Right it was in fact the embezzlement that originally got him to become a whistleblower. The FBI was investigating the embezzlement, and he told them that he could give them a bigger fish. Anyhow he wore a wire in several price fixing meetings and was generally extremely cooperative with the FBI. I think he embezzled on the order of $10 million from ADM, but the Lysine conspiracy was on the order of a $200 million overcharge to Lysine customers.

Now Whittacre was crazy and unstable, but what the DOJ did by giving him a bigger sentence for the embezzlement than the heads of ADM that he made the case against IMO sent a message that cooperating with the government on a price fixing case is not going to help you.

What the story really says IMO also is that one of the only ways for the government to actually get enough evidence to prosecute these cases is to have someone who is part of the conspiracy that has committed some other crime, and the feds can flip them. That's not going to happen too often.

Ultimately the government also proved that ADM was also part of a completely separate citric acid price fixing cartel involving different players, but the MO was exactly the same mustache twirling crazy conspiracy theorist's dream of the players sitting down together in a hotel conference room dividing up the market.