Books about Informant from Amazon.com

"The FBI was ready to take down America's most politically powerful corporation But there was one thing they didn't count on."

So reads the cover of this high-powered true crime story, an accurate teaser to a bizarre financial scandal with more plot twists than a John Grisham novel. In 1992 the FBI stumbled upon Mark Whitacre, a top executive at the Archer Daniels Midland corporation who was willing to act as a government witness to a vast international price-fixing conspiracy. ADM, which advertises itself as "The Supermarket to the World," processes grains and other farm staples into oils, flours, and fibers for products that fill America's shelves, from Jell-O pudding to StarKist tuna. The company's chairman and chief executive, Dwayne Andreas, was so influential that he introduced Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev, and it was his maneuvering that ensured that high fructose corn syrup would replace sugar in most foods (ever wondered why Coke and Pepsi don't taste quite like they used to?). There were two mottoes at ADM: "The competitors are our friends, and the customers are our enemies" and "We know when we're lying." And lie they did. With the help of Whitacre, the FBI made hundreds of tapes and videos of ADM executives making price-fixing deals with their corrivals from Japan, Korea, and Canada, all while drinking coffee and laughing about their crimes. The tapes should have cinched the case, but there was one problem: Their star witness was manipulative, deceitful, and unstable. Nothing was as it seemed, and the investigation into one of the most astounding white-collar crime cases in history had only just begun.

Kurt Eichenwald, an investigative reporter, covered the story for The New York Times and interviewed more than 100 participants in the case. He methodically records the six-year investigation, leaving no plot twist or tape transcript unexplored. While his primary focus is on deconstructing the disturbed Whitacre and revealing the malleability of truth, the portrait of ADM (and even the Justice Department) is damning enough to make anyone a cynic. --Lesley Reed.
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Enron was a $100-billion-a-year company in October 2001--America's seventh-largest. The Houston-based energy firm enjoyed warm ties with newly installed President George W. Bush. Earnings were up 26 percent from the previous quarter, while Fortune magazine had named Enron the country's most innovative company six years in a row. Less than two months later, Enron filed for bankruptcy in the biggest corporate failure in history. Enron became synonymous with the greed and fraud of the go-go high-tech stock bubble of the late 1990s--the worst of a series of spectacular corporate collapses that also took down WorldCom, Tyco, and Global Crossing.

What went wrong? Veteran New York Times financial journalist Kurt Eichenwald does an epic job of telling Enron's story in his 742-page tome Conspiracy of Fools. Eichenwald, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, also authored The Informant, an acclaimed account of a vast international price-fixing scandal at Archer Daniels Midland. Conspiracy of Fools tells the Enron tale with a cinematic narrative style, relying almost exclusively on scene and dialogue to bring his account to vivid life. We see how federal regulators opened the doors for the Enron fraud early on when they let the company loosen up its accounting rules and essentially cook its books. We read how Enron bullied Wall Street firms into issuing favorable reports about its share price by threatening to take away lucrative banking fees. Eichenwald also reveals how Enron manipulated electricity prices during the California energy crisis of 2000. Eichenwald's book is less successful in situating the Enron debacle in its wider context--the cycle of market speculation that reached a historic summit in the dot-com bubble. Was Enron just a cautionary sign of the greed and lack of ethics of a few bad apples, or was it more symptomatic of an entire market system? That may be a debate for another book. --Alex Roslin.
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A ruthless serial killer is running rampant across the country, terrorizing towns and tearing the tongues out of his hapless victims. Even more disturbing are the notes received by a young Miami crime reporter seemingly foretelling the atrocious deeds. Whether the sender is the killer or a psychic remains unresolved for a time until the crime spree escalates to include violent deaths by shark attack and an encounter with a hungry python. The drama intensifies when all the key players are led to a cruise ship and held hostage by a surprising hijacker..
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In The Quality of the Informant, Charles Carr, T-Man, depends heavily on informants in his pursuit of pushers, passers, and makers of "paper" - all those in the thriving business of counterfeiting. Informants are as much a part of the seamy, violent Los Angeles underworld as are the crooks they inform on, and they are crucial to Carr's effort to track down Paul LaMonica, a smooth thug whose skill at manufacturing paper is matched by his murderous amorality.

There are a great many victims in the bloody chase LaMonica leads Carr, a trail that runs from L.A. to Houston to San Diego to Ensenada, Mexico - and the informants are among them; informing is a dangerous game. As readers of Gerald Petievich's earlier books know, the excitement of the pursuit is matched by the vivid authenticity of the gritty world he depicts. Conventional morality is irrelevant in this world, whether for the crooks or for the lawmen - though this taut novel is indeed a powerfully moral tale..
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This CD-ROM contains the KINGDOM NEWS, the longest running continuously published periodical, next to The Watchtower itself. What's more, issue #1, released on March 15, 1918, is arguably one of the rarest of all the Society’s publications. After publishing the first three tabloid-size issues in 1918, the Society took a breather until July 1939 when issue #4 appeared as a four–page 9 x 12 newsletter, followed by eleven more similar-size two-page issues from 1939 to 1946. After 1946, the publication took another pause until 1973, when it reemerged as a 4–page 7 x 9 brochure. Because the Watchtower Library disc already contains the Kingdom News since 1973, this disc will serve as its companion by filling in the gap and transporting the researcher all the way back to the beginning of this fascinating newsletter. In addition, this CD-ROM contains the DIRECTOR, which immediately succeeded the Bulletin and served as the predecessor to the Informant. It enjoyed a brief existence from October 1935 to June 1936. As a result, any issue of the Director is extremely rare. It provided “Field Publishers,” with information regarding: organization instructions, new publications, campaigns, statistics, conventions, radio broadcasts, and sound equipment, etc. This disc contains the Director for all nine months, and as an added bonus, it includes the “Special October Issue” and the “January Extra” issue, for a total of eleven exceptionally rare gems. Finally, this disc also contains the INFORMANT, which replaced the Director and served as the predecessor to the modern-day Kingdom Ministry. It ran from July 1936 to August 1956, in two different sizes. Initially, from 1936 to 1950, the issues were the same large 2–page format as the Director (9 x 12). However, some months saw two issues, and periodically, some issues were published with 4 pages. In 1951, the issues were changed to a 4–page (7 x 9) format, which mirrors the current Kingdom Ministry in format, scope and purpose..
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As a cop Ron Previte was corrupt. As a mobster he was brutal. And in his final role, as a confidential informant to the FBI, Previte was deadly. The Last Gangster is his story -- the story of the last days of the Philadelphia mob, and of the clash of generations that brought it down once and for all.

For thirty-five years Ron Previte roamed the underworld. A six foot-tall, 300-pound capo in the Philadelphia-South Jersey crime family, he ran every mob scam and gambit from drug trafficking and prostitution to the extortion of millions from Atlantic City. By the 1990s, Previte, an old-school workhorse, found himself answering to younger mob bosses like "Skinny Joey" Merlina. Spoiled, cocky, and careless, the young, up-and-coming gangsters were hungry for the media's attention and the public's recognition. Gone were the days of loyalty and discretion.

Convinced that the honor of the "business" was over, Previte became the FBI's secret weapon in an intense and highly personalized war on the Philadelphia mob. Operating with the same guile, wit, and stone-cold bravado that had made him a force in the underworld, and armed with only a wiretap, Previte recorded it all: the murder, the mayhem, and the betrayal. In The Last Gangster, George Anastasia -- the critically acclaimed author of Blood and Honor and The Goodfella Tapes -- tells Previte's story for the first time. Unflinching and enthralling, The Last Gangster is the true story of how the once monolithic, highly organized, powerful, and secretive Cosa Nostra was defeated by its own hand..
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