Enron-exposing journo reveals checkered past

Says the New York Post:

MOVE over, Jayson Blair — here comes Jason Leopold!

While Leopold isn't guilty of the kind of journalistic sins that doomed the New York Times fabricator, he is flogging his own media-centric mea culpa, "Off the Record: An Investigative Journalist's Inside View of Dirty Politics, Corporate Scandal and a Double Life Exposed" (Rowman & Littlefield).

In the fashionably confessional tome, the Enron-scooping former Dow Jones L.A. bureau chief reveals a secret criminal past that included felony convictions for grand larceny and forgery. He battled cocaine addiction and admits he lied on his résumé about graduating from New York University.

Leopold, 35, landed an exclusive interview with former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling after the energy giant declared bankruptcy in 2001.

The next year, he linked Army Secretary Gen. Thomas White to fraud at Enron in a controversial story for Salon.com. The subsequent backlash resulted in the piece being pulled from the site. He had previously been fired by Dow Jones for flubbing figures in another Enron piece.

"I was so obsessed with Enron," Leopold told us, "I made some errors in judgment . . . I wasn't using drugs anymore, but I was acting like a drug addict. I got high on these news stories. I really was still running away from this stuff about my past."
Leopold says he felt a certain kinship with Skilling. "Here I was interviewing the biggest white-collar criminal in the country, and at the same time I had a felony conviction that I was concealing," he said. "I think that's what allowed me to ask all the right questions and figure out what was going on."

The self-styled Enron addict's legal trouble stemmed from a scheme in which he stole more than 10,000 CDs from Milan Records, where he used to work, and sold them to mom-and-pop record shops in Manhattan for cash to subsidize his coke habit before he became a newspaper reporter.

These days, Leopold is working as a consultant for "Blackout," an A&E cable channel movie about the New York blackout of 2003 — but he has high hopes of making some money off of his life story.

He says his reps at Creative Artists Agency are trying to turn his book into a movie or TV series. "The talk is that Johnny Depp is pursuing it as a producer or maybe starring in the film, but some people are saying it might be better as a TV series," he told us. "Sort of like Michael Chicklis in 'The Shield.' Sort of like an anti-hero."