the last book I ever read (Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee, excerpt four)

from Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company by Patrick McGee:

Organized crime was a major problem in Taiwan, with underworld gangs dating back to Japanese occupation in the early twentieth century. By the early 1980s they’d penetrated the legitimate business sector. When the government launched a series of harsh crackdowns, some gangsters responded by running for office and winning elections. By the early 2000s, business, politics, and organized crime were so intertwined that the lines separating legitimacy from illegitimacy were blurry at best. Apple had been paying its contract manufacturer directly, which in turn was supposed to pay these sub-suppliers—vendors a tier or two down in the supply chain. Apple engineers had been, as one of them put it, “beating up on” vendors the past few days, pressuring them to work harder, work smarter, and now they were realizing these vendors hadn’t even been compensated. “Apple writes a check, the supplier is supposed to have the vendor make the change, and you go to the vendor as an engineer to see the effects,” Hillman says. “And you find out they haven’t even been paid a dime because it all went to the mafia.”