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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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It's important to remember that whistleblowing is extremely stressful, so much that it's one of the main things the government talks about on their whistleblowing site:
https://whistleblower.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/whistleblower.house.gov/files/whistleblower_survival_tips.pdf
Researchers have found the same thing, being a whistleblower is terrible for your mental health:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6604402/
In addition, "Half of Patients With Suicidal Thoughts Deny It"
https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2021.10.9
So, just because he denied he was suicidal doesn't mean that's necessarily true. He might have been trying to appear strong to everyone while suffering in silence.
This should definitely be investigated as possibly being murder. And, even if the investigation does determine that he shot himself, they should keep looking to see if he was being blackmailed or if he might have been pressured into suicide.
I just can't imagine an executive at Boeing going out and hiring a hit man. But, what I can imagine them doing is hiring a team of private investigators to go through this guy's entire life and dig up every bit of dirt on him. It could be they found something really embarrassing and were going to blackmail him with it. It could be that they found something innocent that they could frame as being awful, like to make him look like he was a child molester or something.
Really? That's weird, I totally can. It's an exceptionally narrow-minded and short-sighted knee-jerk reaction to a perceived threat of one's executive career. Most coked-out executives already have a massive god complex once they get their MBA and are installed above the ~~proles~~ workers. I can absolutely realistically imagine one Boeing executive getting angry enough and coked-out enough to just decide, "fuck it, I'm going to fix this problem for us before he threatens my career and reputation any more".
The information you present about whistleblowing being stressful is fair. He may indeed have been driven to kill himself instead of being straight-up assassinated like others believe. I refuse, however, to give the benefit of doubt to a massive corporation who has already demonstrated a complete lack of regard for human life and an extremely poor track record of moral and ethical decision-making. This needs to be investigated under the assumption that a hit is an entirely possible reality. Unless you'd rather that nobody blows the whistle on anything in the future - you've already demonstrated that it's an incredibly stressful action. If there's the lingering remote possibility that you can be simply assassinated over it and everyone will look the other way, nobody will ever raise their voice again. The nature of his actions before his death demand a comprehensive and exhaustive investigation into if any person from Boeing had anything to do with it whatsoever, or whistleblowing will continue sliding into something only the insane consider.
While Boeing executives may be criminals, they're pretty much exclusively white collar criminals. They went to business school, not the military. They come from rich households. They don't have gang or organized crime affiliations. How would they know anything about hiring hit men?
Hiring a firm to do PR and to dig up dirt on a whistleblower, sure, that's within their skillset. That's even something they can brag about in board meetings because it's legal. It's the kind of thing they can google, or have a secretary research for them. It doesn't matter if transcripts leak. But, hiring a hit man, how do they know they won't get caught -- and this time for the kind of crime where people actually get sent to real prisons?
Sure, they should work under the assumption that it was a very careful hitman who made it look like a suicide. They should be 10x more careful than they normally would if they even suspected it might be a suicide. But, I still think driving him to suicide is much more likely.
IMO, the kind of press this is getting is part of the reason I don't think it was a hit. If this were Russia, sure. A hit sends the message to anybody else that they better not think of doing the same thing. The press will tell whatever story the government wants. Even on social media nobody very few people will speak up in Russia. But, in the US, this death is going to draw so much more attention to Boeing. Just look at how many articles there are about the whistleblower's death vs. how many there were about him beforehand. Corporations are used to managing news cycles when it comes to legal cases and congressional hearings. Those are boring and don't tend to go viral. But a whistleblower dying as he was giving testimony, that's exciting, it's like the movies, so it's all everyone's going to talk about.
Unless he had even more damaging information that he somehow didn't give to anybody yet, despite the fact he had already been testifying, it seems like the damage his death does is much higher than the damage his testimony would have done.
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.
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.
I, personally, have been harmed by people paid by Boeing.
Ok, care to elaborate?
No.
I was actually hired by Boeing as a hitman once, didn't pay very good tbh
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.
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
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.
Frankly speaking, whether or not a hitman was hired, Boeing is culpable.
Organizing a concerted effort to drive someone to suicide is just as illegal as murdering them. End of story.
If there's evidence they organized a concerted effort to drive someone to suicide, definitely. Otherwise they're just culpable for gross violations of safety that have cost lives of airline passengers.
I would also say it could be manslaughter if the stress from the retaliation from whistleblowing caused him to kill himself
Attention sure, nothing will happen to Boeing though. They own too many politicians, and too many powerful people need them to stay where they are. I have no doubt they killed him.
There's more of a chance of something happening now than there was before the whistleblower died.
Laws don't apply to rich people. They'll find a fall guy.
Very much so. It would be hard to believe they would do it themselves. However, enrolling the right assistance should not be too difficult for them. They even have access to more options than the average business executive.
They are not military, but they have plenty of contacts there. Boeing is a big player in the military industry, they certainly know a lot of people in that world, both in government positions and the private sector.
Several of them don't, but organized crime is within reach. Illegal recreational drugs are not uncommon in the business world. Dealers are more often than not connected to the organized crime. Networking in that world is something within business people's skills.
Hey, who knows, maybe some of those execs started working many years ago as humble machine gun and bazooka salespeople. And who knows what kind of interesting characters they met during those days. While totally not burying their heads into a mountain of white powder sitting in the middle of the table.
It is very likely. High stress would have played against him if he was being bullied or threatened. Also, less involved than having them murdered.
Depends on what you consider damage here. The testimony could have been perceived as a threat to important business deals (and to bonuses). It is not infrequent to see executives caring only about their profits, even in detriment of the company as a whole.
They may have contracts with generals, but not much in the way with soldiers on the ground. If it were a defence contractor that made small arms, then maybe. But, this is Boeing.
Sure... but executives don't go to the bad parts of town to get them. The guy they're buying from is most likely someone who can travel in C-Suite circles and not draw attention. Maybe they're also a member of the golf club and have a legitimate business as a cover. The execs aren't getting in their Mercedes and cruising down to the ghetto to score. The dealers may have connections to organized crime, but not in a way that is obvious to anyone.
We know, their profiles are public.
The Boeing CEO, David L. Calhoun:
The COO, Stephanie Pope:
The CFO, Brian West:
The Chair, Supply Chain Operations Council, William A. Ampofo II:
Just look through their execs and find anybody with even a hint of dirt under their fingernails:
https://www.boeing.com/company/bios
Sure, so they hire PR firms, and private investigators, and call up friendly reporters to try to get them to publish a negative article. They aren't going to order a hit and make it look like a suicide.
Someone has never seen the first RoboCop movie.
Ah yes, thank you for proving my point. People who watch too many movies think that real life is like movies.
What's next? Getting shot makes you fly backwards through the air? Getting knocked out makes you unconscious for hours, but you wake up with nothing more than a sore head? Silencers go "thwpt" and nobody can hear them from more than a meter away?
Dude, relax, no need to be rude. It's just a humorous Internet forum comment, that makes a valid point.
Or are you trying to tell me that powerful corporations don't have very strong security departments with connections?
They have security departments filled with normal people who the execs couldn't trust to do something like this (or order something like this) without ratting them out. They don't order hits. That's movie stuff, like every grocery bag must have a baguette and greens poking out of it, or turning on your TV at the exact moment a news report starts.
So huge multi-billion corporations wouldn't hire the best of the best, when it comes to security?
Life imitates art.
Just the bottom line this, we're not going to agree, but you'd have to be pretty naive to think that those kind of things, with billions of dollars and economies hanging in the balance, doesn't really happen.
Unfortunately.
Life imitates art in some ways, but people getting shot in the shoulder still have fucked up shoulders and often die, no matter how much movies want you to believe that it's a wound you can just shrug off.
Similarly, executives make business decisions that result in thousands of people dying. But, executives in multi-billion dollar companies don't contract out to hitmen to murder people who hurt their companies. That's just movie stuff, and you're naive to think it happens in reality.
And you know this how?
Common sense? The lack of historical precedent? The fact I can watch movies and be aware that they don't represent reality?
So you pulled it out of your ass.
Have a nice day.
I made a decision based on reality. I didn't decide someone had hired a hitman to kill a whistleblower because it seemed realistic to me based on watching too many movies. Believing that is also "pulling it out of your ass", but without any basis in actual reality.