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Enron has become a pseudonym for corporate corruption. Alex Gibney’s documentary based on Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind’s book delves into the personalities that created a perfect breeding ground for corruption.

Ken Lay, the top man at Enron, had been a risk taker from the start. This isn’t inherently bad, but when oil traders were virtually gambling away tens of million of dollars of the company’s money and then hid the fact from investors, there’s a major problem. Lay later hired Jeffery Skilling, who was the architect of Enron’s rise and fall.

The major occurrence that allowed Enron to mask their fraud was being allowed to use an accounting method called market-to-market where long-term, approximated profits could be recorded on the books as real profits. So started a culture at the company where making a deal was more important than it actually succeeding.

However, when ill-fated deals were losing the company almost everything, Skilling brings in Andy Fastow, who devised ways to put off the company’s debt into fake investment firms and then got almost every major bank in the world to invest in these sham companies — virtually giving Enron free loans. Later the company would go onto make billions of dollars exploiting the deregulation of the California energy market, creating rolling blackouts so they could arbitrarily manipulate prices. The recorded phone messages from traders during the California energy crisis are chilling examples of the amount of greed that infested the company at every level.

But the film is more than a collection of facts about what happened. It looks into the personalities of the men that let it happen. Skilling had a brilliant business mind, but was too cocky about his brilliance. The film shows a classic tale of hubris. Skilling was brought under by the pressure of his own promise and drive to always exceed what was expected of him. The film shows him as a person who desperately tried to shed the stigma of being a “nerd” by using his excessive monetary success as a platform to prove he was a true man. He was the one who ran notoriously dangerous sporting excursions for the top execs like dirt-biking racing.

Lay, on the other hand, seems like the typical hands-off leader, who knows that illegal or at least unethical things are happening in his business and just doesn’t want to know about them as long as the money keeps rolling in.

The film brings together a nice collection of experts, reporters and former Enron employees including Sherron Watkins, the executive who blew the whistle on the whole mess. To me, she is an American hero. The film also extends out and discusses how Enron could get away with such a fraud. The reasons extend to the banks and the U.S. government. It’s amazing that George W. Bush says he didn’t really know Ken Lay when he did a personal greeting for Lay as a special going-away gift for an out-going exec. It’s funny how so many politicians are always found in bed with the most evil men on the planet and then say they never met them. Do they think we’re all naïve? I’m digressing, but it’s part of what the film argues.

The arrogance of the smartest guys in the room is what gets them in the end. If you assume you’re smarter than everyone, you start to get lazy and that’s when you get caught with your pants down. What did these jerks think when they created fake deals with people named. M. Yass. Slide that “y” over with the “m” and you’ll get what I mean. For all those innocent people who lost their jobs and their retirement money, sometimes evil comes in an expensive suit not in a bloody turban like they would want us to believe. We have homegrown terrorists indeed.