3 ms·

Broadly and imprecisely speaking, kickbacks are illicit payments by a vendor or contractor to a specific member of the customer company for maintaining the rela

Broadly and imprecisely speaking, kickbacks are illicit payments by a vendor or contractor to a specific member of the customer company for maintaining the relationship regardless of value or worth. It’s a type of bribery. The Sopranos was a TV show about the Mafia. The Mafia is a criminal syndicate whose operations consist primarily of providing illegal drugs, prostitution, and charging companies in their territory for “protection” often from other groups, but also often from themselves. The show had the mafia use a waste management company’s services as a superficially legal reason to be paying these protection payments. At least that’s my interpretation.

oersted 1y ago
The Mafia does actually provide real waste-management services, also in Italy at large scale as far as I know. They do engage in racketeering to ensure that they own all the contracts in a certain region, and compete for territory, but they do often actually go and collect the waste, it's not just a front. And I think they did in the Sopranos too, although it was not explicitly depicted as far as I remember, just off-hand references. The illegal part is in how they get rid of it. Often they take on high-value contracts for toxic waste products that are complex to handle in a compliant manner, and they just dump it wherever.