Jesse McKinley, Hit Men Are Easy to Find in the Movies. Real Life Is Another Story. NYTimes, Jan. 14. 2023.
Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. agent 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.
Law enforcement officials and academics who study killers-for-hire put them into several large buckets. [...] There are also hit men for the mob, the enforcers working in-house to illegally police the criminal underworld. [...] 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.
If the hit man for hire is largely a myth, why is the myth so popular?
There's more at the link.
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