They do exist.
Is it a crime to hire a contract killer? First of all, let’s differentiate between an assassin and a hitman. A hitman is subclass for assassins, hitmen are essentially those people who kill for the mafia, drug cartels, or they just kill random people off the street. An assassin is just anyone who kills for a living. Now, let’s move onto the crux of your question. contract killer
There are two types of assassins/hitmen:
An amateur assassin/hitman is a person who isn’t very well trained, who charges low fees per hit (somewhere in the ballpark of $50 to $15,000 depending on the person). They can be found in every major city in the world, and they make up the vast majority of assassins, there are some very well-documented cases of these types of amateur assassins, VICE has a great documentaries about amateur assassins in Pakistan and in Venezuela. In my experience, these guys are often teenagers or sometimes adults in their early to mid-twenties which needed to earn cash quickly and had no other way of doing it without joining a gang, cartel, crime family, etc. They’re dispensable and thus are often used by organized crime to carry out quick and efficient hits. Is it a crime to hire a contract killer?
Is it a crime to hire a contract killer?
Now let’s move on to the professional assassin/hitman, they exist however you shouldn’t worry about them. There are a multitude of professionals out there who freelance, they’re often highly trained and are almost always ex-military. They charge anywhere from $100,000 per hit to $10,000,000 depending on the person. You don’t often hear about these freelance assassins/hitmen because the majority of them only work maybe once or twice a year sometimes they take year long gaps, they don’t need to kill every other Tuesday simply because they earn enough money in one hit to last them a long time. You shouldn’t worry about these guys, they’re often only called upon to assassinate important political figures, businessmen/women, or people who know things which they shouldn’t. They are usually hired by the mafia, cartels, or businesses to carry out hits on those high-level targets which can not be taken out by amateurs. Is it a crime to hire a contract killer?
Is it a crime to hire a contract killer?
However, professional freelance assassins are not the best. The best are often CIA, Mossad, MI6, etc. The CIA has the SAD SOG, MI6 has Group 13 and E Squadron, the Mossad has the Kidon, and so on. I can only give an account of the CIA SOG, I have no idea about the inner workings of the other groups. The CIA SOG often recruits directly from JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command otherwise known as Tier 1) or from within the CIA itself. JSOC is comprised of 4 SMU’s (Special Mission Units) as far as we know, the 1st-SFOD (Delta Force), DEVGRU (SEAL Team Six as it’s known), the ISA (Intelligence Support Activity), and the lesser known 24th STS (Special Tactics Squadron). They take operators from JSOC to join the SOG which itself is a specialized branch of the Special Activities Division (SAD) of the CIA. These men are the crème de la crème of the US forces, and they are further refined into specialized groups out of which one is the official CIA assassination group. The men in the SOG are known as spooks and you don’t have to worry about these guys either because most likely they’ll never ever have a reason to come after you. Is it a crime to hire a contract killer?