So tonight I was watching The Mechanic a film from 1979 starring Charles Bronson as a high price assassin for hire, his kills are technically complex and he retires to his mansion afterward to sip expensive liquor and listen to classical music.
This is a Hollywood cliche, the highly skilled and cultured assassin who commands a high price tag for his services, his targets invariably rich and powerful.
Has anything like this ever been discovered in real life? I have heard of murder for hire cases and without fail the assassin is a petty crook or biker or street thug, the methods they use are usually crude and the price tag shockingly low, the targets usually someone their employer has bad blood with like an ex husband or a life insurance scam or someone who wants their spouse dead. Then there are of course organized crime or gang thugs and hitmen, but they are usually not for hire they just work for their bosses.
I’m tryng to think of something, but I don’t recall this ever being the case. People with a lot of money don’t kill for just money. Mob-bound for-hire killers definitely existed (and a few might still be around), but it wasn’t a sumptuous, high-class business from what I read of it. Most were always just more-or-less loyal thugs, but sometimes cunning and successful thugs.
Now, if you go back in history you can get pretty far-out definitions of “assassin.” The Old Man of the Mountain was basically a King in his own right, who sent out disposable fanatics to kill his enemies. Does that count?
First off, it seems unlikely that the Taliban would hire strangers (who are presumably infidels anyway) at all. Secondly, a hired gun could never be sure that the Taliban would honor their contract and not just cut off their throats whenever they feel like it. And finally, free lancers in the security business can make money hand over fist under at least somewhat more convenient circumstances than fighting NATO forces.
Maybe these snipers are Muslims who received formal military training in one of the armies of the former Soviet Union or even in a NATO country and then decided to join the jihad.
Organized crime groups tend to have people who are willing to murder anyone the boss needs dead. And maybe these guys get some extra pay after they whack someone. But these guys aren’t independent assassins for hire. They’re part of a group.
There is no such thing as an independent highly skilled assassin for hire.
the Mirror is a bit tabloidish but the daily mail is a pretty respectable UK newspaper. I think your ideas of the Taliban are a bit warped, they are not cartoon villains and yeah the mercenaries were recruited from Egypt, Pakistan and Chechnya, so they were muslims , but if they were brought from overseas and paid to fight that still makes them mercenaries.
if you were such a highly skilled Assassin the clients that could pay you the best would be governments anyway and at that point you become a Mercenary or a covert agent and not an Assassin.
Want to bet that the CIA has used “freelancers” and probably still does.
There was a guy in the 1960s & 1970s named Richard Kuklinski who primarily worked for The Mob. But, if you believe him, was very much open to working for whomever was willing to pay his fee.
Most mob killers are not paid to kill people. Killing people is just what the job involves on that particular day. Most of the time, because of the need for access, the killers know the victims and, therefore, are not eager to commit the crime.