All it takes is a little patience. F. Scott Yeager, a former Enron executive, got some good news from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, which ruled that it wouldn't revisit his case. So, he no longer has criminal charges related to financial fraud hanging over him. Yeager has been acquitted on all counts. This follows a June ruling by the Supreme Court, which tossed a previous 5th Circuit Court ruling that could have resulted in a new trial.

The ruling said, "Today, ... it is clear under our initial ... analysis the jury made a finding in acquitting Yeager that precludes prosecution on insider trading and money laundering." Samuel Buffone, who was one of Yeager's attorneys, stated that his client shouldn't have been indicted to begin with and didn't do anything wrong. It has taken them seven years to get to this point.

Yeager landed in hot water because he sold stock in Enron for more than $54 million before it began the plunge that would ultimately end with its bankruptcy in 2001. He faced 125 counts, was acquitted of five (four for wire fraud and one for conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud) and wound up with a hung jury for the remaining 120, which included insider trading and money laundering. He was later indicted again on 13 counts of insider trading and money laundering.

Oh, if I had never seen those obnoxious "Smiling Bob" commercials...

It's the weirdest thing; it's like we never grew out of those days when peddlers went from town to town selling one bogus potion or another. Somehow, despite regulations and laws, many of those fraudsters still manage to pull the wool over so many eyes and sell their products by the millions. Perhaps it's the promised hope that we just can't resist.

Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals is one such company, known for making and marketing Enzyte, the so-called "once a day natural male enhancement" -- whatever that means. From the commercials it can mean anything from self confidence to bigger appendages, I guess, but it's called a sexual enhancement.

Good news, though. The founder of Berkeley, Steve Warshak, joined the infamous WorldCom's Ebbers and Enron's Skilling with his own 25-year jail sentence on Wednesday. He was convicted earlier this year on 93 counts of conspiracy, fraud and money laundering.

10) The US has not yet requested extradition from Namibia of actor Wesley Snipes who is wanted on tax fraud charges. Snipes, 44, was indicted on eight counts of tax fraud and also of trying to cheat the government out of nearly $12 million in false refund claims and not filing returns for six years. If convicted of all the charges, he could face 16 years in prison. Snipes is not fleeing the US, but, rather, is, working on the set of a film, Gallowwalker, in the Namibian desert.

9) Borrowers get a break. The Federal Reserve kept the benchmark interest rate steady for a third consecutive time, saying the economy was likely to expand at a moderate pace, but still sees inflation risks. The central bank's policy-setting committee voted to keep the overnight federal funds rate target at 5.25%, the level it reached in June after 17 consecutive increases since mid-2004.

8) Sony's quarterly profits dropped 94%. Sony Corporation (ADR) (NYSE:SNE) is struggling with its profit after repeatedly recalling millions of laptop computer batteries because of a potential fire risk. The Japanese firm has also been hit by delays to its PlayStation 3, which will not now be released until next year -- missing the holiday shopping market. About 9.6 million of the lithium-ion batteries have been recalled.

7) Ford's results were the worst of the "big three." The nation's second biggest automaker said its loss widened to $5.8 billion in the third quarter, weighed down by the costs of its massive restructuring plan. Ford Motor Company (NYSE:F) officials also predicted things would get worse in the fourth quarter, as market share drops and Ford pays for further plant closures and restructuring costs.

When Enron's chief Ken Lay dropped dead of a heart attack many people had the initial reaction of feeling cheated. Here was the head of a company that had destroyed employee's retirement accounts, lost shareholders their money, and lied about everything they were doing throughout the whole process, and he seemed to have escaped proper judgement. Many were frustrated to not see him put behind bars for a long, long time.

Now some of the same people will be able to get what they were hoping for. Jeff Skilling, the former chief of Enron who was known for spinning the image of Enron's greatness, will spend 24 years behind bars.

Does that seem like enough? $60 billion worth of company vanished, thousands of employees with almost nothing to show for their life's work versus 24 years?

The sentences used to actually be less. Back in the Savings and Loans days sentences of 1 to 4 years were the norm, according to this article that looks at sentences of criminal CEO's then and now. But in the 2000s white collar crime comes with greater sentencing lengths. Timothy Rigas of Adelphia: 20 years, WordCom's Bernard Ebbers: 25 years, and Tyco's Mark Swartz: 8-25 years. At the very least people like Skilling no longer face a mere slap on the wrist.

That being said, CNN's related poll shows that people still think that sentencing for people like Tyco's chief are still not long enough.

Do you think Skilling's punishment is justice served, or that it was too lenient? Vote in our poll or jump into the discussion in the comments.

Today's funeral of Ken Lay puts to rest his physical presence. Where his soul will end up has been commented on many times and there does not seem to be any controversy. The fact that his family wanted to cremate his body (beating Satan to the punch or hiding the evidence?) is ironic in the sense that when he was alive his company (and my company too), crashed and burned from a financial height that I do not believe has been achieved before in such a short period of time.

The pain of his (and Fastow's, Skilling's and others) financially and morally corrupt adventures spread far and wide affecting a very broad swath of the nation and will be reviewed for decades in business schools, board rooms, Federal Commissions and more.

I crashed with the rest of the shareholders, workers, lenders and affiliated companies. To me the amazing thing is that in one day I made the best sell decision of my investing career and the worst buy. When Cisco Systems hit an all time high of $82 and was the highest "valued" company in the world at a capitalization of $450 billion, some idiot analyst prognosticated that it would be the first trillion dollar company. At the time Cisco was touting 50% annual growth for years out and my alarm bells began flashing. I decided it was time to abandon ship. I sold.

So what did I do with the money from the sale? I decided it would be a good idea to diversify more and moved the money from Internet/tech to energy. The sector was lagging at the time and I thought it might be ready for a rebound.

This afternoon's guilty verdicts in the Enron trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are emotionally cathartic. But I doubt these verdicts will prevent future Enrons.

Public outrage over Enron resulted in the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) legislation. While SOX is intended to make executives more accountable -- SOX was not the basis for their conviction. Instead, Lay and Skilling were convicted on conspiracy to commit securities fraud, among other charges.

Unlike Starr Jones, I'm not a lawyer and I certainly don't know the technicalities on which such a conviction would be based. According to AP, Lay's securities fraud conviction reflected juror's conviction that he "lied to employees, credit rating agencies and analysts with claims that Enron was healthy or that its books had been sanitized of problems when he knew otherwise."

But in simple terms, Lay and Skilling were convicted for inventing financial results that were at odds with reality and then sharing those false results with Enron's constituents. My interpretation is that their motivation was to meet, if not exceed, Wall Street's earnings expectations so they could get Enron stock to keep rising.

Every CEO of a publicly traded company has to be concerned about such expectations. And given the extreme complexity of the financial accounting for many public companies, some CEOs might view the complexity as an opportunity to exploit a gray area wherein they choose accounting policies that increase their odds of beating Wall Street expectations. Today's convictions will surely scare CEOs away from such a gray area.