Luckily, executives have a habit of occasionally putting their blatantly illegal deals in writing (e.g. the recruiting cartel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...).
Beyond a certain size, it becomes hard to pretend you're doing it for one reason while actually doing it for another. Especially if it becomes a pattern.
> Luckily, executives have a habit of occasionally putting their blatantly illegal deals in writing
This is the weirdest way to have laws though. It strongly implies that the person putting it in writing didn't know it was illegal, because otherwise they wouldn't have put it in writing. But then you're never enforcing the law against people knowingly breaking the law, you can only ever enforce it against people who didn't realize it was illegal.
That seems like a bad design. In particular, it rewards a corporation the more evil it is, because the ones who know they're breaking the law are the ones who get away with it.
> Beyond a certain size, it becomes hard to pretend you're doing it for one reason while actually doing it for another. Especially if it becomes a pattern.
The pattern thing also doesn't really work.
Suppose some of your stores are in high crime areas and keep getting knocked off. The employees in those stores don't like the risk and form a union so they can demand bulletproof glass and hazard pay. The company looks at those stores and the insurance cost is getting out of hand and shrinkage is high and the stores just aren't profitable. So they close the stores.
Now you have a strong correlation between the stores that form a union and the stores that close, but it's because union formation and store closures are both caused by high crime, not because the company is purposely closing the stores that form a union.
> It strongly implies that the person putting it in writing didn't know it was illegal, because otherwise they wouldn't have put it in writing.
Just because someone created evidence that didn’t have to exist doesn’t mean they didn’t know their actions were illegal.
On Chris Hansen’s latest predator sting show the suspects frequently acknowledge, in writing, the age of the decoy and the sex acts they want to perform. They also take steps to create alibis, suss out if it is a sting, or otherwise avoid getting caught, which indicates clearly that they know what they are doing is illegal.
The sting show is obviously setting up a situation in which the suspects who know they're breaking the law think the evidence is only in the hands of their co-conspirators who have the same incentive to conceal it as they do.
Major corporations know that their emails etc. are discoverable regardless of whether the recipient is trusted. It's also not even necessary to disclose the true intention to anyone else in the company, unlike a situation where they're trying to enter into an intrinsically illegal transaction with a third party. The manager can just come up with a rationale for closing the store all on her own and then tell everyone else that it's happening.