A man who’s worked at Great Northern Paper since JFK was president and Elvis was king called me this week. What a lot of people don’t realize, he said, about this (an adjective that would cause this paper to burst into flames in your hands) company “is that it’s Maine’s very own Enron.”

I laughed. Not because I thought the comparison laughable, but because the very same thought had struck me not more than five minutes earlier. The man’s opinion had been formed by nearly 30 years of working his hindquarters off and getting shafted by GNP’s succession of owners for the trouble. Mine came after reading “Fishtail, Bacchus, Sundance and Slapshot.”

Not the title of a screenplay for a caper movie featuring four fading Hollywood stars, “Fishtail” et al. is a report by the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations regarding four of the many sham transactions concocted, cutely named and executed by Enron. These four are notable because they were knowingly aided and abetted by such leading financial institutions as Chase, Citigroup and Merrill Lynch.

The 41-page report is just one brief chapter in the story of the biggest bankruptcy in the history of money, and what a ripping yarn it is. Fishtail, Bacchus and Sundance are variations on a familiar Enron theme: set up a bogus corporation, cook up a deal that looks like a valuable asset is being sold to Bogus Inc. with the participation of make-believe investors; get, in exchange for multi-million dollar fees, a leading financial institution to endorse the deal as on the level; use imaginary profits from the sale to spruce up the balance sheet; keep the asset; buy another vacation home in Vail.

Clever schemes all, but Slapshot stands alone. Here, Enron got a one-day, $1 billion loan from Chase, cranked it through a maze of shell corporations until it looked like a multi-year loan to refinance a Canadian paper mill so Enron could cheat Revenue Canada out of $60 million in interest deductions and so Chase could collect $5.6 million in fees for a few hours of shuffling papers. The report includes a schematic diagram (lots of boxes connected by lots of arrows to show lots of money flowing around in circles) of each of the four schemes. There are nuclear devices with schematics simpler than the one accompanying Slapshot.

The remarkable thing about the Enron intrigues is not their elegant sleight-of-hand but their blatant transparency – once financial regulators, congressional investigators, inquisitive journalists and ruined investors knew where to look, the deceptions practically revealed themselves. So it is with the long-running intrigue known as Great Northern Paper.

The man wanted to remain anonymous out of concern he’d lose his job. That was Tuesday. By Wednesday afternoon, everybody had lost their jobs; GNP announced in bankruptcy court the Millinocket and East Millinocket mills would not reopen under Enron’s – oops, make that Inexcon’s -ownership. Still, a promise of anonymity is a promise.

He wasn’t there back in 1900 when lumberman Charles Mullen and industrialist Garret Schenck built the Magic City, but he was there, a new hire, when Great Northern merged with Nekoosa in 1962 and when Great Northern Nekoosa was sold to Georgia-Pacific in ’90 and a year later when the whole shebang was sold to Bowater and in ’99 when it was again sold to some Canadian industrialists with the techno-name Inexcon. He was there when GNP provided 4,400 good Maine jobs; he’s there now, even though there’s not much “there” left up there – the 1,100 jobs that remain won’t be good until they once again come with paychecks.

Each of the mergers and sales came with demands for concessions by workers on wages and benefits – each time, it was the one additional thing needed to position the company for a long and prosperous future. Each of the tax breaks, taxpayer-backed loans, abatements and special considerations from sympathetic lawmakers promised a long and prosperous future. The sales of timberlands and the hydro-electric system – valuable, even crucial, assets to most companies in this business – were done in the name of lengthy prosperity. Pension plans have been renegotiated several times: actually, the workers did the renegotiating; the company of the moment, the reneging.

A lot of money, produced by workers with taxpayers pitching in, is missing from the Millinockets, “but it’s not like it disappeared,” says the man. “We know exactly where it went; to company headquarters in the South. The only difference with Inexcon is that it’s gone north.”

Which suggests is one big difference between Enron and GNP. No need for complicated nuclear-device class diagrams here. All you need is one box labeled “Maine” and one arrow labeled “money” leading to a second box labeled “someplace else.”

I don’t think the big shots at Enron – Lay, Fastow and the others – intended at the start of their energy-trading careers to lie, cheat and steal their way to success; their student dreams as business majors probably did not include ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of employees, retirees and investors. They certainly never intended to send the entire stock market into the dump. It was just a matter of gradually figuring out that phony profits got by lying, cheating and stealing bought just as many toys as profits honestly earned and nobody called them on it until it was too late.

Much like the way the succession of GNP owners eventually figured out that, when it comes to getting concessions, tax breaks and a lot of sympathy from lawmakers, saying you’re going to make these mills prosperous and long-lived is just as good as actually doing so. Which, the man says, brings up one more important difference: “Once we saw what kind of (see first paragraph) stuff Enron was pulling, we stopped falling for it.”

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.