the head of Wikileaks needed the anonymity that TOR offers, just like investigative journalists do. But some others do not. Others use TOR not out of need, but desire. For many things lurk deep in the hearts of men, and if you give them a tool to hide their identities they will use it.
Within minutes I had access to sites that sold things like $20 syringes full of HIV positive blood, a vendetta’s stabbing tool. Where you could buy a soldier’s skull from Verdun for $5,000. Where fake euros cost a fraction of the real price. There was even an encyclopedic portal of links to ugly places I did not care for. Websites like ‘Pedofilie’ or ‘Boyloverforum’. Places that offered you the chance to commission drug experiments on homeless people. There was the opportunity to purchase snuff films made to order. You could buy the contact details of ‘crooked port and customs officials’ or ‘discreet lawyers and doctors’. And then there were the sites that promised assassinations.
‘Unfriendly solution’ was one. The text was chilling, if a word of it was true.
‘I will “neutralize” the ex you hate, your bully, a policeman that you have been in trouble with, a lawyer, a small politician . . . I do not care what the cause is. I will solve the problem for you. Internationally, cheap and 100 per cent anonymously.’
The text continued: ‘The desired victim will pass away. No one will ever know why or who did this. On top of that I always give my best to make it look like an accident or suicide . . . I don’t have any empathy for humans anymore. This makes me the perfect professional for taking care of your problems . . . I’ll do ANYTHING to the desired victim.’ The price varied. For non-authority, ‘normal’ people the cost was between €7,000 and €15,000.
Another site, ‘The Hitman Network’, offered a team of three contract killers in the US and the European Union. They charged $10,000 for a US hit, $12,000 for an EU one. They had two rules: ‘No children under 16 and no top 10 politicians.’
Of course on the dark web you have no idea who is and who is not genuine. It could just be some fat guy called Bob sitting in his underpants in his mother’s loft in Illinois. Or a cop. After all, the US’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has acknowledged it runs agents who pose as fake hit men, men who wear the jewellery, sleeveless tank tops and facial hair of biker gangs, entrapping those who seek guns for hire.35
In a twist of irony, it was even alleged that Ross Ulbricht, the supposed founder of Silk Road – a TOR portal that sells all manner of narcotics, drugs and illegal services – commissioned the murder of six people through hitmen he had contacted on the internet.36 Nobody was actually murdered, although the FBI did say they had faked the death of one former employee of Silk Road and claimed they had convinced Ulbricht the murder had taken place. Ulbricht reportedly wired $80,000 to pay for the hit, though none of this has been proven in court.37
But some of those on the dark web might, just might, be genuine. Because there are definitely men out there who earn a bloody living using the gun in an ugly and vicious way, and there have been for some time.
The first gun assassin to enter the history books appears to have been a Scotsman – James Hamilton. When James Stewart, the half brother of Mary Queen of Scots, was acting as regent for her son, he was shot dead by Hamilton. The sniping Scot, in support of Mary, had fired the lethal shot from an archbishop’s window, through a line of washing. Since then, we have seen world leaders gunned down in their cars, on motel balconies and in theatres, a single bullet spinning a nation into a state of mourning, spurring on a legion of conspiracy theories, and even triggering world events that have claimed the lives of millions.
So President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the back of the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC by actor John Wilkes Booth, wielding a Philadelphia Derringer with a black walnut stock inlaid with silver.38 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was gunned down in the streets of Sarajevo in 1914, wearing such a tight uniform that some speculate it even helped speed his death.39 And a host of others have fallen to the assassin’s bullet, Tsar Nicholas II, Mahatma Gandhi, President Kennedy, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X among them, victims of the powerful political symbolism the assassin’s bullet delivers; potent propaganda in a bloody deed.
Like the best propaganda, the world of the assassin does not easily show its true face. But glimpses of it fascinate and endlessly inform the subject of films and dramas, which, in a way, seems ironic when you read that the father of Woody Harrelson, the star of Natural Born Killers, was actually a contract killer. Charles Harrelson was given two life sentences in 1981 for the assassination of district judge John H. Wood, the first murder of an American judge in the twentieth century.40 The killing was carried out with a high-powered rifle in return for $250,000.41
Other shadows emerge from this world, such as the thirteen-year-old hitman working for the Mexican drug cartel. In 2013 Jose Armando Moreno Leos confessed he had participated in at least ten homicides, hired for his skill at shooting a high-calibre weapon. He was freed, because the Mexican constitution prohibits the incarceration of those under fourteen, but a few months later Jose too was found murdered, execution style.42
Or there is the story of infamous Russian hitman Alexander Solonik, better known as Alexander the Great, who confessed to assassinating a string of Moscow underworld figures in the 1990s. He had a unique skill: he could shoot with both hands.43 Or the time when, in 2011, Indian police arrested one of their most notorious contract killers, Jaggu Pehelwan, a man believed to be behind the deaths of over 150 people. He charged, it was claimed, between £12,500 and £32,500 for each kill and had even done a deal agreeing to two dozen murders for £200,000.44 He died as he lived, shot by rival gang members in 2012.45
Even Britain, with its hard gun laws, has had its share of hitmen. Santre Sanchez Gayle was Britain’s youngest, just fifteen when he shot a young mother for £200 in Hackney in London.46 He was ripped off. Researchers found the average cost of a hit in Britain between 1974 and 2013 was just over £15,000. The highest was £100,000, £200 easily the lowest.47
The assassin’s bullet, of course, is used for many reasons. For the assassin, cash has to be their sole motivation. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ is their cinematic shrug as the gunman leads a cowering accountant into a secluded wood with a shovel.
But what happens when the killer’s art is used for a darker purpose – for the pursuit of power?
It was a question that led my focus and research away from the depraved minds of psychotic killers and guns-for-hire towards the more calculated horrors of gangland murderers – the domain of the criminal with a gun.
6. THE CRIMINALS
A surprising video and gangland killings – El Salvador – meeting ‘the Shooter’ and drinking to the Beast – tea with a spook – secret graves and grave secrets – Holland and Ecuador – personal trauma of guns recalled – memories of Papua New Guinea – a gunpoint mugging and hard justice seen
The video was of a New York that no longer exists. Mean streets against a dripping industrial grime. So far removed from today’s Manhattan’s chic and West Village bearded hipster irony, it wasn’t even New York. They called the song ‘Gotham Fucking City’. The three-minute, twenty-second video was the story of Paris Lane’s death – a suicide captured in song. A eulogy in gritty rap by the singers Smoke DZA and Joey Bada$$, with lyrics as hard as the story it was telling.
Life’s a gamble need my own pair of dice this time,
All I ask is for friends without parasitic minds,
But
