Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.
“They came into my home, made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenues,” said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso. “Right in front of my daughters.”
Calling themselves the CEOnistas, the chief executives were first spotted last night along the Rio Grande River near Quemado, where they bought each of the town’s 320 residents by borrowing against pension fund gains. By late this morning, the CEOnistas had arbitrarily inflated Quemado’s population to 960, and declared a 200 percent profit for the fiscal second quarter.
This morning, the outlaws bought the city of Waco, transferred its underperforming areas to a private partnership, and sent a bill to California for $4.5 billion.
Law enforcement officials and disgruntled shareholders riding posse were noticeably frustrated.
“First of all, they’re very hard to find because they always stand behind their numbers, and their numbers keep shifting,” said posse spokesman Dean Levitt. “And every time we yell, ‘Stop in the name of the shareholders!’ they refer us to investor relations. I’ve been on the phone all damn morning.”
The pursuers said they have had some success, however, by preying on a common executive weakness. “Last night we caught about 24 of them by disguising one of our female officers as a CNBC anchor,” said U.S. Border Patrol spokesperson Janet Lewis. “It was like moths to a flame.”
Also, teams of agents have been using high-powered listening devices to scan the plains for telltale sounds of the CEOnistas. “Most of the time we just hear leaves rustling or cattle flicking their tales,” said Lewis, “but occasionally we’ll pick up someone saying, ‘I was totally out of the loop on that.’”
Among former and current CEOs apprehended with this method were Computer Associates’ Sanjay Kumar, Adelphia’s John Rigas, Enron’s Ken Lay, Joseph Nacchio of Qwest, Joseph Berardino of Arthur Andersen, and every Global Crossing CEO since 1997. ImClone Systems’ Sam Waksal and Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco were not allowed to join the CEOnistas, as they have already been indicted.
While some stragglers are believed to have successfully crossed into Mexico, Lewis said the bulk of the CEOnistas have holed themselves up at the Alamo.
“No, not the fort, the car rental place at the airport,” she said. “They’re rotating all the tires on the minivans and accounting for each change as a sale in the current quarter.”
–An excerpt reprinted with permission from the article, “Remaining U.S. CEOs Make a Break for It: Band of Roving Chief Executives Spotted Miles from Mexican Border,” from SatireWire.com.
