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Donal MacIntyre exposes the psychology of evil contract killers.
He put his life on the line by interviewing a trio of hitmen – and two of them were gagging to kill him.
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Hitman 1
‘The Joker’
“Hey – hitmen can have a laugh too,” the ice-for-blood killer told me.
“Murder For Hire is a funny business and if you earn your spurs then there is no shortage of work,” he bragged, with a genuinely chilling, steely smile breaking all over his face.
He calls himself ‘The Joker’.
He was burly and brutal and liked to think he had a crackling sense of humour.
His handshake was firm and dry.
I expected no less.
This is one of three hitmen I’m interviewing to show what really goes on in their minds.
We’ve seen a glut of movies and shows where killers crawl to psychiatrists to try and make sense of their lives – from Tony Soprano to Martin Blank in Grosse Pointe Blank.
This is non-fiction.
I can’t name the trio of hitmen subjects I talked to – it would cost me my life.
Rest assured they’re terrifyingly real.
They go shopping, they walk past you in the street, they queue behind you in the post office.
And they’re nothing like 90 per cent of the population.
This Joker thought of himself as a craftsman but was much more a journeyman in his trade.
There are “ghosters” (masters and mentors for younger hitmen), ex-military sharp-shooters turned mercenaries – and then there are the journeymen underworld operators, who have honed their talents over the years, often on their own.
This murderer was one of those.
He calls himself The Joker maybe because he likes to crack a gag.
Maybe because he reckons he’s as unhinged as Heath Ledger’s depiction of the disfigured psycho from Batman: The Dark Knight.
Maybe it’s a mix of the two.
Whichever – his face is chiseled and hardened and he has the unbelievable balls to work and live on his own patch.
A master hitman would never do the same – they move around or hide their locations.
The Joker – a UK hitman – makes a terrifyingly decent living.
It took a lot of connections and time to gain his trust.
It’s almost unheard of to get this close to killers who aren’t jailed.
Even when he wasn’t on coke you would never know what he would do next.
A true psychotic.
Think of having a night out with Joe Pesci’s Goodfellas character.
Then take out the comfort factor of the fact he was only a movie character.
Everything was on a knife-edge as I sat picking his brain, and he could turn any second.
He not only carried out hits.
He was also a problem solver – a “cleaner” in the parlance of the underworld.
He took business from anyone and took pleasure in his work.
He explains the moment he kills and it is goosebump stuff.
“The look in their eyes when they are going to meet their maker is simply pathetic,” he says. “If it was me I’d say shoot and be damned but they always quiver and shake and cry and shit and piss their pants. That’s what they do.”
I was not stranger to contract killers but thankfully I usually never got this close to them.
I had a £50,000 price on my head, long before I ever earned anything close to that sum.
Threats from hitmen are still part of my life now, and here I was breathing the same air as one.
“I am quick and fast”, he boasted.
His patch is outside the M25 and he has done contract hits for gangs across the country on home soil and in Amsterdam.
Often the bodies would never be found.
We’re talking at a location The Joker doesn’t want me describing.
So I won’t.
I know there was a witness who disappeared before he could give testimony against The Joker.
“What happened to him?”
“He ended up in the bog or maybe he just went home. I don’t know. I just went for a drink with him,” he said with a wink.
This is a man who had killed, bombed, maimed and strangled his victims for business and pleasure.
Despite his Joker moniker he has inspired fear in almost every person he meets, from the prison officers to judges he has menaced for pay.
“It’s just a job. If they have been placed on the list then they deserved it and they know the consequences,” he says. “You reap what you sow.”
But The Joker does not do hits to sort domestic disputes.
As I revealed last month, most contract killings in the UK are to settle domestic battles, and low-ranking criminals or novices are tasked with the job, attracted by the easy pay-packet.
“I am high-end,” The Joker insists. “If I don’t want to do a job, I won’t take it. The standard in gangland for a high-level or witness hit is £50,000. But people who do back-garden domestic jobs on the wife or cheating husband will do it for much less, and they’ll get caught.”
The Joker has never been convicted of murder.
It’s surprising as he hasn’t had a mentor.
He says he learned his trade in the north of England in quarries and on the Moors where he would shoot off guns and do target practice.
“It is not necessarily about being a good shot,” he explains. “You have to be cool and commanding. You have to be the calm when there is chaos everywhere. You have to be the still where there is panic. I am the still in the moment. Everything slows down for me when I pull the trigger. I was never a knife man but I have used one. It’s just like cutting a Sunday roast. It’s never personal, it’s a job and I was good at it. Very good at it. I was born to it, you might say.”
We’re drinking now.
He drinks, so I do too.
A classic rule of undercover reporting – do as they do.
He lifted his beer to his lips with a glint in his steely blue eyes.
“Some shoot from behind,” he says, comparing his technique to other killers now. “I am not particular. I enjoy the eye-to-eye contact. That last breath is a special moment. The death rattle and the rasping plea. That gives me pleasure. It gives me a hard-on. I am in control.”
The booze is warming him up.
His talk of killing giving him a hard-on when there’s only the two of us here is making me uncomfortable.
There are no innocents in this world he says – his philosophy now.
“If you come onto my radar then you know played the game and lost. And when you entered this world you knew that this was always a possible outcome – an occupational hazard of living.”
He turns his gaze right on me now.
He knows I’ve been threatened by hitmen in the past. “You’re a high-value target,” he tells me.
I feel as if he might as well be looking at a pile of cash.
“It would cost more but people often try not to pay people like me. But they pay me because they fear me. The one rule of hiring the hitman is to pay the hitman. There are consequences if you don’t pay the hitman.”
In his heyday The Joker did three hits a year.
“There were a few I did for myself,” he adds. “But mostly I took the fee the market demanded. A price for each target. A bespoke price for special victims.”
He was always forensically aware.
He wore his balaclavas, his hair caps and burnt his clothes and transport if necessary.
He has spent much time in jail – but never for murder.
“I was never a jailhouse hitman,” he says about his time at Her Majesty’s pleasure. “There you could learn the trade. You could easily get someone killed for an ounce of hash or a box of fags. The ones on long sentences would do it. If it was a high value target you would get paid on the outside through your family. But as I say, it wasn’t for me.”
There is a disturbing trend in Britain now – a trail of virgin hitmen learning their trade in jail and then taking their skills onto the street.
“First you slash in the showers and then you strip their skin with sugared boiling water and then you are ready to kill,” The Joker tells me about learning to kill while caged.
Prison does breed hitmen.
I believe there are many more victims of hitmen than acknowledged by the police.
Often, they have few family and friends keen to ask what happened to them, even if they suspect the worst.
The Joker says, “If there is no corpse then there is no incentive for a major investigation. As I said, I could take you out. Fuck it, I might still do it just for the hell of it.”
I looked at him.
I find myself begging already – the type of thing he scorns.
“Make it quick at the very least,” I say. “That would be the polite thing to do.”
Hitman 2
The Voodoo Killer
He was the personification of evil.
I have never – ever – been more persuaded by the naked terror of a man’s desire to kill than when I was in the presence of a Zoe Pound hitman.
“I’d kill you for the smell of you skin. I’d kill you for the colour of your eyes. I’d kill you for the way you look,” he tells me, a bandana round his neck – and his 10-year-old son sitting beside him.
He’s a member of the Zoe Pound gang – a Haitian voodoo mafia rife in Miami.
They are the scourge of the DEA and the most deadly gang in America.
The Zoe Pound are a group of second-generation Haitians who have brought unprecedented levels of violence to Florida and other southern US cities, known to be involved in drug trafficking and robbery.
On the undercover trail, I have been shot at by the Burmese military, thrown in an Indonesian jail, stepped over mafia kills in
Mexico and had a gun buried in my neck in the shadow of Anfield stadium.
Nothing scared me more than simply being in the presence of this man.
For him murder was sport.
He killed even when he wasn’t paid.
Like some in the hit business – and in- deed, some in the military – serial killers are celebrated.
They seek refuge in a business where murder is revered and celebrated.
Any army has its fair share of serial murderers who would have killed with or without a uniform; with or without a war.
The red and white bandana was this gang “soldier’s” uniform, his army was the Zoe Pound and he was a natural born killer.
Zoe Pound means “Haitian to the bone” and these gangsters are infamous for opening up a new drug route to the US as the DEA put the squeeze on drug trails set up from Colombia and Mexico.
The term ‘ruthless’ does not begin to do justice the violence they have wreaked on the streets.
But its evil was personified most graphically by the killer lounging in front of me in the Miami heat in the company of his devoted son.
The little lad stared into mid-air, almost catatonic – just another day of hearing his dad brag about torture and murder.
Interviewers often ask killers about their boasts, “Do you really believe what you say?”
There was no doubting this murderer’s intent and experience.
The eyes told it all.
The intensity.
He never gave long answers.
He didn’t have to.
His bullets would always speak louder.
It goes without saying I guaranteed his anonymity.
Here’s what conversation I did dare to extract.
Donal: “What’s your life all about?”
Zoe Pound Killer: “Killing pussies. All I do is kill. That’s all I know how to do, eat, sleep, shit and kill.”
D: “Really?”
ZPK: “Simple. I do what I do best.”
D: “Obviously that’s a business. You’re not just doing it for kicks?
ZPK:“For pleasure.”
D: “You’re not really just doing it just for pleasure?”
ZPK:“That’s all. For pleasure.”
D: “How can I believe that?”
ZPK:“I take pleasure in torturing motherfuckers.”
D: “Really?”
ZPK: “Yes. I would get pleasure in getting it out right now and torturing you if I could.”
D: “Why would you want to torture me?”
ZPK: “I might not like the colour of your eyes. I might not like the way you look, I might not like the way you smell today.”
D: “How many do you think you’ve taken down over the years if you don’t mind me asking?”
ZPK: “I lost count. By the time I turned 21 I lost count. Personally I like to use my knife. I like to be personal with it. There’s nothing more exciting than watching the person take their last breath. You know – the look in their eyes when they realise their life is over.”
D: “And this is your son here, is it?
ZPK: “This is my son.”
D: “And you don’t mind him hearing, does he know about your lifestyle?”
ZPK: “He knows what I do.”
D: “And what do you want for him. Would you mind if he followed in your footsteps or do you want something different for him?”
ZPK: “I would prefer a better life for him. That’s whyIdowhatIdo,sohecanhaveabetterlife.I feel if I exterminate enough of you pussies out there, by the time he grows up he’s gonna have no problems. I’m just an angry motherfucker. Angry to the bone.”
Hitman 3
The Reluctant Killer
There are natural born killers and sometimes there are people who get an offer they simply can’t refuse.
The world of the novice hitman is shrouded with peril and that doesn’t come from the executioner, but from the contractor.
Many of them are from the ghettos of Britain, pressured into doing a hit they don’t want on their conscience.
This is one of those grim UK tales.
And it’s left the accidental hitman to deal with the guilt over having to say, “Yes” because it would have cost him his life to say, “No”.
“If you are given the order then you really have no choice,” this accidental hitman tells me. It goes without saying he is a lot – lot – gentler than my other two killer subjects. I never wanted to be a contract killer but it was a choice between him or me. If I didn’t do then I would get the bullet in the head,” he adds.
The reluctant hitman was 25 and had made his money in his teens – earning a hefty £50,000 a month as a cannabis dealer and DJ.
Thin as a whippet, he had none of the looks of a traditional gangland tough-nut.
He also took work as a driver for a major gangster and then got sucked into his world. An orphan, he always sought out surrogate families and to his misfortune he happened upon this gangster family and it was nearly his undoing.
He was soon ordered by the family he chose to adopt to drive to an address.
The visit would mean the end of a man’s life and it carried with it the promise of £10,000 in his pocket.
Joey (not his real name) had been around the block and he knew that even if he was successful it was likely he would never see the money.
He knew the business but he wasn’t a killer.
And if he didn’t succeed he was fearful that he would be the dead man walking.
Fortunately for him, the hit was botched and he is sure he didn’t kill the target – but it haunts him every day.
Joey tells me, “Only about 20 per cent of these type of hits forced on people who don’t want to do them are successful in my opinion. It’s very hard to get away with now.”
Joey’s boss had drafted him in to deal with a Triad dispute but would not rely on the cheap smack heads to do the job – he’d rather use his young driver.
“I know druggies will do it for cheap, but you get what you pay for and there ain’t many people who will do it Dale Cregan-style. Smackheads get sent to burn a business out. They are more reliable doing stuff like that. They have an alibi, can say that they don’t know anything and were just asleep in an alleyway or something.”
When Joey was first asked to do a hit he couldn’t ask why.
He says, “The person would have done something serious. There’s talk all time like, ‘I’d love him to go missing. I’d love him to end up in the canal’. But it rarely results in action from my experience.”
Joey’s problem was that his boss knew all of the get out of jail excuses when handed a hit job.
He would have to go through with the gig.
“Usually, they come up with some excuse like, ‘He wasn’t there,’ or, ‘The information was wrong,’” he says. “The truth is if you pay top dollar then you will get the job done but lots of folk won’t cough up the money or can’t be trusted to pay up even if the job is done. There are plenty of ‘Carry On Hitmen’ about this world but sometimes it gets very serious.”
Joey had no choice but to become an accidental hitman.
His only comfort was that one of his pals was also forced into taking the contract.
“I was at a loose end and got sucked in,” Joey says. “I was driving for a major player and it filled a gap. I got respect and I got to meet a lot of good people. I never wanted to get involved in the killing side of it. I’ve always avoided the worst of it.”
With no other options, Joey went to work as a novice contract killer.
He wasn’t sure if he could do it, worried that he would get killed and terrified of being locked up.
“If I didn’t do it I would end up either missing or dead,” he says. “Missing in this world means dead. The boss just said he wanted me to do it. It was as simple as that. He didn’t really run though much of the background. I just got an address. I didn’t even get a picture. You don’t even know if what you are being told is the real story. And I’d always been told you should never ask why. That’s the talk of the street.”
It turned out it was to settle a dispute with the Triads – ‘Snakeheads’ as Joey calls them.
“It was a debt to the Snakeheads,” he says. “A head of a family was coming over from Hong Kong and the matter of a debt had to be sorted by the time he arrived. My boss got asked by a Triad associate of his to carry out the deed.”
He got some schooling on how to act on a hit.
“Even if you’re scared you still have to have confidence,” he says. “You have no other choice. You still have to show you have the neck to do it. Even though you feel horrible and sick you’ve still got to do it. All the way up there I prayed that something would go wrong that would prevent it happening.”
His prayers for divine intervention went unanswered.
“I’d seen similar things in the movies and it just doesn’t come close to the reality. My legs turned to concrete on the way up. It was a case of mind over matter. I had to act like I didn’t look like the job was a problem but I just remember my legs were like concrete. They just didn’t want to know.”
The target was in his early-30s with kids.
Joey found that out later.
One thing he did escape was being told to use a gun.
He ended up choosing a crossbow as his weapon. “He ran a restaurant in Newcastle,” he says about the target. “I suspected there was also an issue around a cannabis factory which went wrong but as I said the details were sketchy. We just had to go and do it. I remember I got told to do it on a Sunday and the job was done on the Thursday. We got £600 expenses each and were told the rest would come after the job was done. The boss wanted it done with a gun and wanted me to pick up one from an underworld quartermaster – one of his trusted women who stored shit for him. He wanted me to use a gun but I refused that. I figured that we could use a crossbow. My pal had used one before for shooting and hunting. I thought if we’re stopped by the police, we wouldn’t get jail time for carrying that. It’s sports equipment. My mate wasn’t very happy but in the end if we were doing the job it was going to be our decision what weapon we used. We bought it from a sports shop – a flat packed crossbow. If we get caught with the crossbow we were saying we were going fishing. It was supposed to be a two-day job. We were supposed to follow the target and track all his movements. But in the end it was just the one day. It was in June. The weather was good. It was warm but not hot. The shop was in a residential area with a shopping precinct nearby.
“In the end we went in and asked for him by name. He came out and we shot him. There was blood everywhere. The women were screaming in Chinese. It was mayhem. We just scarpered. We got him in the leg. It was carnage but we raced away and straight down the motorway. My heart was pumping. I half expected to hear it on the news on the way home. But we heard nothing. I am sure he didn’t die. That was a problem because the big fella went mad and didn’t give us our money. We weren’t going to argue about that. There was nothing on the news or the papers so he didn’t even know if we had even taken any action at all. But I am still getting grief about it. I worry about it all the time. I just wanted to leave the city as fast as I could. If we were out of the city I thought we would be fine.”
The crossbow was wiped clean and dumped to avoid forensics detection.
“I still have cold sweats over it,” Joey says. “It reminded me that I didn’t have the bottle for that kind of stuff. I was a player to a certain extent but not a do-et. This world wasn’t for me. We never got the cash. But at least no-one died and the boss didn’t ask me again.”