community access to his property.
Despite selling his Enron stocks and becoming quite rich, Pai was also never willing to give
out raises- unless it was to exotic dancers. Anytime he gave a raise to an individual worker,
he told the worker to not inform colleagues, so they didn’t all start clamoring for more money.
All through Pai's ownership of the land, there were lawsuits and potential for
lawsuits from almost every angle. The case was constantly being dragged in front of the judge,
and Pai constantly had to defend his use of the land.
But the fights didn’t last forever.
Aftermath A year after leaving Enron,
Pai finally got tired of all the issues that came with owning the Taylor Ranch. He sold
the ranch for almost $60 million, which was more than double what he'd bought it for.
These days, Pai is still married to the dancer he divorced his wife for, and they have three
children. So to all of you who are positive that that one dancer you saw last night was really into
you, there’s a chance. You just have to be a millionaire, because apparently that helps.
Pai might have sold his Colorado ranch, but he still operates ranches in Texas
and Virginia. He's also very interested in Olympic dressage these days. And no,
he's never had to face any serious consequences for his role in the Enron debacle.
That's the sort of luck you get when you divorce your wife to marry a dancer you met at a club.
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