“The future’s so bright, I gotta wear shades.”
If it applied to anyone in the late 1980s, the lyric from the 1986 hit by Timbuk 3 applied to Mark Whitacre.
At 32, he was president of a division of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), a Fortune 500 company. He had a beautiful wife, three children and was promoted in only three years to corporate vice president and corporate officer. He and his family lived in a mansion, and his compensation package hit seven figures.
Only a few years later, Whitacre was confronted by that same wife, who sensed big changes in her high-school-sweetheart husband. He was consumed with work and seemed unhappy.
Eventually, he told her about his involvement in the long-term price-fixing scheme at ADM, in which the company essentially was stealing money from its customers and passing on higher prices to consumers.