Assassin Subcontracting

2020-12-01 trivia

This fascinating sequence of events happened in China from 2013 to 2014:12.

Businessman #1, Qin, hired a hitman to take out businessman #2, Wei.
The hitman takes the money, pockets a good portion of it, and uses the remainder to subcontract another hitman to do the actual assassination.
This process repeats until a total of five hitmen have been hired.
The fifth hitman talks to Wei and makes an offer: Cooperate, pretend that you’re dead, and I won’t kill you.
Wei agrees, then later informs the police.

Qin and all five hitmen are imprisoned.

A happy ending, of course, but it feels a lot like outsourcing in IT. Loads of middlemen taking money and contributing nothing, and in the end the project fails.

  1. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/oct/22/the-five-reluctant-hitmen-of-china-group-jailed-over-botched-contract-killing
    More detailed timeline: https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/en/5-accused-of-hiring-hit-man-found-not-guilty/ ↩︎

  2. The persons involved have received the 2020 Management Ig Nobel price for their work: https://www.improbable.com/ig-about/winners/#ig2020 ↩︎