Houston ? Financial whiz Andrew Fastow took the stand in the Enron Corp. trial Tuesday and for the first time publicly detailed how he helped inflate the company’s profits and hide losses, with the blessing of his then-boss Jeffrey Skilling.

Fastow, 44, told a packed federal courtroom that by mid-2001, while the company was presenting itself as generally healthy, in reality “the foundation was crumbling and we were doing everything we could to prop it up.”

Off-the-books partnerships created and run by Fastow were the chief means of propping things up, the former chief financial officer testified. He said that Skilling, at the time Enron’s chief executive, encouraged him during one meeting to step up the activity.

“Get me as much of that juice as you can,” Skilling said, according to Fastow. Skilling was referring to the use of the partnerships “to juice the earnings of Enron and report the earnings we wanted,” said Fastow, who once calculated that his financial machinations added more than $1 billion to his company’s bottom line in a little more than two years.

Prosecutors contend that keeping Wall Street in the dark about Enron’s true financial condition was crucial to supporting the company’s stock price – a major source of wealth for Skilling and his co-defendant, former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay.

Skilling, 54, and Lay, 63, are on trial for conspiracy and fraud. They face decades in prison and millions of dollars in fines if convicted of all charges.

Enron, the Houston-based energy-trading firm that once was a regular on “most admired companies” lists, slid into bankruptcy in December 2001, at a cost of thousands of jobs. Investors lost billions of dollars through the collapse of Enron stock; particularly hard hit were company employees, many of whom lost life savings.

Fastow, whom Skilling hired in 1990 and mentored during his rise through the ranks at Enron, pleaded guilty in January 2004 to two conspiracy counts and agreed to a 10-year prison sentence. He struck his cooperation agreement with the government in part to limit the potential jail time faced by his wife, Lea.

Although Fastow’s most damaging testimony involved Skilling, he also implicated Lay. After Skilling’s surprise resignation in mid-August 2001, Lay reclaimed the chief executive’s post and, according to Fastow, attended meetings at which Fastow and other executives laid out details of Enron’s dire financial straits. Earlier witnesses have testified that Lay continued to tout the company’s rosy prospects even after learning of these problems.