Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [71]
In time, they began to bring old Mars trash back to the Mars Dumpsters, replacing the fresh bags with older material they had already scoured for clues. Most of the time, they also hired an off-duty police officer to join them for their raids. That way, the Beckett Brown team would have somebody to run interference on their behalf if they were spotted and questioned by the local cops. Although the legal issues surrounding “Dumpster diving” can be murky, and often depend on where garbage is situated and how it is secured, the Beckett Brown men operated on the assumption that everything they did was legal, since people discarding trash for public collection have abandoned the presumption of privacy for material. Still, they knew the police might be suspicious—or might not buy their legal reasoning—and they thought it was worth the investment to have a police officer on hand, and on the payroll. Beckett Brown gathered trash for months at Mars headquarters, bringing the discarded bags back to their own office, where they sifted through the material.
Dumpster diving is one of the oldest tricks of the corporate-espionage trade. The term itself invokes images of private eyes rummaging through banana peels, desperately digging up dirt on a target. And that’s partly correct. But Dumpster diving is a time-tested technique, and it’s a lot more common than most businesspeople think. Amid all the detritus of a modern corporate office are documents that can be invaluable to corporate spies trying to re-create the activities going on inside a company: e-mail printouts, billing records, used calendars, and the like.
As the Beckett Brown team spent hours plowing through the trash at the Mars headquarters office, they found documents covered with food, coffee grounds, and other foul-smelling waste. On one occasion, they found a pair of soiled underpants. Someone at Mars had a terrible case of diarrhea, and had simply thrown the dirty underpants into the garbage. Still, Beckett Brown’s spies pressed on. They found shredded documents—Mars had some security measures—but found that Mars staffers invariably threw all the shreds of a document into the same wastebasket. The pieces migrated around inside the bag as it was jostled out of the building and into the Dumpster, but they were all still in one place. Beckett Brown set about painstakingly re-creating each document. They developed a list of code words to look for as they read through the reams and reams of papers that they discovered in the trash bags. They created a smaller pile of papers that included the words “Nestlé,” “Magic,” “choking,” “attack,” and “go after,” or the names of any of the top executives of either company.
And then they hit pay dirt. Deep in the trash, they found a guest room contract signed by a Mars executive, Bob Cargo, for ten rooms at the Saint Michaels Harbour Inn and Marina on Harbor Road for Thursday to Saturday, February 19–21, 1998. The contract called for access to the hotel’s meeting room, along with audiovisual equipment. It stipulated that Mars would be charged a rate of $95 per day for the rooms.
Now Beckett Brown had all the information needed to mount an intelligence-gathering operation as well-paid operatives in the chocolate war. And they were opening a crucial new front in the long battle between the two companies: pet food.
That winter, Nestlé announced its agreement to buy the Spillers pet food business from Dalgety,