I’ve been playing Hitman 2 for four straight hours and, to take a breather, searched the board archives for the scoop on hitmen, and found very little. My question is simple: do they exist?
I suppose criminal organizations such as the Mafia employ killers that can reasonably be said to be professional murderers, but are there any Hitman-style, John-Cusack-in-Grosse-Point-Blank hitmen? Freelancing murderers for hire. If so, how do you become one? Not that I’m planning that career, mind. How do your customers get in touch with you?
Yes, there are. Bike Gangs have been known to take on contract hits, and have ‘enforcers’ who will do the job for money. Some mercenary types floating around are hitmen - not generally doing fancy things like taking out world leaders with sniper rifles, but being hired by husbands to kill their wives, etc. There have been several cases in the past few years of people being arrested for trying to kill spouses after the ‘hitman’ they hired turned out to be an undercover cop. It is apparently common enough for the cops to set up sting operations to stop it.
HBO had a two shows that featured interviews with Robert Kuklinski, “The Ice Man.” He was a mob enforcer and hitman for higher and killed “well over 150” people. His wife of 40 years had no idea he did this for a living. You can read a bit about him here:
The interviews are weird because the guy is strangely sensitive at some times, but cold as ice when it comes to killing strangers. I remember him saying that one time he wondered whether you could kill someone with those mini crossbolt guns that you could buy in a sporting goods store so he went and bought one, left the store, and fired it point blank into a guy’s head who was sitting in a car at the curb, “just to try it out.” It worked.
This guy was just sentenced in Boston, for the murder of 20 people (he was a hit man for the Boston-Somerville “Winter Hill Gang”). Martorano admits to 20 murders, others place his toll at 25-27. Martorano worked for “Whitie” Bulger, the head of the gang and a vicious muderer himself!
Majority of UK ones are pretty low level seedy affairs.
Usually someone is brought in from outside the area, and given a time and place.
The idea is that being from another part of the country, there is less chance of a local witness recognising them.
Round here its nearly always about drugs, sometimes gambling debt or bulk drug credit to lower level dealers.
Generally it is pretty matter of fact, just catch someone at a set of traffic lights, or maybe going to the shops, the high powered rifle type hits don’t seem to be the thing.
“Iceman”? When I was much younger, I met another former mob hitman who was known as “The Iceman”, whose real name was Ron Rearick. He became a born-again Christian while in prison and is now (or was) a travelling evanelist. I met him when he came to my church to share his story.
Absolutely. I know one. A stupid one who got caught, but nevertheless he did the killing. I posted about it a couple of years back in *Criminals you have known?
That is, of course there are plenty of people in organized crime who can, will and do commit murders as part of their job. That’s real enough. But the “professional” hit man that you see in the movies is pretty much a myth.
When a guy like John Gotti wants someone beaten up or killed, he has associates and employees who’ll take care of the job. If you want to call such goons “hit men,” fine by me. But there aren’t any rich, suave, aristocratic professional killers who charge a million bucks per hit, and live on the Riviera between jobs. Most assassins are lowlives, and their methods of killing people are mighty unsophisticated and low-tech.
If you want to know what a real hit man is like, don’t picture John Cusack in “Grosse Pointe Blank,” don’t picture CHristopher Lee in “The Man With the GOlden Gun,” and don’t picture Edward Fox in “The Day of the Jackal.” Picture Al Pacino, from “Donnie BRasco.”
Most hitmen are usually ‘muscle men’; eg they’d contract muscle work, beat up guys who dont pay debts, shoot up shops, and generally be intimidating.
The underworld would usually contract these guys every so often to do some dirty work in terms of killing.
As for fully 100% freelance professional hitmen, there would have to be a few in the world, but would only operate for the elite. I suspect theres probably half a dozen or so political hitmen; ones that purposely kill off political enemies of people with full discreteness, not leaving a trace of evidence for the authorities. However, these guys would probably charge insane amounts of money on the side.
But to answer your question in the best possible way, if there’s anything I learnt from economics it is this: If theres a demand, someone will supply.
Here’s a previous thread on the subject. There’s been another, where someone posted an account about a Soviet defector being killed by a squad of guys who showed up one night at the victims house, whacked him, and then took off on jet skis. Apparently, he’d pissed someone off in the USSR, and they waited until after the fall of Communism to extract their revenge. Sounded almost like something out of a Bond film the way it was described. Unfortunately, I can’t find the link, or I’d post it.
So there are professional, freelancing hitmen (though I’d say most people mentioned in this thread don’t come under that heading). But, you say, they aren’t the kind in Hitman or Grosse Pointe Blank. No-one ever walked up to an army base, piano wired a guy taking a leak, put on his uniform, used it to get past security, piano wired a general, and walked out again?
