Do high profile contract killings like in fiction actually ever happen?

whaleross@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 86 points –

You know the type. High security, weeks or months of stakeout, sniper three blocks away...

The hitman sorta things I recall from the news are either planned and executed by national intelligence agents or some savage gunning and running from hired brutes, but never the variant with sophistication and private sector.

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To address the questions you’re really asking;

  • Yes
  • Starts at €10k
  • I don’t work on weekends

10k!? This is what letting in all these immigrants does. Hows a fella supposed to make a cush living when its just being given away.

It starts at $10k. That means that you'll never actually be spending that little. That's probably the price for a sick toddler and you have to supply the tools yourself. These hitmen nickel and dime you just like any other service.

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Oh bummer. I was hoping you could take me out with a spectacular long range headshot this weekend, disappear without any trace or explanation, and leave everybody baffled and speculating for years to come.

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Fiction is fiction.

In real life, stalking the victim for months, sniper shots, or anything that involves any sort of sofisticiation or team of people is asking to get caught.

KISS principle. A successful hit would be as simple as possible, happen fast with no prior interaction, and involve as few people as possible.

I read a book a long time ago that talked about how many environmental activists end up in car accidents. In North America if you were an activist you were very likely to get in a car accident at night along a well known route....

I just read a story about a Tesla Model S that abruptly turned left into a median and accelerated straight into it, killing its occupant on impact.

Most new vehicles could do that too. Most vehicles come with driver assistance that includes braking and accelerating. They almost always have a Bluetooth connection as well.

Shoot, it's not even new vehicles. The report I remember from a college team that trialed 'car hacking' was from 2014 correction, 2011.

Indeed. Still, I'd assume if the hypothetical high profile target has security up to par, it requires a little more than to go in and start blasting. Even if very little planning is required, it would be because the hitman has sufficient expertise, indirectly the planning already being done over years of experience.

There’s good documentation of soviet hits on dissidents and people they considered provocative. Also the CIA and russian attempts on castro

It's still unknown who did this hit, but the story itself and a mass of speculations are very interesting:

https://unresolved.me/lake-city-quiet-pills

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabhouh

Thanks for that rabbit hole. Interesting. It would make sense for a clever and reasonably tech savvy person at that time to put messages in the HTML thinking it would be sufficiently hidden, and to come up with the strategy to mask business traffic from casual traffic by being an overly popular image host. Then again, people in some sort of intelligence biz that use terminology of secure data storage should also know that obscurity is not not security. If it's a LARP, it is an ambitious one, but people that are armchair military do have a weird mindset of their own.

Lake city quiet pills is wild. Barely sociable has a video on YouTube about it.

You could ask Jimmy Joffa. Or any Mexican politician who speaks out against the cartels. Not sure they will be able to answer though since nobody has seen them in a while...

Yeah, it did cross my mind, along with the Italian mob killing prosecutors back in the day, but as far as I recall those too are gunning everything in proximity of the target or at most sophisticated a planted car bomb. Not like the roof top assassin that disappears into thin air sort of thing.

but never the variant with sophistication and private sector.

If they're good at what they do why would we hear of them?

Because if it does happen even infrequently, it would be unlikely that not at least a few had a media leak or some upset spouse exposing it.

There's a reason rich folk hire armed private security, ride in bulletproof vehicles, and hold kidnapping insurance.

Yeah, well, kidnapping is something different, isn't it.

Sure, but my mind kinda buckets it under the file of rich people problems, like getting bumped off

The private sector, like corporations? It happens to a degree but you'll find connections to both intelligence agencies and organized crime pretty quickly. Just look into Coca Cola's assassinations of union leaders in Colombia if you want an example.

There is a fairly significant amount of planning that goes in to these, but it doesn't have the "cool" of fiction. Killing in reality is brutish and horrific.

I was thinking just anything outside national intelligence basically.

Oh yeah, the Coca Cola murders! Looking it up now I'm surprised it was in the 90s and even 00s and today nobody cares. For some reason it would make sense if it was in the seventies. Oil and mining industries come to mind as well for murdering unionists. I'd imagine it still happens in poor countries and never reaches the international news, while the murders being of the most brutal massacre sort imaginable.

You're absolutely right. I'd never expect real life murder to be cool. Even less it to be a business that is supposedly covert and underground but where everyone is hot and flashy with charming eccentric quirks and everybody knows everybody.

At best I'd assume a couple of paranoid individuals with antisocial traits carefully exchange information and experiences over a quiet drink at some anonymous hotel bar,. While keeping a close eye on each other, because why would an independent professional murderer trust an elite competitor or even a colleague, regardless either of them being in it for the thrill or the money.