I got quite a surprise last night while watching The Daily Show and Jon Stewart’s interview with guest Matt Damon. [Note: the link for the interview doesn't seem to work; it can be seen by going to the Daily Show link and scrolling down the Damon interview.] It took me a little time to be sure, but then I realized that the character Damon plays in his movie The Informant, to be released this week, is in fact Mark Whitacre, who was the highest-level corporate "mole" in FBI history as he fed information to the government on the price-fixing practices of the giant agribusiness corporation ADM.

I hadn’t thought about this case in years, but it is one I followed closely when it first broke because I had actually interacted with Whitacre around the time he began informing the FBI. I worked for a small California biotech firm and our company used Whitacre’s division of ADM for "toll manufacturing" of our product. It was my duty to make the technical presentation to Whitacre when he visited us while deciding whether to take on our business.

Because nearly twenty years have elapsed since that meeting, I don’t recall details, but I do remember Whitacre coming off as he is portrayed in most accounts: bright, quite driven and working very quickly. However, it’s my understanding, from reading the Wikipedia entry on Whitacre, where the book on which the movie is based is discussed, as well as from comments Stewart and Damon made in the interview, that Whitacre is portrayed in the movie in a somewhat different light than that in which he is seen in the previous book, Rats in the Grain, the first chapter of which can be read here.

The primary difference in how Whitacre is portrayed comes down to how one interprets the fraud for which Whitacre himself was eventually prosecuted. It appears that in The Informant this fraud is seen as an outgrowth of Whitacre’s bipolar disease. By contrast, here is how Rats in the Grain describes it:

Later ADM calculated that the wire transfers totalled more than $9 million. It refused to explain why standard audit techniques had failed to detect the scheme before Whitacre blew the whistle on the company.

For a time, Whitacre continued to fight brashly. He publicly insisted that he merely had partaken of an insidious off-the-books bonus plan for upper management. The extra cash came with significant strings: if an executive displeased ADM, it could expose him for tax evasion. He argued that this is what had happened to him but strenuously denied that he had stolen anything. ADM ridiculed the notion of under the table bonuses and painted him as a thief.

I have no trouble believing that ADM carried out such a practice of setting up all of its higher level executives to be subject to control through threat of exposure for fraud and tax evasion. After all, the internal "motto" that Whitacre found in the price-fixing practices that dominated the company was "The competitor is our friend and the customer is our enemy". The overall history of ADM and the political clout of its long-time Chairman Dwight Andreas fit that profile very well.

Upper levels of management at ADM have turned over since this scandal, and I have not followed the company in detail since these changes, so I have no idea whether the corporate culture there has changed. However, there have been attempts to obtain a pardon for Whitacre and FBI personnel involved in Whitacre’s case have participated in these efforts. These actions, to me, provide support for the theory that Whitacre’s "fraud" was manufactured by ADM.