Though there are many candidates for the most grievous of human crimes, few make a better case than the betrayal of innocents by those who have sworn to protect them. We are not naive; we expect that, in the course of our lives, there will be those who try to exploit us, to entrap us in their schemes and their desires. But while we naturally have our guards up for these manipulators, we have no innate defenses against being blindsided, exploited, used and discarded by those in whom we have placed our trust. Though we can imagine the consequences of being knifed in the back by our sworn protectors, The Whistleblower makes a powerful case for why we cannot truly fathom this betrayal until we have witnessed its cost.
Approaching 40, restless and struggling under the fiscal burden of raising three kids on her own, Ms. Bolkovac, a police officer in Nebraska, stumbles upon an opportunity for a new and financially rewarding challenge. The year is 1999 and the embers of the ethnic conflict in the Balkans are still simmering when the UN rewards Dyncorp, a private contractor based in Virginia, with a $15,000,000 contract to resuscitate and re-train the police forces in the war-torn region. Offering lucrative salaries to cops, active and retired, across the United States, Dyncorp quickly recruits a stable of officers, including Bolkovac, and dispatches them to the Balkans as UN Monitors on six-month terms to bring some semblance of law back to cities and towns traumatized by an existential conflict.
Though Bolkovac initially finds her work rewarding, investigating sex crimes that would have otherwise gone completely unpunished, difficulties quickly accrue. Not only is she disturbed by the insensitive attitude of some of her male colleagues towards the women trafficked in and out of the region, she soon realizes that there is an almost institutional unwillingness to take seriously the crimes she is pursuing. However unnerved this makes Ms. Bolkovac, it's not until she discovers wads and wads of American money, in a bar she knows to have been peddling underaged girls, that she has uncovered proof of a heinous crime. For the money could have only come from the pockets of American servicemen and or her fellow American Dyncorp employees, the currency being otherwise unavailable in the region. Ms. Bolkovac's attempts to further investigate the matter are thwarted by her bosses. And when she refuses to go quietly, her time sheets are altered as a means of creating cause to fire her which they do without shame or mercy, never imagining that Bolkovac would challenge them in open court.
The Whistleblower is as riveting as it is sickening. Ms. Bolkovac details her journey from the rough but ultimately sane streets of Lincoln, Nebraska, to the lawless and exploitative alleys of the turn-of-the-century Balkans with commendable and relentless logic. The author clearly possesses an ordered mind, capable of holding onto important facts while pursuing vital leads as a means of solving difficult crimes. But while her personal narrative does not disappoint, the extent to which she exposes Dyncorp's depravity is breathtaking. She mounts a convincing case that Dyncorp made virtually no attempt to perform even the most basic of background checks on its employees before sending them into the eminently exploitable Balkans. Consequently, a number of opportunistic rapists and pedophiles effortlessly found their way onto its payroll. When this was brought to Dyncorp attention, rather than do the right thing and admit their errors, they swept the sins of their employees under the proverbial rug, discharging them with stainless records. It was only after Ms. Bolkovac's lawsuit over her wrongful dismissal that Dyncorp agreed to change its policies. And yet, depressingly, even these changes appear to have been only window-dressing. For Dyncorp continued to be plagued by similar scandals after sending its employees into Iraq at the behest of the US government.
The Whistleblower is, in many ways, an old tale. It exposes the depressing duplicity of corporations that care about profit more than justice and the governments that blithely allow them to do so. But though it may not be an original, it is full of rewarding irony. For Ms. Bolkovac had only circumstantial evidence of Dyncorp's involvement in the trafficking of underaged girls. Forced to prove her case in a European court, she'd have surely lost. After all, a few off-handed comments and a box-full of American currency do not represent smoking guns. It was the extent to which Dyncorp committed fraud as a means of wrongfully dismissing her that secured its conviction. A stomach-churning but ultimately rewarding read about the courage of one person to do the right thing in the face of revolting corporate malfeasance. (3/5 Stars)
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