The Informant: A True Story Review

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The Informant: A True Story ReviewOn 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").The Informant: A True Story Overview

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