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The Informant: A True Story
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The Informant: A True Story (Paperback)
by Kurt Eichenwald (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...)
(84 customer reviews)
* Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald
* Serpent on the Rock by Kurt Eichenwald
* Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous
Fall of Enron
* Blood on the Street: The Sensational Inside Story of How Wall
Street Analysts Duped a Generation of Investors by Charles Gasparino
* Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
"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 an out of print or unavailable edition of this
title.
From AudioFile
When the U.S. government accused powerful agri-business giant Archer
Daniels Midland of price-fixing, they thought they had the ultimate
star witness--a vice president turned informant who had taped
nefarious meetings with competitors. They ended up with a horrible
liability instead; their informant turned out to be a psychotic liar
who stole millions from his employer. Michael McConnohie dramatizes
this true-crime story masterfully. White-collar crime might not sound
too interesting, but Eichenwald's punchy prose and McConnohie's
masterful reading keeps a listener's attention to the end, when
author confronts in-formant in a dynamic denouement. T.F. © AudioFile
2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This
text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
See all Editorial Reviews
Product Details
* Paperback: 656 pages
* Publisher: Broadway; 1 edition (July 3, 2001)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0767903277
* ISBN-13: 978-0767903271
* Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1.8 inches
* Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
* Average Customer Review: based on 84 reviews. (Write a review.)
* Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,862 in Books (See Top Sellers in
Books)
(Publishers and authors: improve your sales)
* Also Available in: Hardcover (1st) | Audio Cassette
(Abridged) | All Editions
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Inside This Book
Citations: This book cites 2 books
Explore: Citations | Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats
Key Phrases - SIPs: lysine executives, lysine competitors, lysine
business, lysine market, antitrust team (more)
Key Phrases - CAPs: Mark Whitacre, Dwayne Andreas, Aubrey Daniel,
Mick Andreas, United States (more)
Browse Sample Pages: Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Index | Back
Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:
Inside This Book (learn more)
First Sentence:
The large gray van, its windows tinted to block the glances of the
curious, pulled away from the Decatur Airport, heading toward Route
105. Read the first page
Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
lysine executives, lysine competitors, lysine business, lysine
market, antitrust team, lysine producers, lysine prices, antitrust
office, antitrust prosecutors, methionine plant, lysine case, fraud
prosecutors, bogus invoices, cooperating witness, case file number,
lysine production, antitrust attorneys, volume agreement, antitrust
lawyers, corporate plane, antitrust division
Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Mark Whitacre, Dwayne Andreas, Aubrey Daniel, Mick Andreas, United
States, Jim Randall, Special Agent, Brian Shepard, Fraud Section,
Lamet Vov, Terry Wilson, Hong Kong, Sid Hulse, Bioproducts Division,
Jim Epstein, Jim Griffin, New York, Beat Schweizer, Howard Buffett,
John Hoyt, Robin Mann, Scott Lassar, Reinhart Richter, Swiss Bank
Corporation, Simpson Thacher
New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats
Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Search Inside This Book:
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 2 books:
* Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart in Front Matter
* Serpent on the Rock: Crime, Betrayal and the Terrible Secrets
of Prudential Bache by Kurt Eichenwald in Back Matter
What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item?
78% buy the item featured on this page:
The Informant: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald $11.53
10% buy
Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald $11.53
5% buy
Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
4% buy
Serpent on the Rock by Kurt Eichenwald $10.85
3% buy
Blood on the Street: The Sensational Inside Story of How Wall Street
Analysts Duped a Generation of Investors by Charles Gasparino $17.16
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103 of 113 people found the following review helpful:
Fiction? You will wish it were so., September 5, 2000
Reviewer: Francis J. Mcinerney (Commonwealth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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.
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40 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
Is Truth Stranger Than Fiction?, September 26, 2000
Reviewer: James R. Moriarty (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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").
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Customer Reviews
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0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Eichenwald is great, February 18, 2007
Reviewer: Alex M. Gordon - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This is the second book I've read by Eichenwald (Conspiracy of Fools
being the other) and I thought they were each fantastic.
Comment | Was this review helpful to you? YesNo (Report this)
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Could not put it down!! ADDICTIVE!!, February 6, 2007
Reviewer: Torontoman38 (Toronto, On Canada) - See all my reviews
Well-written. I'm not a business major nor a businessman, but this
was an easy read for me. I really loved reading this book. Of
particular interest is a scene when FBI agent Hoyt talks to his hard-
working, average Joe brother-in-law. In this scene, you will realize
how this white collar crime affects the average person, like you and
me. His research was incredibly thorough. I can't say enough about
this book. It's well-written, thorough, and it's all true. Truth is
stranger than fiction.
Comment | Was this review helpful to you? YesNo (Report this)
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Like a Grisholm novel...but true, January 11, 2007
Reviewer: MHT "Beach mum" (Santa Monica, CA United States) - See all
my reviews
I dreaded reading this because it's long and the type is small.
However, once I started it, I couldn't put it down. The story is
astounding, made more so because it's true. It reads like a Grisholm
novel. I remember the story when it happened, and learning the
details made it even more fascinating.
Comment | Was this review helpful to you? YesNo (Report this)
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Right up there with A Civil Action, January 7, 2007
Reviewer: Lost in Thought (Palo Alto, CA) - See all my reviews
The Informant is quite possibly one of the best pieces of non-fiction
that I have read. Not only does it offer a compelling, true story
that could come right out of a novel, but it also offers temendous
insights into the world of the FBI, the Department of Justice, high-
powered law firms, and questionable business practices. This is not
your normal piece of non-fiction: characters are well developed, the
writing is suspensful and gripping, the story is intriguing. In
short, I really cannot recommend The Informant highly enough -- the
only book that compares is A Civil Action, a genuine classic.
Comment | Was this review helpful to you? YesNo (Report this)
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