i was expecting some big time cover up government shattering revelation....not the killing of a widow for her construction company.
Heck how much money can they even get from that......why not just kill her and make it look like a suicide?
Great movie but stupid stupid stupid reason for doing it.
You have no idea how much money is on the table for a large contractor. Lebendauer was trying to move into Pittsburgh, which is an industrial city currently trying to reinvent themselves as a service-oriented city.
That means cleaning up industrial parks, building new roads, building bridges & overpasses, putting up new office buildings, possibly putting in a new light rail system... How much do you think it would cost to convert Pittsburgh to Seattle?
We're talking billions of dollars.
For a large, established government contractor, these contracts can be pretty easy to win - take a few officials out for a nice dinner, put together some impressive looking presentations, hire some local companies to do some early work (to show money flowing into the city) and voila - nine-figure contracts just fall from the sky.
Unless there's a small, local construction company that is capable of making waves. They challenge every public hearing, they demand studies on things that the big contractor was hoping nobody would notice, and if the big contractor *does* win the contract, then they are constantly pestering the city council to ask for audits, performance reports, and so on.
It can increase the costs of doing business by a factor of ten or more.
As taxpayers, we should appreciate this and embrace it. But the big money people hate it. Of course in the real world they don't go around assassinating business owners - but you can bet they've thought about it.
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Philo's Law: To learn from your mistakes, you have to realize you're making mistakes.
In the book, the couple are killed exactly because of that - they were making waves. Zec's company bribed their waves into government contracts, causing the couple's company to lose contracts they should have won. The husband started asking questions, so they killed him. The wife continued, so they offed her, too.
Fighting a religious war is like fighting over whose imaginary friend is better.
I think Zec had his own team. The real shooter was already on his payroll as a hired assassin. So no extra money there. All they needed was a fall guy & a police officer. The fall guy was a loner who frequented the only long range shooting range nearby. So befriending him would be easy. Once befriended it would be easy to drug him & lift his fingerprints. The black cop said he didn't have a choice. So they probably blackmailed him. So it was probably inexpensive to set dude up. Maybe a couple million. But to receive hundreds of millions it's worth it to Zec.
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