What drives someone to hire a hit man?
GREED, love and ambition are among the top reasons for enlisting a hired gun to get rid of estranged lovers and rivals.
According to private investigators and criminologists, the availability of firearms, combined with poverty and substance abuse, makes it relatively easy to find people willing to kill for money.
But often these hit men are far from the slick professionals depicted in movies, leading to them and the “criminal mastermind” being nabbed.
Although this is not an everyday occurrence in South Africa, the country has seen its fair share of high-profile contract killing trials.
Recently, British million-
I’m perturbed at how easy it is to go to a tavern and approach a person to kill. It’s disturbing
aire Shrien Dewani arrived in Cape Town to face murder charges after allegedly hiring hit men to murder his new bride, Anni, while they were on their honeymoon in Cape Town in November 2010.
Taxi driver Zola Tongo implicated Dewani in the murder, saying the 33-yearold had offered him R5 000 to organise hit men to get rid of his wife.
Dewani has denied any involvement in the murder.
Tongo is serving an 18-year prison sentence as part of a plea bargain and two other men are serving lengthy prison sentences for the crime.
Johannesburg private investigator Kyle Condon of D&K Management Consultants said that in his 21 years as an investigator, his company had dealt with about five cases of contract killings.
Pretoria private investigator Mike Bolhuis said that these murders were not common in South Africa. Many people had violent thoughts, he said, but only a fraction acted on them.
When they do, they are usually driven by greed, love or ambition — in that order — say investigators, criminologists and psychologists.
Condon said money played a role when, for instance, the murder mastermind was a beneficiary of the victim’s insurance policy.
Others may have extreme career ambitions and want to get to the top of the ladder at all costs — even if it means having a business partner or rival murdered.
Another motivation is eliminating a rival in a child custody battle. In these cases, Johannesburg clinical psychologist and criminologist Craig Traub said, the instigator sometimes thought it would be in the child or children’s best interests if the other parent was no longer in the picture.
This, he said, happened mostly in abusive relationships. Spouses, particularly women, were also driven by societal pressure to have their partners killed in cases in which divorce was taboo.
“They are desperate because they want to get rid of the person. They can’t do it themselves,” said Traub.
And finding hit men in South Africa was not difficult, experts said.
“I’m perturbed at how easy it is to go to a tavern and approach a person to kill. It’s disturbing. It’s that easy,” said Condon.
“It’s quite easy [to find a killer], especially among the poor . . . A lot of people don’t have a proper income,” said Bolhuis.
South African Police Service spokesman LieutenantGeneral Solomon Makgale said: “Generally speaking, if you have cash, it is easier to find people who are prepared to do anything for the cash.”
Benedict Weaver, owner of security consultancy company Zero Foundation in Cape Town, said that those who hired hit men were under the mistaken impression that the risk of getting caught is low.
Bolhuis concurred: “They see it in movies and think they too can get away with it, but it’s far from that.”
Often, he said, it was the very hit men who were hired to take care of the problem who led the police straight back to those who had hired them.