The FBI wasn't really sure what they'd got on their hands when the rising corporate star Mark Whitacre offered to expose a massive worldwide price-fixing conspiracy at his company.
And the trouble with The Informant!, the movie about the case, is that the director Steven Soderbergh seems equally unsure of what he had when the time came to film it.
His confusion is not surprising. What seems initially to be a simple case of corporate greed in the early 1990s is muddied when (spoiler alert) Whitacre is revealed to have embezzled millions of dollars of company funds and, at times, to have a delusional grasp of reality.
The serious issue at the heart of this story is that Whitacre ended up getting a 10-year jail term for his frauds, more than three times as long as the Archer Daniels Midland corporate executives whose actions cost consumers hundreds of millions of dollars in artificially inflated prices. Whitacre's actions also prompted such concern by law enforcement agencies that the final result was to deter future whistle-blowers.
A book on Whitacre's case by The New York Times investigative journalist Kurt Eichenwald formed the basis of this movie. It, as well as a 1997 movie featuring Timothy Dalton, is also called The Informant, and the presence of the exclamation mark in Soderbergh's film is indicative.
The much-lauded director behind Traffic and the Oceans 11 trilogy could easily have made a movie similar to The Insider, the serious and slightly turgid 1999 film saved by Russell Crowe's breakthrough performance as the corporate cigarette-industry whistleblower.
Instead, Soderbergh focuses on Whitacre's personal journey and his increasingly tenuous grasp on reality through years of covert wiretapping, investigation and, finally, imprisonment after he is stripped of his immunity.
All this is portrayed in Soderbergh's typically stylish way, drawing deeply on the themes that worked so well in the Oceans 11 trilogy. The trouble is that the subject matter doesn't really lend itself to a lightweight rat-pack crime caper.
Damon does his best to salvage the film with an endearingly manic performance as Whitacre, a role for which he gained 15kg and, well, dorkified himself.
A series of strong performances by the supporting cast, including Scott Bakula and Joel McHale as increasingly exasperated FBI agents and Melanie Lynskey as Whitacre's long-suffering wife, also help, but manage only to stop this movie from being a total disaster.
The film contains characteristics of a movie that has been adapted from a book, including seemingly obscure plot fragments that one strongly suspects relate to a subtheme of Eichenwald's book that has been glossed over in the big-screen adaptation.
The Informant! has drawn polarising reactions from its audiences, prompting lavish praise or disappointment but hardly any middling opinions. At the box office in the US, it was beaten in its opening week by Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
As for the real-life Whitacre, after being released from jail after serving more than eight years, he re-entered the corporate world and rose to become the chief operating officer of Cypress Systems, a California-based biotech company.
The Byblos iftar in numbers
29 or 30 days – the number of iftar services held during the holy month
50 staff members required to prepare an iftar
200 to 350 the number of people served iftar nightly
160 litres of the traditional Ramadan drink, jalab, is served in total
500 litres of soup is served during the holy month
200 kilograms of meat is used for various dishes
350 kilograms of onion is used in dishes
5 minutes – the average time that staff have to eat
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
The specs
Engine: 2.0-litre 4-cyl turbo
Power: 201hp at 5,200rpm
Torque: 320Nm at 1,750-4,000rpm
Transmission: 6-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 8.7L/100km
Price: Dh133,900
On sale: now
The%20specs
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Company profile
Company name: Suraasa
Started: 2018
Founders: Rishabh Khanna, Ankit Khanna and Sahil Makker
Based: India, UAE and the UK
Industry: EdTech
Initial investment: More than $200,000 in seed funding
The smuggler
Eldarir had arrived at JFK in January 2020 with three suitcases, containing goods he valued at $300, when he was directed to a search area.
Officers found 41 gold artefacts among the bags, including amulets from a funerary set which prepared the deceased for the afterlife.
Also found was a cartouche of a Ptolemaic king on a relief that was originally part of a royal building or temple.
The largest single group of items found in Eldarir’s cases were 400 shabtis, or figurines.
Khouli conviction
Khouli smuggled items into the US by making false declarations to customs about the country of origin and value of the items.
According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, he provided “false provenances which stated that [two] Egyptian antiquities were part of a collection assembled by Khouli's father in Israel in the 1960s” when in fact “Khouli acquired the Egyptian antiquities from other dealers”.
He was sentenced to one year of probation, six months of home confinement and 200 hours of community service in 2012 after admitting buying and smuggling Egyptian antiquities, including coffins, funerary boats and limestone figures.
For sale
A number of other items said to come from the collection of Ezeldeen Taha Eldarir are currently or recently for sale.
Their provenance is described in near identical terms as the British Museum shabti: bought from Salahaddin Sirmali, "authenticated and appraised" by Hossen Rashed, then imported to the US in 1948.
- An Egyptian Mummy mask dating from 700BC-30BC, is on offer for £11,807 ($15,275) online by a seller in Mexico
- A coffin lid dating back to 664BC-332BC was offered for sale by a Colorado-based art dealer, with a starting price of $65,000
- A shabti that was on sale through a Chicago-based coin dealer, dating from 1567BC-1085BC, is up for $1,950
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COMPANY PROFILE
Company name: Letstango.com
Started: June 2013
Founder: Alex Tchablakian
Based: Dubai
Industry: e-commerce
Initial investment: Dh10 million
Investors: Self-funded
Total customers: 300,000 unique customers every month
