In The Italian Job (2003), Steve back-stabs his entire team after a successful heist and takes the gold for himself with the aid of another team (lets call them rip off team).

Later he exclaims that he wanted it all for himself. What I don't understand is, presumably, the team that helped him rip off his previous team would want a cut, and there is no way they would accept a small portion of what is a multi-million dollar score.

At no point in the movie did they say Steve killed his ripoff team. So the question is:

Why did Steve even bother screwing over his original team if he would have to accept a similar pay division with his new team?

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    I highly doubt it. Unless you are mob boss who has subordinates in line with fear and an army of loyal followers, these guys are going to get curious. Steve isn't exactly a criminal mastermind, and he has no loyalty so it stands to reason that the people he aligns with don't either. Thus, they would most likely find out and either demand their fair share or get rid of him. – Alex Sep 20 '17 at 20:50
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    Well founded assumptions. Either way, so are you in assuming that he never told them anything. – Alex Sep 20 '17 at 20:56

It's never explicitly stated in the movie what happened to the "Rip-Off team" as you call them and there's no cannon answer that I'm aware of but if we were to speculate then there are several plausible explanations as to how he could avoid giving them the same sort of split that the original team was offering.

He could have hired them on a fixed-fee type deal as mercenaries - since the whole team was clearly well into successful criminal careers it's not unreasonable to suppose that they had significant personal funds available at the time of planning the job and it's plausible that he could keep the true nature of the "score" from the team to prevent them getting ideas about doing the same to him as he did to Charlie's team.

He could have killed them - the film doesn't say he did, but it doesn't say he didn't either. And he is clearly shown to be capable of killing in service of his plans.

  • In support of your first point, it seems more than reasonable to assume that Steve would only go through with backstabbing his old team if the backstabbing would net him more money compared to sticking to the old plan. That inherently means that Steve must be aware that his rip-off team will cost less than the fair shares of his original team. – Flater Sep 21 '17 at 10:35
  • Or it's a plot hole – Alex Sep 21 '17 at 12:42
  • @Alex Possibly, but given the existence of plausible alternatives I tend to give the writers the benefit of the doubt and assume that one of those things happened off-screen but YMMV – motosubatsu Sep 21 '17 at 12:58
  • Agreed. There were 6 total men in the original team splitting $35M, which comes to roughly $6M per person. Steve could easily pay a mercenary team a lot less than $29M for one job, which means that whatever he paid for the mercenary team netted him a lot more than the $6M he would have walked away with if he hadn't backstabbed his original team. – Johnny Bones Sep 21 '17 at 13:38

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