Feeding the Beast: How Wedtech Became the Most Corrupt Little Company in America.

• Author: Thomas, Michael M.

Feeding the Beast: How Wedtech Became the Most Corrupt Little Company in America Feeding the Beast: How Wedtech Became the Most Corrupt Little Company in America. Marilyn W. Thompson. Scribner's, $22.50. Over a period of roughly 10 years, beginning in 1975, an inconsequential South Bronx machine shop, Welbilt Electronic Die Corporation, later renamed Wedtech, managed to gather and utterly dissipate approximately $150 million of public money and private capital. Its founder-promoters early battened on to the possibilities afforded by well-meaning "set-aside" legislation designed to give minority-owned businesses a leg up in government contract work. By the time the sorry "saga" had run its course, Wedtech or, more properly, the relatively small public and private money sources to which it provided special access, had become a schooling ground for as rich and greedy a variety of shark as ever gathered in one place in the history of American business.

It is this quality of concentration, this extraordinarily high per-dollar ratio of peculative diversity and creativity, that gives the Wedtech story its particular flavor. This is not, as the publisher's blurb suggests, "the worst domestic scandal of the Reagan administration." That laurel surely belongs to the still-unfolding savings and loan crisis, the criminous underpinnings of which are only now beginning to become visible.

Nevertheless, Marilyn W. Thompson, a New York journalist and an early digger into the Wedtech scandal, has delivered a smoothly written, frequently intriguing, and just as frequently maddening account of the scam's brief life and flush times. Within the dimensions of the story as she has chosen to tell it, surely nothing has been left out. Indeed, incipient mulcters of the public purse could do worse than to take her version (I believe at least one other "big" book on Wedtech is in the wings) as textbook and Cicerone.

The problem with Thompson's book is as much a matter of taste as anything else. She is almost exclusively concerned with the processes of fraud. These may by turns be fascinating, outrageous, even bloodcurdling, but in business, even of the shadiest sort, process must inevitably boil down to meetings, conversations, and the preparation of documents. Wedtech was a tale played out by some of the most florid characters a novelist could wish for; it would embrace a vast cast of suborning and suborned: street-smart "dese, dem, and dose" types, a congressman, a...