From an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter
comes an outrageous story of greed, corruption, and
conspiracy—which left the FBI and Justice Department counting on
the cooperation of one man . . .
It was one of the FBI''s biggest secrets: a senior executive with
America''s most politically powerful corporation, Archer Daniels
Midland, had become a confidential government witness, secretly
recording a vast criminal conspiracy spanning five continents. Mark
Whitacre, the promising golden boy of ADM, had put his career and
family at risk to wear a wire and deceive his friends and
colleagues. Using Whitacre and a small team of agents to tap into
the secrets at ADM, the FBI discovered the company''s scheme to
steal millions of dollars from its own customers.
But as the FBI and federal prosecutors closed in on ADM, using
stakeouts, wiretaps, and secret recordings of illegal meetings
around the world, they suddenly found that everything was not all
that it appeared. At the same time Whitacre was cooperating with
the Feds while playing the role of loyal company man, he had his
own
agenda he kept hidden from everyone around him—his wife, his
lawyer, even the FBI agents who had come to trust him with the case
they had put their careers on the line for. Whitacre became sucked
into his own world of James Bond antics, imperiling the criminal
case and creating a web of deceit that left the FBI and prosecutors
uncertain where the lies stopped and the truth began.
In this gripping account unfolds one of the most captivating and
bizarre tales in the history of the FBI and corporate America.
Meticulously researched and richly told by New York Times senior
writer Kurt Eichenwald, The Informant re-creates the drama of the
story, beginning with the secret recordings, stakeouts, and
interviews with suspects and witnesses to the power struggles
within ADM and its board—including the high-profile chairman Dwayne
Andreas, F. Ross Johnson, and Brian Mulroney—to the big-gun
Washington lawyers hired by ADM and on up through the ranks of the
Justice Department to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Attorney General
Janet Reno.
A page-turning real-life thriller that features deadpan FBI
agents, crooked executives, idealistic lawyers, and shady witnesses
with an addiction to intrigue, The Informant tells an important and
compelling story of power and betrayal in America
關於作者:
Kurt Eichenwald has written about white-collar crime and
corporate cor-ruption for the New York Times for more than a
decade. A two-time winner of the prestigious George Polk award for
excellence in journalism and a finalist for the 2000 Pulitzer
Prize, he has been repeatedly selected by TJFR Business News
Reporter as one of the nation''s most influential financial
journalists. For the Times, he has covered some of the
highest-profile news stories emanating from the business world,
including the Archer Daniels Midland story, and he is the author of
Serpent on the Rock. Eichenwald lives in Westchester County,
outside New York City, with his wife and three children.
From the Hardcover edition.