They have particular sets of skills.
Eh - I would assume part of becoming an elite assassin is learning how to pick locks and bypass security.
Sort of like those suave international jewel thieves who are always able to slip into the fifteenth story of a luxury hotel from the outside.
Maybe they only whack people who can afford to stay in the same posh hotels they do?
They only whack people they get paid to whack. Folks I piss off couldn’t afford them.
Yes. Folks who I have ticked off could not afford the Jackal or the Phantom or the Shadowman. Maybe they could hire instead the Water Ox or the Oaf or the Klutzz.
Not suffering from acrophobia is obviously an occupational requirement.
Reality seems to be markedly different. A couple nights ago I watched a true crime feature on TV about Richard Kuklinski, “The Iceman”, a onetime Gambino family hitman. He was named for his sometimes freezing the bodies of victims to disguise time of death, an idea he supposedly got from a fellow hitman known as “Mr Softee” since he drove a Mr. Softee truck in his ?spare time. None of this evokes John Wick. Kuklinski had a comment relevant to his thread after his initial arrest on five murders (he was alleged to have committed up to 200, some for fun). From the AP story in 1986:
“Judge Peter Ciolino set bail and ordered Kuklinski to surrender his passport. Deputy Attorney General Robert J. Carroll said Kuklinski had large sums of money in Swiss bank accounts and a reservation for a flight to Switzerland.”
“Kuklinski did not speak as he stood handcuffed in court. Later, he told reporters, ″This is unwarranted, unnecessary. These guys watch too many movies.″”
*the body of one of Kuklinski’s victims was stuffed under a platform bed in a North Bergen, N.J. motel room. Apparently housekeeping was less than diligent, as the room was rented several times over the next few days without anyone noticing, except for a disagreeable odor in the room (thankfully for the motel, this was before TripAdvisor).
Oh, and fans can get this groovy t-shirt:
https://truecrimecollective.com/products/richard-kuklinski-stay-cold-t-shirt-pre-sale
Procedural shows frequently bill an upcoming episode as “Ripped from the Headlines!” Sometimes it’s some kind of medical phenomena that gets waaaay too inflated for shock value, like multiple personalities. IRL, these cases come from case studies that took years of therapy to determine.
On TV, it takes a much shorter time to evoke an extra personality. Crazy people can instantly switch personalities, commit crimes, and switch back. But two personalities aren’t enough. Let’s give the crazy person a THIRD one! They developed this one as a protective buffer between the other two personalities. You didn’t expect that, did ya?
Actually, the only time in my life I’ve ever met someone actually diagnosed with that particularly disassociative disorder she actually did have three personalities. And a drug habit. And a chronic, potentially life-threatening medical condition.
Suffice to say she had a LOT of problems.
How many of them had the chronic, potentially life-threatening medical condition?
Kuklinski was certainly a cold blooded murderer but even worse he was a big fat liar. You can’t really believe anything he claimed after he was caught. Mobsters that had no reason to lie because they already took pleas said they never heard of him. He killed a bunch of people but he was not a high level mob hit man. He had a giant ego and loved to inflate his reputation for his own amusement. I guess what else are you going to do in prison?
All three of them, but apparently they each required different dosages of their medication and one of the three didn’t believe she had the condition so wouldn’t take it. This lead to rather more hospital visits than anyone was happy with. One reason the multiple personality diagnosis was believable was because of how, depending on which person was in charge, her reactions to a lot of things changed including on a physical level. It was very strange to see.
We couldn’t handle her at our out-patient clinic, she had to go in-patient.
Was her name Faith, by any chance? 
That almost sounds like a Coen Brothers movie compared to how I bet most contract hits (attempted or successful) go down. For example, my wife lived in a house next to an apartment that had numerous issues, like things falling off it and destroying parts of her fence, and she got into it with the landlord on numerous occasions about things like this. He refused to pay for damages. This started a few years before we started dating, but it went on long enough that I tried to intercede on her behalf with the landlord, and I can say from first hand experience that he was a nasty, vindictive prick.
He had a number of other violations with other properties he owned that got him in trouble with the courts. At first a judge tried sentencing him to live in one of his shitty properties, a la Joe Pesci in ‘The Super’, but that failed to change his ways, so he started getting sentenced to jail stints.
This pissed him off to the point he contracted some petty criminal he knew to kill 2 judges he didn’t like. Fortunately, the petty criminal got busted for an entirely separate crime before he carried out either of the hits, and ratted out the landlord in a plea deal. The landlord went to prison and died of a heart attack before he got any chance of parole.
I feel like that’s how most of those things go— try to hire some lowlife to kill somebody, and it just blows up in your face when they use you as leverage to get a plea deal for their other numerous crimes. I seem to remember reading news accounts of a few similar things happening like that in the past, often angry husbands or wives who try to contract a hit on their spouse and just get ratted out.
HIPAA prevents me from giving any identifying details but no, that was not her name.
Just sounds a lot like someone I used to know. 
A staple of bad comedies is a woman showing her (clothed or unclothed) breasts or ass to a random man and asking them how they look.
Similarly, completely uninhibited women who will get naked for any reason also seems to happen an awful lot in those movies.
Yeah, in real life, that tends to be less, “I’m a free and uninhibited spirit!” and more “I’m on waaaaay too many drugs right now!”
To much sun. They aren’t made archive-quality. (Ducks and runs for cover…)