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THE INFORMANT: A TRUE STORY, by Eichenwald, K. New York: Broadway Books, 2000, xv+606 pp., $26.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).
The competitors are our friends, and the customers are our enemies.
We know when we're lying.
} Corporate mottos of the Archer Daniels Midland Co.
The Informant begins in 1992 with allegations of industrial espionage and extortion targeting the new Bioproducts Division of the Archer Daniels Midland Company, self-styled 'Supermarket to the World'. After investing more than $150 million and building the planet's largest facility for producing lysine, an amino acid used as a feed additive to promote weight gain by chicken and pigs, output was lagging far below the plant's rated capacity of 113 000 metric tons per year. The proprietary microbes necessary to convert dextrose into lysine were dying like flies. Mark Whitacre, the manager of the Bioproducts Division, told his bosses he had learnt why: a phone call from an executive at one of ADM's Japanese competitors revealed the existence of a plot to introduce a microbe-killing virus into the plant's fermentation tanks. For a payment of $10 million, the caller promised to name the mole working for ADM responsible for disrupting its lysine production process and to supply a virus-resistant microbe that would solve the plant's problems.
As The Informant unfolds, Mark Whitacre, the first Ph.D. named to head one of the company's main operating divisions, rapidly becomes the central figure in a bizarre and convoluted story eventually involving wire fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, obstruction of justice, and price-.xing conspiracies. In the end, Dr. Whitacre turns out to be a pathological liar of truly Clintonian proportions. He lied to his bosses, to his coworkers and associates, to the FBI, to his lawyers, and even to his psychiatrist. Given the evidence he helped gather over the course of several years as a cooperating witness, about the only thing Whitacre seems to have told the truth about was his role in negotiating an agreement between ADM and its Japanese and Korean competitors to fix the price of lysine, about which more later.
After hearing Whitacre's charge of foreign sabotage and extortion, the politically well-connected leadership of ADM, Dwayne Andreas and his sonMichael ('Mick'), phoned Dwayne's nephew Allen, a lawyer who oversaw ADM's European...