I assume you can’t go to real court over something like this.
Eh, the kind of thing you’re asking about is essentially fiction. Not that murder for hire isn’t a thing, it’s just that it doesn’t work like anything you’ve read or seen in movies. It’s one of those things where if you aren’t part of a criminal enterprise, you aren’t going to be able to hire someone, and you’ll be hiring them from someone else in the same network.
So, in any semi realistic situation, there won’t be any arbitration or argument. You fail, you fuck up, you die. Or, I guess, turn state’s evidence, which is where what little about actual “contract” killing that’s known comes from. It isn’t like an actual contract.
Now, in fiction? Tons of options. Likely, you’d have whatever head of the crime network making the decision, maybe with other heads, maybe solo.
But, again, the term contract killing isn’t exactly about a contract. There’s not a formal arrangement involved. It’s contract in the meaning of hired.
Dang I hope was hoping in addition to the black market, there was an underground judicial system.
I’m not sure if it would be better or worse, but even in places where organized crime is stable and relatively low key, there’s not much in the way of cooperation.
Like, in the city I used to work in, the drug trade was pretty much owned by one group, gambling by another, moonshine by a third, and if you wanted guns, you tended to deal with the drug guys, but that was because they had outside deals with one or another of the cartels (I have no clue which) where they could get more than just the same stuff you could buy on your own legally (but would probably buy a stolen one if you were looking for something for a reason). This meant that they ran the trade de facto, despite it not being something they cared about if someone else sold guns here and there.
Now, the cartels did have people that were killers. But not hired guns, so to speak.
But those groups didn’t really communicate. There weren’t regular meetings to divvy up the city’s vices or anything. They just didn’t fuck with each other because they weren’t set up to handle other trades.
There were some Russians that tried to move in at one point, running heroin, but they went away. Went away being a euphemism for eating a bunch of lead salad, which is bad for one’s longevity. Supposedly, and I was not involved in the shit at all, it was handled in house, nobody asked the cartel for any help. The cartel wouldn’t have been willing to send their men up, fight some group anyway. They’d just wait and make deals in other ways. Not worth it in terms of risk/reward. They’d sell guns to the gang, but not manpower.
Again, supposedly, there was an Armenian gang that ran gambling at one point, and they got busted which opened up room for the mixed group to pick up the pieces. But that was before I paid any attention to any of it. Only reason I paid enough attention to pick that kind of stuff up was bouncing and doing security. The guys running shine liked to swing dick around bars sometimes, trying to play a protection bullshit, and the titty bars I bounced sometimes were fairly popular with them in that regard and because they could get free attention.
Also have a friend that made high interest personal loans for a few years, and he had to pay a cut to the guys running the gambling. I mean, didn’t have to, it was just easier and safer. One of his uncles was a moonshiner, so he knew some of those guys as well.
From what I gathered, that’s the way most cities operate. There may have been a time when there was more broad organization, but afaik, that was dying out in the eighties.
However, pretty much any city of any decent size has some kind of organized crime. It’s just a matter of how big the group is, and how much they control. Some places, you’ll have one of the national level gangs running things, others it might be all small groups running territories within a city. Shit, it isn’t just cities. The drug trade is like that out here in the boonies. Only difference is that you run into specific types of drugs being handled by a group. Locally, there’s a bike “club” that more or less runs the meth and pills, but weed is a free for all, and coke is really only for making crack, which is spread all over.
Anyway, that’s going way off topic. The point is that there’s rarely any kind of cooperation at all, much less enough to have some kind of justice system in place.
The real answer is you can’t actually contract for illegal things, the contract is void from the start.
Tell that to the tiefling with vial of the killer’s blood underneath the Moonkeeps Tavern…
Illegal contracts are not enforceable in court. You’ll have to hire another contract killer to kill the contract-breaking contract killer.
No, you can’t go to real court. You’re actually kinda getting at something more serious: This is true for all crimes. Especially also drug crimes. That is why the prohibition of drugs causes violent crime: the only way to enforce contracts over illegal drugs is through violence.
I think US tax department explicitly states that you must state any income you obtained through illegal means in your tax returns.
Is the implication here that if you don’t state it then you owe back tax on illegal gains when they catch you?
Gen Z really want everything handed to them. I remember the old times, there was no thing as a contract killer, if you hated your enemies, neighbor or the president, you had to kill them yourself. This generation doesn’t know how to do that kind of stuff by themselves anymore.
This is literally what organized crime does, it’s like the cops for criminals.
You get a contract killer to kill your previous contract killer. Duh.
I read somewhere it’s actually more common for a hired killer to turn the person who hired them into the police than for them to actually do the job.
In that same article, it said the average payment for a contract killer is less than $5000. So maybe if you’re gonna hire a contract killer, you should not cheap out and get the one that requires a million dollars, with payment only on the death of the victim.
I heard of some kid who made bank setting up a hitman website on the TOR network and accepting payment in Bitcoin. He just handed over the information straight to the police and kept the bitcoin.
There’s a website set up by a white-hat hacker to solicit work as a network penetrator. It has some odd name that’s assassin related (contractkiller.com or something similar, I can’t remember offhand). He set it up, and forgot about it. When he went back to it, a lot of the messages were people asking him to kill someone.
He sent all the info to the police, and left the website up. Now it’s just a honeypot for people trying to have someone killed. I visited it a while ago, it’s very tongue-in-cheek. But people are stupid and willing to believe anything.
Judge Dredd, obvi.
Since you’re outsourcing this, the adjudicator is either the first contract killer involved, or the second contract killer you specifically hired to deal with that first contract killer.
there are two legal options for a contract killer: military sharp shooters, and death pentaly executors. Both have options to deal with this. Both have strong limits on what contracts they will take though so probably not what you are asking.
This is why I only hire Shelly de Killer.
John Wick.
Or maybe the Ian McShane character person…
Or the adjudicators that made JW an outcast in three (was it?).
Yes, the adjudicators.
There’s better answers here addressing the unlikeliness of contract killers existing in the sense of a freelancer available for hire to all the general public rather than someone trusted by peers in a criminal enterprise and also about the “contract” not really being a contract because it’s unenforceable but I think you could also draw the conclusion just by reasoning alone that if a contract killer in that Hollywood sense of the term existed, and breached their contract and you the client don’t have the personal connections or power to threaten that particular assassin’s life in response, there’s always just good old reputation at stake. I mean, it wouldn’t help you in your specific case if they’ve nicked off with the money and left your target very much alive but to have hired them in the first place would have required word of mouth in hopefully a pretty small community of people since you can’t exactly expect to find them on fiverr so you could make it know pretty quickly that this person doesn’t honour their contracts so their wet work career would be over pretty quick.
