What’s a hitman?

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A hitman is a man who has been hired to kill someone; when a woman takes up the occupation, the appropriate term is “hitwoman.” While often associated with organized crime, many hitmen are actually amateurs, responding to expressions of frustration from friends and neighbors. The kind of fictionalized contract killings portrayed in movies is just that, and the reality is that contract killing is a brutal, dangerous, and illegal occupation.

As commonly understood, a hit man is hired by a client who wants the death of a third person. The killer may be an independent contractor who enters into an arm’s length agreement with the client, or, in the case of organized crime, may already be a collaborator or employee of the client. Although research in the field is limited, evidence suggests that most contract killings are solicited by private citizens for the purpose of ending an intimate relationship, such as a marriage in which the proposed victim is unwilling to condone divorce, or is worth more to the dead client than alive. Other common motives are revenge and retribution.

There is no legal way to hire a hitman – no online resource or classified ad section in newspapers – and so the client generally advertises the need by word of mouth. In many cases, someone who becomes aware of the customer’s need will alert law enforcement, who will investigate and, if justified, arrest the customer. If the client does indeed come into contact with a legitimate hitman, both want to maintain as much anonymity as possible, hoping to avoid the possibility of being identified and prosecuted in the future.

Although a hitman enters into an agreement with the client, the law in most developed countries provides that a contract to kill for hire, like any other contract to perform an indictable crime, is not legally enforceable. Those who hire hitmen sometimes believe that the fact that they do not commit the actual murder protects them from prosecution. Nothing could be further from the truth; in most jurisdictions, the person who contracts to murder is as guilty in the eyes of the law as the person who actually commits the murder. In some cases, in fact, contracting a killer can be an aggravating circumstance that justifies the imposition of the death penalty both against the killer and the client.

Popular culture is filled with stories of real and imagined contract killers. Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, an underboss of the Gambino crime family in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, is said to have killed 19 people on orders from his superiors in the crime organization. The Venezuelan terrorist assassin known as “Carlos the Jackal,” who is serving a life sentence in France, is claimed by many books and films to have led an almost charmed life while pursuing his career as a terrorist hitman; while there is no doubt that he was a very dangerous killer responsible for multiple murders, the reality of his life is much more mundane.

Evidence suggests that most contract killings are carried out with firearms, but that contract killings account for a very small percentage of all homicides. Crime statistics in the United States tend to support the idea that contract killings account for a minority of all homicides, although the sensationalism surrounding cases when they are discovered tends to skew perceptions of contract killing as a rarity. For example, the Pamela Smart case, in which she seduced a student and convinced him to kill her husband in exchange for sexual favors, and the Texas Cheerleader case, in which the mother of a high school cheerleader tried to hire someone to kill the mother of one of the girls competing with her daughter, both generated headlines and breathless comments for weeks.

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