Rating: 
Summary: White Collar Crime "Does Pay"
Review: Even though not as fascinating as Kurt Eichenwald's previous masterpiece...Serpent on the rock; the Prudential Financial Insurance Company's billion dollar fraud...this new story again confirms that "White Collar Crime Does Pay." The price fixing i.e. illegal artificial price inflation, caused the American & Canadian public to be "ripped off" of billions of dollars in consumer' products. Again the culprits, the immoral and "powerful" greedy industrial executives, received a simple slap on the wrist, having to pay back, pennies on the dollars in fines. Talk about your true justice!
Rating:
Summary: The best thrillers are true stories
Review: This true story of the fall of ADM is engaging and captivating. If you have any interest in big business and how it impacts on everyday life of everyday people, you will enjoy this glimpse inside ADM. The overarching story about a vast international conspiracy to fix prices is a gripping story of personal and corporate greed run amok. Ultimately, the actions of Mark Whitacre detailed here by Eichenwald affected many different people who never heard his name or knew his story. The story told here shows how much can go on in the world of corporate America to affect the lives of every person. Told in a straightforward manner, the story here is easy to follow and would be a great book if it were a piece of fiction. That the story is completely true makes The Informant all that much more gripping.
Rating:
Summary: True Story Thriller - unbelievable!
Review: I had never heard of the company ADM, but now it will stay with me forever. A gripping true white-collar crime story - so incredible that it is hard to believe that it is actually true. I had to keep reminding myself! The FBI blunders, delusional witnesses, complacent companies, international corruption and politics - this book has it all. A real page turner.
Rating:
Summary: The competitor is our friend, the customer is our enemy.
Review: I've always enjoyed a book about a good financial scandal, ever since I read a Penguin paperback in the mid-sixties about Tony DiAngelis and the Great Salad Oil Swindle. The 'Informant' carries on the tradition of exposing the arrogance of corporate power. However like another reviewer I had my doubts about the book after reading more than half of it because not too much seemed to be happening, meeting after meeting between Mark Whitacre and the FBI and Whitacre's meetings with the bosses of ADM take up an awful lot of pages. The book really comes alive when the Feds have the evidence and decide to prosecute ADM for price fixing in the lysine market, various departments of Government seem to have conflicts of interest in how to prosecute the case and a further twist is added when it turns out that whistle-blower Whitacre has been helping himself to company funds. Eichenwald blends all the increasing action together and it does become a book that you can't put down until the last page. I would have preferred it if he had provided some background early on about how the market for lysine works, how come the companies that buy this product by the ton had no idea that the price was fixed? Another point (minor I admit) is that the thirty-seven pages of notes and sources at the back of the book would work best if they appeared at the bottom of the relevant pages, I got fed up with having to keeping turning to the back to check on a source. I know the purists will say that this material belongs in the back of the book but it is another example of how conservative the publishing biz is. Amazingly there are four pages in the front of the book that actually have roman numerals for page numbers. So, an excellent read about corporate and personal greed and I'll long remember the comment from Dwayne Andreas, CEO of ADM while the price fix was in, ''The competitor is our friend, the customer is our enemy'', though he said it in the early nineties I think that it could explain a lot about corporate America in this new century. I hope Mr Eichenwald is considering a similar expose of Enron. BTW, I understand Mark Whitacre, diagnosed with a mild form of schizophrenia, committed suicide in prison this February.
Rating:
Summary: Forget Potboiler- This is an Essential Textbook!
Review: You better believe that this is a real life potboiler! Kurt Eichenwald unravels a dark tale of criminal misconduct in the Archer Daniels Midland conglomerate. If you listen to NPR, or watch PBS, they're the soft selling, "Supermarket to the World" guys. They must pick some good shows to sponsor, because I've watched enough of their highly evocative thrashing golden wheat field trailers to recognize them.
The supermarket line is not their only slogan however, they use this one internally, like a mantra, "The customer is our enemy." Doesn't have the same ring to it. And the only staples they are likely to produce are best evoked in terms of that giant who would grind your bones to make his bread. No farmer power in that version.
I read the book in the summer of `01, when it satisfied my cynicism with a sizzle. I have since returned to it, with a different agenda, the post Enron, post enduring freedom, war profiteering, outrage and post traumatic shock agenda. But I also have that eye-opening, alarm that has become my own mantra- "Have these multi-national greed addicts anesthetized us? Why have we only clucked at their perfidies, and not harnessed some guts and challenged them who would destabilize the financial structures of the global free market chimera?
War on Drugs? 2nd ammendment rights to bear arms? Is this Laurel and Hardy? What gives, fellow over-educated sleeping beauties? Greed costs us more lives than drugs and terrorists. Political purchase power means no free elections here in the country that will declare war on you for not having them yourself. ADM, is a good place to start but it is the tip of the iceberg. Whether we reap what we snooze or not, this book should be a textbook; the means by which we teach our kids the following:
Civics, criminal justice/law, history, economics, international relations, the American political process, journalism, and that real pain-numbing oxycotin favored by the right known as
"CHARACTER COUNTS." That's all I can write- just read this book, consider it like another snide remark on our highly unemployed, recession dimmed citizens- " dutiful volunteering."
Rating:
Summary: The Best In It's Class! Awesome!
Review: Kurt Eichenwald's "The Informant" is so good it is shocking. Countless hours of reading over documents, interviewing, thinking, writing, re-writing, structuring the book and more had to go in to creating a book so well written, so well structured and so powerful. This is a superb achievement! On the surface, and for the first 300 pages of the book, this is about an executive, Mark Whitacre, inside the Archer Midland Daniels company working with the FBI to gather evidence to expose price fixing in the lysine market. The turning point of the story is the FBI raid on Archer Midland Daniels headquarters. "That night, the (the FBI agents) could hardly be blamed for believing that this case was all but over. But it would be their last night of confidence and celebration for years to come....... For on that night in the summer of 1995, almost nothing was what it appeared to be" (pg 8) To be honest, I almost put the book down after 250 or so pages because it was getting a little repetetive. But once I got to the raid, around page 300, new information starts to come out and I absolutely could not put this book down. I just had to find out what was going on and how things were going to turn out. On this Eichenwald writes, ".... the story was intentionally structured to lend temporary credence to some of the many lies told in this investigation. Essentially, I was attempting to put readers in the same uncertain position as the investigators, all while dropping hints -- admittedly subtle at times -- about where reality began" (pg 567, Afterword) Eichenwald concludes by writing, "It is said that truth can set you free. But as this story shows, a corollary also holds true: Lying can leave you imprisoned -- in every possible meaning of that word" (pg 567, Afterword) Read the book to find out what the heck he means!
Rating: 
Summary: An Inside Look at Corporate Corruption
Review: This book starts out well, with lots of detail about the investigation into price fixing of ADM's products in the 1990's. The detail becomes overwhelming as the tale goes on, with meeting after meeting of the conspirators laid out for examination.
The story is mostly about the flawed personality and reasoning of the primary character, a former ADM executive, whom the FBI coddled and prodded as they built their case. His ulimate exposure is a surprise to the FBI, despite the many clues he left along the way. The cumbersome infighting among Federal Agencies is also laid bare. The events are well documented and is an interesting read for fans of true-crime stories. It leaves one understanding how so many investigations have been botched; not for lack of evidence, but lack of cooperation and coordination.
Rating:
Summary: What an Amazing Story!!
Review: I stumbled on this book by accident, and was intrigued by the cover reviews, which likened The Informant to a Grisham novel. I was doubtful, since hype is king in publishing these days. But I was wrong. This book was easily one of the most thrilling, page-turning masterpieces I have ever read, better than even my favorite Grisham book! I could not believe it was a true story.
In this age of Enron, I cannot think of a better book to lay out the real secrets behind corporate crime. The sleaziness of what went on inside this oh-so-upright corporation is unbelievable, as is the amazing story of everything that happened to bring the bad guys in. It's hard to describe much of this tale without giving away too much, but suffice to say, there are surprises aplenty.
The only thing I couldn't understand about the book was why haven't I heard more about it? It is so excellent. I can't believe that Hollywood hasn't made this thriller into a movie yet. But don't wait for them to figure it out. Read the book. Just make sure you don't need to get up early the next day.
Rating:
Summary: Sets a New Standard for Investigative Reporting
Review:
The level of detail in this book is extraordinary, as is the meticulous documentation of sources. Even the index is surprising in both its presence and its quality.
A few little gems jump out at me from all the detail: 1) Corporate corruption appears to not only be routine, but massive among more industries and companies than we might believe. 2) The government does actually try to regulate and prosecute, but this is both very expensive, and appears to result in the public *not* becoming conscious of the mis-deeds--no massive boycott, for example, seems to result. 3) The executives that conspire to cheat the public are remarkably ignorant. I was stunned to read how one of the principals in this story fell victim to what I thought was a really well-known Nigerian scam for defrauding numerous Americans of tens of thousands of dollars each, claiming that it will "release" millions in hijacked funds from the national bank. 4) The government often mistreats its own people. I was especially troubled, having seen employee abuse at other national agencies, when the book related how a senior FBI agent was not allowed to transfer--and save his mental health--because of his boss's selfish interests. 5) Lastly, I was left with the impression that there is an elaborate dance that goes on between the very expensive top law firms that protect corporate criminals, and the government. While the government seems to have worked hard on this one, the general impression that is left is that the normal drill when the public has been defrauded of hundreds of millions of dollars, is for the culprits to plead "no contest" and agree not to do it again--in return for token fines and guaranteed immunity. At the end of the book I was left feeling dismayed at the depth and breadth of corporate corruption, at the general inadequacy of government in keeping the private sector economy honest, and at the lack of alternative public advocacy devices for truly focusing public spotlights such that fair pricing and fair practices are widely understood and enforced by customers, not just under-funded over-worked oversight bodies. Although the book is very very long at 629 pages, I would have liked to see an author's epilogue titled "What Is To Be Done?" The author of this book can rightly claim to be among a select few intimately familiar with this problem in a manner no book by itself could communicate, and so a public policy analysis, some sort of prescription, would have been a valuable postscript to this excellent, really superior, investigative report.
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive and thoroughly researched albeit overlongg
Review: When I saw Kurt's new book on ADM I decided that I had to read it. I read his last book on Prudential, "Serpent on the Rock", some years back and to this day I am still haunted by the corruption and deceit that he narrated so well in that exhaustive and harrowing story. The book on ADM won't disappoint in that regard. Once again a large and influential corporation decides to bypass the law in favour of greed. I just found that the first two parts of the book (the book is divided into three sections) a bit overlong. Essentially they serve to build up the main protagonist, the informant, going through his various emotional vacillations and motivations for essentially spying on his own company for over three years. In that space of time capturing a damning wealth of evidence against ADM, which serves as the cornerstone of the government's case of price-fixing. While ADM engaged in price-fixing across all its product lines the government's case rested in the main on one product: lysine. That is what the informant was responsible for as a manager of that division. While it was enough of a case on its own it didn't need over 300 pages to explore all the various meetings that took place the world over to bring out the main point: ADM was engaged in price-fixing and it was clearly illegal and they knew it. It would have been enough to tell a little about the informant and the two FBI agents that served as his mentors as it were. Not to say that they coached him, but rather chaperoned him through this emotionally trying period. From that it would have been quite enough to focus on one price-fixing meeting, what I call the "smoking gun" meeting in which all the competitors got together, agreed that the consumer was the enemy and drafted an agreement to fix prices and volumes the world over. That's all the reader needs to know. That's also all the anti-trust lawyers needed to see and hear. The rest was just padding. More of the same. The last part of the book, titled "Nothing Simple is Simple" moves at a much more brisk pace and hence is much more exciting to read. Although I would have liked to have known more about what was going in inside ADM from insiders once the cat was out of the bag. All the reader gets is second hand scuttlebutt. While I concede that Kurt has done an outstanding job compiling this vast amount of material into a tellable narrative that once again serves to shake our confidence in the ability of companies to self-regulate in the face of the need to produce profits, the material nonetheless could have done with some more careful editing to produce a more compelling story. I am patiently waiting for Kurt to tell the story of Enron, which I hope that he has already started on.
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