HOW MUCH does it cost to hire a hitman? £200... £15,000... or £100,000
Read on to find out the surprising answer from mafiosi and gangsters in a fascinating new book exploring what a human life is really worth
HOW many people have you killed? I ask, the words surreal and absurd as soon as they leave my mouth. I can’t quite believe I’m here in New York, having dinner with a Mafia hitman.
With a dismissive wave of his hand, John Alite tells me he thinks he was responsible for taking well over a dozen lives in total.
‘But I’m not a computer, I didn’t know I had to keep count.’
He probably shot 40 men, he says, but didn’t keep track of how many of them subsequently died. Then there were the ones he killed by other means.
‘I batted the first guy I killed with a baseball bat. He was a vegetable. They had him on life support.’
It was never pretty. ‘ There are some people who like to romanticise gangsters. They wouldn’t if they had come with me when I was killing somebody with baseball bats across the head, the screams, the blood, me covered in it.’
I’m sitting down with him to hear his terrifying, brutal recollections not out of morbid interest but for a good reason. It’s part of my research into a question that I find deeply fascinating — can you put a price on a human life?
You may think that life is priceless and that trying to put a monetary figure on it is not only impossible but crass and grotesque. But in our society, the cost of saving a life, creating a life and so on is routinely calculated.
Every time a life-saving measure is judged to be too expensive — a piece of cutting- edge medical research, say, a product recall on a faulty car or putting more lifeboats on the Titanic — someone has inevitably made a decision about what a human life is worth.
That’s what I’m trying to pin down, and where better to start than with someone who was paid to kill.
A word of advice to begin with. If you want to find a hitman, don’t google it. Don’t go on the dark web, either: the contract killers advertising their services there are pretty much always scammers or FBI agents looking to entrap you. Real hitmen operate through criminal networks and personal connections; if you want to get in touch with one, you need to know the right people.
In my quest to discover the price of taking a life, I spoke to ex-police officers, crime reporters and former prison governors, all of whom claim to have had the right connections.
I asked the HM Prison and Probation Service for the prisoner numbers of some of Britain’s most notorious murderers so I could write them letters asking about their pricing structure.
I got nowhere. They either couldn’t help, or they didn’t reply to me. But one night my phone rang and it was John Alite, calling from New York. He’d heard what I was looking for. Could he help?
Alite spent 30 years as a hitman for the Gambino dynasty — one of the notorious ‘Five Families’ of the Mafia that controlled organised crime in New York City — at a time when the clan was under the reign of John Gotti, Senior and his son.
He worked for the mob as a teenager until 2003, when he got word that the FBI was closing in on him and decided to go on the run, leaving his wife and children behind in the U.S.
Interpol tracked him down to Copacabana, Brazil, and arrested him on murder, kidnap and racketeering charges. He spent two years in a wretched Brazilian jail before being flown back to America in chains in 2006.
There he discovered that Gotti and the rest of the clan had been informing against him. He’d done their dirty work but they dumped on him (probably because, being of Albanian heritage rather than Sicilian, he was classified only as an ‘associate’ of the Mafia rather than a full ‘made’ man).
They betrayed him, so he made a deal with the prosecutors: he would plead guilty and testify against members of the mob in exchange for a more lenient sentence.
In court in 2008, he admitted two murders, four murder conspiracies and at least eight shootings. He got ten years.
Today, at 59, he has put his criminal life behind him and is now a motivational speaker, an author and the host of podcasts Mafia Truths, and The Mob, The Mafia And The Man.
I meet him in a steakhouse in Manhattan that looks like something out of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. He’s chosen it because it’s where he used to do business, on the telephone that the owner would bring for him to use at his table.
Smartly dressed in a pale designer suit, his black shirt unbuttoned enough to reveal a hint of his faded neck tattoo and glinting gold medallion, he looks like a character straight out of Central Casting as he flashes a dazzling smile and expensive teeth.
He tells me he was a talented baseball player at school and won a sports scholarship to university, but his dreams of going professional were thwarted by injury.
His skills with a bat made him particularly attractive in his fallback career as a mob enforcer. This began in 1978.
He was working in a deli that was also being run as a betting operation, and a gangster named Lucchese recruited him to fetch takings for the mob.
‘Then he asked me to collect with a little bit of violence.’
He says he killed people over debts that could be as small as $1,000. The money was irrelevant. It was about enforcing the mob’s authority.
‘You have to rule with fear. What people fear is violence. And if I’m the guy doing the violence, I’m the one that’s in control.’
It’s an image he still cultivates. ‘There are two things they respect in the street: the ability to make money and the ability to take someone’s life. And if you’re good at those two things, you’re going to be the guy calling the shots.’
I ask him about prices and he says: ‘There isn’t a fee as such for your services, but there are “opportunities” because of your services,’ he explains.
If, say, a new nightclub is opening up, ‘ there would be phone calls made to people that owned the establishment to tell them that John’s coming by and to make a deal with him.’
By ‘persuading’ them to give him a slice of the action, he ended up owning nightclubs in three states, and parking lots and valet businesses in six states. There were catering halls, candy stores, glass companies — all sorts of real estate investments. I ask how much money those ‘opportunities’ earned him in total.
He leans back and calculates, ‘I made, I don’t know, $100 million? I sold one of my parking companies for $ 17.6 million. One of my nightclubs was making about $3 million to $4 million a year. I owned an estate in New Jersey that’s worth about $10 million now. I had houses in Manhattan that were worth a couple of million and properties in Princeton.’
If Alite is telling the truth — that he made $100 million — this would imply that each of the 40 or so hits he carried out was worth millions of dollars to him. But he never put price tags on the lives of the individuals he killed. He didn’t think about their lives at all.
‘In the mob world, it’s not about personality — who you like, dislike. It’s always around money. When you’re hurting somebody, it’s because someone’s not paying
loan shark money, union money dues, or shake-down money from an operation. You don’t ask questions, you just go and do what your superiors tell you to do.’
John Alite may not have had a price list, but some Mafia hitmen do. When Giancarlo Orsini informed on his Mafia bosses, he told prosecutors in Rome he’d been paid €17,000 (£14,500) to kill cocaine dealer Federico Di Meo in 2013 and €25,000 (£21,000), shared between him and an accomplice, to kill loan shark Sesto Corvini.
He charged just €3,500 (about £3,000) to kneecap beautician Cinzia Pugliese outside her tanning salon.
Orsini would travel to his target on a scooter, wearing a helmet and sunglasses, before shooting each one precisely five times. It was his trademark.
We know about Orsini and his prices because his story was published in the Italian press, but generally no country releases official data on contract killings, who commits them and what they get paid. Criminologists seeking to understand the economics of murder-for-hire have to rely on the details revealed in court documents and news reports.
Our public understanding of hitmen is, therefore, based on the ones who don’t get away with it.
As Professor David Wilson, founding director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University, tells me: ‘I’m looking at failures, the hitmen who aren’t very successful, aren’t very skilled, and as a consequence what they might charge is quite low. The most successful hitmen — obviously I could never meet them, because they weren’t stopped and they weren’t arrested.’
As well as presenting a number of true- crime TV shows, including one with Silent Witness actress Emilia Fox, he has written several academic papers on hitmen, one of which specifically examines the going rate for murder-for-hire. It is one of the few pieces of research into the price of taking a life in a contract killing.
His researchers identified 27 hits in England, Scotland and Wales between 1974 and 2013, committed by a total of 35 people (some worked in teams). They found that individual sums ranged from £200 to £100,000 a hit but the average price was £15,180 — ‘the cost of a small second-hand family car,’ he points out dryly.
And people were commissioning hits for what he calls ‘ the most banal of reasons’: business disputes, marriage breakdowns, custody battles. They were crimes conducted for mundane reasons, by unremarkable people, for relatively little money.
‘ It’s within the pockets of ordinary people,’ he says. ‘ That’s the frightening thing,’ he says.
Santre Sanchez Gayle, 15, was both the cheapest and the youngest hitman in his sample. He was paid just £200 to kill a mother, Gulistan Subasi, in Clapton, East London in 2010, although police
believe he had been promised £2,000. His victim had flown to the UK from Turkey to regain custody of her nine-year-old son.
Gayle was commissioned to kill her before she could take the boy home with her. Security camera footage shows him ringing her doorbell and waiting calmly for Ms Subasi to open the door before shooting her at point-blank range with a sawn-off shotgun.
‘There was no hesitation and he showed no nerves,’ the senior investigating officer said. ‘We all thought it was a professional hitman. It did not look like a 15-year-old boy.’
He was only caught because he bragged to a friend afterwards. Gayle was jailed for a minimum of 20 years.
With the £200 he was paid, he bought a fake Gucci, Wilson tells me. ‘But it wasn’t really about the money. He saw the hit as a way of establishing his reputation within a local street gang.’
This makes him unusual. Most hits are about money.
There are four different kinds of hitmen, Wilson says. First, the novices like Gayle, who can be very professional, but their lack of experience makes them cheap. Then there are the dilettantes, who have no specific skills and are driven to murder because of a desperate need for money to pay off gambling debts and the like.
‘They go down the pub and say, “I’d do anything to get five grand”, and someone will say, “Well, I know somebody who’s looking for … ”’
Journeymen are also cheap — criminals who establish a reputation for easy violence in prison.
‘ If you are prepared to stab somebody in the showers in exchange for phonecards or half an ounce of tobacco, then when you’re released you’re used in exactly the same way.’
Finally, there are the master hitmen — the ones who arrive at the scene of the hit out of nowhere, and disappear as soon as the job is done. They are well established within national or international criminal networks, but you’ve got to be in quite a sophisticated one to even identify them.
And they’re expensive. All their travelling and expertise adds to the substantial cost of their services.
But their prices fluctuate according to supply and demand.
‘ When the peace process happened in Northern Ireland,’ Wilson explains, ‘there were a lot of men who had access to firearms and had used them regularly. They saturated the market, and, therefore, the price came down.
‘ They were trading on their fearsome reputation as IRA men. Now that reputation has gone to the Russians and the Albanians.’
John Alite says he was groomed as a fighter from the age of three by his Albanian father.
‘He wanted to make me tough, to be successful and not to be bullied. At an early age, I learned a detachment from violence and blood. I was never haunted by what I saw, what I did. It was just another day at the office for me, unfortunately.’
All the millions he made have gone now. He lost it all. At best, he sold assets for a penny on the dollar before the government
‘It’s within the pockets of ordinary people’
All the millions he made have gone now
seized them. He spent millions on lawyers. It turns out that, however tough he was, there was another price to pay. As a grandfather now, the past troubles him.
‘You don’t sleep well. You have thoughts of some of the family members. You have psychological issues. Anybody that’s seen the amount of action and blood that I’ve seen . . . it’s not a normal human thing.’
He tells me he has reached out to the families of some of the people he’s killed, met their children, cried with them. Prison changed him, he says. He was baptised while he was in jail. And when he was on parole he started giving talks to inner-city children warning them of the dangers of making the wrong choices in life.
‘But don’t get me wrong,’ he adds. ‘I’m still the same person. I have the capability of killing at any moment if I wanted to. I don’t want to.’
I ask: ‘Aren’t you scared of repercussions for speaking so openly?’
He flashes that dazzling grin. ‘Not at all. The guys in the mob world — most of them are frauds. They’re nepotism kids; it’s like a father and son union almost now. I was a killer. If anyone gets in the ring with me, I’m still that same guy. I don’t fear anybody at all.’
He hasn’t totally rejected his past ways. One of his money-making sidelines these days? On his website, he sells personally signed baseball bats.
AdApted from the price Of Life by Jenny Kleeman (pan Macmillan, £18.99). © Jenny Kleeman 2024. to order a copy for £17.09 (offer valid to March 9, 2024; UK p&p free on orders over £25), go to mailshop.co.uk/ books or call 020 3176 2937.