Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [75]
“You see, Charlie, not so very long ago there used to be thousands of people working in Mr. Willy Wonka’s factory. Then one day, all of a sudden, Mr. Wonka had to ask every single one of them to leave, to go home, never to come back.”
“But why?” asked Charlie.
“Because of spies.”
“Spies?”
“Yes. All the other chocolate makers, you see, had begun to grow jealous of the wonderful candies that Mr. Wonka was making, and they started sending in spies to steal his secret recipes. The spies took jobs in the Wonka factory, pretending they were ordinary workers, and while they were there, each one of them found out exactly how a certain special thing was made.”7
In this story, Willy Wonka resolves the problem of spies by hiring only the extremely loyal Oompa-Loompas to man his chocolate factory. Nestlé didn’t have that luxury. It hired spies of its own.*
Now Beckett Brown was poised to gather information on a new target: Nestlé’s own former manufacturer, Whetstone Candy Company. And in an ironic twist, Nestlé would run just the type of operation against its former subcontractor that, infuriatingly, Mars had run against Nestlé.
In the months after Nestlé recalled Magic, Whetstone continued to work on the concept of packaging a toy with a chocolate candy. The huge sales of Magic were clear evidence that the concept would be an enormous hit. After months of research, Whetstone developed a plan for a chocolate that could include a toy and still meet the FDA’s safety requirements. Hank Whetstone patented the plan, and then flew to the Glendale, California, offices of Nestlé to pitch it to executives there.
“They didn’t like it that I had the patents,” Whetstone recalls. “They asked me why I hadn’t come to them first.” Nestlé didn’t bite on the new idea; it told Whetstone that it wasn’t interested in the chocolate-and-toy category anymore. It had lost too much money on Magic to sink any more investment dollars into another try.
Whetstone went ahead with plans to develop the chocolate himself, and his relationship with Nestlé became more and more strained. All along, he had other business with Nestlé, producing various chocolates for it at his three-building manufacturing facility in Saint Augustine, Florida. But in October, he recalls, Nestlé ended its last contract with his firm. Nestlé, he says, was worried that he might do a deal with Mars—and what was worse, that he might use the facility Nestlé had paid for to produce chocolates for its archrival.
Soon after Whetstone says his contract with Nestlé ended, Beckett Brown’s records show that the corporate spies were sniffing around the manufacturing facility in Florida, trying to discover what it was producing, and for whom. Beckett Brown’s team was executing a play from a well-worn playbook when, at 3:45 A.M. on November 17, a car rolled up Coke Road in Saint Augustine, pulling into the parking lot of the Riverside Centre shopping area. Behind the wheel was Larry Dyer, a local private investigator subcontracted by Beckett Brown. In a surveillance report he dutifully prepared the next day, Dyer noted that his parking space gave him a “direct line of vision” toward the chocolate plant.
Everything was quiet, until 5:04 A.M., when Dyer spotted a trash truck from a private hauling company, BFI Waste Systems, pull into the manufacturing facility to collect the day’s garbage. When the truck pulled out, Dyer pulled his car into traffic right behind it. He followed the truck for several blocks, pulling alongside it when it parked at a branch of Prosperity Bank.
I exited my vehicle and approached the driver. The driver stated his name was Marc. I asked Marc for the garbage bags from Whetstones. He stated he had talked to his boss at BFI about giving us the bags of garbage. His boss told him if he did, he would be acting…on his own. The driver further stated he was afraid of losing his job. He refused to give me