Enron auction today !

$44,000 gets letter as company bids adieu to slew of stuff

By MIKE TOLSON and ROMA KHANNA
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle

With all due respect to Elvin Hayes, the erstwhile Houston basketball star, a new Big E has been crowned.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the appointed hour," head auctioneer Kirk Dove intoned just past noon Wednesday. "This is truly a one-of-a-kind item."

To his right stood a gleaming silver cockeyed E, the corporate trademark for Enron that once stood in front of company offices at Three Allen Center in downtown Houston. Of all the 6,000 items up for bid at the first U.S. liquidation auction for the bankrupt energy giant, perhaps none had less intrinsic value than the 5-by-5-foot hunk of stainless steel. Still, the crowded banquet room at the Astrodome Radisson swelled with expectation.

Bidding soared quickly to $11,000.

"This is not a time to hold back," Dove said.

The bidders obeyed. The price hit $15,000.

"Eat your heart out eBay," he laughed.

Many of the 13 assembled television cameras focused on one bidder at the front of the hall who held his number high as the total kept rising.

"Sir, this is your 15 minutes of fame," Dove told him.

In truth, it wasn't even 15 seconds. Moments later the action shifted to the rear of the room where Jimmy Luu was starting to get serious. The 28-year-old computer shop employee had made his way through long lines and two hours worth of items that did not interest him to complete a mission.

A cheer went up when Luu topped an online bidder at $28,000. One by one the out-of-town bidders dropped out. Luu seemed to have the auction won at $31,000 before a last-second rival popped up a few rows behind him.

With Dove standing atop a chair between the two, the bidding topped $40,000. Still Luu held fast. When Mir Azizi dropped out, Luu had his E. All it took was $44,000. His boss would be happy.

"It's just a once-in-a-lifetime thing he wanted to own," Luu said. "He just said do anything to get it."

The true purchaser was the unnamed owner of Microcache Computer, a chain of sales and repair shops in Houston. A statement released later by the company's attorney said the Big E was obtained as "an opportunity to preserve a piece of history."

At some point, the Big E will be put on public display in one of the shops.

Developer Azizi, who mildly heckled Luu as he spoke with reporters, said he wanted the "crooked E" as the perfect ornament to adorn the top of his 18-unit loft complex under construction in Midtown.

"I figured I could rename the unit and call it E-loft," Azizi said after the auction. "I thought it would be a nice marketing gimmick for us and that the E would have some historic value, even if it was negative."

Azizi was initially prepared to pay up to $22,000 for the E. He deliberately stayed out of the early bidding, then revised his limit as the price rose faster than a share of Enron stock in the good old days.

"I never participated until the end because my intention was not to bid it up," he said. "I figured it was a good time to surprise the other floor bidder and get it for about $30,000."

But in the heat of bidding, Azizi drove up the price to $43,000 before finally shaking his head no.

"If my complex had 100 units, maybe I could have spent more," he said. "But I just could not justify spending more than $43,000. It wasn't worth anything, when you think about it."

The Big E went for $27,000 more than a similar item sold at a London Enron auction in February. Dove thought the price was reasonable nevertheless.

"I honestly think that 20 years from now, this will still be a great purchase," said Dove, co-owner of the Dovebid, the company that is handling the two-day auction. "It's associated with corporate history."

To varying degrees, so were all the items offered for bid, from the multicolored, logo-bearing Nerf balls to the television sets that once sat in employee offices.

In the auction's early hours, as people stood in two-hour lines just to get into the bidding room, it seemed that the Enron connection was propping up some dubious prices. An online bidder in Boerne paid $525 for a 20-inch Sony television set that retails at less than $350 new.

"It's not just a TV," Dove explained. "It's an Enron TV, and that has a certain amount of caché."

How else to explain a used DVD player going for $325?

Much of the equipment, culled from the disbanded broadband and energy services divisions, consisted of high-end networking components of little interest to the crowd that had come mostly to be part of the event. By mid-afternoon, as auctioneers hawked $33,000 Cisco switch routers and stacks of servers, the lines had disappeared and a third of the chairs sat empty.

Progress remained slow, however, because of all the Web bidding. Dovebid officials said more than 15,000 people had registered by noon. Scheduled to end at 5 p.m., the auction trudged into the night to finish the first-day goal of 3,000 lots. As darkness fell only a few die-hards and a gaggle of computer equipment dealers remained in the bidding room.

It was quite a contrast to the early morning, when people began arriving before 8 to get an opportunity to pick over the bones of the once-mighty energy giant. Some were serious. Many were hoping for any sort of souvenir.

"I'm looking for a little memento for my sister," said Dee Bailey of Katy, whose long wait in line turned into a social occasion for her and her friends. "I'm trying to get her a gift, maybe a chair. She has some colleagues that came to her job from Enron."

Others were miffed at the wait and accused the auction company of poor planning. Dove acknowledged underestimating the size of the on-site crowd, though Enron officials pointed out that until three weeks ago the auction was slated for the company warehouse. Fire marshals nixed that plan.

"This sort of crossed over from a straight auction to a cultural event," Dove said.

And it's not going to be the last Enron auction, a spokesman said. There's more computer equipment and more furniture. And at least one more Big E, the much larger and lighted one that still rests on a marble base in front of the corporate headquarters at 1400 Smith.