The Informant: A True Story

A fascinating true story that reads like a novel. The author, Kurt Eichenwald, has obviously done a considerable amount of research to present the details of the investigation of Mark Whitacre, an Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) executive whose greed overcame his ability to see the ethical nature of his crime. Equally fascinating is the author's inside look at the emotional effect on the FBI agents who iniitally handled the investigation. Occasionally I got bogged down in, as well as frustrated with, the details about the various turf wars between government agencies. I think some of that information could have been condensed. Overall, it's an excellent book that held my attention from beginning to end. --Camille Gavin

This is a great story in the hands of a very skilled reporter. It's one of those read-late-into-the-night books that caused me to be bleary eyed every morning last week! Just couldn't wait to finish it and find out what happened. One of the jacket blurbs says it "reads like Grisham." Heck, it reads a lot better than Grisham because the story is true and Eichenwald is a far better writer than Grisham. Get it; you'll enjoy it...and I can guarantee you'll never come across another story like it.

On the rare occasions when the banal details of corporate crime are uncovered, developed and prosecuted, the inside story is sometimes difficult to believe. Even more often, these stories, particularly those involving complex financial chicanery, fail to survive the conversion to film or print.An obvious exception is "The Informant," Kurt Eichenwald's extraordinary new book about the Archer Daniels Midland Company price-fixing scandal in the mid-1990s. Mr. Eichenwald, an award-winning journalist at The New York Times, has balanced a cast of a nearly unimaginable characters with meticulous reporting and sourcing built on endless of hours of government tapes, documentary evidence and interviews.Mr. Eichenwald's masterfully constructed narrative describes how ADM, the self-styled "Supermarket to the World," conspired with international competitors to corner food additive markets. The book focuses on Mark Whitacre, the wildly contradictory former ADM executive whose secret cooperation with the FBI apparently was intended to hide his own crimes. As Mr. Eichenwald writes, the book is about the "malleable nature of the truth," and how nothing in the ADM case was necessarily what it appeared to be. Along the way, the story is told in a way that "lend[s] temporary credence to the many lies told in this investigation," according to Mr. Eichenwald. In the end, the book accomplishes what few of its kind have: it has woven an otherwise tedious collection of technical and legal details and deceptions into one of the best tales of corporate crime in the past 20 years.As the federal government found in its development of the ADM case, it's difficult to humanize corporate schemes, whether in civil or criminal litigation, or in the news or entertainment media. Mr. Eichenwald not only overcomes this obstacle, he has succeeded in producing a book that reads like a thriller. At one point in the book, in fact, a few of the characters even question whether Mr. Whitacre is acting out scenes from a John Grisham best-seller, "The Firm." Mr. Eichenwald also is fortunate to inherit an amazing cast of characters that includes not only Mr. Whitacre, the Andreas family, and high-level law enforcement agencies but also ADM's political network -- which at various times has included Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bob Dole, Dan Quayle, former Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney, and powerful Washington and New York law firms, among others. My admiration of the author emanates in part from his reporting of the Prudential-Bache financial scandal in the early 1990s, both in The New York Times and in his book "Serpent on the Rock." As a part of the legal team that successfully represented 5,800 victimized investors in civil litigation against Pru-Bache, I believe Mr. Eichenwald was unequalled among journalists in his command of that subject matter. Even then, where "Serpent on the Rock" succeeded nicely in chronicling the Pru-Bache scandal, "The Informant" excels. I believe tha

In the antitrust case against Archer Daniels Midland for world-wide price fixing in lysine (a feed ingredient that makes animals grow more rapidly), the U.S. government relied on Mark Whitacre, an ADM executive. In legal terminology, he was playing the role of 'cooperating witness.' Eventually, three ADM executives would be sentenced to jail and a $100 million fine would be paid by the company to settle the case. But while Whitacre was cooperating at one level, he was not at many other levels. He informed the FBI of the conspiracy in the beginning, or there would have been no continuing investigation and no case. Although novels often have characters do things like that, it never happens in ordinary course. No executive in the middle of a price-fixing case had ever turned themselves in before. What a coup! Or was it? For something strange was going on. In the beginning, Whitacre had attracted the attention of the FBI by having reported to ADM that a competitor was sabotaging ADM's production of lysine with a virus. Soon in the investigation, Whitacre admitted to the FBI that this had never happened. Tipped off that Whitacre was flaky, the government relied on many lie detector tests and tape recordings to get the facts. What they never realized was that Whitacre couldn't tell a straight story if his life depended on it. Then came the biggest surprise. Just as the government took its case public, ADM came back with charges that Whitacre had been stealing millions of dollars from the company while serving as a cooperating witness with the government. The company was right, and Whitacre was successfully prosecuted for these thefts. ADM also tried to make the case that the FBI caused this to happen, but was rebuffed in its arguments. As a result of his double-dealing, Whitacre had blown his immunity agreement with the government and was one of the three ADM executives who were convicted of the price-fixing conspiracy.The story is written from the perspective of the FBI agents conducting the investigation. You will be fooled, along with them, as they pursue the case. It makes for the most complicated, convoluted set of events you can imagine. John Le Carre's stories are much simpler, by comparison.Although I had read about the case as it unfolded in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times (where Eichenwald covered it), the details came as a surprise in many cases. Eichenwald has gotten access to a tremendous amount of raw material including 800 hours of interviews with 100 people, 10,000 plus pages of data including secret grand jury testimony, and transcripts from secret recordings made by Whitacre. As a result, he has created a detailed dialogue of key events that reads like a screenplay. You will feel like you are there. The techniques are like fiction, but the material is fact. I cannot resist pointing out that this book reaffirms the maxim that truth is always stranger than fiction.Here's the author's wrap-up on