The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [404]
52
Chickenfeed
Decatur, Illinois, and Atlanta • 1995–1999
Howie and Devon were on the lam. He had walked out of the office at ADM on a Friday knowing he would never return. A pack of reporters had been camped out in their driveway ever since. He and Devon started packing. They sneaked out of Decatur at dawn on Sunday on a rented prop plane to fly to Chicago, where they met family friend Don Keough, who was giving them a ride to Sun Valley on his private jet. Since reporters weren’t allowed inside the Allen conference, Howie thought they would be safe.
He had been pacing the floor for ten days, ever since Mark Whitacre, an excitable manager he knew at ADM, suddenly confessed to him that he was acting as an FBI mole. Whitacre told him that the FBI was going to arrive at Howie’s house at six o’clock on Tuesday night for an interview. Now Howie knew why Whitacre kept showing up at work for several days in a row in the same greenish polyester suit: He had been wearing a wire. Ever since Whitacre made his confession, he’d been calling every day, blathering his anxieties at Howie, who tried to disentangle himself. Howie hadn’t busted Whitacre, but he could tell from the panic in Whitacre’s voice that he must be cracking under the stress.
That Tuesday night, Devon tried to fix dinner with shaking hands. When the doorbell rang, Howie wanted to throw up. In came a guy in a suit—who told him he was not a target. Three hundred FBI agents were fanned out across the country, interviewing other people about price-fixing of an ADM product called lysine that was used in chicken feed.
Howie was terrified but had made up his mind to be completely forthcoming with the FBI. He said he didn’t trust Dwayne Andreas, who had put him in charge of funneling requests for political contributions, a role, given Andreas’s history, that might have made anybody’s stomach churn.1 He told the agent that the previous fall Andreas had rebuked him when he raised ethical questions about providing entertainment to a Congressman. Howie didn’t know anything about price-fixing, however.
The second the FBI agents left, Howie called his father, flailing, saying, I don’t know what to do, I don’t have the facts, how do I know if these allegations are true? My name is on every press release. How can I be the spokesman for the company worldwide? What should I do, should I resign?
Buffett refrained from the obvious response, which was that, of his three children, only Howie could have wound up with an FBI agent in his living room after taking his first job in the corporate world. He listened to the story nonjudgmentally and told Howie that it was his decision whether to stay at ADM. He gave only one piece of advice: Howie had to decide within the next twenty-four hours. If you stay in longer than that, he said, you’ll become one of them. No matter what happens, it will be too late to get out.
That clarified things. Howie now realized that waiting was not a way to get more information to help him decide, it was making the decision to stay. He had to look at his options and understand as of right now what they meant.
If he resigned and they were innocent, he would lose friends and look like a jerk.
If he stayed and they were guilty, he would be viewed as consorting with a gang of criminals.
The next day Howie went in, resigned, and told the general counsel that he would take legal action against the company if they put his name on any more press releases. Resigning from the board was a major event. For a director to resign was like sending up a