Kurt Eichenwald

Kurt Eichenwald at the 2009 Texas Book Festival.

Kurt Alexander Eichenwald (born June 28, 1961), an American writer and investigative reporter formerly with The New York Times and later with Condé Nast's business magazine, Portfolio. Eichenwald had been employed by the Times since 1986 and primarily covered Wall Street and corporate topics such as insider trading, accounting scandals, and takeovers, but also wrote about a range of issues including terrorism, the Bill Clinton pardons controversy, Federal health care policy and sexual predators on the Internet. He is the author of three bestselling books.

New York Times

Eichenwald joined the Times in 1986 and, after two years working as a news clerk, was hired as the Wall Street reporter. He primarily wrote about corporate scandals such as the criminal cases at Enron, Worldcom and Columbia/HCA, but also wrote the Market Place column for the Times beginning in 1992. Later in his career at the Times, he branched out to issues related to politics, terrorism and child pornography. In 1998, he was named a senior writer at the Times. He left the paper in 2006.

Books

Serpent on the Rock

His reporting on Prudential also led to his first book, Serpent on the Rock, which focused primarily on the limited partnership scandal at Prudential Securities, which is alleged to have defrauded 340,000 people out of eight billion dollars. In the book, Eichenwald portrayed the Prudential scandal as being about more than just a single bad investment firm. "This is a cautionary tale about an abuse of the investor faith that is an essential building block of the American economy," he wrote. "At its essence, it is what allows billions of dollars of securities to trade each day based on nothing more than a voice on the telephone. By taking advantage of that faith, Prudential-Bache cracked the foundation of the marketplace." The book was celebrated in reviews, with frequent comparisons to the bestseller Barbarians at the Gate, and became Eichenwald’s first national bestseller.

The Informant

Beginning in 1995, Eichenwald reported on the unfolding price-fixing scandal at Archer Daniels Midland for the Times, and used that story as the basis of his second bestselling book, The Informant. That book was proclaimed by The New York Times Book Review as "one of the best nonfiction books of the last decade." A movie version of the film adaptation was released in 2009, starring Matt Damon and directed by Steven Soderbergh. While still a business book, The Informant was much more of a police procedural than any of Eichenwald’s other work, depicting the inner workings of the FBI in detail.

Conspiracy of Fools

Eichenwald’s investigation of Enron led to his third and most successful book, Conspiracy of Fools. The book made the New York Times bestseller list in its first week in publication. The book was optioned as a movie by Warner Brothers, to possibly star Leonardo DiCaprio. DiCaprio was involved from the start, but changes in his schedule may not allow him to act in the film, only produce, but casting details aren't final yet.

Awards

Eichenwald is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award for Excellence in Journalism in 1995 and 1998, for articles about the dialysis industry and fraud at the nation's largest hospital company, Columbia/HCA Healthcare Corporation. He was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2000, along with his Times colleague Gina Kolata, for an investigation of medical clinical trials. In 2006, he won the Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism and the Best in Business Enterprise Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

External links

• Kurt Eichenwald speaker profile at The Lavin Agency
• October 27, 2009 ABC Radio National interview with Mark Whitacre and Kurt Eichenwald
• "The New York Times Legal Aid Society" - Slate Magazine
• "A Heartbreaker From Eichenwald And The Times" - CBS News
• "Announcing the 2006 Payne Awards for Ethics in Journalism" -- "University of Oregon
• Two-part Booknotes interview with Eichenwald on The Informant, February 4, 2001, and February 11, 2001.