Yeah, I suppose that makes sense - it technically wasn’t the corporation that decided to do a thing, but rather, the individuals comprising the board of the corporation, sitting around the board table on company premises, in company time, raising an item in ‘Any Other Business’ comprising ‘hey why don’t we just kill that guy?’, and agreeing to do it without writing anything down.
I do wonder, supposing the facts of such a meeting were known (let’s say there later arose evidence in the form of a clear and high quality video recording of the meeting, with crisp, clear audio), what the law would do about it.
In cases other than murder, I think I am right in saying that the law sometimes holds both the organisation and officers responsible for illegal outcomes. Of course the people conspiring would be in trouble, but I don’t think it would be much of a defence for the company’s lawyer to argue “look, nobody wrote it down in the minutes of the meeting, so it wasn’t the company that did anything”
Yep. The CEO of an unnamed aeronautics company can order cost cuts that ultimately cause a plane to fall out of the sky, killing 200 people, and he’s likely legally protected from prosecution. If the same guy hires a hitman to kill one whistleblower, he’ll go to prison, and only get to go home in a coffin.
I would imagine accounting controls at most companies would make paying a contract killer difficult, if not impossible.
Even CEOs don’t have the carte blanche sort of fiscal authority that would allow them to just pay someone thousands of dollars in cash and not leave a paper trail of some kind. And that paper trail would likely look very fishy if they did manage to do it using corporate resources.
A corporation would not murder someone. I can imagine a corporate officer doing something stupid when under pressure, though, just like any other human.
The closest I can think of was John DeLorean, who ran out of money for his company and in desperation tried selling cocaine. But that was a personal crime, not a corporate crime.
The fact that Ralph Nader did so much damage to GM and yet wasn’t killed or even threatened should be telling. And I wouldn’t put too much stock in his ‘honeytrap’ claims since there is no proof of them and it would be easy for a nerdish celebrity to think women wouldn’t be attracted to him and so any woman who approaches him is likely working for The Man. The fact is, no such trap was ever sprung on him.
Many large corporate HQs have expensive security contracts. In fact most of the companies that provide mercenaries also provide corporate security professionals. So I can see how it might be done through the existing contracting process. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Actually, having typed that out it reads too much like an instruction manual. So yeah, I can see you might accomplish it, but I’ll stop there.
In answer to the OP, I think constructive murder – driving people to suicide, is painfully common in the USA, especially in “Right to Work” States. Companies often and purposefully cut off employment from sick or injured workers who need expensive health care in order to keep their health insurance premiums low.
And sure, it’s illegal, but only if the person you cut off can afford a lawyer, and of course they can’t. So they die of their untreated illness, or they find their pain management on the street and eventually die of an overdose, and nobody ever tracks it back to the company. The cartels are carrying a whole lot of water (taking the blame via overdoses) for the large corporations who don’t want to pay for healthcare, but don’t want the government to pay for it either. A big percentage of those deaths really lie at their door.
But I don’t think there’s a whole lot of hiring hit men.
But it wasn’t covered up, right, all the details are right there in that article.
The idea that a regular western corporation would be able to have someone killed in the US or another western country (like the Boeing whistleblower mentioned above), and get away with it seems pretty implausible to me.
Its happened overseas (on the orders of a local arm of a US company) though, but in countries where right-wing death squads were already active. But even there where there was a lot of powerful people with an interest in keeping it quiet, we know the details, even if those powerful people were not brought to justice:
Which is pretty hard, if you don’t want to be discovered. Companies got away with it as there was generally a blind eye cast to bribery as a cost of doing business in certain places. Everyone knew that certain line items, for “hospitality” and the like, were actually for bribes, but no one cares. Now when governments take things like that more seriously, companies, even big ones, are caught when they try it.
The hardest part is stopping the hit man from singing like a canary to stay off death row and maybe not die in prison when they are caught.
A really good movie in the vein of this thread is The International starring Clive Owen and Naomi Watts. In answer to the question of whether or not the movie was true, the following was said:
> The film draws on a number of macabre incidents from international banking: the Bank of Credit and Commerce International crisis in 1991; the murder of Roberto Calvi, an alleged banker to the Sicilian Mafia, in London in 1982; and the assassination by poisoning of Georgi Markov in London, in 1978.
Yeah, ISTM that that’s the crucial qualifier. There are still plenty of places around the world where a company will quietly (or ostentatiously, depending on what they can get away with) “disappear” an inconvenient individual.
And there were corporate-sponsored “hits” in pre-modern-era America, too. The Pinkertons, as you note, and the Wyoming Stock Growers Association hiring assassins to eliminate alleged “rustlers” in the 1890s, for example. And of course there are plenty of occasional examples of corporate executives in all times and places getting involved in murder for personal reasons.
But a deliberate executive decision on behalf of the corporation as an entity, in today’s USA, to outright assassinate an individual? Yeah, I’m not saying it couldn’t happen or hasn’t happened, but I’d want to see pretty definitive evidence to convince me that it did happen.
Minimal details in that article, look for a the published version of the lawsuit if you want to find out how disgusting the details can get. And just in the past few days additional names have been released of executives included in the lawsuit for covering up the activities of the CEO. Many corporations public and private are owned by a small set of people who are unrestrained in their actions until they reach the level of a crime, or a lurid scandal. It’s quite possible even the worst of behavior reaching the point of murder has never been uncovered.
Curiously enough, most of these cases are more than 20 years old. This might mean one of two things; either morality and ethics have improved in the 21st century, or they are better at covering things up.
Or maybe it just takes 20 years or so before the truth gets out.
I agree that it’s highly unlikely, as you’re crossing a line from the company doing something wrong to an individual. I ain’t going to jail for my employer, even (especially?) if I’m a well compensated executive. I can more easily see it in the case of a small LLC where the company and the person are basically indistinguishable.
As for HOW it would be paid for, that’s the easy part, really. I once worked for a large publicly traded company and there was talk of a bribe in a foreign country. I want to be clear that we DID NOT DO THIS. We were asked for one to get through some onerous import/export bureaucracy.
In the course of discussion it came up “I mean, could we if we wanted to?” and the answer was pretty clear that you’d do it with payments to “consultant” middle men and it would easily hide quietly among the huge amounts we legitimately paid to consultants. A justice department working backwards would have it figured out easily, but the actual payment wouldn’t have looked out of place in the corporate ledgers.
Again, we did not do it. We did not consider it. In the end, I was responsible for a million dollar failure due to the bureaucracy being insurmountable without a bribe. Fortunately, I had opposed the project and it was the CEO’s baby. He wasn’t in the job very long.
It’s not unheard of for corporations/corporate officers to become involved in harassing “whistleblowers”, sometimes with blatant illegality.
Alleging without evidence that corporations murder critics puts you into Alex Jones territory, allying you with the sort of people who convinced themselves of the Holistic Doctor Murder Conspiracy.
This doesn’t apply to most or all of them and doesn’t necessarily invalidate their claims, but based on personal experience it’s not that unusual for “whistleblowers” to display signs of mental instability.
