HOUSTON -- The wife of former Enron Corp. finance chief Andrew Fastow began serving a yearlong prison sentence Monday.

ENRON DOWNFALL VIDEO Legal Expert: Lay's Conversation With Media Part Of Ploy Listen To Enron Traders On Audiotape HISTORY Enron Boom To Bust Article Archive Chronology Of Events BACKGROUND ON KEY FIGURES Enron, Government Probe Kenneth Lay Sherron Watkins FindLaw.com (Adobe Acrobat Reader required to view) U.S. vs. Causey, Skilling, Lay U.S. vs. Andrew Fastow U.S. vs. Lea Fastow DISCUSSION Plea Agreements Good Idea? RESOURCES Enron Corp. Securities and Exchange Commission

Lea Fastow, 42, dressed in a navy pantsuit, turned herself in at the 11-story federal prison in downtown Houston at 8:20 a.m. Monday, six hours before the judge's deadline. She was accompanied by her lawyer, Mike DeGuerin, father Jack Weingarten, and others.

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Attorney Comments On Sentence, Fastow Family Family, Lawyer, Others Accompany Fastow To Prison

"She knows she was due here at 2 o'clock and she wanted to get it going," DeGeurin said. "If the judge says do 12 pushups, she's going to do 13."

Andrew Fastow did not accompany his wife.

"Andy is with the children," said DeGeurin, referring to the couple's two grade school-aged kids, who are on a court-approved vacation with their father. "One of them is really too young to understand, but the other one knows all about it."

Guards took Fastow's fingerprints, mug shots, and issued her a khaki-colored prison uniform to change into after she was checked in.

"There were no tears. We have a job to do and we are going to do it the best we can," De Guerin said.

Fastow -- the second Enron-related person to serve jail time for actions associated with the energy company's collapse -- will spend the next year in an 8-foot-by-10-foot cell several miles from her affluent home south of Houston's wealthiest neighborhood. In May, she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor tax crime, admitting to helping her husband hide ill-gotten money from one of his many financial schemes that fueled the one-time energy giant's December 2001 failure.

Her legal team had asked that the judge in her case recommend the Federal Bureau of Prisons place her at a minimum-security camp for women in Bryan, about 90 miles northwest of Houston. U.S. District Judge David Hittner refused to recommend a specific institution, and the prisons bureau placed her at the lockup about four blocks from Minute Maid Park.

Hittner granted her permission to travel to Florida with her family from June 19 through Sunday.

The lockup, essentially a federal jail, is more restrictive than minimum-security camps because it houses both men and women in separate quarters of all kinds of security classifications. Most are there for drug crimes.

Like other inmates, Fastow will receive 20 to 23 hours of contact visitation with her family each week.

The former finance chief's wife was indicted last year on six felony tax and conspiracy charges for crimes that occurred after she quit her job as Enron's assistant treasurer in 1997.

Her husband already had been charged with what grew to 98 counts of conspiracy, fraud and others for engineering financial schemes that fueled the company's crash as he skimmed millions of dollars for himself.

According to DeGeurin, she convinced Andrew Fastow to cut a deal with prosecutors and plead guilty as her legal team negotiated a deal for her.

Andrew Fastow pleaded guilty in January to two counts of conspiracy and will serve the maximum 10 years in prison when prosecutors no longer need his cooperation. Lea Fastow got the maximum 12-month sentence for the misdemeanor.

Prosecutors recommended Fastow only serve five months; however, Hittner sentenced her to one year -- much longer than the average sentence for the crime.

"I am still terribly disappointed with the sentence itself. I think it was wrong and unjust," DeGuerin said.

The Fastows, who have two sons under the age of 10, wanted to avoid simultaneous prison sentences. That should be achieved because he is expected to be a key witness in a pending case -- that has yet to be scheduled for trial -- against former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling and former accounting chief Richard Causey.

That case is expected to take months of preparation followed by months of testimony. Lay's lawyers hope he will be tried separately as early as September this year.

Lay was indicted last week on 11 counts of fraud and conspiracy. He was added as a defendant to the existing fraud, conspiracy and insider trading case against Skilling and Causey. All three pleaded not guilty.