By Mark Gregory
BBC financial reporter

Houston is a great place if you like shopping malls, congested 10-lane highways and suburban sprawl.

There's plenty of all of these to choose from spread over a vast plain so flat it looks as if the ground has been ironed. The air shimmers with heat and humidity. 

At the heart of this monster of a city is a small downtown district that's different in character, dominated by towering skyscrapers, many of them weirdly futuristic in shape and strangely coloured.

One of the most impressive towers is the home of Enron, the giant energy company that collapsed last year in the largest ever corporate bankruptcy.

The poison oozing from Enron's faked accounts has infected financial markets around the world.

Hardly a week goes by without revelations of accounting malpractice at some other big American corporation - usually with a peculiar name that few people had even heard of before its problems rocked the foundations of capitalism.

Enron's still-gleaming HQ contrasts with the company's ruined reputation

Mind you, there's nothing new about financial shenanigans in Houston.

The city was created as the result of a property scam in the 1830s.

Two brothers named John and Augustus Allen bought a patch of mosquito and alligator infested swamp. They attracted settlers by placing well-written advertisements on America's Eastern seaboard.

The adverts failed to mention salient facts such as the mosquitoes, the alligators or the swamp.

In 1839, 10% of the population was wiped out by an epidemic of yellow fever.

Living conditions have improved since then, but maybe the original buccaneering spirit of the Allen brothers lives on in the actions of the local business community.

Founding fathers

The city is named after Sam Houston, the founder of modern Texas.

His motley little army of settlers won independence from Mexico by beating a vastly larger force of professional soldiers under the Mexican general Santa Anna.

Sam Houston won his battle in less than 20 minutes by the flagrant abuse of generally accepted cultural norms.

He waited until siesta time and ambushed the Mexican army while its soldiers were asleep.

Modern Houston may look like a nondescript lump of suburbia, but not all is as it appears. This, remember, is a city where even the traffic wardens carry guns.

Indeed any adult in Texas can normally carry a gun so long as it's not concealed. A permit to carry a concealed weapon is subject to checks but is not generally hard to obtain.

There was a time apparently when it was quite legal for a man to kill another man if he caught him in the middle of the sexual act with his wife.

Bankruptcy rules are still on the generous side. An adult has the long established right to keep a homestead however serious the debts.

Nowadays this means executives caught up in financial scandals can not legally be evicted from their multi-million dollar mansions.

A bankrupt also has the right to keep a mule, which these days is interpreted to mean a car. What happens when someone has both a mule and a car is unclear.

Social rules

But this most certainly isn't a society without strict rules.

A frequently repeated announcement at Houston international airport informs you that anyone making jokes or other inappropriate remarks about security arrangements is liable to be arrested.

I myself had a brush with Texas law enforcement. When I first arrived, the only place I could get my satellite broadcasting equipment to work was the top of a multi-storey car park in downtown Houston.

But I forgot to tell anyone who I was or what I was doing. That was a mistake. The car park was overlooked by several much higher office blocks.

Apparently the police were flooded with calls from anxious workers who had looked out of the window and seen a suspicious looking man attaching wires and gadgets to a car many floors below them.

I was just about to do a live broadcast when I looked up to see that I was being closely watched by two police cars that had crept up while I was fiddling with my equipment.

I was told in no uncertain terms to stand up, keep my hands away from my pockets and walk slowly towards one of the cars.

Presumably they thought I might be an al-Qaeda operative who didn't have a licence for a concealed weapon.

Tension eased as soon as they worked out that I was a harmless reporter with a cute English accent. In fact one of the policemen, a particularly large one, became protective and maternal.

At that point I got scared. It was a bit like being cuddled by King Kong.

BBC News front page