do you know the best part of "The Informant" and his story?

I'm not sure if I'll ever see the movie-- although it looks pretty good.

But, to borrow from Paul Harvey, here's "the rest of the story"-- his turn to Jesus Christ-- from Marvin Olasky's interview with the real-life Mark Whitacre in World...

Whitacre is best known publicly for his whistleblower role in the 1990s ADM price-fixing case, which ended with a $100 million fine for the company and prison for some top officials. ADM's 2005 annual report also lists a $400 million payment to settle a class action suit. But Whitacre, while secretly taping price-fixing discussions, was also stealing $9 million from ADM.

His saga of corruption and mania will receive new attention over the next several weeks as The Informant!, a movie starring Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, hits theaters around the country. (See: Megan Basham's review: "Unfaithful telling," Sept. 18, 2009.) The film is a dark comedy that does not deal with Whitacre's conversion to Christ...Whitacre told me that had he avoided prison or received only the six-month sentence that could have been his at one point, he would have remained merely a nominal churchgoer who worshiped financial success...

Here's the craziest part of his story:

Q: Your personal venture into deception began in 1991 when you responded to one of those scamming letters from Nigeria. There wasn't even email then, it was by fax, and it was new. They made all these promises that we would make $20 million, $30 million, $50 million. Being hyper-ambitious, over-compulsive, I invested, along with a couple other vice presidents under me.

Q: When you lost $200,000, how did you respond? I wrote a check to myself from ADM.

Q: You submitted phony invoices? That's correct.

Q: As a divisional president you had check-writing authority. Yeah. I knew about the price-fixing which was a billion-dollar crime, so I sure wasn't worried about the company turning me in for a $200,000 crime...

Here's the coolest part of his story:

Q: While all this is happening you're going to church every Sunday. My family went to the Methodist church. I considered myself a Christian. People saw our 13,000-square-foot house, our 8-car garage full of cars. People would say, the Whitacres are behind these iron gates, they've got horse stables, they've got everything. We really had nothing—or at least I didn't....

Q: [Prison was a] Dangerous place, and you didn't want to go. They took the hour break. I did not. I was reading the Bible, reading in Psalms, and that's when I started really relying on God, as compared to going to church on Sunday and saying I'm a Christian. I got on my knees and said, "God, for someone in prison for almost a decade, the divorce rate is over 99 percent. They don't survive as a family six months in prison, let alone a decade. Would I even have any employment after nine years in prison, a convicted felon?"

To view a video of Mark Whitacre's recent appearance at The King's College in New York, click here.