The Informant: A True Story (Paperback)

~ (Author) "The large gray van, its windows tinted to block the glances of the curious, pulled away from the Decatur Airport, heading toward Route 105..." (more)
Key Phrases: lysine executives, lysine competitors, lysine business, Mark Whitacre, Dwayne Andreas, Aubrey Daniel (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"The FBI was ready to take down America's most politically powerful corporation. But there was one thing they didn't count on."

So reads the cover of this high-powered true crime story, an accurate teaser to a bizarre financial scandal with more plot twists than a John Grisham novel. In 1992 the FBI stumbled upon Mark Whitacre, a top executive at the Archer Daniels Midland corporation who was willing to act as a government witness to a vast international price-fixing conspiracy. ADM, which advertises itself as "The Supermarket to the World," processes grains and other farm staples into oils, flours, and fibers for products that fill America's shelves, from Jell-O pudding to StarKist tuna. The company's chairman and chief executive, Dwayne Andreas, was so influential that he introduced Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev, and it was his maneuvering that ensured that high fructose corn syrup would replace sugar in most foods (ever wondered why Coke and Pepsi don't taste quite like they used to?). There were two mottoes at ADM: "The competitors are our friends, and the customers are our enemies" and "We know when we're lying." And lie they did. With the help of Whitacre, the FBI made hundreds of tapes and videos of ADM executives making price-fixing deals with their corrivals from Japan, Korea, and Canada, all while drinking coffee and laughing about their crimes. The tapes should have cinched the case, but there was one problem: Their star witness was manipulative, deceitful, and unstable. Nothing was as it seemed, and the investigation into one of the most astounding white-collar crime cases in history had only just begun.

Kurt Eichenwald, an investigative reporter, covered the story for The New York Times and interviewed more than 100 participants in the case. He methodically records the six-year investigation, leaving no plot twist or tape transcript unexplored. While his primary focus is on deconstructing the disturbed Whitacre and revealing the malleability of truth, the portrait of ADM (and even the Justice Department) is damning enough to make anyone a cynic. --Lesley Reed --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"The Informant is epic in scope, a tale of human foibles--of greed, deceit, and arrogance--and also of the search for truth. Eichenwald has told it masterfully, with the narrative drive of a novel. I guarantee it'll keep you reading late into the night."
-- Jonathan Harr, A Civil Action

"The Informant is superb reporting in the service of a great story, one with the drama and suspense of a Le Carré novel. Set squarely in the American heartland, delving into the inner sanctum of a global corporation, it explores the shifting boundaries of truth and deception, loyalty and betrayal. It is a remarkable achievement."
-- James B. Stewart, Den of Thieves and Blind Eye

"The twists and turns of this nonfiction work leave many thrillers in the dust. Eichenwald's spare prose and journalistic eye for detail make the pages fly."
-- David Baldacci, Absolute Power and Saving Faith

"I would say The Informant reads like Grisham, only nobody ever could have invented these characters. A tale this riveting and this strange could only have been built from truth."
-- Sherry Sontag, coauthor, Blind Man's Bluff


From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (July 3, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0767903277
• ISBN-13: 978-0767903271
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (102 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #43,168 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

54 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Is Truth Stranger Than Fiction?, September 26, 2000

By	James R. Moriarty (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Informant: A True Story (Hardcover)

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 that this book puts Mr. Eichenwald into the elite company of Jonathan Harr ("A Civil Action"), James B. Stewart ("Den of Thieves" and "Blind Eye"), Ken Auletta ("Greed and Glory on Wall Street"), and Bryan Burrough and John Helyar ("Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco").

101 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fiction? You will wish it were so., September 5, 2000

By	taking a rest - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

This review is from: The Informant: A True Story (Hardcover)

I read hundreds of books in a year, and this work is one of the best I have read in 2000. Kurt Eichenwald deserves an award for getting it through the attorneys and then to publication.

Eichenwald, a finalist for the year 2000 Pulitzer and winner of other awards for his writing, has not only taken a riddle, wrapped in mystery, and shrouded by an enigma,(a nod to Winston Churchill) and made it readable, he has created a brilliant book. He created a book that could stand as a work of Fiction and be a novel of excellence, or be true to this bizarre story that strains credibility so many times, and yet he manages to give every bit of credence the reader needs to believe. Mike Wallace of 60 minutes couldn't have dissected this tale with greater skill.

And if you think I jest about the novel it would make, if 19th Century is your style, think Wilkie Collins, or if your taste is more contemporary, perhaps Charles Palliser of Quincunx fame. That is the type of labyrinthine thought that would be required to conjure this story from thin air.

At the center of the story is what at first seems to be an all-too-common tale. American consumers have gotten a great deal of exposure recently as to how a company can, in the opinion of The Justice Department, be detrimental to the public welfare. I would suggest there are issues that make bureaucratic careers, and issues that are literally participants in the lives of nearly all of us, and they are important.

Unless you treat eating as an extreme sport, you probably have not snacked on any software lately, be it Microsoft, or even Apple. However in the case that this book covers, this company is in your favorite restaurant, your house, your kitchen, and before you continue, they are all over what sits on the end of your fork, every meal, of every day. This book involves a company that many will not recognize it is about the people who have appointed their company "Supermarket To The World". Now that level of arrogance just begs the question of who are these people, and how do they operate?

Archer Daniels Midland is responsible for many of those ingredients you will find on the label of what you consume. Ingredients like, oilseed products, emulsifiers, etc. They also produce flour for your local pizzeria, and lysine for the folks who raise your food. In addition they can produce political pressure proportionate to a company 50 times their

size. And finally they have a Human Resource Department that hired and almost handed the company over to an individual so bizarre, that in his more lucid moments he fancies himself, Whitacre, Mark Whitacre. His delusions of grandeur as a secret agent would be absurd if not for the role he was playing as the critical person in the government's efforts to take down ADM, and some of their partners scattered across 5 continents. In addition to being the world's supermarket, ADM also developed those skills necessary to run illegal businesses on a global scale.

An individual chooses to help the FBI gather evidence against the corrupt company he works for, what could be simpler, how many novels have used the same premise? Unfortunately for the 2 agents that put their careers on the line, and spend years of their life working with this person, there was nothing simple, they would have been pleased with complex. These two agents got chaos in its human form, their "informant".

All starts well, and then an inconsistency appears, no problem. Later a reported fact was not quite so factual, but whose memory is perfect? But then reality is turned upside down. A lie is a lie, is a lie about a lie a double negative, making it a truth? Do you believe the person, his recorded voice, the memo he wrote, or what he has told his attorney, or surely what he tells the U.S. Government's lawyers, perhaps a judge? And how is it possible for an Author to even attempt to put this episode of The Twilight Zone in to book form?

Eichenwald has done so, by creating something that is not your typical read. He breaks with convention without breaking or even bending the truth. As the Author stated, "the reader is deceived into believing fiction through the true recitation of fact.''

Brilliant! Period.

30 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A few words from someone who lives in Decatur, October 25, 2000

By	Michele A. Raupp "michelebelle" (Bloomington, IL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Informant: A True Story (Hardcover)

As a Decatur resident, I couldn't wait to get into this book and read the stories behind the headlines. I was not disappointed. Many of the names in the book are more than familiar to me. It was fascinating to relive the chronology, all the while remembering what kind of scuttlebutt was going about town at certain points of the story.

Eichenwald has told this tale well. There are times when it is difficult to follow, but not due to the writer. There were just so many people involved, keeping them straight almost requires a white board and colored markers. The characters were depicted well. Between Whitacre's obvious instability and the government's inability to coordinate itself, it was like watching the Grinch's sleigh teeter on the tip top of the mountain. Will it crash or won't it?

I did find a few errors in the story, but they were not central to the story. (E.g. there is no passenger train service in Decatur - I assumed the writer meant Springfield. And there were a few mix-ups concerning dates.)

One word of caution to anyone who reads this book, however. It's easy to think of ADM as some faceless giant plundering its way through the agri-buisness world. But remember; the actions for which ADM was fined and three people were sent to jail are the actions of a few individuals. ADM employs thousands that put in an honest day's work every day. I am proud to call many of these people my friends.