Indeed, I would suspect that real hitmen usually aren’t full time hitmen as an occupation. In the case of the highend examples you mention, they’re probably ex special forces or spies for that country that usually don’t get asked to do that, but do some other jobs for their paymasters. And most “hitmen” are probably actually from extremely poor countries and live and work in gangs doing all the usual gang illegal stuff in addition to doing hits (for relatively low sums).

I think dark web hitmen are entirely scams, but I suppose if we can literally buy heroin or crystal meth online from the dark web, it’s not entirely naive to think aprori that hits could also be purchased. The reason they’re not is probably that it’s actuslly extremely difficult to regularly perform hits in the West, and probably not a great business model to scale on the dark web for the average Joe who wants to pay only a few grand for a hit.

Richard Kuklinski was a fulltime hitman. He had some other scams on the side, but killing was his business. I suspect that when you're running a large criminal enterprise you need people like Kuklinski on a kind of retainer basis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kuklinski

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpTDo4fUW4s

> Richard Kuklinski was a fulltime hitman

The wikipedia page you linked says:

> Throughout his criminal life, Kuklinski was involved in narcotics, pornography, arms dealing, money laundering, collecting debts for loan sharking, hijacking and contract killing.

Sounds like a full stack criminal to me.

As a data point for low-end assassinations -- some cities don't have the police resources to investigate fully every time a faceless teen or young twenty-something rolls up on a moto, shoots someone, and rolls on. I remember this being something that the local radio and papers would talk about in some of the south american cities closest to the fishing village I spent 7 or 8 years in.

It was convenient to pretend that all kinds of legitimate low-level assassinations are gangland "ajuste de cuentas," back-and-forth murders amongst gangs, to the point where the phrase 'ajuste de cuentas' became kind of a shorthand to refer to the police's lack of zeal.

So that the entry level product could be surprisingly reasonable for settling business disputes in extra-legal ways.

In all the cases you mentioned, these assassins were not in a business or contracting service, they were government agents, military, and otherwise trained and in the sole use of their own government. In most cases of “mafia” hitmen, they were not contractors either, but essentially a specialist within a family. There are freelance hitmen, especially in places like Mexico where cartels hire from pools of desperate young men, who get paid mediocre money for killing. I doubt that a world of truly skilled, high-end assassins exists as a free market, too many legitimate and illegal interests would benefit from their dissolution.

High risk low reward describes a lot of lower-level street gangs, no? I would suspect they are the largest sellers of murder-for-hire.