Informant (66 page)

The caller clicked off the line.

Hightower found Levetown and told him about the bizarre call. He passed the message up the line. Eventually, a decision was made by Kroll’s top officers to notify Williams & Connolly of the call.

The news deeply alarmed the defense lawyers. The anonymous Lamet Vov letters, which had stopped months before, had seemed vaguely threatening. Now this call raised those worries again. Something had to be done, they decided. Over the objections of the detective agency’s founder, Jules Kroll, Williams & Connolly ordered the investigation cut back. Kroll operatives were instructed to conduct no further interviews of potential witnesses.

No one knew it, but the Lamet Vov—the man who had called to Kroll’s offices—had just won a big round.

Outside of Yokohama, Japan, a letter arrived by overnight mail at the home of Masaru Yamamoto. For six months, Yamamoto, from Kyowa Hakko of Tokyo, had watched helplessly as the American investigation of the lysine price-fixing scheme unfolded. He could hardly believe that Whitacre had been taping their conversations all those years. He felt ashamed and frightened.

And now, the letter on this day, January 9, 1996, was telling Yamamoto to cut a deal.

The writer was David Hoech, an American consultant who for years had provided Yamamoto with market intelligence about the agricultural industry. Frequently, his information had been on target—particularly details of ADM’s plans, which he had often learned about during conversations with Whitacre. But this time, Hoech was writing with a different type of inside dope. The government, he wrote, appeared to have strong evidence—and Yamamoto needed to be prepared.

“If the Department of Justice did not have a solid case, they would not have ceased the covert operation using Mark Whitacre,” Hoech wrote. “Since June 27, 1995, they have been interviewing other people.”

While Yamamoto was out of the reach of American law enforcement, Hoech said that the tapes would almost certainly be damaging and would likely appear in the Japanese media. Then, the consultant offered some blunt advice.

“I would make a deal with DOJ for immunity from prosecution first for myself, and second to try and protect the company,’’ he wrote. “Please accept my advice and thoughts as one friend to another.’’

Yamamoto set down the letter. He faced a lot of tough decisions.

•   •   •

The government cast a wide net of subpoenas as Shepard and Herndon turned to some of the more bizarre allegations raised by Whitacre during his cooperation. Even with their witness’s credibility in shambles, the agents could not ignore his charges. Besides, evidence of other crimes—from stealing proprietary microbes to illegally recording competitors—might give them the leverage they needed to obtain more evidence from ADM in the price-fixing case.

Some allegations seemed to hold little promise. One of the first to fall through was the claim that ADM had surreptitiously taped conversations at the Decatur Club. Whitacre had said that his information was secondhand, from secretaries who transcribed the tapes. But, when interviewed, the secretaries seemed to know nothing about it. With only unproven rumor, there was little to do other than hope that subpoenas might bring in real evidence.

Other allegations seemed to be supported by Whitacre’s tapes, so the agents focused their efforts there. In an early recording, Jim Randall appeared to have been caught saying that he had paid $50,000 to someone named Mike Frein for a proprietary bacitracin bug. Herndon conducted a nationwide computer search, tracking Frein down and calling him. The agent asked broad questions; Frein steadfastly denied any wrongdoing and readily agreed to an interview. Herndon was delighted; this was moving quickly.

Days later, Herndon received a voice-mail message from Frein, telling him that the interview was off. Instead, Frein said, Herndon should telephone Aubrey Daniel. Herndon dialed the law firm’s main number and asked for Daniel. He was surprised when the call was put right through.

“This is Bob Herndon. I’m an FBI agent on the ADM case. And I have a message from Mike Frein to call you.’’

“Yes,’’ Daniel replied. “I don’t represent him, but you’ll be getting a call shortly from someone who does.’’

The call arrived quickly from William Joseph Linklater, who begged off the interview. He had only recently been hired to represent Frein, he said, and wouldn’t even know his client yet if he saw him. Herndon sighed. With lawyers involved, hopes for an easy Frein interview were over.

Then, out of nowhere, a breakthrough.

A former ADM executive who had received a subpoena agreed to talk to Shepard. On January 17, Shepard met with the former executive, Joseph Graham.
*
In longhand, Shepard took notes of Graham’s statements and was excited by what he heard. The new witness said that he had specific knowledge of ADM’s attempts to steal competitors’ technologies—even confirming some things that Whitacre had first described.

Graham said that he knew about ADM’s attempts to use prostitutes to obtain information from competing companies and to find disgruntled employees. He also said that ADM had tracked down two prostitutes to work near a competitor in Eddyville, Iowa, before Randall pulled the plug on the whole operation.

There were other technology schemes, Graham claimed. For example, he was aware that ADM sent people into the sewers near competitors’ plants, in hopes of finding proprietary microbes that had accidentally washed away. The allegation sounded exactly like something Whitacre had told Ferrari.

Graham also claimed to know about other schemes that Whitacre had never mentioned. He told Shepard that ADM had offered a Nebraska security firm $100,000 to pose as janitors on a competitor’s premises for the purpose of stealing bugs. But the firm turned down the offer, he said.

Once Graham finished his story, Shepard asked for corroboration such as expense statements. Graham promised to search for the records.

Shepard hopped on the new information. He immediately flew to Nebraska to meet with the security firm that Graham had mentioned. But the interview was a bust. The firm’s director denied knowing about the one-hundred-thousand-dollar proposal. The director seemed credible to Shepard—but so did Graham.

On September 24, Graham contacted Shepard with news. While he had been unable to locate the expense statements, something else had turned up. In one box, he had found a sealed envelope dated June 3, 1991. It was something he had hidden away years before and forgotten. Tearing it open, he had found two folded sheets of paper.

It was, he said, the list of questions that ADM had prepared for the prostitutes.

Herndon nodded a greeting to the radio operator for the Springfield office as he walked toward a fax machine. Shepard had called minutes before with the latest on the prostitute questions, promising to fax over a copy of them right away. Within minutes, a blurry, handwritten list scrolled out. Herndon picked up the sheets and headed back to his desk, reading as he walked.

“Questions for Girls, Eddyville,’’ the top read.

Glancing over the first question, Herndon chuckled.
What is current grind—bushels per day?

The other questions, given the circumstances when they would have been asked, seemed ridiculous.
Is Pepsi-Cola a big customer? Are they planning to add more fructose capacity? Who is the fastest growing wet miller?

Herndon reached his desk and called over some fellow agents. Several had already heard about the discovery of the question list.

“You guys have got to hear this,’’ Herndon said. He read out a few questions to the laughs of his colleagues.

“I can see it now,’’ one agent chuckled. “Some bimbo’s humping away with a Japanese guy who barely speaks English, and she blurts out, ‘Is Pepsi-Cola a big customer?’ ”

The agents roared.

The laughter continued throughout the day. Herndon faxed a copy of the questions to the antitrust prosecutors. He also sent a copy to Rodger Heaton in the Springfield U.S. Attorney’s office, since he was likely to handle the case if Antitrust took a pass—a likely prospect, since there really weren’t provisions in the Sherman Act against prostitution or espionage.

The questions deflated whatever eagerness existed for the case. They seemed so ridiculous; the prosecutors worried that someone at ADM had been kidding Graham years before, and the man simply didn’t get it. Either that, or whoever had put this idea together was a real buffoon. Topping it off, with Graham insisting that Randall had put a stop to the plan, there was a good chance that no crime had ever been committed—even if the questions were real.

Herndon and Shepard were told to keep pursuing the investigation, but they had few illusions about the chances for prosecution. After all, it’s awfully hard to win a conviction for a crime that leaves the jurors in stitches.

Faxes and letters from the anonymous Lamet Vov had begun stacking up again at Williams & Connolly starting in November. The writer—purporting to represent an organization called the ADM Shareholders’ Watch Committee—was no longer just sending them to the offices of ADM directors and managers; now, they were arriving at their unlisted home-fax numbers.

The letters criticized the board for being misled by ADM management and raised a series of unrelated claims, such as accusations that one executive had been involved in a hit-and-run. A January letter listed allegations that the writer claimed could be proved with Whitacre’s tapes. That same letter attacked Kroll Associates for the attempted interview of Patti McLaren, claiming that the detectives had offered money to Whitacre’s sister-in-law.

“The shareholders are well-equipped to see this battle through,’’ the letter concluded. “No, Dwayne, we are not some politicians that you can buy off or frighten!’’

As far as Aubrey Daniel was concerned, the letters amounted to illegal threats, almost certainly coming from Whitacre. Lawyers and investigators were dispatched around the country, trying to piece together information about the Lamet Vov—information that they hoped would prove useful in ADM’s war against Whitacre.

The first assignment was to learn the meaning of
Lamet Vov
. That proved relatively easy; a lawyer digging through a reference book found the term under a slightly different spelling,
Lamed Vav Zaddikim
. The Hebrew phrase referred to a concept from the Babylonian Talmud about a group of thirty-six anonymous, righteous men who live in the world during each generation. There seemed little doubt that the writer of the Lamet Vov letters was making an allusion to this group of hidden saints.

Figuring out the Lamet Vov’s identity proved more difficult than cracking the code of the pen name. With the first group of letters, the sender had altered the telltale, the line at the top of a fax that identifies the phone number of the transmitting machine. But finally, a fax with a telltale arrived. Williams & Connolly tracked it down to a Kinko’s copy center in Kentucky and located the center employee who had handled the transmission. The employee had some vague memory of the man who had sent the letter, but the description sounded nothing like Whitacre.

As soon as the lawyers were set to concentrate more on Kentucky, another Lamet Vov letter arrived by Federal Express. This one was traced to a FedEx station in St. Louis, but that lead also proved to be a dead end. With the original letter in hand, though, Williams & Connolly had the chance to dig up some solid evidence. The letter was sent out and dusted for fingerprints—but none were found. Whoever sent the package had planned ahead and worn gloves.

In hopes of finding more leads, the letters were turned over to an expert who specialized in psychological profiles based on writing samples. The expert found similarities in sentence structure between the Lamet Vov letters and some of Whitacre’s writings, but also found significant deviations in style. The expert concluded that, while Whitacre may have played some role in the Lamet Vov letters, another writer or writers had to be involved.

Stumped, Aubrey Daniel and his partner, Barry Simon, met at the Justice Department with Mackay and Nixon on January 31. The lawyers presented their findings to the prosecutors and requested that the government include the Lamet Vov letters in the investigation of Whitacre. The next day, the prosecutors sent a fax to Bassett and D’Angelo, describing the Williams & Connolly briefing and enclosing the Lamet Vov letters turned over by the lawyers.

“We request that the FBI initiate an investigation to determine the person or persons responsible for these letters,’’ the prosecutors wrote. “Please call so that we may discuss your intended plan of action.’’

The agents laughed. Weeks before, they had been told to rush the investigation and put aside all of the other allegations of wrongdoing; now they were supposed to waste time figuring out who was writing a bunch of poison-pen letters?

“Who cares?’’ D’Angelo said in a call to Bassett. “What’s the violation?’’

The agents put the letters in the case file, and promptly forgot them.

But ADM and Williams & Connolly could not. Soon, reporters were calling the company asking questions about the allegations raised in the letters. The final straw came on February 12, when Bonnie Wittenburg, a stock analyst with Dain Bosworth, put out her latest report analyzing ADM stock. Wittenburg repeated her previously issued opinion that investors should sell the stock, listing several reasons. But one of her rationales stood out from the rest.

“Shareholders’ Watch letters raise serious questions,’’ she wrote.

The following day, a Tuesday, Scott Lassar headed into the conference room at the Chicago U.S. Attorney’s office. He was joined by Herndon and Kevin Culum, an antitrust prosecutor. They had come together that day for the first full interview of Marty Allison, the former ADM vice president accused of participating in frauds with Whitacre. But this day, Allison was meeting with the government to be quizzed about his knowledge of price-fixing.

Allison arrived accompanied by his attorney, Michael Monico. The thirty-eight-year-old Allison was handsome, just over six feet tall, with blond hair and hazel eyes. From his first instant in the room, he seemed contrite.