Alternative Summer Jobs, Volume 3: Murder For Hire

You, the witty and charming reader, may have been reading this so far thinking “theft is all well and good but I don’t want to feel guilty at the end of the day because I’ve taken things that don’t belong to me – how can I earn an honest crust in this crazy mixed up world?” This is a good question, and my answer is this – “have you considered being a hitman?”

Being a hitman is an excellent career for people who are determined, methodical in their work and enjoy problem-solving as part of their job. It takes the skills of both the armed robber and the pickpocket, and yet the hitman is neither – he is sly and elegant when needed, but other times he will straight up kill you with a cocktail stick through the throat when you’ve nipped to the toilet. If you are resourceful and patient, this may be the career for you, and allows you to meet a wide variety of interesting characters moments before you snap their spinal columns with a pair of bolt-cutters as they sleep.

What can I earn?

When you kill people for a living, you can more or less charge what you like, but when you’re first starting out, try and find out what the going rate is and significantly undercut it just to get your name out there. Once people realize you provide a quality service, you can bring your prices more in line with what you want. Luckily, you don’t need a lot of money up front to get set up in the murder business – a few pieces of necessary equipment will allow you to both protect yourself and offer a competitive service.

If you earn a crime syndicate commission – being hired exclusively by one branch of organized crime to dispose of opponents – then that can often be worth substantially more than freelance work, however it does come with the price of being a contact for organized crime. If the organization gets fingered by the law, you too will be fingered and there are few things more frustrating than getting fingered as a result of others’ mistakes (you’d be forgiven for being offended by the gratuitous use of the word “fingered” in this paragraph, as this word tends to have unsavoury connotations outside of criminal lingo – it merely means to be arrested and tried, and does not mean anything untoward, unlike the words “bollocks”, “cocks”, and “tits”, which hold identical meanings inside and outside of crime).

What do I need?

You will need a car and a valid driving license in order to be a hired murderer, as body disposal is a lot more difficult on foot.

If you are asked to dispose of the corpses you generate – most times you will – you will need a few good-quality bin-liners and a hacksaw, alongside a quiet place where you can work your sordid craft in peace. Once the bodies have been bagged up, take them to a tip yourself – cats are buggers for ripping binbags open if they’re left out, and binmen are a bit touchy; they wouldn’t shift my fridge freezer once, so I suspect they’re liable to get a bit funny about handling rotting dismembered corpses.

As for the actual act, you’ll need a lethal weapon, which we will come to in our case studies.

You will also need to promote yourself a little; this can be difficult, and for obvious reasons we advise against business cards – these can be expensive, when you can advertise on Gumtree for free. Place an advert, claiming you are not a hired murderer. This is a secret criminal code, so that people who want a hired murderer know to disregard the word “not” whereas any curious Jimmy Law-Bodies’ simply see a perfectly normal advert for somebody who isn’t a hired killer, just like all the others.

So you’re ready to be a hired killer, let’s assess some hypothetical scenarios. Let’s kick it off with an easy one.

Case Study #1 – Student
Criteria: Single, lives in a three-bedroom house with two very close friends who would notice his disappearance, wanted dead by a student from a rival university’s football team
Cost: Anything from £500-£5,000 depending on the client/target

Step 1: Monitor the target for a week – always get as much information from the client as possible. Know the target’s patterns inside out. Become him. Know what the wind feels like in his hair. Know his fears and ambitions. Know him as you know yourself.

Step 2: Wait until he’s walking home alone one day, leap out of somewhere and club that motherfucker to death with a cricket ball in the end of a long sock.

Step 3: Walk away.

This is what is known in the industry as a “rimjob” (again, this does not mean anything rude – it simply refers to somebody outside, or “on the rim”, of the criminal world and whose death is unlikely to cause inter-gang tensions, unlike the words “dildo” and “tromboning” which are relatively explicit in their meaning). You can make a lot of money from rimjobs, because these are often one-offs for disgruntled members of the public who – in turn – have no sense of what a job should cost. But you should not make a living from these, as they are unreliable by their very nature. Let’s look at something a little more high profile.

Case Study #2 – Drug Dealer
Criteria: Has robbed somebody of their drugs, naturally jumpy as he sells drugs for a living and also steals them apparently
Cost: £1,000-£10,000

Step 1: Knock on the target’s door. If he asks you what you want, tell him you want to buy some drugs. Use a lot of drug words to make yourself sound hip to his game – for instance, tell him you want a thrupenny (thrupenny bit is rhyming slang for “quite a bit”) of Bobby Davro (Bobby Davro is northern drug slang for ketamine) or some such thing.

Step 2: If this doesn’t get you inside, you need a way to get into the property. Remember, this is a man who sells drugs, he’s going to be on edge – it’s a naturally difficult line of work and we’ve all been affected by the economy. Calmly ask to be allowed in to view the goods. If this does not do the trick, offer to buy the lock off his door – most drug addicts are used to selling all their worldly goods and dealers are no exception. Ask for a demonstration, during which he will open the door.

Step 3: Either way, you are now face to face with the drug dealer. Bring out the cricket ball in the sock and kill him with a minimum of fuss. Take what you can/need to and get out of there.

So we’ve seen that this game requires a little deception and a lot of physical violence, but these are relatively simple jobs compared to the one that follows – this is the big daddy of the hitman trade, and will require every single skill we’ve discussed in this series plus a whole lot more. This is the top job.

Case Study #3 – Mob Boss
Criteria: In town for the weekend, heavily guarded, staying on the 14th floor of the Ramada Hotel, wanted dead by a rival mob boss
Cost: Price on Mob Boss’ head currently stands at £1m

Step 1: Get as much information as possible on the target, ideally discovering his favourite sort of food.

Step 2: Get a job at the Ramada that weekend. If they are currently not looking for staff that weekend, kill a current member of staff whose size and proportions loosely match your own and steal their uniform, then re-apply for the job; they will be much more impressed by somebody who has their own uniform, and they will have just lost a member of staff. If you do not get the job this time, simply put the uniform on and pretend you work there on the day, most people will not notice you’re new.

Step 3: Take a wheeled cart up to the mob boss’ hotel room. If you are stopped by hired goons, inform them that the mob boss ordered room service – his favourite food. One of two things will happen here – they will either believe you or they won’t. If they do, you’re golden and you can skip to step 6, if they don’t, compliment them on their jackets, asking where they got them.

Step 4: Open up the jacket seemingly to take a look at the label, curious to know the manufacturer so you can secure the garment as your own. This is to see what kind of guns they have on them. The tricky part is coming up next, which may require a bit of practice on tramps.

Step 5: Stab them until they are dead.

Step 6: Enter the mob boss’ hotel room with the cart – he won’t remember ordering the room service so tell him it’s free from the hotel. Note: something that happens a lot in the movies is something called foreshadowing, where you say something seemingly cryptic that gives away your true intentions, such as “it’s a gift from an old friend”. I can only advise against this, as – while it may make for interesting dialogue on screen – the targets usually get it a lot quicker than you would hope. Resist the urge to add a poetic twist to your target’s demise.

Step 7: Remove the cloth from the tray and set the meal down in front of him. He may have a food taster, in which case he is free to taste the food before the boss himself takes a bite. Eventually the boss will bite into the food. Ask if everything is to his satisfaction – at this stage, he may ask for a glass of water or wine. Don’t fetch it for him – not only is it not your job, but it means you have to go down to the kitchen and risk him seeing the two bloodied corpses outside his room. Best to just act as if you’re going to get them before you…

Step 8: Beat him to death with a cricket ball in the end of a sock. May seem crude for such high pofile work, but guns make a sound, knives provide an early visual warning, you really are better off with the cricket ball in a sock as it allows you a foot or two of distance in case they try to put up a fight. If anybody else is in the room, they will be so flabbergasted by what you’re doing that they’ll either die of shock, fall out of an open window to their almost certain death or patiently wait for you to finish, curious to see what you will do next. If anybody is left standing, give them the old cricket ball treatment or simply beat them to death with their own shoes.

Step 9: Exit the hotel via the fire escape. Do not clock out, and if you agreed to swap shifts with anybody earlier, do not honour your agreement and do not return for any further shifts or work parties.

Final Points

This is a difficult line of work, but is a lot more lucrative than any other branch of crime – if you can start bumping people off for a living, you’ve hit the jackpot, but be warned it is a competitive business and I needn’t tell you what can happen when hitmen get competitive.

I hope these guides have proven useful, and offered you a glimpse at some alternative ways to generate some extra cash over the summer – who knows, you may enjoy your new line of work so much that your degree in contemporary theatre takes a back seat to your murdering and stealing. Either way, I wish you the best of luck.

John Tucker