This seems quite definitive, can you point me a direction for further reading?
They may have been “serious”, but the very act of advertising your mad hit man skillz in a national magazine would require that you be something of a doofus to begin with, regardless of what a man killing bad ass you are.
Prove what? That there are no would-be professional assassins posting “Need to kill a business partner or inconvenient spouse? Call 1-888-FOR-DETH” ads in S.O.F.? :rolleyes: How about this: you prove that the discovery or conviction of even one truly professional hit-man–a guy who makes a real living exclusively at political or commerical killings for hire–resulted from these ads and investigation thereof.
If you’ll bother reading up-thread, you’ll note that I don’t deny that there are people who do killings for hire. However, I highly doubt the existence of private, high living, freelance assassins as inquired by the o.p. Most “assassins” are either in the category of “buttonmen” (criminals pressed into service as being pretty good and willing at killing) or ex-military/ex-terrorist types who are supported and protected by some clandestine arm of a government intelligence or paramilitary organization, and many assassination attempts come off as clumsy, ill-conceived maneuvers better suited to a Monty Python skit than a movie thriller. Publishing ads in S.O.F. for employment is just asking to be caught, and in general, the business of hiring out to interested parties on the free market is complicated by the fact that murder and political assassination is nominally illegal essentially everywhere.
Personally, my favorate fictional hitman is Lawrence Block’s Keller; Keller, however, has a patron (the “Old Man”, and later his assistant, Dot) who through some obscure means arranges jobs for him so that he never has to advertise himself or be overexposed to customers. Like “The Equalizer” it makes for a good story hook, but it seems dubious that one could maintain a functional business on this basis for any time without running afoul of law enforcement and investigation.
Stranger
There are certainly Mob “soldiers” (usually some kind of enforcer) who are called upon for killings on a regular basis. Jimmy Burke (portrayed by Robert DeNiro as “Jimmy Conway” in the film Goodfellas) certainly did his share of killing for profit and apparent pleasure even before wacking almost his entire crew on the famous Lufthansa heist, portrayed with amusing gruesomeness in the film. (“When they found Carbone in the meat truck, he was frozen so stiff it took them three days to thaw him out for the autopsy.”) Burke wasn’t what you’d call a professional assassin, of course, but he was essentially on-call to the Lucchese family (and his own side interests) due to his proclivity for murder and skill at disposing of bodies and evidence.
Stranger
Here’s the case in question. It seems to have been rather isolated, and everyone involved got caught, so the skill level cannot have been astronomical. I have browsed through old SOFs and there were classifieds of such type. I assume most were, as has been suggested, by nutcases or mercenary wannabes, but this guy took it a step further.
I expect such killers are rare, but there appear to be a few of them.
Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski demonstrated unparalleled nerve and (heh heh) coolness in carrying out hits for the Mafia. Had he been Italian, he would have doubtless become a ‘made guy’ in the mob. But his Polish/Irish ancestry forced the mob to use him as a case-by-case contract killer.
He was very professional, and uniquely proficient at avoiding detection: he would always discard a handgun after he’d killed someone with it. And he was truly devoid of any remorse: he once killed a random stranger on the street chosen by the mob as an ‘audition’ for a mob job. He was not a blustery kid (although he did have a terrifying temper).
Kuklinski had dealings with (and eventually killed) a purported contract hit man named Robert “Mister Softee” Pronge, supposedly trained in demolitions by the military.
Wiki acknowledges or reflects that a fair amount of what Kuklinski claimed was only on his own say-so. Not that he sounds like a good guy.
There are enough amoral people in the world that it seems a bit surprising that an efficient market for such services didn’t spring up somewhere.
Maybe there are too few qualified buyers and sellers for the market to be liquid and determine what such services are really worth. I would suspect that the intrinsic value (to the extent there is one) of a contract hit would need to be pretty high, because of the high degree of objective risk it entails. How many people really have that much money? And, since the definition of an effective assassination includes no one getting caught, how many operatives have the appropriate combination of amorality, skill, intelligence, planning to have objectively high odds of delivering what they promise?
And how would the two groups meet? Markets thrive when all the relevant infromation regarding product quality is accessible. But a would-be serial hitman can’t very well be forthcoming or transparent the way your swimming pool contractor can in providing testimonials about his past work, as he’d have to effectively confess to multiple capital crimes, and implicate his past clients in them too – which if he were to do, would immediately send his current would-be employer running for cover, given that secrecy is part of the package he’d be buying.
Even more fundamental problem – how would the qualified buyer meet the willing and qualified seller? I think it would kind of be like being a furry-fetishist in 19th Century Kansas (assuming such could exist). Not a lot of fora where you could hope to openly discuss your interests and find a counter-party. Most would be buyers (and sellers) of murder-for-hire would likely ideally prefer that they never have direct contact with, or never expose their identity to, the other party – which again, kind of inhibits a trust-based fair-market transactin.
Couple these market-inhibiting factors with the legions of dumbass rednecks who are regularly televised on those undercover television shows getting busted for trying to hire (or for offering to supply) a hit from/to an undercover agent for $365 and a barbecue grill, and it turns out that (thankfully) no serious person would take the risk of trying to buy/sell such services, such that a market never really developed and probably won’t. Which is just as well.
For a comprehensive but quite depressing discussion of (1) the CIA’s inept attempts to hire the mob to kill Castro, (2) the ineptness of the outside help that the CIA has worked with in efforts to kill people, (3) the CIA’s ineptness generally, see Tim Weiner’s recent book, Legacy of Ashes.
I just thought of another way of looking at why it would be hard to have one of those movie-style suave-international-man-of-mystery sorts of “professional” killer:
The kind of guy who would be able to:
*blend in/hide in plain sight so as to make the approach to his target;
*live an itinerant lifestyle, trotting the globe from the Amazon one week to Paris the next;
*gather intelligence on his target;
*find nearly-flawless ways of making the availability of his services known to wealthy would-be clients, and closing deals, while assuring that he is not being entrapped, won’t later be betrayed, and won’t leave a financial or communications paper trail that could circle back to him;
*keeping sufficiently busy that he can maintain the type of safe-houses and cut-out plans and backup identities (none cheap) that he’d need to have as backups;
*not botching the attempt;
*not being inadvertently or purposefully spotted or tracked down by the target, by bystanders, by law enforcement;
*hiding/laundering the (large) proceeds of seriously-illicit activity, yet maintaining access to assets if he has to flee or go underground;
*avoiding the type of massive and concentrated law enforcement attention that would surely be focused on him if any of his crimes were linked;
would have to have a level of martial skill, discipline, training, intelligence, spy-type tradecraft, planning ability and foresight, game-theory, that relatively few people possess. In the civilized West, those people (probably correctly, because they are intelligent) would statistically be highly likely to do a cost:benefit calculation and determine that more, easier, safer, money could be made in starting a hedge fund, investment banking, computer-modeling the stock market, establishing a dominant retail chain, committing financial fraud – none of which involve hours hunched on a cold rooftop with a sniper rifle, or 4:00 a.m. escapes off the hotel balcony, or facing capital punishment. Really, then, a professional killer from a modern Western society would have to be someone on the far right tail of a lot of skill/discipline Bell curves, who was also an utter sociopath and just doing it for fun. Probably a pretty vanishingly small population.
Mind you, change the variables a bit, and things change. My premise above is based on the notion that he has to elude a modern, non-corrupt, and pretty massive and technologically advanced law enforcement apparatus. Posit a milieu where all those are absent, and the police presence is either absent, inept, bribable – maybe it’s more viable. Or, take a place where the brightest of the bright don’t have a well-marked path to I-banking. Killing for hire might be the least-worst option to make a lot of money, as it rarely would be in the shiny metropolises of the West. All of which kind of ratifies what siam sam mentioned about rural Thailand, where the economic, law enforcement, etc. factors shake out very differently than in the world of Jason Bourne.
I agree with that. I was just pointing out that I remember the incident, is all.
I agree. The last Bourne movie was a piece of total inanity from beginning to end, but you know it was going to be that way as soon as they: [spoiler]used a sniper to assassinate someone in the middle of a crowded train terminal.
That would send the entire country into a panic (remember the sniper attacks around Washington?). Every agency of the national and local governments would launch an investigation; newspapers, news organizations, and individuals would jump on it immediately. If the government said to back off because it was national security (they’d obviously know pretty quickly it was a U.S. spy agency that did it), the government would fall, relations with the U.S. would be suspended, and the entire international community would have hysterics.
There couldn’t possibly be anything stupider that than, except possibly giving the CIA an office in a Manhattan skyscraper with big open windows looking in on the secret safe. Yes, the movie did that as well.
An assassination that goes public - like the Russian poisoning in London a few years ago - is the worst possible outcome. At least in the western world. I suppose there are countries in the world in which public murders can be covered up, but there are fewer every year.
Spy movies are now part of the fantasy genre. You can’t even destroy 50 cars in a high speed city chase any more - Bourne 3 yet again - without making worldwide headlines.
P.S. Hey, Bourne: cars now have airbags.[/spoiler]
When I lived in Hong Kong, in 2003, a property developer was killed in a teahouse. The assassin was a mainlander (a PRC citizen, not a HK resident) who had eaten breakfast there for the few days beforehand. The staff recognised him as a mainlander from his accent, when interviewed by the police afterwards. He walked up behind his seated victim and shot him in the back of the head, then calmly walked out amidst the mayhem.
The South China Morning Post reported at the time that he was in all likelihood a professional assassin, and that the motive was related to a property deal the victim was involved in acrosss the border in China. The teahouse was in the middle of Central, the busness district, and was frequented by well-to-do Chinese business men and even judges. It was a brazen murder.
This article suggests the murderer was caught, assuming its the same assassination.
Ok, disclaimer: I’ve been drinking too much to be posting in GQ but…
This is GQ, Stranger. The OP disallowed mob hits:
Then you state: "[T]here are certainly people who make a living killing other people for fun and profit…"
“Living” meaning ‘what they do to pay the bills’ I’d guess. Then you disclaim that:
Which really isn’t the same thing as “killing other people for fun and profit”. Do you care to amend your assertion?
Amend what? I was offering up an example of what the Mafia uses to perform for-pay killings; not sleek, well-paid guys sitting around in a bar waiting for a phone call, but thugs and “soldiers” who are particularly good at killing, albeit mostly as a sideline to being enforcers. That’s probably as close as it gets to a professional killer in the United States. Others have noted that you can buy a killing elsewhere around the world where law enforcement is lax (Thailand, Russia) from presumed “professionals”, although it certainly isn’t the high flying career one would infer from watching movies.
Are there people who will kill for money, and perhaps even regard this as their primary occupation? Sure. Do they make six figure awards for their services? Doubtful.
Stranger
Weren’t the Thuggees “professionals”? I mean, that was what they did. Not charity work or politics, they killed people.
No, they were religious fanatics.
I had always been under the impression that the ads in Soldier of Fortunewere for mercenaries/mercenary companies, rather than hitmen.
You know, the sort of people you hire and then send them off to Cuba to ensure your arms/drugs/sex slaves shipment arrives without a hitch.
They are, but even at that this is typically the dregs of the mercenary crowd. Experienced, professional mercenaries (or private security contractors like Sandline International, Executive Outcomes, and Blackwater Worldwide) are generally run by experienced and retired SpecOps people, involved in the community of private security services, and already have contacts that their likely customers; mostly governments, large corporations, and intelligence organizations. And while they might do work that is of dubious moral merit or engage in activities that are extralegal, it is rare that they’ll openly and obviously violate the doctrinal or statute law of the nation they and their customers are based in, and I would argue that it would be extremely unlikely that the would perform any tasks that can be categorized as assassination per se (though they may not be unwilling to use force in excess of that strictly needed at times). The people who advertise in the back of Soldier of Fortune…well, some might be legitimate, experienced operators who just want to work on their own, but I suspect most are guys who did a stint in the Army or Marines without any distinction and decided that they’d like the chance to fire automatic weapons in the private sector, but lack the contacts and credentials to get legitimate work. I wouldn’t be surprised, perhaps, if you could find one of these turkeys willing to pull the trigger on some poor slob, but that doesn’t mean they make a living at it or can execute the kind of elaborate planning and setup for a real assassination like that of Anwar El Sadat.
I forgot about this earlier, but from the 1930s and 1940s there were the Brownsville Boys, popularly known as “Murder, Inc.” by the press. This was essentially an organization of hired killers run by the National Crime Syndicate started by “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky. These guys were essentially full-time contract killers (the Mob even hired them out to other interests on occasion) but they were mostly working stiffs, not high rollers. I don’t think any such organization exists per se in the United States today; most Mob hits now seem to be pretty clunky, ill-planned affairs.
Stranger
Yes there are. I had a co-worker one time who offered to put me in contact with one. I obviously declined the offer, but he even gave me a price range for the service. He invited me to a party one weekend and we started drinking together on the weekends after that. We became good friends after a few months. I gained his respect by not repeating any of his business outside of work to any employees of the company we worked for. He was a very serious guy and I do not doubt his sincerity in the offer. We had talked about a lot of personal stuff and I had discussed some of my problems. About a year later I left the company and we lost contact. Then after about 4 years I see in the paper where he had been arrested for killing another man in another state. He wound up doing some time in prison for it but I ran into him after he got out. He said he had changed his life and he was doing better. Very strange.
Are there professionals who assassinate zombies? Zombies who are professional assassins? Do they specialise in head shots?
Despite not wanting anyone killed I’d be very tempted to take up that offer just so I could try to document things to post online so I could prove it, and yes I realize how stupid that is whether it is a real contract killer or a cop/agent. :smack:I’d risk my life for a cite.