Are contract killers nothing more than a Hollywood myth, or has government-sanctioned murder been revived?
We all know the routine. A highly-trained, solitary figure, using bespoke technology, martial arts proficiency, and expert marksmanship and weaponry, breaks into a secure government facility undetected and silently kills a high-profile target before slipping away unnoticed. We’ve been watching this scene play out in television and film for so long that we no longer even question it. But do these people actually exist?
The Sunday New York Times this week featured a story about the difficulty of finding professional hitmen despite Hollywood’s insistence that this is a thriving profession with a vibrant community of highly-trained killers for hire. Meanwhile, the Washington Post is reporting that assassinations by foreign governments are on the rise with “India…Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other countries credibly accused of plotting lethal attacks overseas.”
So which is it? Are loads of hitmen sitting around in industrial lairs or seedy dive bars, waiting for their next job, or are they about as common as honest building contractors? Just look at serial killers, another Hollywood trope that would have us believe that once a week, a madman is terrorizing some local community and requiring an FBI task force to fly in on a G6 like the Pros from Dover to catch him. Are psychotic killers really running amuck all over the world, or do we just imagine it? It’s hard to know for sure.
According to IMDB, the first movie to feature a contract killer was a 1931 German film called Der Mann, der seinen Mörder sucht, or “The Man in Search of His Murderer.” But the tale of the hitman has long been a favorite in cinema. This Gun For Fire (1942), Dial M For Murder (1954), The Mechanic (1972), The Day Of The Jackal (1973), The Man With The Golden Gun (1974), Prizzi’s Honor (1985), Nikita (1990), The Professional (1994), Pulp Fiction (1994), Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), Road To Perdition (2002), Kill Bill (2004), Collateral (2004), No Country For Old Men (2007), Hitman (2007), In Bruges (2008), The American (2010), The Iceman (2012), John Wick (2014), Sicario (2015), and the television show Barry (2018–2023). That’s barely scratching the surface and doesn’t even really get into the entire Asian cinema subgenre of professional hitmen.
In the movies, they’re always an ex-cop or retired military, as if that explains it all. Where are they getting the training for lethal, solitary, covert ops? How did they start? What were they trained for? Is this a side hustle or a full-time job? None of it comes close to answering the question of how many people are out there with the necessary skills, the moral ambivalence required, and the cold will to murder for profit.
Fictional hitmen seem to be broken down into two basic types. The first is the brutish sort favored by Eastern European gangsters. The Enforcer. Subtlety is not their forte. They succeed because they don’t care if they’re caught or killed. They’re soulless.
Then you have The Professional. The quiet, unassuming man who lives a quiet, boring life in relative comfort but who is a combination computer hacker, burglar, explosives expert, spy, and assassin. He’s more of a Ninja than a special-ops mercenary. He probably has a family at home and coaches Little League.
Who are the real killers? How many of them, and who do they work for?
They say that 1.2% of men and 0.7% of women have significant psychopathic traits. That’s not nothing. It’s like 400k men and 238k women just in America, where we also just happen to have 120 guns for every person. The percentage of psychopaths in prison rises to 15–25%, which isn’t terribly surprising but not exactly comforting.
Successful psychopaths exist in business, with one report claiming that 20% or more of CEOs expressed significant psychopathic traits. Soldiers in the special forces, men who have often killed multiple targets, many up close and personal, have been known to refer to themselves as “compassionate psychopaths.”
Criminal statistics tell us that only about 50% of murders are ever solved, which means that half of the people get away with it. Those are pretty good odds if you’re in the murdering business. It’s a coin flip. Heads, you get away scot-free. Tails, you end up doing 25 to Life in Rahway or Sing Sing. It all depends on what you stand to gain, I guess.
Just how good is the upside?
This seems to be the main problem for contract killers. Either you’re a true believer, sponsored and trained by the government, who sees the job as critical to the safety and security of the nation, or you’re an opportunist looking to score. It’s one thing if you have an ideological framework for your actions and another if it’s purely financial. With the latter, the benefit has to far outweigh the risks, which brings us to who can afford to hire a professional killer and what they risk just for trying to hire someone.
A CIA agent has been trained and supported by an enormous, complex organization for years and is presumably trustworthy and loyal. Some random stranger you hire, no matter how good their references, is inherently neither. They’re in it for the money, so if they were ever caught, they would have little incentive to take the fall alone. I suspect that if you’re a billionaire, there are many other ways to get what you want without risking a prison sentence for trying to kill someone. So who hires, or at least tries to hire, hitmen?
Most of the professional contract killers that we know of, meaning the ones who got caught, were only professional in the sense that someone paid them at least once. They weren’t highly trained. They didn’t have a long and storied career taking out targets. They were just some schlub who was immoral or desperate enough to murder for money.
You can just imagine a few guys in a bar talking about how much they dislike their boss, and one of them thinking, “How hard could it be?” It’s basically the plot of the 1989 film “Boondock Saints.” Two Irish brothers go on a killing spree of mafiosos using methods and strategies they’d seen in the movies. As meta as it is, the entire film is completely unbelievable. But it’s a movie.
From the reporting by the Times, it would appear that most contract killers are nothing more than FBI plants. They even have a website called rentahitman.com that presents as a parody but has resulted in the arrests of people both looking for help and offering their services. The Feds just pick them up.
Your typical hired hit is a spouse or family member who hires someone of ill repute to kill a former loved one, often for insurance money but sometimes just so they can spend more time with the stripper. It rarely ends well. Although we don’t really know what happened in the 50% of murders that are never solved, so how we do we know at least some of them weren’t professional hits? We don’t. Maybe that profession is doing quite well.
For what it’s worth, they haven’t caught the person or persons who killed the Sikh separatist in Canada, even though they foiled a plot in the US and arrested an Indian government official for allegedly setting up the hits. The Canadians have accused the Indian government of being behind it, and it would appear the Americans think so, too, but not much has been done, and that guy is still dead.
Russia seems to be constantly throwing people out of windows, poisoning them, or making them radioactive. North Korea has sent hit squads to take out undesirables outside of their country. Saudi Arabia killed a Washington Post journalist critical of the Saudi government in an embassy, then dismembered and disposed of his body.
Clearly, it’s possible to kill someone outside of your own borders, as long as you can stand the heat. State-sponsored violence always has a place in the world and, while often disliked, is still somehow allowed.
We just roll our eyes and say, “Those crazy Russians.”
What are you gonna do?