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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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You didn't think executives would resort to violence?
Let me introduce you to Coca Cola and Shell. And the East and West India Companies before them.
These guys approved MCAS knowing it could create situations that were were unrecoverable. They aren't above killing people for profit.
They've been found guilty of killing people on American soil? I hadn't heard that, do tell.
Yeah, the 1400s are really relevant here.
Yes, white collar crime.
Get your history correct atleast. East India Company was in charge of India until 1857 and squeezed it dry. It was basically an early blueprint of modern day capitalism and imperialism.
I was off by a couple of centuries, but it's hardly relevant now. If the most recent example of bad corporate behaviour you can find is from a company that was dissolved 150 years ago, you don't have much of an argument.
I, personally, have been harmed by people paid by Boeing.
Ok, care to elaborate?
I was actually hired by Boeing as a hitman once, didn't pay very good tbh
No.
Your naiveness is super precious. You can't see someone with incredible amounts of wealth hiring someone else to make a problem go away?
OK! Next time, you should try a couple of Google searches before wasting all that time typing out nonsense. I didn't even finish the first page of search results, there were so many. And they are just the ones dumb enough to get caught.
https://www.insideedition.com/husband-of-murdered-microsoft-execs-ex-wife-arrested-after-allegedly-hiring-hitman-to-carry-out
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/erik-maund-hired-hitmen-kill-mistress-holly-williams-blackmailer-william-lanway-indictment/
https://patch.com/california/venice/westside-ceo-sentenced-hiring-hitman-kill-partner
https://nypost.com/2022/06/12/ex-amazon-mexico-ceo-juan-garcia-paid-hitman-9k-to-kill-his-wife/
You watch far too many movies, making you adorably naïve.
Did you even read this link? It wasn't a hit ordered by an exec, it was an exec that was killed in a hit ordered by the husband of his ex-wife.
Again, did you even read this link? This isn't an executive in a multi-billion dollar defense contractor. This is an "executive" at a family-owned auto dealership.
Another one I know you didn't read. Again, this isn't a multi-billion dollar defense contractor, this is a tiny company with only 50 employees. And, most importantly, he tried to hire a hitman and failed.
Yet another one you didn't read. Yes, it's "Amazon", but it's Amazon Mexico. The hit happened in Mexico City. It was also his wife that he arranged to have killed, not an enemy of Amazon's business. And, importantly, if his goal was to get away with murder, he failed. The hitman he hired testified against him.
If you think this happens, find an example where it's:
You probably believe you can find one of those, because you're adorably naïve and watch a lot of exciting movies. But, I'm betting you won't find any. But, great job googling "exec" and "hitman", you really showed your google-fu. I just wish you'd read the links you posted and saved me some time.
So what do you mean by white collar crime? Does it include killing people or not? Because knowingly bringing about systems that result in the death of people, having a private security contractor that you know will shoot striking workers in your third world countries plantation or ordering a hit on someone are all the same. It is decided that people will die for the companies profit and just because the people who order it dont do it directly themselves, doesn't change the gravity of it.
Also there os myriads of examples from today, where western companies directly or indirectly order people to get killed, just usually in third countries. The idea that a defense company with billions of profits at stake every year doesn't have access to hitmen is unconvincing. Why wouldn't they? Just as the mafia is branching into white business, white business of size are employing criminal means.
If you still think there is some unpenetrable divide, all you need is a private detective agency that has a history of dealing with problems "reliably" in the past.
It's a pretty well defined term.
It may mean being responsible for their deaths, but not in a way in which you could be charged for murder.
Almost always indirectly, and almost never on US soil. Not hiring a hitman to stage a suicide in the US. The kinds of things that US corporations do are the kinds of things they can talk about at board meetings without worrying that they'll go to jail of the meeting is bugged. They can talk about hiring SecuriCo in Zambia to deal with unrest at the mine. Or, they can talk with hiring the law firm Goldman, Burke and Mott to deal with the bad PR from the whistleblower. They're not going to chat about going onto a dark web server to hire a hit man to kill a whistleblower. That's movie stuff, not reality.
If that's "white collar crime" then so is hiring a hitman.
You're being rather naive. Sure, those bosses would have a hard time doing violence on other people, personally. But through another person? Nah. The same as approving MCAS, knowing it will kill people.
Also, you need to take a basic history lesson. "1400's" is a really bad guess.
And you watch too much TV.
I haven't had one in ~14 years.
I do live in a bad part of town and this guy used to be my neighbour (before he died a few years ago.)
Chill guy all in all (except when someone snitched and he lost like 2 pound of meth). Interesting stories as well.
Made really good risotto.
I don't need a TV. :)
No, it isn't. If you hire a hitman you can be tried for conspiracy to commit murder. If you approve a system that could be unsafe for an airplane, your company might have to pay a fine. They're vastly different crimes, even if one results in a lot more deaths.
You watch too many movies.
They might have the mindset required to hire a hitman. But, they don't have the connections. They also don't want to take on the personal liability of doing that. These are almost all finance guys who have MBAs. They wouldn't make a decision like this on their own, and they wouldn't be able to talk about it in a board meeting without risking a conspiracy charge.
The MCAS decision is ridiculous, but it exactly the kind of thing they can discuss in a board meeting without risking criminal charges. Even if the meeting had been recorded, the transcript would be boring board-room talk, nothing that they could be indicted for.
Anyone can find a hitman online, all it takes is 15min to get to know how deep web markets work. They're by far the least reliable service ofc, but it is sold and there are escrow services as well. How well they work in cases like that is a whole other matter, but I, personally, find it rather ludicrous a suggestion that a high-level Boeing boss who manages the complexities of a job like that (especially when simultaneously playing Jenga with airline safety) wouldn't be able to figure out how to access a black market.
Especially when they could always hire a person to do that for them. Do they trust anyone at all, with any of their criminal shenanigans? Well surely the co-conspirators at least. These massive, systemic changes that made Boeing go from trusted airline to killing whistleblowers weren't the actions of one man.
And if there was a group of men, then it's shared responsibility. Even if they conspire to hire a hitman. It doesn't feel as much like a violent crime when it's done in white-collars and agreed on in a fancy hotel suite.
I imagine it looked something like this, except Webb's character wasn't there
Yes, and many people who try are caught in a sting operation by the police.
https://abcnews.go.com/2020/newlywed-thirty-years-murder-sting/story?id=13836957
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RentAHitman.com
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/alleged-hit-man-plotting-nyc-murder-arrested-in-fbi-sting-with-guns-ammo-old-man-mask/4144188/
Yes, and that's the problem. This isn't the sort of thing an executive would do on their own without talking to other execs about it. If they did that they'd have to trust that the other execs would back them up and not turn them in. And, this is a real, serious crime. This isn't a crime where the company has to pay a fine. This is a crime where they would personally be liable for conspiracy to commit murder.
Exactly my point. Those took a whole group of executives discussing their plans openly in meetings. They wouldn't discuss actually breaking the law in meetings like that. Instead, they'd talk about who they'd have to lobby to get the laws changed how they wanted, what pressure they could put on regulators, what kinds of PR campaigns they'd need to run, etc. Those are things that people might see as dishonest and unethical, but they're all legal. If someone in the meeting objected to the decisions, they'd have a little debate and then some decision would be made. The other execs wouldn't have to worry that the conversation would leak and they'd be charged with serious crimes. If the conversation leaked there might be a bit of embarrassment, they'd have to hire a PR firm, and done.
The decisions they made almost certainly cost lives, but even if you had transcripts for those meetings, even an ambitious prosecutor probably couldn't find any actual crimes being committed. The execs at Boeing almost all have finance backgrounds, so most of the meetings would have been about money, and how much they could save while keeping an "acceptable safety margin" -- which we might not think is acceptable, but they'd have the lawyers to argue that it was acceptable.
You don't go from open discussions about how to increase profits by outsourcing work to discussing how to hire a hitman to kill one of your whistleblowers. That's suddenly stuff where the people in the room would be chargeable for conspiracy to commit murder.
The Mitchell & Webb parody proves my point. Removing Webb's character makes it back into a movie scenario. His character shows just how ludicrous those movie scenes really are. At some point when murder is being discussed, someone is going to actually have to check "just to be clear, you mean murder, right?". Because you're not going to order to have someone murdered just because the CFO used an ambiguous term.
Sorry for the second reply, we're both avid talkers and I've already taken half an ambien.
With all respect, I disagree. And I've been friends with actual murderers. Well a murderer. I mean, I only knew him after his sentence, dk what he did when he did the murdering. Just that I've been in circles with a lot of people's who've done various crimes, and unless theyre referring to their trials or sentences or something, they never mention the crime. It's all euphemisms.
The actual confirmation bit would be online with an escrow service, after finding s reliable one.
I can imagine that if you're someone who assumes they're being bugged all the time. Like, Mafiosi wanting to talk business without actually saying something that could be used in court against them. But, I don't think that's the world that Boeing execs live in.
And I think it is.
Most low level users are in that group, being so pissed if you ever mention the real name of anything. Before actually good protected comm apps like Wickr, Signal etc, buying drugs was such a hassle. Sometimes two people would meet only to realise that neither of them have drugs, they both want to buy.
I don't think the execs live in a world where people have to spell out murder if they're gonna murder someone.
If I were to link a bunch of drug busts, would it make drug markets any smaller?
Like I said, they're the most unreliable service, but you really don't have to be that smart to use one responsibly. It's not like going on Craigslist looking for a guy who thinks he's hidden himself by using incognito mode.
"rentahitman.com" lol might as well set up a stand called "we sell meth here mister police man". I hope you do realise the impossibility of me proving just how many successful hit jobs there have been which no-one was ever caught?
No, see they can all talk about this particular person being a problem, in the board room. Without talking about anything criminal, or even thinking about anything criminal towards him.
But later in the night, a few of those execs are getting drunk in a fancy suite, doing blow. They know what they've done vis-a-vis the airline jenga. There's even evidence against them. They would be stressed. Substance abuse is very common in the business world, as are dark triad personality traits and the occasional psychotic behaviour. (CEO psychopathy prevalence is something fierce compared to the average.)
If there's enough plausible deniability and shared responsibility, those people rarely do. Even when it's very clear death was indirectly caused by some of the decision of the leaders, they rarely get into trouble.
Ofc conspiracy to murder is a bit different than cooking the books for instance, but when we're talking about airline safety, they're not too dissimilar