I thought the guy's name was familiar. Mark Whitacre, who is played by Matt Damon in the new movie "The Informant!," came up on our radar more than 12 years ago when he was running a company in Chapel Hill. I had been business editor for six months.
Here's a story written by David Ranii that I pulled from the archives.
Whitacre sues agent from FBI
CHAPEL HILL - A few months after MarkWhitacre began secretly taping the price-fixing schemes of his fellow executives at Archer Daniels Midland for the FBI, he began using the agency's own equipment to surreptitiously record his meetings with the FBI agent in charge of the investigation.
By that time, Whitacre said, he was as wary of the FBI as he was about the goings-on at ADM, the self-proclaimed "supermarket to the world."
Among other things, that wariness was triggered by instructions from FBI agent Brian Shepard to destroy evidence, Whitacre
claimed in a lawsuit filed Monday.
The surreptitious recordings made at ADM by
Whitacre - now the chief executive of a Chapel Hill startup, Biomar International Inc., and the former president of ADM's Bioproducts Division - set the scene for Decatur, Ill.-based ADM to pay a record $100 million fine and plead guilty to price-fixing.
Now Whitacre said a second set of tapes he made - the ones the FBI didn't know about - could be used as evidence in a lawsuit his lawyers have filed against Shepard.
Whitacre said that lawsuit is a prelude to filing a suit against the FBI itself. At any rate, one legal expert told Reuters that,
because the suit targets Shepard in his official capacity as an agent, Whitacre is effectively suing the FBI.
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Urbana, Ill., claims that: - Shepard threatened Whitacre with criminal prosecution when
Whitacre asked to have his immunity agreement reviewed by a lawyer, even though another FBI agent advised him to do just that.
The FBI later decided that Whitacre had broken the immunity agreement, according to the suit, and last month charged him with price-fixing - the very crime he was recruited to uncover - along with two other former ADM executives.
- Shepard prevented Whitacre from seeking medical assistance for depression and "suicidal thoughts," which
Whitacre said were inspired by the stress of being an FBI mole.
Whitacre said he was diagnosed as a manic-depressive after he tried to commit suicide in August 1995.
-Whitacre was repeatedly subjected to "anger, shouting, threats of criminal prosecution and intimidation" from Shepard.
The FBI press office in Washington declined to comment on
Whitacre's lawsuit.
"We couldn't discuss or comment on pending litigation," an FBI spokesman said.
In an interview with The News & Observer late last week,
Whitacre said that, in retrospect, he was naive to agree to work as an FBI mole in the first place.
"What happened is, I had ADM on one side, the government on the other - both massive forces, and I am stuck in the middle with a big mess," Whitacre said.
Whitacre moved from the Midwest to Chapel Hill last September and took the job as chief executive officer of Biomar, which is
developing technology to predict, years in advance, whether someone is likely to contract cancer and other diseases.
Whitacre said that although he is seeking more than $1 million in compensatory damages - plus punitive damages - in his suit,
his primary motivation is "to put the cards on the table about what really happened."
Clearly, however, the lawsuit also is part of his defense against the criminal charge of price-fixing.
Whitacre has pleaded innocent to the charge.
ADM also has accused Whitacre of embezzling millions of dollars from the company, a charge he denies, saying the money he received was part of a company-approved, secret compensation plan for top executives. He has sued ADM for wrongful termination.
Whitacre said the seeds of his mistrust of the FBI were sowed when, early on, Shepard told him to destroy any tapes that made ADM look good - such as a recording that indicated ADM was involved in price-fixing involving fructose. (The price-fixing
case that eventually was pursued against ADM involved two other products, citric acid and lysine, an animal feed supplement.)
"He was saying ... this case was a 'tough sell.' To make it a higher priority, he wanted the best stuff to sell it as
a case," Whitacre said of Shepard. "If he didn't like a tape and thought it was bad for us, he would say ... this is a tape you have to go home and get rid of. Destroy it."
When Whitacre questioned the legality of destroying the tapes, according to the suit, Shepard said he would deny ever having issued such instructions. "Who are they going to believe, an FBI agent or you?" Shepard asked Whitacre.
Whitacre said he didn't destroy those tapes, however. He also said Shepard stopped ordering that tapes be destroyed after his
superiors made the case a priority.
The pending criminal case against Whitacre forced him to go public with the FBI's treatment of him and his manic-depression, despite his concerns about revealing his condition.
Whitacre said his depression is under control because of medication - and pointed out that prominent, successful people like Mike Wallace also have been diagnosed as manic-depressive.
Whitacre said of his lawsuit: "This gives people a sense of what could happen when you go undercover."
(Reuters contributed to this report.)
