Giantkillers: The Team and the Law That Help Whistle-Blowers Recover America's Stolen Billions

by Henry Scammell

Book Overview

In 1986, with contractors stealing an estimated 10 percent of the total federal budget by fraud, Congress passed a newly strengthened anticorruption law. Ordinary citizens could file lawsuits on behalf of the government to recover money stolen from the public treasury, and they would share in the result. In the years since, the False Claims Act has emerged as one of the nation's most potent weapons against corporate greed. Giantkillers is the story...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802141889
• ISBN13: 9780802141880
• Release Date: February 2005
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Reads like a John Gresham book except that its all true

This is a remarkable story about a group of true American heroes who fought for their country in a number of ways -- some on the battlefield and some in the courts. The principal characters challenged huge, corrupt and powerful companies that stole from the American taxpayers in many ways selling shoddy, defective and in some cases nonexistent goods and services to the US government: Defense contractors that sell defective airplanes to the US Air Force; manufacturers who sell defective "bullet proof" vests to our police; drug companies that bill Medicare for defective or nonexistent medicine for the elderly and on and on and on. All of this happened. And it still does. Corporate "mobsters" will do anything for a buck. The work described in the book continues that of President Abraham Lincoln when he first signed into law the Federal False Claims Act in 1863 giving Americans the right to act as private attorney generals to sue corporate mobsters stealing from all of us. Its a great read but it will make you angry before you've finished.

An informative history of the "False Claims Act"

Giantkillers: The Team And The Law That Help Whistle-Blowers Recover America's Stolen Billions by freelance writer Henry Scammell is an informed and informative history of the "False Claims Act" from its legislative origins during the American Civil War as a way to halt the sale of lame horses and worthless gunpowder to the Union Army, down to the present day hallmarked by major corporate frauds on an Enron or Worldcom scale. Illustrative cases include a landmark Medicare fraud case against HCA (which resulted in a fine of 1.7 billion dollars being paid to the federal government); a fraud case against National Health Laboratories that led to the government recovering more than $800 million from the medical lab industry; a $59.5 million settlement by GE for scamming the Pentagon and Israeli air force; the Salomon Smith Barney banking scandals that collectively paid more than $200 million for illegally skimming huge profits from municipal bond deals; and more. Giantkillers is a highly recommended revelation of corporate greed, reckless power, and personal integrity.

Read about the samuri fraud fighters

Though Henry Scammell has chosen to illuminate the federal False Claims Act through the high-profile cases of a single law firm, we now have a growing False Claims Act bar reshaping corporate culture, and an ever-increasing number of states embracing state versions of the law. The result is that in boardrooms across the country there is a new realization that fraud against the government can be effectively prosecuted, and that triple damages may be exceed out of date cost of doing business assumptions based on the wrist-slap penalties that formerly pertained. Henry Scammell's eminently readable book makes clear that nailing the con artists depends on a rare breed of individual who is willing to risk career and peace of mind to see justice done. The journey is rarely easy, and never short. Scammell recounts whistleblowers that fought for years and risked marriages and bankruptcy to see their cases through. While some focus on the economic payoff at the end, Scammell pays attention to the terror of the ride - a ride that is often shared by law firms that invest hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of time building cases in which the government often shows only a passing interest -- at least in the beginning. Part history book, part psychological narrative, and part forensic fraud report, Giant Killers weaves a compelling tale about the personalities and travails of doing the right thing - and the ultimate payoff in the end.This book is a good read and you should read it before John Grisham does a novel on one of the stories Scammell relates.

Good read and worth buying!

There are a lot of ways to judge a book, but the most important is whether it is a good read. This book is not only well written, it is entertaining, and it provides a glimmer of hope for those of us that despair over the scale of government waste. Government agencies are often embarrassed when ripped off, and are therefore slow to prosecute. What this book makes clear is that the secret to ferreting out fraud is to deputize citizens who are often better placed to understand the complexities of corporate scams than many government lawyers, and who are often highly motivated as well. The motivation is not always monetary. More often then not is a personal and righteous anger at being asked to lie about the quality and the price of the goods being produced at taxpayer expense. Just as a small match can extinguish a lot of darkness, so too can a single whistleblower extinguish a lot of fraud by changing the economics of lying and cheating. The system must work; last year False Claims Act settlements were up 75%, and it's been a while since I read an article about a $700 toilet seat. Haliburton better watch out!

FIGHTING FIRE WITH FIRE

Capitalism is built on greed, the most powerful motivator of mankind. Greed has built our nation, but also threatens the foundation of our society. This book details the amazing story of how a few men and women set out to change some of this and protect all of us. They took an old law that had been rendered useless, overcoming immense obstacles in the process, and succeeded. The new law enabled the common man to fight for the US government, and be rewarded for doing so. Nothing could be more American, and no other law could be more threatening to the corporations that wanted to continue to cheat all of us by sending our soldiers to war with defective weapons, bribing our doctors and billing $6,000 for toilet seats.The corporate crooks fought back with the help of elected representatives they had bought and paid for. In the end, the battle was taken to the Supreme Court. The final verdict resulted in a complete victory-the False Claims Act had stood up to the challenge.The rest is history. Tens of billions of stolen dollars have been returned to US taxpayers and hundreds of billions have been saved because would be corporate criminals had second thoughts. All because a few men and women had a dream to stop the crooks, using rewards to fight greed.People don't change. We are all the same in Russia, the US or Europe. What changes is the system we live within. It can be just or unjust. It can bring out the best or the worst in us. Corporations are there to make a profit, any way this is possible. Mr. Phillips, founder of Phillips and Cohen made sure that making a profit by stealing from the government became less desirable. In the end, all of us won and the US became a better place to live.