Jeff Skilling is Sherman McCoy.
Of all the photos of Jeff Skilling being escorted into the Houston federal courthouse in yesterday's papers, Tim Johnson's shot for Reuters, which appeared on the front page of yesterday's ROB, was the one that best capured the schadenfreude for me.
There's an episode in The Bonfire of the Vanities (I'm thinking of Tom Wolfe's outstanding 1987 novel of corporate hubris, not the soggy, misguided turkey of a movie) in which the central character, Sherman McCoy, is arrested and stripped of his Wall Street/Park Avenue trappings to expose the very mortal man behind the "Master of the Universe" veneer.
His expensive silk tie, his belt and even shoelaces are removed as he's carted off in handcuffs to the cop shop to be charged.
It's a masterful piece of storytelling. Wolfe chooses a simple, brilliant device to pour salt in McCoy's wound - the sytrofoam packing peanuts in the back of the cop cruiser that cling to his suit trousers add the final touch to this portrait of humiliation. If you've read the book, I'm sure you'll remember the scene.
In Tim Johnson's photo, Jeff Skilling doing his 'perp walk' is Sherman McCoy. Look at him: belt and tie gone, rumpled shirt, the half-defiant, half-pleading stare into the camera, even what looks like a gum wrapper adhering to the heel of his $200 shoe.
It's the punishment of Nemesis perfectly captured in that one shot.
As Rotman business school prof, Joseph d'Cruz put it in yesterday's Globe: "This is justice as theatre."
