The Informant: A True Story - Softcover

Eichenwald, Kurt

 
9780767903271: The Informant: A True Story
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767903277 ISBN 13: 9780767903271
Verlag: Crown, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

From an award-winning New York Times investigative reporter comes a gripping account of one of the most captivating and bizarre tales in the history of the FBI and corporate America.

It was one of the FBI's biggest secrets: Mark Whitacre, a senior executive at Archer Daniels Midland--America's most politically powerful corporation--became a confidential government witness. Putting his career and family at risk, Whitacre, along with a small team of agents, tapped into secrets at ADM that led the FBI to discover the company's scheme to steal millions of dollars from its own customers.

But as the FBI and federal prosecutors closed in on ADM, they suddenly found that everything was not all that it appeared. While Whitacre was cooperating with the Feds and playing the role of loyal company man, he also had his own agenda. 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.

Meticulously researched and richly told, 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

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kurt Eichenwald is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and a New York Times bestselling author. He previously wrote about white-collar crime and corporate corruption for the New York Times for twenty years. 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. He is the author of Serpent on the Rock and Conspiracy of Fools. Eichenwald lives in Westchester County, outside New York City, with his wife and three children.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

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 KurtEichenwald, 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

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1

The large gray van, its windows tinted to block the glances of the curious, pulled away from the Decatur Airport, heading toward Route 105. Inside, four foreign visitors watched as images of the modest town came into view. Working-class houses. An Assembly of God church. A man-made lake. The vast fields of corn that could be seen from the air were no longer visible, replaced instead by an entanglement of industrial plants and office buildings.

These were the sights of a thousand other blue-collar neighborhoods in a thousand other Midwestern towns. Still, on this day, September 10, 1992, it was hard not to feel a slight sense of awe. For years, world leaders had seen these images, perhaps from this very van, in a virtual pilgrimage of power. In the last few months alone, this road had been traveled by Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, and by Dan Quayle, the American vice president. Those men, like leaders before them, had been drawn to this out-of-the-way place in the center of America largely by one company and often by one man: Archer Daniels Midland and its influential chairman, Dwayne Andreas.

Few Americans were familiar with who Andreas was or what he did. But among the world’s moneyed and powerful, he and his grain processing company were known well. In Washington, anyone who mattered was acquainted with Andreas—or more likely, with his money. For decades, he had been one of the country’s foremost political contributors, heaping cash almost indiscriminately on Democrats and Republicans—this year alone, Andreas money would be used by both George Bush and Bill Clinton in their battle for the presidency. The largesse helped transform Andreas into one of Washington’s most important men, even as he remained comfortably ensconced in its shadows. But it also thrust him into controversy. It was the $25,000 from Andreas that operatives of President Nixon laundered into the bank account of a Watergate burglar. Following the wide-ranging investigations that stemmed from the Watergate scandal, Andreas was tried and acquitted on charges of violating campaign-finance laws—but that was for the $100,000 he gave to Nixon’s 1968 rival, Hubert Humphrey.

The foreign visitors traveling to ADM on this day hoped for an opportunity to meet Andreas but were uncertain if they would. At this point, they were scheduled only to speak with others in ADM management, the people who ran its day-to-day business.

If all went well, the visitors expected the meeting to last some time. After all, before the day’s end, there were several important things that they needed to learn. But there was also one important thing that they needed to steal.

The van turned onto Faries Parkway, heading directly toward ADM’s homely, sprawling complex. Yellow flowers planted along the side of the road did little to soften the effect of the property’s jagged barbed-wire fence. At the main gate, the driver gave a nod to the guard before turning right toward the squat, nondescript building that housed ADM’s top brass. The van came to a stop beside the seven-foot bronze statue of Ronald Reagan, mounted on a two-ton granite base, that Dwayne Andreas had erected to commemorate a 1984 visit by the then-president.

Hirokazu Ikeda stepped down from the enormous vehicle, trailed closely by Kanji Mimoto, both senior executives from Ajinomoto Inc., a giant Japanese competitor of ADM. Two other Ajinomoto executives followed—one Japanese, one European. Shading their eyes from the morning sun, the men headed into the building’s lobby and introduced themselves to a receptionist. She placed a call, and within seconds a young, energetic man came bounding down a hallway toward them. It was Mark Whitacre, the thirty-four-year-old president of ADM’s newest unit, the Bioproducts Division. He was a man whom in recent months they had come to know, if not yet to trust.

Whitacre smiled as he stepped into the lobby. “Welcome to Decatur,’’ he said, shaking Ikeda’s hand. “And welcome to ADM.

“Thank you, Mr. Whitacre,’’ Ikeda said in halting English. “Happy to be here.

Whitacre turned and greeted Mimoto, a man closer to his own age who spoke English fairly well. The other two men were strangers; they were introduced to Whitacre as Kotaro Fujiwara, an engineer at the company’s Tokyo headquarters, and J. L. Brehant, who held a similar job at its European subsidiary.

With introductions complete, Whitacre escorted the executives down the hallway toward ADM’s huge trading room, the corporate nerve center where it purchased tons of corn, wheat, soybeans, and other farm products for processing each day. On the front wall of the vast room, a screen flashed up-to-the-minute commodity prices. At row after row of desks, an army of traders barked buy and sell orders into telephones.

Around the edges of the room were various executive offices, most with the doors open. Whitacre stopped at one office and tapped on the door frame.

“Terry?’’ he said. “They’re here.

Terry Wilson, head of the company’s corn-processing division, looked up from his desk and smiled. The expression was more a re- flection of strategy than delight; he was hoping to finish with the Ajinomoto executives quickly, in time for an early afternoon round of golf. Like many American businessmen, Wilson often felt frustrated with the Japanese. In negotiations, they seemed loath to horse-trade; they would listen but often retreated into ambiguity, making no specific commitments. Such tactics were considered a sign of virtue in Japan, the vague responses praised as tamamushi-iro no hy¯ogen o tsukau, or “using iridescent expressions.’’ Whatever its elegant description in Japanese, for Westerners like Wilson, a hard-drinking ex-marine, the approach was tiresome. He was not looking forward to it today.

Wilson stepped from behind his desk, past a television that was broadcasting the day’s news.

“Mr. Ikeda, Mr. Mimoto, it’s been a long time,’’ he said. “You’ve come on a day with such nice weather, it’s a shame you’re not here to play golf.

The men chatted about their golf games as Whitacre led them to the executive meeting room, where they found their places around a conference table. A kitchen staffer appeared, serving iced tea, water, and orange juice. As everyone settled in, Whitacre walked to a wall phone and dialed 5505—the extension for Jim Randall, the president of ADM.

“Jim, our guests are here,’’ Whitacre said simply. He hung up and returned to his seat.

Everyone knew this could be a tense moment. Randall had been at the company since 1968. His skills as an engineer were indisputable; his hands-on role kept the huge processing plants running. Still, the sixty-eight-year-old Randall was no Dwayne Andreas. As much as Dwayne’s smooth and polished style made him the perfect Mr. Outside for ADM, Randall’s gruff, plainspoken approach ensured that he would remain Mr. Inside. He often rubbed people the wrong way, whether he was boasting about his sports cars or ADM’s market dominance. The visitors today expected to hear about the company’s might; they knew that ADM’s invitation to visit was partly for the purpose of scaring them.

Randall walked into the room a few minutes later, introduced himself, and took his place alongside Wilson and Whitacre. Instantly he took control of the meeting and the conversation, describing how ADM was transforming itself into a new company.

Over slightly less than a century, ADM had grown into a global giant, processing grains and other farm staples into oils, flours, and...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767903277
ISBN 13 
9780767903271
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
657
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780767903264: The Informant: A True Story

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0767903269 ISBN 13:  9780767903264
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2000
Hardcover