Mark Edward Whitacre is an American business executive who came to public attention in 1995 when, as president of the Decatur, Illinois-based BioProducts Division at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), he became the highest-level corporate executive in U.S. history to become a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) whistleblower. For three years (1992–95), Whitacre acted as a cooperating witness for the FBI, which was investigating ADM for price fixing. In the late 1990s Whitacre was sentenced to 9 years in federal prison for embezzling $9.5 million from ADM at the same time he was assisting the federal price-fixing investigation.
Moweaqua is a village in Shelby and Christian counties, Illinois, United States. The population was 1,831 at the 2010 census.
Decatur is the largest city and the county seat of Macon County in the U.S. state of Illinois, with a population of 70,522 as of the 2020 Census. The city was founded in 1829 and is situated along the Sangamon River and Lake Decatur in Central Illinois. Decatur is the seventeenth-most populous city in Illinois.
The Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, commonly known as ADM, is an American multinational food processing and commodities trading corporation founded in 1902 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. The company operates more than 270 plants and 420 crop procurement facilities worldwide, where cereal grains and oilseeds are processed into products used in food, beverage, nutraceutical, industrial, and animal feed markets worldwide.
John Maguire Dowd is an American attorney, former attorney for the United States Department of Justice, and former Marine Corps Judge Advocate. Dowd was employed by several law firms in the Washington, D.C. area for his expertise in defending clients accused of white-collar crimes. He was appointed by Major League Baseball (MLB) to lead the special counsel in multiple investigations with the organization in the 1980s and 1990s involving sports betting and bribery, the most notable investigation being the Dowd Report in 1989, which resulted in Pete Rose being banned from baseball for life.
Kiss of Death is a 1995 American crime thriller film starring David Caruso, Samuel L. Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Helen Hunt, Ving Rhames, and Stanley Tucci, directed by Barbet Schroeder.
Dwayne Orville Andreas was one of the most prominent political campaign donors in the United States, having contributed millions of dollars to Democratic and Republican candidates alike. For twenty-five years, he was in the leadership of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), the largest processor of farm commodities in the United States, where he made his fortune.
Kurt Alexander Eichenwald is an American journalist and a New York Times bestselling author of five books, one of which, The Informant (2000), was made into a motion picture in 2009. Formerly he was a senior writer and investigative reporter with The New York Times, Condé Nast's business magazine, Portfolio, and later was a contributing editor with Vanity Fair and a senior writer with Newsweek. Eichenwald had been employed by The New York Times since 1986 and primarily covered Wall Street and corporate topics such as insider trading, accounting scandals, and takeovers, but also wrote about a range of issues including terrorism, the Bill Clinton pardon controversy, Federal health care policy, and sexual predators on the Internet.
Northwestern California University School of Law is an online, correspondence-based distance education institution founded in 1982.
Bob Zany is an American stand-up comedian and actor. He is known for performing with his trademark cigar on stage. According to an article found on his web page, he "stuff[s] a cigar into a plastic bag with a couple of Bob Zany original postcards and charge[s] five bucks for the package. [He] call[s] it the Bob Zany Fun Kit."
The Liberty City Seven were seven construction workers and members of a small Miami, Florida-based religious group who called themselves the Universal Divine Saviors. Described as a "bizarre cult," the seven were falsely arrested and wrongly charged with terrorism-related offenses in 2006 after being entrapped by a Federal Bureau of Investigation sting investigation. The members of the group operated out of a small warehouse in the Miami neighborhood of Liberty City.
Angelo "Sonny" Mercurio was an Italian-American gangster and a member of the Patriarca crime family who became an FBI informant and recorded a Cosa Nostra induction ceremony. His act led to the incarceration of family boss Raymond Patriarca, Jr. and other top family members.
The lysine price-fixing conspiracy was an organized effort during the mid-1990s to raise the price of the animal feed additive lysine. It involved five companies that had commercialized high-tech fermentation technologies, including American company Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Japanese companies Ajinomoto and Kyowa Hakko Kogyo, and Korean companies Sewon America Inc. and Cheil Jedang Ltd. A criminal investigation resulted in fines and three-year prison sentences for three executives of ADM who colluded with the other companies to fix prices. The foreign companies settled with the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division in September through December 1996. Each firm and four executives from the Asian firms pleaded guilty as part of a plea bargain to aid in further investigation against ADM. The cartel had been able to raise lysine prices 70% within their first nine months of cooperation.
Cypress Systems, Inc. is a biotech company headquartered in Madera, California and is best known for its research, in collaboration with the National Cancer Institute (NCI), regarding the use of selenium supplementation for the prevention of a variety of cancers. Cypress Systems, Inc. also manufactures selenium, zinc, and chromium for the nutraceutical industry.
The Informant! is a 2009 American biographical-crime comedy film directed by Steven Soderbergh. Written by Scott Z. Burns, the film stars Matt Damon as the titular informant named Mark Whitacre, as well as Scott Bakula, Joel McHale and Melanie Lynskey. It depicts Whitacre's involvement as a whistle blower in the lysine price-fixing conspiracy of the mid-1990s, based on the 2000 nonfiction book The Informant, by journalist Kurt Eichenwald.
Blanche M. Manning was a United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
Hector Xavier Monsegur, known also by the online pseudonym Sabu, is an American computer hacker and co-founder of the hacking group LulzSec. Facing a sentence of 124 years in prison, Monsegur became an informant for the FBI, working with the agency for over ten months to aid them in identifying the other hackers from LulzSec and related groups. LulzSec intervened in the affairs of organizations such as News Corporation, Stratfor, UK and American law enforcement bodies and Irish political party Fine Gael.
United States v. Archer Daniels Midland Co. was a criminal case filed on October 15, 1996 in which the United States alleged that Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) and other corporations and individuals engaged in a conspiracy to fix and maintain prices of lysine and citric acid and to restrain or eliminate competing suppliers of these additives in violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. ADM entered into a plea agreement in which ADM pleaded guilty to both antitrust counts and agreed to pay a combined fine of $100 million. This is equivalent to $191.90 million in present-day terms and was at the time the largest antitrust fine ever imposed.
Thomas L. Daniels was an American businessman and diplomat. He served as the chairman of Archer Daniels Midland.
Susan Smith was an American FBI informant. She was strangled by her handler and lover, Agent Mark Putnam.
