Many attempted murder plots, whether instigated by amateurs or professionals, are marred by ineptitude, experts say, despite what happens in “Goodfellas” and “The Sopranos.”
It’s a scene as old as celluloid: a shadowy figure named Luca Brasi or John Wick or Barry Berkman lurking in the darkness, outfitted with sinister intent and nifty weapons, effortlessly committing a murder for cash, animus or cold political calculations.
Whether they’re called hit men, contract killers or assassins, figures who kill for a living are a staple of Hollywood thrillers — and, by extension, the public imagination.
But experts in law enforcement and international espionage say that murders-for-hire are notoriously difficult to successfully arrange, let alone get away with.
Take, for example, what prosecutors say was a recent foiled plot to kill a Sikh separatist in New York City, which American intelligence officials believe was ordered by the Indian government. Once the plot reached the point where the alleged conspirators needed to employ a killer, things got complicated: The would-be hit man turned out to be an undercover agent working for the U.S. government.
Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer and the author of several books, including “The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins,” says he has known many bad guys during his decades in law enforcement and espionage. But even he says finding a real-life killer would stump him.
“I could not find you a hit man,” he said. “And I know a lot of murderers.”
Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, concurred, calling the public perception of a slick, skilled hit man “pretty much myth,” adding that a for-hire killer is usually “nothing more than a thug who offers or agrees to a one-off payday.”
“Which is why they get caught,” Mr. Kenney said.
Only about half of all murders in the United States are cleared or solved each year, according to the F.B.I., making it difficult to say definitively how many people are killed specifically by hit men. While there are also no handy stats on how many murder-for-hire attempts fail, experts and indictments indicate that many are marred by amateurism and ineptitude.
Still, the non-hits just keep on coming.
“There isn’t a real efficient, high-quality hit service out there like in the movies,” said Michael C. Farkas, a defense attorney who has worked as a New York City homicide prosecutor.
There are murder plots that unfortunately succeed — as Canadian officials believe was the case in June with the killing of another Sikh separatist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in British Columbia, though it is not known if for-hire killers were involved. That case chilled Canadian and Indian relations, and has cast suspicion on Narendra Modi, India’s conservative prime minister and a Hindu nationalist.
Law enforcement officials and academics who study killers-for-hire put them into several large buckets. There are the civilians engaged in everyday murder plots, which often end in sloppy or tragic fashion.
There are also hit men for the mob, the enforcers working in-house to illegally police the criminal underworld. These killers, perhaps the source of most urban lore about the illicit profession, have been luridly overexposed in shows like “The Sopranos” and films like “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas.”
Employed in a similar fashion are so-called sicarios, whose use by drug cartels has been heinously prolific at times. And of course there are also the professionals employed by government intelligence agencies, who have been suspected in assassinations in London and elsewhere.
Still, even in those attempts with James Bond-ian overtones, law enforcement has proved adept at thwarting some of those crimes, as illustrated by the foiled murder plot against the Sikh separatist in New York.
For the average person wanting to engage a hit man, the perils of purchasing such a service are myriad, particularly in cases involving inexperienced killers, many of whom are stymied by basic logistics like keeping quiet about their plans.
“It’s more complicated than it seems,” said David Carter, a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University. “And sometimes these aren’t the brightest people.”
Unsuccessful attempts on the lives of lovers — or, more to the point, former lovers — are perhaps the most common, experts say, and many have been stopped by the police. In other grim cases, targets have included children and family members.
A typical real-life murder plot involves a bar, some sinister banter and poor decision-making, said Gary Jenkins, a former police investigator from Kansas City, Mo., who now hosts the “Gangland Wire” podcast.
“They’ll say, you know, ‘I’d like to get her taken care of,’” Mr. Jenkins said. “So the bartender, or the local fixer, or the kind of quasi-criminal that’s there will go to his friendly A.T.F. agent or the F.B.I. and say, ‘Hey, this person is talking about wanting their spouse killed.’ And then the police will go in and be the hit man.”
There is also an ever-expanding web of forensic tools and electronic tripwires used by the police, including cellphone tracking and text messages. These tools play prominently in many cases, including that of a former beauty queen, Lindsay Shiver, who is awaiting trial on charges of trying to have her estranged husband killed in the Bahamas. Ms. Shiver is said to have sent text messages to her bartender boyfriend and a purported hit man before her arrest, along with a photo of her husband.
“Kill him,” Ms. Shiver allegedly wrote.
There is also the internet, of course, which emerges as a source of so many problems: In November, for example, a Louisiana woman was sentenced to 18 months in prison for trying to use a parody website, Rentahitman.com, to hire someone to kill a romantic rival.
That site, which advertises a “point & click solution” to problems, was linked to an F.B.I. crime complaint center, and also recently may have ensnared a Tennessee Air National Guardsman, who federal prosecutors accused of applying to become a hit man and even sending along a résumé.
Such sites, experts say, are often linked to law enforcement, even those on the dark web. “You have all these wonderful honey traps, the advertisements for people saying: ‘Oh, I can do this. No deed too immoral!’” said David Shapiro, a John Jay professor and former F.B.I. special agent. “And a lot of those are F.B.I. sponsored.”
Mr. Shapiro added that there was also a peculiar cheapskate quality to some of those involved in deadly plots, with their interest in looking for low-cost liquidations of those they hate.
“It’s costly,” he said, adding: “You get people who really can’t afford to do it right.” A lot of distrust permeates the planning of these crimes, which creates its own problems. Would-be killers, for example, will accept payment for a hit — and then disappear.
“You’re navigating risk every step of the way with every potential contact,” said Sean Patrick Griffin, a criminal justice professor at the Citadel in South Carolina, adding that like many shady activities — including money laundering — only a small number of people are known to make their living by killing.
“It’s a very niche, very unique thing,” he added. “There are not that many people, silly as it sounds, with the talents available for that type of commodity.”
Statistics from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services show that in 2022 there were only seven arrests statewide for contract killing, which the state considers first-degree murder. And that was a banner year for arrests for such badness, matching the total for the five previous years combined. Murder for hire is also a federal crime, with penalties ranging from fines and lengthy prison time for failed attempts to life imprisonment or the death penalty “if death results.”
Still, despite the fail rates and steep penalties, people — and governments — keep trying to have other people killed, whether because they are deluded by fictional images of sleek assassins or because they’ve given into the fantasy of operating outside the law with impunity, according to those who have studied these would-be killers.
“The Hollywood attraction is the suspense, the intrigue, the secrecy, the ‘super-person’ aura of the hit men that they depict,” Mr. Shapiro said. “And on the layperson’s side, I mean, who among us has not at one time or another wished for the death of somebody else? But for getting our hands dirty, we declined to do it.”
Even with professional assassins, plots often unravel, said Mr. Baer, the former C.I.A. officer. Three former senior American officials recently described what they said was a foiled Russian plot to kill an informant in Florida.
“Political assassinations just rarely work,” Mr. Baer said. “They are a tactic of desperation or insanity. You can’t get away with murder.”
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