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The Informant: A True Story


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Are you the publisher or author? Learn how Amazon can help you make this book an eBook. 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
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"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.

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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: 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)
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* 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
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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

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The Informant: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald $11.53
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Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald $11.53
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Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron
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Serpent on the Rock by Kurt Eichenwald $10.85
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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