Episode 024: Murder for Hire

Hello, hello, my deviant darlings, welcome back to the Mortician’s Daughter. You know, just the other day, I was taking a stroll, allowing my mind to explore some dusty corners, and I started thinking about RentAHitman.com - obviously. Well that led me to a deep dive on Contract Killings or Murder-for-Hire, wherein one person hires, bribes, or manipulates another person to kill a different person or persons. Oftentimes this is a monetary transaction. Now I don’t know what you think, but Contract Killing sounds like something that happens within the Mafia or a political assignation. Whereas Murder-for-Hire sounds more like the person who hires someone to off their spouse for the insurance money. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe it’s just semantics. Basically, it’s the same thing, no matter what you call it. Let’s go over some terms here. A hitman is a contract killer who generally operates independently whereas an enforcer is a contract killer that works for a criminal organization. According to a study conducted between 1989 and 2002 - and subsequently reported on Wikipedia where I found it first - insurance policy payouts are the number one reason for murder-for-hire and the cost to hire a killer ranged roughly from $5k to $30k with the average falling somewhere around $15k. Now, like I said, this was from 1989 to 2002 so who even knows what inflation has done to those numbers. I don't know if the rising cost was matched to the rise in housing costs in America or was it more like a tall, cold can of Arizona Iced Tea? And for those outside the US, the cost of housing is absolutely appalling when one considers the rise (or lack thereof) in income. I mean, the median home price in 1980 was $47,200 and now is almost $200k - more than quadrupled! Arizona Iced Tea, on the other hand, has staunchly maintained its low, low pricing. In fact, it’s actually something one might study in business school, assuming you studied business and not something dumb… like philosophy. Yes, a 23oz can of Iced Tea still costs 99 Cents. The company says they’re still pulling in a profit, just a smaller profit. Imagine that. Okay, no more tea talk. And I’m not going to make a joke about spilling the tea. I’m fighting the urge. I won’t give in. [Deep Breath] Moving along. Now, not every contract killing pays cash, nor is there really a contract involved. You just have to get someone else to kill someone on your behalf and you've basically crossed the line. Okay. Think about the 1995 cinematic classic starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Gus Van Sant. In this movie, To Die For, Kidman’s character will go to any lengths to achieve her dream of being a famous newscaster. Even if it means killing her husband. Instead of coughing up the funds to pay for the murder, the character seduces a teenage boy and convinces him to do the dirty deed. Now, this isn’t just a movie review. This story is based on the real life crime tale of Pamela Smart and William Flynn. Smart, who really wasn’t that smart, convinced William Flynn, or Billy, to knock off her husband - which he did with the help of a few friends - also teenagers. Pamela Smart was Billy’s school teacher and first seduced him when he was only 15 years old, a year before she asked him to kill her husband and threatened to break up with him if he didn’t. Uncool, lady. So, Billy Flynn was sentenced to 28 years to life for second-degree murder. He was granted parole on his 41st birthday. He told the parole board he will always be haunted by the murder. For her part, Pamela Smart received a life sentence without the possibility of parole, but Nicole Kidman did play her in the movie so I guess there’s that. Who would play me in a movie version of me? Nope. I don’t want to answer that question in a place of public record. Okay, so the story of Pamela Smart and Billy Flynn sounds like a tale we’re all familiar with. Maybe you’ve heard or read a story similar to this. Secret affair turns to murder. But, really, murder for hire really sounds more like contract killing. Money for murder. Person X wants to kill Person Y so he hires Person Z to do. Usually so Person X can put some distance between the victim and them. That brings us to the Bugs and Meyer Mob, a street gang who operated out of New York's Lower East Side. The gang was started by Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky during the early years of Prohibition, when they were both still teenagers. There are different accounts of how the two became friends before they formed a crime duo. Lanksy was the brains and Siegel was the muscle. Now, Bugsy Siegel might have been the youngest member of the gang, but he was known for being the wileyest with a quick and violent temper. In fact, if Wikipedia is to be believed, Bugsy got his name because he was so often described as being "crazier than a bedbug." In the 1920s, Bugs and Meyer, the gang, picked up work from Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello. Now, that’s the gangster Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Costello was his right-hand man. In a PBS special called The Syndicate, they explore the development of crime organizations in American which eventually coalesced into what became known as "The National Crime Syndicate” by combining the criminal enterprises of various ethnic groups, like Jewish and Italian immigrants, during Prohibition. Okay, but I can’t get off-track here because we could probably talk about organized crime all day. I want to focus on just this one facet: contract killing. See, when this National Crime Syndicate formed in the early 1930s, some of the gangsters, including Lansky and Siegel, argued that they should have a different, well, department, I guess. Basically, they thought that all hits or "enforcement" should be handled by one select group of people. This branch or department would take care of anyone the Syndicate wanted dead. There would be other branches, like those that handled gambling and another for prostitution. Here’s where we get to Murder, Inc., the branch of the Syndicate that dolled out death at their bequest. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Murder, Inc. was the "arm of the American national crime syndicate founded in the 1930s to threaten, maim, or murder designated victims for a price.” Now, whether or not they actually used the name Murder, Inc. or that was just a press-inspired moniker is up for debate. Either way, it has a nice ring to it. Then again, Lucky? Bugsy? Murder Inc? All these sound like they could appear in a Dick Tracy comic along with Itchy, Flattop, and The Brow. And who could forget Breathless Mahoney? Wait… let’s see here… okay, it looks like that did happen. Yes, the movie Dick Tracy vs. Crime, Inc. starring Ralph Byrd, Michael Owen, and Jan Wiley was released in 1941. Close enough to Murder, Inc., right? Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and then Albert Anastasia headed up the group and under his leadership they killed enemies, informants, witnesses, and accepted contracts from all across the United States. They even killed other gangsters like Morris Kessler and the Amberg brothers. Maybe my favorite part of the Murder, Inc. organization was their home base. Yeah, so Murder Inc. MURDER INC was run from Rosie Gold's candy store. A CANDY STORE. Right there on the corner of Saratoga and Livonia Ave in Brooklyn. Now, Harry Strauss was rumored to be the most active killer on the payroll at Murder Inc. Historians estimate Strauss killed somewhere between 100 and 500 people. That's a big span, but I guess if you're a good contract killer, the whole point is that people shouldn't know it's you, right? Don't get caught, right? Employees of Murder Inc were given a regular salary as a retainer and then a bonus per killing of 1 to $5k. I gotta say, if the average cost of a hitman is about $15k these days, that number is probably the only one that hasn’t really felt the expansive girth of American inflation since those early days. Murder Inc might have been slowly dismantled by the American legal system, but mob killings haven't stopped. Marinko Magda, Serbian Hitman, convicted for 11 murders. Giuseppe Greco, a Sicilian hitman, who killed at least 58 people. Julio Santana, Brazilian hitman, and perhaps the deadliest in history, killed 492 officially, but the unofficial number is higher than that. The numbers get pretty staggering. Let's move past the mafia after this one quick fact. Remember Bugsy Siegel? We just talked about him. Well, apparently this mob boss who helped get Murder Inc off the ground was assassinated in 1947 in Las Vegas. Gotta wonder if they were from that same group of killers for hire he worked with back in New York. Let's take a look at some other circumstances that have led people to say, you know, rather than putting that money toward a vacation, I'm going to bankroll someone's murder. I mean, there are political killings, judicial murders, and criminals fighting with others criminals, but I think the thing that really gets people are the hits that get personal. Obviously I’m thinking about Joe Exotic who became a Netflix Superstar for the show Tiger King during the COVID years. Joe was a zookeeper with a penchant for Big Cats, like tigers, not maine coons, who once attempted to hire someone to kill Carol Baskin, of Big Cat Rescue, his rival. As many of us know, the hitman Joe tried to hire was actually an undercover FBI agent. Joe Exotic was eventually arrested on 17 charges of animal abuse and TWO counts of attempted murder for hire. He's now serving 22 years which was cut down to 21 years after an appeal. And, last year in 2023, Joe announced he would be running for president in the 2024 election. You can run for president from jail now. That's a thing that happens now, I guess. Sadly, many instances of contract killing emerge from troubled relationships. Robert Fratta, a former police officer who appeared in Werner Herzog's series On Death Row, hired two men to kill his wife. He was executed earlier this year by lethal injection in Texas. Flordelis dos Santos de Souza, a Christian singer, Pentecostal pastor, and former Brazilian congresswoman, was convicted for the murder of her husband, also a pastor, named Anderson do Carmo. And, if this one wasn't weird enough, Flordelis has three biological children and 51 "adopted" children. How many of those kids were legally adopted remains in question, but one of those kids was Anderson do Carmo. Yep, her husband. She adopted him at the age of 14 in 1991 and married him seven years later. They founded a church together and then Anderson was killed in 2019. In 2022, she was convicted of his murder and sentenced to 50 years in prison. If this wasn’t messed up already, it was another one of Flordelis’s adopted children who confessed to being the one who carried out the crime. At the time of the crime, Flordelis held office in congress and could not be arrested because of her political immunity. However, the Ethics Council of Brazil voted to remove her from congress and, with her immunity revoked, she was arrested. And who can forget about Wanda Holloway? Yes? No? Let's take a journey back to 1991 when Shanna Holloway, Wanda's daughter, didn't make it onto the cheerleading squad. Did Wanda take this opportunity to teach her daughter that things don't always go the way you want them to? No, obviously no. Wanda asked her ex-brother-in-law to help her hire a hitman to kill Verna Heath, the mother of the teenager who beat out her daughter to secure a spot on the school cheer squad. Holloway explained that she figured the death of the girl's mother would prove so devastating that there's no way she'd make regular cheerleading practice and then her spot would go to Wanda’s daughter. The former brother-in-law reported Wanda to the police and he was able to provide tapes of Holloway promising her diamond earrings in exchange for Verna Heath's life. She was sentenced to ten years in prison on September 9, 1996 and assigned a $10k fine. The Heath family also filed a civil suit and Holloway agreed to pay a total of $150k to the victims. Wanda Holloway was released from prison in March of 1997, after just six months, and was permitted to serve the remaining 9.5 years on probation. Wow. I don’t even know where to go here. Trading earrings for a woman’s life so your daughter can be a cheerleader? Did I mention these two girls were only 13 at the time? What is going on over there, Texas? Ack, wouldn’t you know it? Out of time again. Alas. Maybe we’ll return to contract killers down the road. I still have a lot to share that I wasn’t able to get to today. But, before we part ways, I have two quick things. First, let’s jump back to the satirical website RentAHitman.com. Sounds like a joke, right? Well, that’s because it is. This domain was purchased in 2005 for a company that never got off the ground. However, when the owner of the domain logged into his email for the website a few years later, he had received hundreds of emails asking about contract killing services. That man, Bob Innes, thought these messages were just jokes or people messing around, but in 2010, one request from a woman in Canada had him worried. So he contacted the authorities and that woman ended up getting convicted for soliciting murder. That’s when Bob decided to turn this domain into the satirical website that has landed a lot of idiots in jail. Despite the jokes on this parody site, people still reach out hoping to find a killer for hire to do some dirty work. Consequently, a number of additional convictions followed. So many people have sent in serious requests for hitmen, Rolling Stone did an expose on the website and its founder. Bob estimates that he's been able to help save around 150 lives through his unexpected Darwin test. In fact, in January of 2022, a woman named Wedny Lynn Wein was sentenced to 24 years in prison after she tried to find a hitman to kill her ex-husband through, say it with me, Rentahitman.com. As the judge in that case stated, "If the intent wasn't so serious here, this would be almost comical. But it's not." So I’ll close the conversation for the moment with a new word for your vocabulary. The word is “wetwork” and it's a Russian euphemism for murder for hire or assassination. Wetwork? Spilling Blood? Contract murder can also be referred to as a wet job, wet affair, or wet operation in criminal slang and originally referred to a robbery that involved a murder. Creepy but true. Let’s all keep away from wetwork, okay? It sounds bad, it is bad, and I want no part of it. I’ll be back shortly with another installment of macabre fun. Until then, I’ll keep you in my thoughts, my little baby bats. ~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_killing https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/az-iced-tea-inflation-99-cents https://www.dallasnews.com/news/2015/03/12/william-flynn-teen-killer-in-case-that-inspired-to-die-for-paroled-after-25-years/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugs_and_Meyer_Mob https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/lasvegas-syndicate/ https://www.britannica.com/topic/Murder-Inc-American-crime-syndicate https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033535/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Exotic https://web.archive.org/web/20090811085108/http://texnews.com/texas97/mom030197.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetwork https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/rent-a-hitman-wendy-wein-murder-for-hire-sting-operation-1066756/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RentAHitman.com https://mlive.com/news/ann-arbor/2022/01/ive-humiliated-my-family-says-woman-sentenced-for-trying-to-hire-fake-hitman-service.html