How do otherwise well intentioned, hard working and responsible professionals become caught up in bad deals?

In the 1872 novel “Demons” (aka “The Possessed”, & “The Devils”), Dostoevsky’s character Stavrogin confronts character Pyotr Stepanovich with dangerous insight:

Here you’re counting off on your fingers what forces make up a circle? All this officialdom and sentimentality - it’s good glue, but there’s one thing better still: get four members of a circle to bump off a fifth on the pretense of his being an informer, and with this shed blood you’ll immediately tie them together in a single knot. They’ll become your slaves, they won’t dare rebel or call you to accounts.

It’s an extreme literary metaphor - written as dark caution against the risks of nihilism. Possibly also an oblique argument in favor of matrix management models; those where the benefits of transparency outweigh the inefficiencies/discomfort of chaos, complexity, and red tape.