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sweetdreamsfanfic · 2 years

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SHOT IN THE DARK PART UNO

LUCIFER X READER

MAFIA AU

Brief: In this oneshot Lucifer to the public is a well known corporate boss, however to the crime world he is the boss of the largest crime family. Out of fear of you leaving him, he never tells you. Yet all secrets come out eventually…

A/n Intending to make this a series, please let me know what you think!

Also I recommend listening to Salvatore by Lana Del Rey as you read this, it’ll truly set the mood for this

WARNING: I wouldn’t consider it graphic but there is detailed violence so take caution

It was late into the evening when your friend had brought up your partner, Lucifer. The pair of you were sitting in her orangery sharing a bottle of white wine between you. The two of you were inseparable and that is how your lunch date turned into a late evening chat.

“On the topic of partners, you should return to Lucifer before it gets too late. I know he has Mammon to guard and chauffeur you but I think I have stolen enough of your time.”

F/N put her glass of wine on the table, dusting the imaginary dust off her dress and standing up.

“Thank you for inviting me over,” You started, getting up of the couch as well.

“Anytime! Anyway I should be thanking you for inviting me to lunch. Tomorrow I’ll pay for our lunch after the yoga class!” F/N stated with the same insane amount of energy she had early that day.

“Quarter past nine, don’t forget!” You chuckled, moving in to kiss her cheeks.

“Haha, I won’t! Now make sure Mammon drives safely.” F/N said, giving you one last tight hug.

“Will do! Bye!”

When you finally arrived back home, thanks to Mammon, you immediately felt something off. Normally Lucifer would have been made alert to your arrival and would wait in the lobby for when you entered the house.

“Mammon…“ You called out.

However it appeared Mammon had already left to park the car away for the evening. You were unsettled immensely by being alone in the eerily quiet mansion, a shiver crawling up your spine as you placed your purse down and sauntered up the grand staircase.

As you approached Lucifer’s office, you noticed the door was left wide open and not left only slightly ajar like Lucifer insists it being. An ominous shadow could be seen through the entrance, this was when you heard Lucifer’s voice.

“J-jack we can talk about this. Belphegor was manipulating you-“

“Shut up! I know your tricks Lucifer, and they end now.”

The click of the safety lock being removed on a gun echoed in the empty halls.

Pulling yourself out of a state of panic, you grabbed the nearest vase and empty it of it’s content. Steadily, you approached the office.

“Jack you know I would never harm you.”

Lucifer’s reasoning fell on deaf ears, you could see Lucifer’s desperation whilst he was held at gun point. You have no idea why this stranger would come in and attempt to kill Lucifer, a respected businessman.

“Oh shush. We both know Belphegor is the only one who truly respects me.”

“And we both know it is he is the exact kind of guy who would use you to seal his own vendettas!”

Jack’s grip on the gun tightened, the panic this rose in you was all you needed to commit to smashing the vase against his head.

“SHUT-!”

The glass shattered immediately, scattering across the floor as his body collapsed with a thud.

With wobbly legs you stepped over the bleeding man and took Lucifer’s face into your shaky hands. You couldn’t help but let tears well up as you starred into his eyes.

“Thank Diavolo you’re okay sweetheart!”

Lucifer cracked a smile, bringing his hands up to cup your face and bring his forehead to yours.

“Thank you my love, I genuinely thought I was going to die,” He stated, relief evident in his voice.

He moved his hands to pull you towards him, “But then you appeared, my guardian angel.”

“I was so scared Luci,” You fired back, “H-how did he even get in? You have surveillance cameras everywhere-”

“I know you have a lot of questions, all of which I promise to answer but for now can we just enjoy each others embrace?”

Eyeing him and his tense shoulders and pained face you nodded your head.

“Absolutely, but shouldn’t we at least call the police first?” You asked with a tone of uncertainty.

Lucifer hummed in response, “I’ll inform Mammon to do that, for now go shower and change into pyjamas. I’ll join you shortly.”

“Fine, but don’t be long okay?” You said slowly, taking a step back from him.

“I won’t. I love you Y/N.”

He managed to make you smile despite the fact you were still debating whether you had just killed a man in your mind.

“I love you too Lucifer.”

As you sauntered out, you took one more glance at the bleeding out man. His face was smushed against the blood stained floor that was once a deep mahogany. Dodging the shards of glass, you left.

Lucifer let out a deep breath as he ran a hand through his unruly hair. He was grateful you had arrived when you had, however he feared this would lead to him confessing to his crime business. Every outcome in his mind led to you leaving him or fearing him.

When Mammon eventually arrived to drag the unconscious Jack into the basement, Lucifer informed him that they needed to meet up with his other crime family brothers.

Once the floor was a deep mahogany again and Lucifer was finished with his shower, he climbed into bed with you. To his surprise, you were still awake.

“I thought I was going to lose you and now I might’ve k-killed a man.” You stated with tears threatening to pour as you turned to face him.

For the first time the coy Lucifer was at a loss for words. Thus, he did the next best thing. He opened his arms and let you cry your heart out in his embrace.

#obey me #reader insert #lucifer x reader #shall we date lucifer #x reader #mafia au #corporate business #yandere vibes #dark #shall we date

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notanotherbookreview · 1 year

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https://www.blogger.com/blog/posts/3686096258659236837PARADISE NOW?? Paradise Gardens audiobook. Chapters 15 and 16. Good for 18 days. Paradise Gardens, like Huxley for this time. (The Corporate Business Estates Underground)

#free audiobook #dystopia #paradise gardens #susaniweinstein #pelekinesis #corporate business

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pritinanda1212 · 2 months

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Navigating the Busy Skies: Top Reasons to Choose a Corporate Travel Management Company in Delhi NCR

Choosing the Right TMC: With numerous TMCs in Delhi NCR, selecting the right partner is crucial. Consider their industry experience, local expertise, technology platform, service offerings, and cost structure.

#corporate #business trip #corporate business #travel #events #trip #business #corporate hotel booking

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zozotheme · 8 months

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Looking for a Perfect Design for a Consulting Website?

Seek No More! As Zozothemes Released #Corpkit - Business Consulting WordPress Theme

Click here ► https://1.envato.market/jWAbb5

Corpkit is a modern & clean business consulting WordPress theme from Zozothemes. It is designed for various business and consulting services, and also for small and medium-sized companies and agencies in various sectors.

We provide high-quality SEO-friendly website themes and templates with 100% responsive design.

Explore it ► https://zozothemes.com/

#web design #wordpress #web development #wordpress themes #wordpress theme #website #web designing #web design services #wordpress website #corporate business

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onyx-film · 10 months

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#corporate business

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aussie-bookworm · 1 year

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I don’t mind too much if the Twitter users immigrate to tumblr.

However I will start Biting if tumblr becomes the standard social media site everyone uses.

My employers don’t need to know that I am a clown and this is the circus I frequent. They don’t need to learn about the chainsaws I juggle or the jokes I yell while entering a tiny car with a bunch of other clowns.

#itsallmine #Twitter #tumblr #They can just look at my family photos and things my family have said while I’m busy throwing pies in the background #i will be extra pissed off if corporations move over here too #*prays in incompatible target markets*

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csuitebitches · 6 months

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Takeaways from my mentor

I meet with my mentor as and when he’s available. He manages my family’s money and he’s very good at what he does - his firm manages about $5 billion, and I have great conversations with him.

I don’t want to talk too much about him, but he came from a lower middle class background and today is wealthy beyond comprehension. He could buy a plane or two in the middle of the night if he wanted.

Today we focused a lot of personal growth in my career.

He gave me two books - The Inheritors by Sonu Bhasin and Fortune’s Children by Arthur Vanderbilt.

Here are some brief takeaways:

Work backwards from the outcome you want.

Define the outcome of where you want to be and plan it backwards to your current position.

2. Eliminate, eliminate, eliminate.

Life is all about elimination. Don’t focus on your weaknesses, focus on your strengths. Eliminate all the things you know you’re not good at, you have no interest in and that make you depressed.

3. Intellectual honesty.

Be honest with yourself about things you are good at and are not. The easiest person to fool is yourself.

4. Read one business biography a week.

Everything you’re going in life, there’s a 99% chance someone else has gone through it and come out of it victorious. He also mentioned this article.

5. Outline 3 strengths and 3 weaknesses.

6. (In business/ corporate careers) You’re either primarily an investor (you’d rather fund companies and start ups than start them), an operator (you’d rather build something hands on), or a manager (you’d rather periodically manage something hands off. Like for instance you could have your own franchise bakery chain where you don’t need to exercise minute control over every franchise but you still ensure that there’s some managing done from your part).

7. Do not have extreme ideologies at this age.

Not when it comes to religion, politics, etc.

8. Emotions, money and your time are something you need to be ruthless about. Absolutely ruthless.

Be careful about the friends you have and the influence they have on you.

#ceo aesthetic #that girl #personal growth #strong women #powerful woman #balance #getting your life together #c suite #q/a #productivity #Business #Mentor #mentoring #takeaways #business advice #Corporate #success

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undreaming-fanfiction · 1 year

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Eddie hated this and he'd just started.

See, he was so proud when he made it, when he got his first office job. He saw what decades of physical labor did to Wayne's back, his hands, and he wanted to make his uncle proud. So he kept applying and applying and getting ignored and rejected and finally, finally he got a job in a pretty large corporate. Not exactly something prestigious, but hey, it had potential. The experience counted and all that.

He thought maybe workplaces would be different, that the good ol' high school dynamic would fuck off, but no. He was sitting at his desk, trying to fill in paperwork after a taxing phone call, but all he could focus on was whispering from the neighboring cubicle that was ostentatiously loud. He didn't know who sat there yet, the guy had been on vacation for the two weeks Eddie was in the company. From the stuff he was hearing, he was getting introduced anyway and not exactly the way he'd have liked to be.

"Can you believe they actually let him work here?" It was Carol, of course it was, the office gossip and mean girl knockoff. "I mean, he doesn't even look decent! Did you see that hair?" Okay, that hurt. He actually pulled his hair into a neat bun every morning, but you can't please some people. "And he has tattoos, what would our customers think if they actually met him, plus you should have heard the rumors about his past-!"

But just as he was about to slam down the pile of paperwork and either take an extended smoke break or gently ask Carol to go fuck a polar bear, he heard another voice. Bored and wonderfully bitchy.

"That's absolutely fascinating, Carol. Please tell me more, what could this guy possibly have done? It must be something juicy. Did he perhaps fuck his boss during the Christmas party and then lie about it to his boyfriend of five years? Oh wait no. That was you. Silly me."

Eddie had to bite his pencil to stay quiet, but his whole chest hurt by trying to keep the snickering in. And then the offended gasp. "I- you promised you wouldn't-!"

"I didn't promise shit, Carol. You just came to me, cried your eyes out - bad move by the way, invest in some waterproof mascara for god's sake, mascara in wrinkles doesn't good on anyone, and yes, you do have wrinkles - and tried to play the victim. Except I heard your small proposition to the guy before so it didn't really work out. But it's fine, you know," and oooh, the tone was smug, so bored, Eddie loved this guy already, "Tommy saw you as well and had a good time with Nicole to get even. So there's nothing to worry about. Now tell me, what did this horrible Eddie Munson do to summon wrath of such a righteous woman such as yourself?"

Eddie heard a sharp sound as Carol got up from the desk. "Fuck you, Steve Harrington," she spat out and sped past Eddie's seat. He just gave her a small salute.

When the sound of high heels faded, Eddie leaned over the cubicle wall and knocked to draw the guy's attention. And yeah, maybe he was a little bit biased because he'd just obliterated a textbook definition of a shrew, but this Steve was fucking gorgeous, light brown eyes looking at him, a smug smirk tugging at his lips.

"Oh hi," said Steve and offered his hand, shaking Eddie's. "Sorry for that. I'm Steve Harrington and whatever deepest, darkest secrets you're hiding, I don't care, I'm pretty sure I've heard them all. What did you do? Shave your head in school? Join a cult? Cut dolls apart and chant hail Satan?"

That had Eddie laughing again, but he still had an introduction to make. A proper one. "Nice to meet you, Steve. Eddie Munson, and I'm worse than your darkest nightmares. I sometimes wear socks in sandals."

Steve's eyebrow twitched. "Oh, Carol was right, you are a monster!" he muttered. "Speaking of monsters..." His head leaned to the side, towards Carol who was angrily carrying her coffee mug, her mascara running again.

Before he could catch himself, Eddie leaned over the wall and whispered as loudly as he could muster. "Can you believe some people wear dotted dresses with stripes on their stockings? We can't all be born with taste, I guess...tragic."

And again, maybe Eddie was just biased, but Steve's laughter was so pretty that it actually made dealing with Carol's bullshit worth it.

#steddie #steddie au #steddie drabble #corporate au #coworkers au #stranger things #stranger things au #stranger things drabble #yeah so I'm crazy busy and kind of not doing too well #so this is not proofread #but I wanted to put something small together so here you go

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worldcastlive1 · 2 years

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What Is the Role of Virtual Platforms in the Success of a Business?

No business can think of success these days without using any online platform. From holding a business meeting to assigning tasks to the employees, everything has become easy with the use of online streaming platforms. You can easily conduct virtual business meetings which will save your time and management cost. Therefore, virtual platforms have become a crucial part of success these days. Check our website today!

#Corporate Business #Streaming Services for Business #Virtual Meeting #Virtual Business Meeting #Streaming Software

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businessmemes · 2 months

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if you interact with Jenessica you will be reassigned to the JAR.

#business #businesscore #business memes #office space #memes #this is business #business tips #IT #business woman #server room #technology #wires #capitalist hell #officecore #corporate hell

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car-leasing-in-india · 2 years

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Corporate car lease - ALD Automotive

Ald Automotive is a company that provides Corporate Car Lease Services to Corporates, Businesses and Individuals. We have a team of professionals who have vast experience in the industry.

#car lease #Corporate business

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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 months

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The long, bloody lineage of private equity's looting

Tomorrow (June 3) at 1:30PM, I’m in Edinburgh for the Cymera Festival on a panel with Nina Allen and Ian McDonald.

Monday (June 5) at 7:15PM, I’m in London at the British Library with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Baroness Martha Lane Fox.

Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”

It used to be that we rarely heard about private equity, but then, as national chains and iconic companies started to vanish, this mysterious financial arrangement popped up with increasing frequency. When a finance bro’s presentation on why Olive Garden needed to be re-orged when viral, there was a lot off snickering about the decline of a tacky business whose value prop was unlimited carbs. But the bro was working for Starboard Value, a hedge fund that specialized in buhying out and killing off companies, pocketing billions while destroying profitable businesses.

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

Starboard Value’s game was straightforward: buy a business, load it with debt, sell off its physical plant — the buildings it did business out of — pay itself, and then have the business lease back the buildings, bleeding out money until it collapsed. They pulled it with Red Lobster,and the point of the viral Olive Garden dis track was to soften up the company for its own bust out.

The bust out tactic wasn’t limited to mocking middlebrow family restaurants. For years, the crooks who ran these ops did a brisk trade in blaming the internet. Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole:

https://prospect.org/economy/vulture-capitalism-killed-sears/

Same goes for Toys R Us: it wasn’t Amazon that killed the iconic toy retailer — it was the PE bosses who extracted $200m from the chain, then walked away, hands in pockets and whistling, while the businesses collapsed and the workers got zero severance:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/01/how-can-they-walk-away-with-millions-and-leave-workers-with-zero-toys-r-us-workers-say-they-deserve-severance/

It’s a good racket — for the racketeers. Private equity has grown from a finance sideshow to Wall Street’s apex predator, and it’s devouring the real economy through a string of audactious bust outs, each more consequential and depraved than the last.

As PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind, more and more investors are piling in. Today, the PE sector loves a rollup, which is when they buy several related businesses and merge them into one firm. The nominal business-case for a rollup is that the new, bigger firm is more “efficient.” In reality, a rollup’s strength is in eliminating competition. When all the pet groomers, or funeral homes, or urgent care clinics for ten miles share the same owner, they can raise prices, lower wages, and fuck over suppliers.

They can also borrow. A quirk of the credit markets is that a standalone small business is valued at about 3–5x its annual revenues. But if that business is part of a large firm, it is valued at 10–20x annual turnover. That means that when a private equity company rolls up a comedy club, ad agency or water bottler (all businesses presently experiencing PE rollup), with $1m in annual revenues, it shows up on the PE company’s balance sheet as an asset worth $10–20m. That’s $10–20m worth of collateral the PE fund can stake for loans that let it buy and roll up more small businesses.

2.9 million Boomer-owned businesses, employing 32m people, are expected to sell in the next couple years as their owners retire. Most of these businesses will sell to PE firms, who can afford to pay more for them as a prelude to a bust out than anyone intending to operate them as a productive business could ever pay:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

PE’s most ghastly impact is felt in the health care sector. Whole towns’ worth of emergency rooms, family practices, labs and other health firms have been scooped up by PE, which has spent more than $1t since 2012 on health acquisitions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

Once a health care company is owned by PE, it is significantly more likely to commit medicare fraud. It also cuts wages and staffing for doctors and nurses. PE-owned facilities do more unnecessary and often dangerous procedures. Appointments get shorter. The companies get embroiled in kickback scandals. PE-backed dentists hack away at children’s mouths, filling them full of root-canals.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect

The Healthcare Private Equity Association boasts that its members are poised to spend more than $3t to create “the future of healthcare.”

https://hcpea.org/#!event-list

As bad as PE is for healthcare, it’s worse for long-term care. PE-owned nursing homes are charnel houses, and there’s a particularly nasty PE scam where elderly patients are tricked into signing up for palliative care, which is never delivered (and isn’t needed, because the patients aren’t dying!). These fake “hospices” get huge payouts from medicare — and the patient is made permanently ineligible for future medicare, because they are recorded being in their final decline:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Every part of the health care sector is being busted out by PE. Another ugly PE trick, the “club deal,” is devouring the medical supply business. Club deals were huge in the 2000s, destroying rent-controlled housing, energy companies, Mervyn’s department stores, Harrah’s, and Old Country Joe. Now it’s doing the same to medical supplies:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

Private equity is behind the mass rollup of single-family homes across America. Wall Street landlords are the worst landlords in America, who load up your rent with junk fees, leave your home in a state of dangerous disrepair, and evict you at the drop of a hat:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights

As these houses decay through neglect, private equity makes a bundle from tenants and even more borrowing against the houses. In a few short years, much of America’s desperately undersupplied housing stock will be beyond repair. It’s a bust out.

You know all those exploding trains filled with dangerous chemicals that poison entire towns? Private equity bust outs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons

Where did PE come from? How can these people look themselves in the mirror? Why do we let them get away with it? How do we stop them?

Today in The American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik reviews two new books that try to answer all four of these questions, but really only manage to answer the first three:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

The first of these books is These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/These-Are-the-Plunderers/Gretchen-Morgenson/9781982191283

The second is Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, by Brendan Ballou:

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brendan-ballou/plunder/9781541702103/

Both books describe the bust out from the inside. For example, PetSmart — looted for $30 billion by RaymondSvider and his PE fund BC Partners — is a slaughterhouse for animals. The company systematically neglects animals — failing to pay workers to come in and feed them, say, or refusing to provide backup power to run during power outages, letting animals freeze or roast to death. Though PetSmart has its own vet clinics, the company doesn’t want to pay its vets to nurse the animals it damages, so it denies them care. But the company is also too cheap to euthanize those animals, so it lets them starve to death. PetSmart is also too cheap to cremate the animals, so its traumatized staff are ordered to smuggle the dead, rotting animals into random dumpsters.

All this happened while PetSmart’s sales increased by 60%, matched by growth in the company’s gross margins. All that money went to the bust out.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/09/27/the-30-billion-kitty-meet-the-investor-who-made-a-fortune-on-pet-food/

Tkacik says these books show that we’re finally getting wise to PE. Back in the Clinton years, the PE critique painted the perps as sharp operators who reduced quality and jacked up prices. Today, books like these paint these “investors” as the monsters they are — crooks whose bust ups are crimes, not clever finance hacks.

Take the Carlyle Group, which pioneered nursing home rollups. As Carlyle slashed wages, its workers suffered — but its elderly patients suffered more. Thousands of Carlyle “customers” died of “dehydration, gangrenous bedsores, and preventable falls” in the pre-covid years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/opioid-overdoses-bedsores-and-broken-bones-what-happened-when-a-private-equity-firm-sought-profits-in-caring-for-societys-most-vulnerable/2018/11/25/09089a4a-ed14-11e8-baac-2a674e91502b_story.html

KKR, another PE monster, bought a second-hand chain of homes for mentally disabled adults from another PE company, then squeezed it for the last drops of blood left in the corpse. KKR cut wages to $8/hour and increased shifts to 36 hours, then threatened to have workers who went home early arrested and charged with “patient abandonment.” Many of these homes were often left with no staff at all, with patients left to starve and stew in their own waste.

PE loves to pick on people who can’t fight back: kids, sick people, disabled people, old people. No surprise, then, that PE loves prisons — the ultimate captive audience. HIG Capital is a $55b fund that owns TKC Holdings, who got the contract to feed the prisoners at 400 institutions. They got the contract after the prisons fired Aramark, owned by PE giant Warburg Pincus, whose food was so inedible that it provoked riots. TKC got a million bucks extra to take over the food at Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility, then, incredibly, made the food worse. A chef who refused to serve 100 bags of rotten potatoes (“the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my life”) was fired:

https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/michigan/prison-food-worker-i-was-fired-for-refusing-to-serve-rotten-potatoes/69-467297770

TKC doesn’t just operate prison kitchens — it operates prison commissaries, where it gouges prisoners on junk food to replace the inedible slop it serves in the cafeteria. The prisoners buy this food with money they make working in the prison workshops, for $0.10–0.25/hour. Those workshops are also run by TKC.

Tkacic traces private equity back to the “corporate raiders” of the 1950s and 1960s, who “stealthily borrowed money to buy up enough shares in a small or midsized company to control its biggest bloc of votes, then force a stock swap and install himself as CEO.”

The most famous of these raiders was Eli Black, who took over United Fruit with this gambit — a company that had a long association with the CIA, who had obligingly toppled democratically elected governments and installed dictators friendly to United’s interests (this is where the term “banana republic” comes from).

Eli Black’s son is Leon Black, a notorious PE predator. Leon Black got his start working for the junk-bonds kingpin Michael Milken, optimizing Milken’s operation, which was the most terrifying bust out machine of its day, buying, debt-loading and wrecking a string of beloved American businesses. Milken bought 2,000 companies and put 200 of them through bankruptcy, leaving the survivors in a brittle, weakened state.

It got so bad that the Business Roundtable complained about the practice to Congress, calling Milken, Black, et al, “a small group is systematically extracting the equity from corporations and replacing it with debt, and incidentally accumulating major wealth.”

Black stabbed Milken in the back and tanked his business, then set out on his own. Among the businesses he destroyed was Samsonite, “a bankrupt-but-healthy company he subjected to 12 humiliating years of repeated fee extractions, debt-funded dividend payments, brutal plant closings, and hideous schemes to induce employees to buy its worthless stock.”

The money to buy Samsonite — and many other businesses — came through a shadowy deal between Black and John Garamendi, then a California insurance commissioner, now a California congressman. Garamendi helped Black buy a $6b portfolio of junk bonds from an insurance company in a wildly shady deal. Garamendi wrote down the bonds by $3.9b, stealing money “from innocent people who needed the money to pay for loved ones’ funerals, irreparable injuries, etc.”

Black ended up getting all kinds of favors from powerful politicians — including former Connecticut governor John Rowland and Donald Trump. He also wired $188m to Jeffrey Epstein for reasons that remain opaque.

Black’s shady deals are a marked contrast with the exalted political circles he travels in. Despite private equity’s obviously shady conduct, it is the preferred partner for cities and states, who buy everything from ambulance services to infrastructure from PE-owned companies, with disastrous results. Federal agencies turn a blind eye to their ripoffs, or even abet them. 38 state houses passed legislation immunizing nursing homes from liability during the start of the covid crisis.

PE barons are shameless about presenting themselves as upstanding cits, unfairly maligned. When Obama made an empty promise to tax billionaires in 2010, Blackstone founder SteveS chwarzman declared, “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

Since we’re on the subject of Hitler, this is a good spot to bring up Monowitz, a private-sector satellite of Auschwitz operated by IG Farben as a slave labor camp to make rubber and other materiel it supplied at a substantial markup to the wermacht. I’d never heard of Monowitz, but Tkacik’s description of the camp is chilling, even in comparison to Auschwitz itself.

Farben used slave laborers from Auschwitz to work at its rubber plant, but was frustrated by the logistics of moving those slaves down the 4.5m stretch of road to the facility. So the company bought 25,000 slaves — preferring children, who were cheaper — and installed them in a co-located death-camp called Monowitz:

https://www.commentary.org/articles/r-tannenbaum/the-devils-chemists-by-josiah-e-dubois-jr/

Monowitz was — incredibly — worse than Auschwitz. It was so bad, the SS guards who worked at it complained to Berlin about the conditions. The SS demanded more hospitals for the workers who dropped from beatings and overwork — Farben refused, citing the cost. The factory never produced a steady supply of rubber, but thanks to its gouging and the brutal treatment of its slaves, the camp was still profitable and returned large dividends to Farben’s investors.

Apologists for slavery sometimes claim that slavers are at least incentivized to maintain the health of their captive workforce. This was definitely not true of Farben. Monowitz slaves died on average after three months in the camp. And Farben’s subsidiary, Degesch, made the special Zyklon B formulation used in Auschwitz’s gas chambers.

Tkacik’s point is that the Nazis killed for ideology and were unimaginably cruel. Farben killed for money — and they were even worse. The banality of evil gets even more banal when it’s done in service to maximizing shareholder value.

As Farben historian Joseph Borkin wrote, the company “reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted”:

https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben

Farben’s connection to the Nazis was a the subject of Germany’s Master Plan: The Story of Industrial Offensive, a 1943 bestseller by Borkin, who was also an antitrust lawyer. It described how Farben had manipulated global commodities markets in order to create shortages that “guaranteed Hitler’s early victories.”

Master Plan became a rallying point in the movement to shatter corporate power. But large US firms like Dow Chemical and Standard Oil waged war on the book, demanding that it be retracted. Borkin was forced into resignation and obscurity in 1945.

Meanwhile, in Nuremberg, 24 Farben executives were tried for their war crimes, and they cited their obligations to their shareholders in their defense. All but five were acquitted on this basis.

Seen in that light, the plunderers of today’s PE firms are part of a long and dishonorable tradition, one that puts profit ahead of every other priority or consideration. It’s a defense that wowed the judges at Nuremberg, so should we be surprised that it still plays in 2023?

Tkacik is frustrated that neither of these books have much to offer by way of solutions, but she understands why that would be. After all, if we can’t even close the carried interest tax loophole, how can we hope to do anything meaningful?

“Carried interest” comes up in every election cycle. Most of us assume it has something to do with “interest payments,” but that’s not true. The carried interest loophole relates to the “interest” that 16th-century sea captains had in their cargo. It’s a 600-year-old tax loophole that private equity bosses use to pay little or no tax on their billions. The fact that it’s still on the books tells you everything you need to know about whether our political class wants to do anything about PE’s plundering.

Notwithstanding Tkacik’s (entirely justified) skepticism of the weaksauce remedies proposed in these books, there is some hope of meaningful action. Private equity’s rollups are only possible because they skate under the $101m threshold for merger scrutiny. However, there is good — but unenforced — law that allows antitrust enforcers to block these mergers. This is the “incipiency standard” — Sec 7 of the Clayton Act — the idea that a relatively small merger might not be big enough to trigger enforcement action on its own, but regulators can still act to block it if it creates an incipient monopoly.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

The US has a new crop of aggressive — fearless — top antitrust enforcers and they’ve been systematically reviving these old laws to go after monopolies.

That’s long overdue. Markets are machines for eroding our moral values: “In comparison to non-market decisions, moral standards are significantly lower if people participate in markets.”

https://web.archive.org/web/20130607154129/https://www.uni-bonn.de/Press-releases/markets-erode-moral-values

The crimes that monsters commit in the name of ideology pale in comparison to the crimes the wealthy commit for money.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farbenizers

[Image ID: An overgrown graveyard, rendered in silver nitrate monochrome. A green-tinted businessman with a moneybag in place of a head looms up from behind a gravestone. The right side of the image is spattered in blood.]

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