Trevor Laffan: Life as an assassin-for-hire can be a hit-and-miss affair

Assassins have been with us forever. History has shown us that there is always someone who is prepared to pay for the services of those who specialise in sending a living person to the hereafter. Fair enough.

But what’s the protocol when it comes to hiring a hitman? Where do you look, and how much does one cost?

Surely it can’t be as simple as placing an ad in The Echo. Maybe there’s a brochure with special offers in the ‘Hitman for Hire’ section.

The other thing is, how do you know that the person you hire is right for the job? Does he have a catalogue of dead people that you can browse through, and a choice of methods of dispatch with a price list attached?

I’m only asking this because there is an ongoing police investigation where I am currently living in Cyprus, in relation to an alleged plot to carry out an assassination of two British men.

Apologies for the overuse of the word ‘alleged’ here, but nothing has been proven in a court of law yet.

It’s a gun-for-hire story, but the alleged plot was foiled, and the alleged targets have since flown the coop.

You might think they had a narrow escape, but when you look into the details of this alleged plot, the whole thing was so farcical, that maybe they could have just stayed where they were and chilled out on the beach without a care in the world.

An Irish man, allegedly, had a role in this escapade, according to the reports by The Irish Times, the Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network, Norway’s VG, and Swedish public broadcaster SVT.

On August 10, a post appeared in a group on the encrypted messaging platform Signal seeking a hitman to carry out an assassination in return for about €58,000.

Danish police had been monitoring the Signal channel as part of a crackdown on ‘Violence As A Service’ (VAAS).

Who even knew there was such a thing as ‘Violence As A Service’, or that people can use social media and messaging apps to recruit others to carry out crimes including murder, assault and arson?

A Danish police undercover officer posing as a hitman responded to the message and agreed to take on the job. The conspirators are reported to have arranged for him to fly to Cyprus.

Danish police then alerted their counterparts on the island, and they put him under discreet surveillance.

According to the various media outlets, police allege that the Irish man was responsible for dropping off money for the purported hitman outside a laundromat in Ayia Napa. He was arrested along with two Norwegian males.

When that plot was foiled, a second five-man hit team from Sweden was sent to the island at the start of September to finish the job, police alleged. They were also arrested, bringing the total number arrested to eight.

All but two of the eight have since been released and deported.

The Irish man has denied any involvement in the case and says he was just here on holidays. The investigation continues.

The case has been covered widely in the media over here and I would like to reassure both of my regular readers at this point that I am not the Irish man referred to in the account.

I live near the locations where these events occurred, but I have never been a hitman.

I will admit, though, there have been occasions in the past when I wished I was. I have dealt with people who often drove me to consider that line of work.

Anyway, back to our plot. The whole thing seems amateurish, but when you look at some other cases throughout history, you find that amateurism is often present in these cases too.

According to History and Headlines, on April 30, 2009, during a Queen’s Day parade in Apeldoorn, The Netherlands, Queen Beatrix and her family were attacked by a man driving a Suzuki Swift.

Trying to ram the open-top bus that the royal family was riding in, the would-be assassin missed the bus, literally, and crashed his car into a monument, killing himself.

No idea how he missed a target that size, or how he ever thought a Suzuki Swift was a match for a bus.

Richard Lawrence provides another example of incompetence. He became the first person ever to attempt the assassination of a U.S States president when he decided to ambush and kill Andrew Jackson in 1835.

Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, fired two pistols at point-blank range, but both misfired due to damp gunpowder (possibly from humidity). He never got a chance to reload. Old Hickory was not a name bestowed upon Jackson for nothing.

When the two guns misfired, Jackson beat the hapless would-be murderer to the ground with his walking stick. The blundering assassin was later confined to a mental institution.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was the president-elect of the USA when he began giving a speech to a small crowd in a Miami park in 1933.

He was speaking from the rear seat of an open top car. The crowd pressed forward, and a 32-year-old assassin fired six shots at FDR. Giuseppe Zangara, the diminutive 5ft 1in attacker, had bought the pistol for $8 at a pawn shop - no expense spared - and had to stand on an unstable, wobbly bench to get a reasonable vantage point to shoot FDR.

None of the shots hit Roosevelt, but they did hit five other people, including the Chicago mayor.

Zangara claimed his mission in life was “to kill kings and presidents”.

Assassination can be a complicated business.