“Person of Usefulness”

“How do Professional Hitmen Know so Much About Their Victims?”

 

In truth, “killers for hire” (the correct legal term in England and Wales) don’t necessarily need to know very much at all, but their need for some reliable information, often in very small key snippets, is one of several reasons why their relationship with organised crime is both intimate and somewhat at arm’s length, like bi-curious schoolgirls really. The killer needs to know who the customer wants killed and the customer needs to know (or specify within fairly broad limits) when and where he cannot afford to be. There’s a certain amount of danger in the killer and customer even knowing who the other is and that’s another reason why organised crime is there for them both. And then there is the money: the killer benefits from having a third party pay his fee by a route the customer does not know and the customer does actually benefit by that fee being a different amount (perhaps a very different amount) from what he has paid out. The killer won’t stand for his fee being shaved merely to camouflage it, but it is acceptable for organised crime to deduct monies for tasks which the killer is better off not doing for himself, and gathering necessary information on the target and their movements is something the killer cannot do at all safely in most cases.

But, even more importantly, organised crime is Organised with a capital “O” for a reason and information is, and always has been, its primary commodity. More valuable than rubies precisely because information can always be smuggled, and in many cases it can be obtained without much effort and without breaking any laws. Indeed, the structure of organised crime has evolved to harvest information as a side-hustle to every other hustle. So, there’s a good chance that any competent organised crime gang will already know much, perhaps all, of the things which the killer would otherwise have to take risks to find out. There’s also a risk that if the customer passes on all the information, perhaps even privileged information, that they have, the killing itself will acquire a signature which points back to them! (That’s what the murders of Barry and Honey Sherman look like to Medawar, BTW.) This is why an experienced killer for hire might improvise around a dataset which a semi-professional killer would find inadequate. And semi-professionals do exist: they are often quite well off without killing people and it’s more like a self-funding hobby for them. Sometimes they are former military personnel who want to feel they are still “professional” and “in the game” but there are a lot of military instincts they will need to suppress to get away with it for any length of time, and always building a “proper” dataset is one of them!

In effect, organised crime can launder the killer’s fee in the same action as it launders the information he needs, supplying him only with facts he can use but which can’t be traced back to any particular source. And within the hierarchy, information, like money, generally flows upwards. Organised crime is a pyramid with a very broad base and at the bottom are people who are not “members” of any gang, but who will take the precaution of sounding out someone who is a member about anything “big” they might be planning, just in case it’s something the gang wants to tax, or even forbid. Some of the people at the bottom of the pyramid commit no crime other than talking about their lawful work and their clients. They might be the handymen and gardeners, even the dustmen and postmen, local shopkeepers. They definitely will include mini-cab and courier van drivers! There will be policemen and other officials, too, but their information runs the risk of being traceable and all public servants will come under routine scrutiny from time to time. And the people who decide what information to sell and how much it will cost, will be much higher up the pyramid than the source. They will look to their own security first, the customer’s and killer’s needs second and then the devil takes the hindmost.

This all adds up to any detectable dataset building on a murder victim being a signature of the semi-professional, and should organised crime have a commission where such a thing is actually necessary, the really smart thing to do would be to pass the job on to the semi-professionals and save their actual professionals for less amateurish capers.

So, given all that, the question really is: “how might a semi-professional murder for hire gang, perhaps including or advised by ex-military or US Federal Agents, go about building a dataset on a target?”

Below this article is an embedded video by the YouTuber, former US Army soldier and SIGINT specialist, Ryan McBeth, in which he uses the public’s prurient interest in the Jeffery Epstein scandal to enlighten us as to how Human Intelligence (or “human engineering”) techniques might be used to harvest even quite specific intelligence and, in particular, something he calls “Elicitation.” Unlike blackmail, bugging and torture, elicitation is not illicit and this makes it extra-useful for those seeking to get persons close to a target to volunteer the information needed to kill that target. Had those persons been the subject of coercion or illegal hacking, they would have a “victim card” to play that might embolden them to come forward and come clean once the worst has happened and someone has been murdered. Elicitation is the process of approaching and cultivating a friendly, supportive relationship with a “person of usefulness” to tease out, very gently and with no pressure at all, information about an object, subject or person of interest.

(By explaining that’s all Epstein needed to do in order to fulfill his operational goals, Mr McBeth indirectly but convincingly implies that the mansion full of hot and cold running fourteen year-olds was either unnecessary or simply something that Epstein’s guests would have expected to be available more or less anywhere they went to relax! Either way, the sexual exploitation was gratuitous.)

There are all sorts of ways a person of usefulness (friend, neighbour or colleague to the target) might be approached; either through their professional or personal life. They might find a distant or previously-unknown relative getting in touch (and this might not even be a scam because any of us might connect to someone known to a criminal gang at one remove or another) or they might be asked to mentor a junior colleague. If the person of usefulness were a junior, they might find someone gratifyingly senior mentoring them! A new face might turn up at a hobby-related club which the person of usefulness attends.

If the person of usefulness has a strong professional profile, they might be invited to join all sorts of prestigious bodies (perhaps as an Honorary Fellow of a Royal College outside their own field?) and the people they meet there would be so irreproachable as to be trusted with almost any information that really should not have been divulged.

In such a case, whereby the person of usefulness finds it unthinkable that they might have been, or even must have been the source of the information used to kill someone close to them, they will seek mental and emotional refuge in not thinking the thought, and indeed in promoting some alternative theory, up to and beyond the point where that theory becomes wholly ridiculous to objective and rational observers, especially their junior colleagues who will be much better at smelling a rat than a senior colleague’s peers.

And rather than being a willing and useful witness in any murder investigation, the person of usefulness would have a strong subconscious compulsion, or even a conscious determination, to misdirect that investigation. Sooner or later, such compulsion must surely become so obvious that even the most charitable investigators will be unable to ignore it.

 Knowing that one has been the target of effective human engineering can be as a bad as a physical assault, perhaps worse. But there could be cases where that knowledge, publicly-aired, might be a fitting punishment for arrogance.

 

 

The non-live link to the above video: 

https://youtu.be/Wpz3lc2QYwI