Hit Men

Hit Men

STORNOWAY, Scotland — Everyone starts as a novice, whatever your job. You bumble around, make mistakes, learn by doing. It applies in any walk of life, and the criminal industry isn’t any different. A team from Birmingham City University’s Center for Applied Criminology has carried out the first typological study of British hit men, and it starts, of course, with the novice.

Santre Sanchez Gayle — a novice seeking to impress the senior members of his gang, according to a case detective — was just 15 when he was paid the pitiful sum of 200 pounds (about $330) to kill a young woman. He was caught only because he bragged about the murder: the greatest sin of the professional killer.

The novice can be easy to study. He’ll make mistakes, like leaving just enough forensic evidence behind or using an easily traceable weapon. He goes to jail. And it will, almost always, be a he. Of the 36 convicted hit men studied, only one was a woman, Te Rangimaria Ngarimu. She turned herself in after a hit in 1992. Failure is the cost of experience, but this is a job where failure, even a minor one, costs you everything.

I write crime novels, with a focus on organized crime. A lead character who’s supposed to be a skilled hit man becomes a tricky construction when there’s so little by way of facts to base him on. 

For the criminologists, the dearth of knowledge was a motivator for the study, published in a recent issue of The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice. It was an attempt to examine the methodologies of the British hit man with the hope of helping law-enforcement officers to better understand the kind of people they’re chasing. 

The dilettante, the journeyman and the master are the other categories. The dilettante is typically a desperate man and, though older than the typical novice, is often no more experienced. Driven by a need for money, he accepts a role he isn’t fit to play. The study’s most notable dilettante is Orville Wright, a former legal clerk. He was offered 5,000 pounds to murder Theresa Pitkin in 1996, and broke into her apartment with a knife. Then, rather than kill her, he started talking to her. He decided he couldn’t go through with it. This wasn’t a coldblooded killer.

The journeyman is an old pro, experienced and far removed from his novice days. He represents a significant change from the first two categories. He probably has organized-crime connections. Roger Vincent and David Smith worked together in 2003 in the execution of David King, who was an underworld figure, suspected by his killers of having become a police informant. They waited for him outside his local gym in a stolen van and, when he emerged, fired more than 25 rounds from an AK-47, killing him instantly. They fled the scene, burned the van and switched to another vehicle. But a glove found at the scene of the vehicle switch gave the police Mr. Smith’s palm print. One small mistake in an otherwise carefully planned and executed hit gave the police the clue they needed.

Where Mr. Wright planned to use a knife, Mr. Vincent and Mr. Smith had the contacts necessary to source a gun, no easy task in Britain. But where the previous categories carried out a killing in desperation for money, or to impress someone, for the journeyman it’s just a job. There’s no guesswork. 

The master is an evocative term for a suitably mysterious group. As the authors say, their study is necessarily based on failure: They can study only those who are caught. A master doesn’t find himself in court. While that ghostliness is a lure for fiction writers like me, it’s a frustration for researchers.

The problem with the best hit men is that the only thing we know about them is that they exist. We see their victims, and the victims’ cause of death, but that’s all. Unlike a researcher, tied to facts, a crime writer’s greatest thrill is perhaps mystery: Our hit man’s a blank canvas, to be decorated with the contents of our imagination. Maybe he starts as a novice, young and desperate. He develops and improves, and a degree of mastery slithers in and takes over. 

The study points out that the single greatest tactic for avoiding detection is to never work in the area where you live. Move around, every job in a different place where you have no roots to trip over. The outsider. Perhaps a man of military background, working with military precision, but an outsider.

All of which is why our fictional hit men are a suitable distance from reality. Whatever type they fit, even the nonmasters, they have to stay masterfully free for at least 80,000 words. 

The study describes the locations and manner of the hits as often “not unusual and extraordinary, but rather commonplace and ordinary.” It describes the reasons for many hits being ordered as “mundane.” Not descriptions creators of fiction want to carry with them.

So we read mountains of books about hit men, watch countless hours of them on screen. We play video games where we’re dropped into the role of the killer. Something draws us to these people in fiction. It’s the fact that, in reality, we would never do that job. There’s a line in the sand that a normal person won’t cross, no matter how desperate we are or how high the price. 

That idea, of doing something so inhuman, makes the hit man intriguing. Getting close to the unknowable, creating a character who occupies the corners so dark no normal person can see into them. We don’t want to be hit men. We don’t find them glamorous; we’re repulsed by them. But we want to understand. As soon as we recognize something as being beyond our sensibilities, we have a need to learn why this isn’t the case for others. It isn’t a desire to see them succeed that leads us to crime fiction but bear rather the chance to stand close and watch how they fail. A need to understand that motivates researcher, writer and reader alike. 

Malcolm Mackay  is the author, most recently, of the novel “The Sudden Arrival of Violence.” 

Wissai's Sidebar:

Anyone who has bothered to read my posts knows that I have created a hit man character, Omar Sabat. Two female readers (all my rabid fans are females. Males historically have shown distaste and disgust and displeasure at my assertions of superiority and contempt for the human race. They typically try to take me down via lies and insults instead of cogent arguments based on facts and logic. My reaction to these enfeebled and pathetic endeavors is to continue viewing these intellectually dishonest, ignorant, and stupid scumbag detractors with unadulterated and unalloyed contempt for these creatures are not fit and qualified to kiss my ass and lick my boots) have confessed to me that they like the character very much and wonder if Omar is real and based on my exploits! Their inquiries of course pleased me tremendously. I don't care for science fiction or far-out fantasies like zombies and all that crap. I prefer hard-boiled realism with an edge. Violence is part and parcel of life. There are moments we are called upon to kill, and we must be ready for them. We must execute our actions decisively and with finesse, if at all possible. There's art in everything humans do.