The Informant!
The Story:
One night in early November, 1992, Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon), an Ivy League Ph.D. who was a rising star at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) did something extraordinary when he confessed to FBI agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) that ADM executives-including Whitacre himself-had routinely met with competitors to fix the price of lysine, a food additive.
It was initially Whitacre's wife (Melanie Lynskey) who forced Whitacre to become a whistleblower by threatening to go to the FBI herself if he would not have informed the authorities of ADMs illegal price-fixing activities. That meeting marked the first time that a participant in a price fixing cartel had ever voluntarily tipped off law-enforcement officials about a scheme. After informing the FBI, he assisted Dean Paisley (Allan Havey), Brian Shepard, and Robert Herndon (Joel McHale) in gathering evidence by clandestinely taping the cartels activity in business meetings in locations as far as Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City, and Hong Kong.
During Whitacre's undercover work that spanned almost three years, the FBI collected hundreds of hours of video and audio tapes that documented crimes committed by executives from around the world fixing the prices of food additives in the largest price-fixing case in history at the time.
Starring:
Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey, Frank Welker, Allan Havey, Patton Oswalt
Director By:
Steven Soderbergh
Release:
2009
Watch the Trailer:
