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, despite massive institutional resistance, the False Claims Act has emerged as one of the nation"s most potent weapons against corporate greed. Giantkillers is the story of that law and what it has accomplished. Charged with intrigue and courtroom drama, Giantkillers describes in novelistic detail how an unlikely team - a conservative senator, a liberal congressman, and a crusading public interest attorney - revitalized a public interest law, enacted during the Civil War, that was gutted by lobbyists and almost forgotten. Giantkillers tells how the trail-blazing firm of Phillips and Cohen gave the law its teeth back and made triumphant heroes out of those previously scorned as "whistle-blowers." Providing an inside eye into the world of the whistleblowers, their adversaries, and their allies, this timely story weighs the lure of corporate greed and reckless power against the high cost of personal integrity.