Review: 'Informant' exciting tale of corporate intrigue

"The Informant"
By Kurt Eichenwald
Broadway Books
Nonfiction/True crime
606 pages

In this story: An honest man? Unearthing the truth RELATED STORIES, SITES

By L.D. Meagher
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- It seemed like a gift. On November 5, 1992, an executive of the Archer Daniels Midland Company sat down with an FBI agent and told him an incredible story.

The executive, Mark Whitacre, said that ADM, one of the largest agricultural businesses in the world, was involved in a criminal conspiracy to rig the prices of lysine, an additive for livestock feed. Whitacre offered to help the agent collect the evidence needed to prove his claims.

Six years later, the case against ADM would finally go to court. What happened in between is a story of byzantine complexity. New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald untangles it in "The Informant." Eichenwald interviewed more than 100 people and reviewed thousands of documents (including secret grand jury testimony) to find the truth about the ADM case.

The plot twists the story takes would do service to any novel of corporate intrigue. That much of the action takes place in the bucolic setting of Decatur, Illinois, makes the level of duplicity that much more jarring. But the story is not so much about the under-the-table deals ADM struck with its putative competitors. It's about the duplicity of the man at the center of the case.

Mark Whitacre presented himself to the FBI as an honest man forced to conduct business dishonestly by his superiors. He claimed he was set up to take the fall if ADM's misdeeds ever became public.

But that wasn't the whole truth. It wasn't even a small part of it. Whitacre had his own agenda, one he kept carefully hidden from federal agents and prosecutors, his attorneys and even his wife.

The cast of characters in "The Informant" is large and diverse. It includes top executives at ADM -- including Mick Andreas, son of the company's politically connected chairman -- and other agri-businesses, the highest levels of U.S. law enforcement (including FBI Director Louis Freeh) and political figures like former Democratic Party chief Robert Strauss and former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. There are lots of lawyers, a psychiatrist and a few scientists thrown in for good measure.

As the story unfolds, Whitacre vacillates between cooperative whistleblower and defensive company man. He harbors the illusion that once his role in exposing criminal conduct at ADM becomes public, he'll be in a position to run the company. Agents and prosecutors can't decide if he's hopelessly naive or completely out of touch with reality.

At each critical juncture of the investigation, Whitacre seems intent on sabotaging it. He makes selective leaks to news media, some of which blindside the people trying hardest to help him. One of his lawyers, James Epstein, has to read a Chicago newspaper to find out that Whitacre has been skimming money from ADM.

"Epstein sagged in his seat," Eichenwald writes. "The only way to save Whitacre from a long prison term was to keep him valuable to the government as a witness in the price-fixing case. But that meant keeping a low profile . . . And now, right there on the front page of the Tribune, his client had just publicly confessed to a multi-million dollar fraud."

In an afterword, Eichenwald acknowledges that the title of "The Informant" is a bit of misdirection. It seems to cast Mark Whitacre into a role he never plays.

The typical informant offers law enforcement officers tidbits of fact to help them achieve their long-term investigative goals. The information Whitacre passed along was designed to serve his own needs, not the government's.

Wiretaps, body microphones, clandestine motel meetings, hidden cameras -- all the tools of modern criminal investigation are brought to bear in "The Informant." But Eichenwald makes it very clear that the all the latest technology isn't enough to unearth the truth. Especially when the truth is hidden behind a wall of corporate dissembling and private greed.

First chapters: 'Deadly Persuasion'
November 1999
As soft money grows, so does controversy
November 21, 1996

Archer Daniels Midland
Broadway Books (Random House)

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