Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [78]
These days, John Dodd is a sad figure. He’s in his early sixties and no longer works, instead living off the remnants of his fortune. He spends most of his time poring over old documents and calling sources, attorneys, and anyone else he thinks might be able to help him get the word out about Beckett Brown. He complains that his first set of attorneys left him the loser in his fraud lawsuit against the other participants in the Beckett Brown fiasco. He says he lost every penny of his initial start-up capital plus more than $1 million in legal fees in the years since the company’s crack-up.
IN VEVEY, A Nestlé fax machine spit out another letter from Mars on March 6, 1998, two days after the sternly worded letter from Forrest Mars to Nestlé’s chairman Helmut Maucher. This exchange took place one rung down the corporate ladder: Mars’s general counsel Edward Stegemann was reaching out to his counterpart at Nestlé, Dr. Hans Peter Frick, in an effort to call a cease-fire in the chocolate war.
Nestlé’s people were upset because a group of leftist consumer activists was about to hold a press conference on the danger of mixing toys with candy. Nestlé suspected once again that Mars was the real force behind the group. Stegemann explained that he had no idea how Nestlé could have come to that conclusion, and that Mars had been investigating the issue itself. “Mr. Maucher, and presumptively all of Nestlé, believe we are behind this press conference,” Stegemann wrote. He then made an attempt at humor: “If only I were this clever I could demand a triple bonus from my owners.” In fact, he insisted, Mars had been thinking Nestlé was putting up the press conference. “We began to get the sense that this was one of your Machiavellian ploys.”
But even as he insisted that he didn’t control the activist group, Stegemann told Frick that he had reached out to its leaders and asked them to postpone the embarrassing event. It seemed that Mars was making a peace overture by getting the consumer group to stand down. Now Mars expected the other side to stand down, too. Stegemann cautioned his counterpart at Nestlé against doing too much research to find out who was behind the group’s activities. “I believe the more you and we thrash about trying to find out just what is behind this—and regrettably we really have been thrashing about—the greater the chance that it will become a story and attract a hell of a lot more attention than it otherwise could,” he wrote. “I believe,” he declared, “that we should treat this as if we were making love to a porcupine—we can handle it, but very carefully and calculatedly.”
There may well have been a temporary cease-fire that year. But the chocolate war continues to this day. Many of the combatants and battlefields have changed, but the tactics are familiar. In June 2008, for example, the Associated Press reported that the Swiss chapter of a left-leaning antiglobalization group called Attac had filed a legal complaint against Nestlé in a Swiss court. The document alleged that Nestlé had hired the intelligence company Securitas—the firm that bought Pinkerton—to plant a spy inside Attac. It was a move the Pinkertons had invented more than 100 years before. The operative allegedly attended meetings, the Associated Press noted, at which the group planned a book to be titled “Attac against the Nestlé Empire,” criticizing the company’s position on genetically modified organisms, water privatization, and trade unions.10 Did Nestlé suspect that Mars, once again, was the secretive force behind an activist group’s efforts?
It is difficult to tell for sure. Nestlé wouldn’t say.
PART II
Techniques, Technologies, and Talent