Decatur, Illinois
Touring them is a do-it-yourself project. No gift shops. No velvet ropes. No docents whispering over your shoulder. No multimedia displays of nitrite poisoning or police beating workers. You’ll have to imagine for yourself an endless tape loop playing what former Archer Daniels Midland executive and expert price-fixer Terry Wilson told a March 1994 meeting of his supposed competitors: “You’re my friend. I wanna be closer to you than I am to any customer, ’cause you can make it that I can make money or I can’t make money.”
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The biggest and most amorphous “company” to which Decatur is subject is the agricultural industry that surrounds it. Decatur’s big employers–Caterpillar, A.E. Staley, Bridgestone/Firestone, and the largest, Archer Daniels Midland–supply and are supplied by farmers. The agricultural industry has a direct impact on Lake Decatur as well. Barry Commoner, then based at Washington University in Saint Louis, told the story in one succinct chapter of his 1971 book The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology.
One trouble with nitrate is that babies’ digestive systems can turn it into nitrite, which in sufficient quantities can deprive the blood of oxygen, asphyxiating the kid from within. Lake Decatur exceeds the state EPA’s limit of ten milligrams of nitrate per liter of drinking water almost yearly, with levels usually peaking between February and July. There’s no way for current water-treatment plants to remove nitrate, and boiling the water at home only increases its concentration. Prevention is the only known cure.
Later on Whitacre frequently rendezvoused with his FBI handlers in the more posh Holiday Inn on the far west end of town, just off U.S. 36 before it reaches the Decatur beltway. Here on January 9, 1993, he signed a formal cooperation agreement in which he pledged (among other things) not to engage in any criminal activity without the prior knowledge and approval of the FBI–a promise he wasted no time in breaking by continuing to embezzle from ADM. Here too, Whitacre failed two lie-detector tests administered by the bureau in December 1992 and March 1993. Both times he was sure he had outwitted the machine.
–Harold Henderson
