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The Informant!

Mark Whitacre, a rising star at the Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) office in Decatur, Illinois, during the early 1990s, blows the whistle on the company's price-fixing tactics at the urging of his wife Ginger.

One night in November 1992, Whitacre confesses to FBI special agent Brian Shepard that ADM executives—including Whitacre himself—had routinely met with competitors to fix the price of lysine, an additive used in the commercial livestock industry. Whitacre secretly gathers hundreds of hours of video and audio over several years to present to the FBI.

Whitacre assists in gathering evidence by clandestinely taping the company's activity in business meetings at various locations around the globe. These include locations in Tokyo, Paris, Mexico City, and Hong Kong. He eventually collects enough evidence of collaboration and conspiracy to warrant a raid of ADM.

Whitacre's good deed dovetails with his own major infractions, while his internal, secret struggle with bipolar disorder seems to take over his exploits. Whitacre's meltdown results from the pressures of wearing a wire and organizing surveillance for the FBI for three years, instigated by Whitacre's reaction, in increasingly manic overlays, to various trivial magazine articles he reads.

In a stunning turn of events immediately following the covert portion of the case, headlines worldwide report Whitacre had embezzled $9 million from his own company. This happened simultaneously while he was covertly working with the FBI and taping his co-workers. Whitacre also aims to be elected as ADM CEO following the arrest and conviction of the remaining upper management members. In the ensuing chaos, Whitacre appears to shift his trust and randomly destabilize his relationships with Special Agents Shepard and Herndon and numerous attorneys in the process.

Authorities at ADM begin investigating the forged papertrail Whitacre had built to cover his own deeds. After being confronted with evidence of his fraud, Whitacre's defensive claims begin to spiral out of control, including an accusation of assault and battery against Agent Shepard and the FBI, which had made a substantial move to distance their case from Whitacre entirely. Due to this major infraction and Whitacre's bizarre behavior, he is sentenced to a prison term three times as long as that meted out to the white-collar criminals he helped to catch.

In the epilogue, Agent Herndon visits Whitacre in prison as he videotapes a futile appeal to seek a presidential pardon. Overweight, balding and psychologically beaten after his years long ordeal, Whitacre is eventually released from prison, with Ginger awaiting to greet him.