The former WorldCom chief executive, Bernard Ebbers, arrives at federal court in New York for his fraud trial. Photograph: Chris Hondros/Getty Images
In his book Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe coined the phrase Masters of the Universe to describe Wall Street's movers and shakers in the 1980s.
The phrase would have certainly applied to Bernard Ebbers, the man who pieced together a telecommunications empire from myriad mergers in the early 1990s.
In the telecoms and internet boom of that decade, WorldCom and Ebbers were the toast of Wall Street. WorldCom was a behemoth that employed 80,000 people and Ebbers was worth $1.4bn (£917m), according to Forbes magazine, when WorldCom stood at its zenith.
All that seems a long time ago now. A New York jury yesterday found Ebbers guilty of leading an $11bn accounting fraud that pushed his company into the largest bankruptcy in US history. Due to be sentenced in June, he faces a maximum 85 years in prison.
It was a stunningly decisive verdict, especially as defence teams in complex fraud cases have plenty of scope to obfuscate jurors. But the jury clearly did not buy the main thrust of the defence - that Ebbers did not know what was going on. For many, the Ebbers saga will symbolise the moment when the Masters of the Universe got their comeuppance. The verdict also bodes ill for other senior executives, including Kenneth Lay of Enron and Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco, who are facing their own court trials.
The WorldCom and Enron sagas are also a reminder that excesses inevitably follow a boom. The bull market of the 1980s threw up its own Masters of the Universe, larger than life wheelers and dealers such as Michael Milken, invariably described as the junk bond king, who ended up in jail for securities fraud, and Ivan Boesky, who also saw jail time for insider trading. Now it's the turn of Ebbers.
