The Now-Illegal Investment Structure That Incentivized Cold-Blooded Murder

There might not be a single more classic motive for murder than money. Inheritance, life insurance fraud, if there’s a million bucks to be made from someone’s demise, it’s pretty easy to guess who’s going to be in the last scene of that Law & Order episode. Of course, even should someone get away with it, in actuality they’re facing a real nightmare when it comes to probate and actual payout. 

But there’s one antiquated form of investment, also used as life insurance, that couldn’t make the profit to be made from the death of a co-signer any clearer. It’s a structure known as a “tontine.”

A tontine, in its basic investment form, is simple. Every member pays an upfront sum, often to fund a business or common investment. The members are then each paid out their shares of the return on a regular basis. Mathematically, it’s blissfully simple. The key wrinkle that makes them, to some, morally questionable is that if one of these members is to, say, mysteriously disappear? Their share is absorbed and redistributed, boosting the payout for every other member. 

So, if you’re decent at math and terrible at ethics, you quickly realize that you could eliminate a couple of the other investors that are bloating the denominator in your 1/X fractional payout and make more money.

It gets its name from Lorenzo de Tonti, who pitched the idea to the King of France as a way to raise money quickly from a huge number of citizens without an initial outlay of capital. The original tontine was rejected, however, because even in 1653, plenty of people found the idea of profiting off of other's deaths pretty grim. Apparently, that passed, because it became an incredibly popular structure for life insurance in the early 1900s. As if there wasn’t enough ickiness to begin with, it also kicked off massive amounts of embezzlement, a last straw that resulted in the U.S. outlawing the tontine as an insurance structure.

If you read that and think, “Boy howdy, that’s begging for a murder plot,” you’re not alone. Writers aplenty saw the motive that tontines provided, and they practically kicked off their own genre of whodunit. Agatha Christie herself knocked out a tontine-like tale in 4:50 from Paddington. M*A*S*H featured a low-stakes tontine revolving around a bottle of brandy in the episode “Old Soldiers.” (Something that funnily enough, did occur in real life with champagne.) Even The Simpsons got in on it, with a tontine established among Abe Simpson’s World War II squad, the Flying Hellfish, with regards to a trove of stolen Nazi art. 

Knowing the unsavory motives and history connected with the tontine, it makes perfect sense which character suggests it: a young Montgomery Burns.

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