In a small courtroom packed with Whitacre’s relatives, government agents, ADM supporters, local students and courthouse employees, U.S. District Court Judge Harold Baker excoriated Whitacre for committing crimes based on “garden variety venality and greed.” The Chicago Tribune (March 5, 1998)
For Mark Whitacre, the American Dream became a nightmare.
The highest-ranking executive at a Fortune 500 company to become a whistleblower grew up in Morrow, married his high school sweetheart, graduated from Ohio State University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees and went on to Cornell University to receive a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry.
In 1989, at 32 years old, Whitacre joined Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) as divisional president of the biotech division and corporate vice president. He was the No. 4 executive in a company ranked No. 56 on the Fortune 500.
He and his wife, Ginger, bought an eight-bedroom house with an eight-car garage. He added a Ferrari, two BMWs and two Mercedes. The couple once had cars in the garage that were a year or two old and still had the sticker prices on them.
“Boy, did I get obsessed with that lifestyle,” Whitacre told a crowd of 225 Wednesday at the eighth annual Leadership Luncheon at Cincinnati Christian University. “I felt like I was a rock star. My own success became my failure.”
He had everything. But he also had nothing, he said.
Dream job
Archer Daniels Midland isn’t a company that’s on the tip of everyone’s tongue. But that’s exactly where its products go.
“When you go to the grocery store, nine times out 10, if you read that ingredient label on the side of that package, at least one ingredient was produced by ADM,” Whitacre, now 56, said. Those products include almost 2,000 food ingredients made at more than 270 plants around the world—various oils, starches, citric acid, cocoa and sweeteners among them.
Whitacre’s base salary was $350,000, but with stock options and bonuses, he made seven figures a year. He was one of seven executives with access to a corporate jet at any time.
“Our chairman was 75 years old, our president was 69,” he said. He had a chance to become the next president or CEO. And soon. “Instead of fighting the culture, I became part of the culture.”
That culture had a dark secret—one that was about to consume Whitacre.
Cracks in a strong foundation
“I grew up in a home in Morrow, Ohio. My parents still live in the same home that I lived in starting at age four,” he told the crowd, which included Ginger. “I grew up learning to do the right things, with the right moral compass. But when I got a level of power, that moral compass became a gray area. I came to that fork in the road, and I made some huge mistakes.”
Whitacre met his wife when she was in the seventh grade and he was in the eighth grade in Little Miami schools. They were homecoming king and queen in 1975. They married in 1979. (Photos below courtesy of Ginger and Mark Whitacre)
Whitacre said his wife noticed a lot of changes in him in 1992. For one thing, he was working up to 120 hours a week.
“I was obsessed. It was almost like an addiction with that job. She sat me down and said: ‘What’s going on with your life, Mark? You don’t spend any time with us.’ I didn’t spend any time with her or with our three children. All I did was work, work, work. And I said, ‘The more I work, the more bonuses I get, the more stock options I get, the more money I make. That’s the way to make millions of dollars in this company.’ She said: ‘I’d rather have less stuff and have your time. We have eight cars in the garage, and our three kids aren’t even driving.’”
Whitacre would work long hours, come home for dinner and then get on the phone for more work. He told his wife that when it’s 8 o’clock at night in the US, it’s 8 o’clock in the morning in Asia.
The secret revealed
Ginger wanted to know why he had to be on the phone so much. He told her that ADM was fixing prices with competitors in other countries. She asked what exactly that meant. He explained that it was a way to charge more for their produces and added, “We’re making an extra billion dollars (a year) for the company!”
She said, “‘You’re a $70 billion company—why would you steal a billion?’”
Talk about greed, he said. “I didn’t get that then.”
Ginger asked how long it had been going on, and he told her about 14 years, “and these guys are pros.” He had been doing it for about seven months, and he was learning the ropes.
“She said, ‘Isn’t that illegal?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s illegal, but everybody’s doing it. We’ve got 11 companies involved. It’s something that companies our size do. It’s very common.”
Then Ginger brought it home with a simple question: “Who pays for this?” He told her that when someone buys $50 of groceries, it costs them an extra two or three dollars. “That’s all,” he said.
She said that means her grandma, her aunt, her uncle and her brother were all paying for it. “I can’t live with this,” she told him. “You’ve got to turn yourself in.”
He told her he could go to jail, and they could lose everything.
“I’d rather be homeless than live in a house where illegal activity is going on,” she said. “Either you turn yourself in today, or I’m going to turn you in.”
A surprise for the FBI
Within an hour, Whitacre was sitting with the FBI. Over the course of four hours, with his wife at his side, he told FBI agents he was involved in a billion-dollar international cartel, price-fixing case.
“Let me tell you something, when you walk into the FBI and tell them that you’re stealing a billion dollars a year, it’s an interesting rap.” Calls were going out everywhere, he said, all the way up to FBI Director Louis Freeh.
They told him either you are going to prison, or you are going to wear a wire to bring the scheme down. He wore the wire for three years. It was the longest time ever that someone wore a wire in an FBI case.
“Just imagine yourself, for a minute, when you go back to work today, that you have a tape recorder attached to your body, another tape recorder in a briefcase, and a third tape recorder in a special notebook. And you’ll be taping your co-workers, your supervisors and in, some cases, your friends, unbeknownst to them,” he told the Cincinnati Christian University crowd.
“Now imagine doing that every day for three years. I was in my 30s; it was 1992. I met four FBI agents at 6 o’clock in the morning. They shaved my chest every morning, they taped a microphone to my chest. They checked the batteries in the tape recorder attached to my body, another one in a briefcase and third one in a notebook. You had three just in case one or two didn’t work, that way they could capture the conversation.”
Undercover with the FBI, he met with executives in meetings around the world. A green lamp that “looked like it came from a yard sale,” accompanied Whitacre on his travels, as did the video camera he disguised.
“That green lamp was in the Shangri-La in Singapore, that green lamp was in the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong, that green lamp was in the Four Seasons in Chicago and at two or three meetings a month for three years, sitting two or three feet from where we were sitting.”
No one noticed. “Greed blinds you. All they could think about was the billion dollars we were making for their companies and the millions of dollars that they would make in bonuses as a result of it.”
Once, in a California meeting at a Marriott hotel, his briefcase started clicking. The tape got twisted and started clicking more loudly. He had to open the briefcase to fix it, and the participants in the meeting didn’t even blink.
Trying to find himself
After two years of wearing a wire, Whitacre said he didn’t know who he was—whether he worked for ADM or the FBI or what. Once, when he was blowing leaves off the driveway at 3 o’clock in the morning during a thunderstorm, his wife came out and told him he needed God in his life.
He told her: “Who needs God? I’m going to be president of the 56th largest company in America. It was just announced two months ago. When our 69-year-old president retires, I am taking his place. It’s already in concrete. I’m going from No. 4 to No. 2.”
Ginger told him: “You’ve got to be delusional. That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. The only reason why they announced you as the next president is because they don’t know you’re the informant. You’re bringing down the chairman, the vice chairman, the president. I thought you always knew that when this is all over with, you’ll have to work for somebody else. They’re going to fire you for being a whistle-blower.”
Whitacre knew his wife was right. He hadn’t considered the end game; he thought that by doing the right thing, he would be the hero.
Then he started thinking that no one would hire him once his whistle-blowing became public. So he hatched a new scheme. He decided he would write his own severance package: three years’ worth of his compensation so that he would have three years to get back on his feet.
Using fraudulent invoices, Whitacre wrote himself five checks totaling $9 million.
When the price-fixing case broke in the public, ADM contacted the FBI to tell them that Whitacre had embezzled $9 million. (Photo below by B. Ferguson, from Mark Whitacre talk on Feb. 26 at Cincinnati Christian University)
“Biggest mistake I ever made,” he said. “Talk about a decision made in isolation out on the driveway at 3 in the morning.”
Whitacre’s FBI handlers stood behind their informant and told him that they would get the best plea deal they could for him. They told prosecutors that if Whitacre were prosecuted for embezzlement, it would put a chill on future white-collar cases; that Whitacre was in a fragile mental state because of all of the pressure and was not sleeping at night; that while FBI agents received counseling every three months to deal with a double life, Whitacre got no help.
The U.S. Attorney offered six months at a prison camp, “the deal of a lifetime,” as Whitacre was told. He fired his lawyer and threw the plea deal into the trash can, despite his wife begging him to sign it. He hired new legal counsel, and after two years of fighting, he received a 10-year prison sentence. It would’ve been 15 had he not paid back the $9 million.
“That’s how smart I thought I was.”
Whitacre lost hope. At age 41, he faced a decade in prison. One day, he pulled the car into one of his garages and attempted suicide. A grounds keeper found him unconscious in the nick of time. He was hospitalized for a month. After that he was treated for bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Seven months before reporting for prison, Whitacre got a visit from Ian Howes, a CFO for a pharmaceutical company involved with Christian Business Men’s Connection. Howes told Whitacre that he had read about his case. He told Whitacre that prison would be the beginning of his life, not the end and counseled Whitacre until he left for prison.
Chuck Colson, who founded Prison Fellowship ministries after serving time for his role in the Watergate scandal, also visited Whitacre and counseled him.
“He could relate to me; he reached out to me,” Whitacre said.
Redemption
In his third month in prison, in June 1998, Whitacre realized what Howes and Colson had been telling him. His life was changing.
“I got down on my knees and surrendered my life to Jesus Christ because of the seeds planted by Ian Howes and Chuck Colson.”
In August of 1998, “the food companies we stole from—Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Kraft, Pillsbury—contacted Ginger and said, ‘Ginger Whitaker, if it wasn’t for you, price-fixing would still be going on.’” They told her that they would take care of the family financially while her husband was in prison.
“Those companies that I stole from financially took care of my family for nine years,” he said. They also helped Ginger get her teaching degree, and she was a Teacher of the Year in 2007.
The family moved to three states, following Whitacre as he was moved from prison to prison. Visiting hours occurred on weekends, and his family’s time in prison with him added up to three years and eight months “because of the mistakes I made.”
Whitacre became emotional several times during his talk, primarily when he spoke of what his family endured.
In the end, he said, there were 60 convictions across many companies in the case—including ADM vice chairman Michael Andreas, who received a two-year prison sentence. ADM paid a then-record $100 million in civil fines and $400 million to settle a civil antitrust suit. “We thought we were above the law,” Whitacre said.
He went from a seven-figure income to earning $20 a month in prison, from a 13,000-square-foot house to a 10-by-10-foot cell.
He served eight years and nine months in prison, getting out early for good behavior. He helped fellow inmates learn to read and write, conducted GED classes and mentored dozens of inmates using the Christian Business Men’s Connection’s “Operation Timothy” Bible study materials.
A new life
Whitacre had four job offers when he came out of prison without sending a single resume. His downfall became the subject of a movie, The Informant! starring Matt Damon. (Pictured below with Mark and Ginger Whitacre)
The Whitacres today live in Florence, Ky. He commutes to California for his job as chief operating officer and chief science officer for Cypress Systems Inc., a biotechnology company involved in cancer research.
He said he also finds great joy in serving others, and he delivers his story across the country—at 86 events in 2013 and 74 the year before. His wife attends about a third of the events with him, often doing a QA.
“If I look at my 56 years of life, the most productive years of my life were the nine years in federal prison because for the first time in my life, I was helping somebody besides myself.”
LEARN MORE: Mark Whitacre’s website
Once a whistleblower & embezzler, the man who inspired "The Informant!" talks ...
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét