Gun Baby Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of the Gun (14 page)

It was a treasure trove of documents that proved there were war crimes and human rights abuses, incompetence and intrigues on the part of the US military in Iraq. And Julian gave it over, countless classified military files, on a USB stick in a Lebanese restaurant near Paddington station.

As I got to know Julian, his appearance changed considerably as the world focused more and more on what he had leaked. He lost weight, dyed his hair bleach blond, took on a lined tiredness. But there was one thing that was constant: his bulletproof vest. He feared a CIA attack, that he was an assassin’s target, and I couldn’t help but look at the bulky blue vest and think: headshot.

A few days after giving the Bureau the files on the Iraq War, I was told by Julian to download a messenger system called Jabber. It was an encrypted service that lets people talk relatively securely. So that night, as London foxes barked outside my window and the streets were silent in sleep, I logged on and began a conversation with one of the most controversial men in the world at that time.

Caught in the green-blue glow of a screen, I was told to download certain applications, and his terse words guided me through a portal I had never known existed. I felt ashamed at my technological illiteracy. He told me about TOR, a system that allows its users to search the internet without their computer’s address being revealed. One that lets you look at websites untraced, because TOR wraps your servers’ information around other servers’ information, hiding you behind peeled layers of anonymity, like an onion.

Clearly, the head of Wikileaks needed the anonymity that TOR offers, just like investigative journalists do. But some others do not. Others use TOR not out of need, but desire. For many things lurk deep in the hearts of men, and if you give them a tool to hide their identities they will use it.

Within minutes I had access to sites that sold things like $20 syringes full of HIV positive blood, a vendetta’s stabbing tool. Where you could buy a soldier’s skull from Verdun for $5,000. Where fake euros cost a fraction of the real price. There was even an encyclopedic portal of links to ugly places I did not care for. Websites like ‘Pedofilie’ or ‘Boyloverforum’. Places that offered you the chance to commission drug experiments on homeless people. There was the opportunity to purchase snuff films made to order. You could buy the contact details of ‘crooked port and customs officials’ or ‘discreet lawyers and doctors’. And then there were the sites that promised assassinations.

‘Unfriendly solution’ was one. The text was chilling, if a word of it was true.

‘I will “neutralize” the ex you hate, your bully, a policeman that you have been in trouble with, a lawyer, a small politician . . . I do not care what the cause is. I will solve the problem for you. Internationally, cheap and 100 per cent anonymously.’

The text continued: ‘The desired victim will pass away. No one will ever know why or who did this. On top of that I always give my best to make it look like an accident or suicide . . . I don’t have any empathy for humans anymore. This makes me the perfect professional for taking care of your problems . . . I’ll do ANYTHING to the desired victim.’ The price varied. For non-authority, ‘normal’ people the cost was between €7,000 and €15,000.

Another site, ‘The Hitman Network’, offered a team of three contract killers in the US and the European Union. They charged $10,000 for a US hit, $12,000 for an EU one. They had two rules: ‘No children under 16 and no top 10 politicians.’

Of course on the dark web you have no idea who is and who is not genuine. It could just be some fat guy called Bob sitting in his underpants in his mother’s loft in Illinois. Or a cop. After all, the US’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has acknowledged it runs agents who pose as fake hit men, men who wear the jewellery, sleeveless tank tops and facial hair of biker gangs, entrapping those who seek guns for hire.
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In a twist of irony, it was even alleged that Ross Ulbricht, the supposed founder of Silk Road – a TOR portal that sells all manner
of narcotics, drugs and illegal services – commissioned the murder of six people through hitmen he had contacted on the internet.
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Nobody was actually murdered, although the FBI did say they had faked the death of one former employee of Silk Road and claimed they had convinced Ulbricht the murder had taken place. Ulbricht reportedly wired $80,000 to pay for the hit, though none of this has been proven in court.
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But some of those on the dark web might, just might, be genuine. Because there are definitely men out there who earn a bloody living using the gun in an ugly and vicious way, and there have been for some time.

The first gun assassin to enter the history books appears to have been a Scotsman – James Hamilton. When James Stewart, the half brother of Mary Queen of Scots, was acting as regent for her son, he was shot dead by Hamilton. The sniping Scot, in support of Mary, had fired the lethal shot from an archbishop’s window, through a line of washing. Since then, we have seen world leaders gunned down in their cars, on motel balconies and in theatres, a single bullet spinning a nation into a state of mourning, spurring on a legion of conspiracy theories, and even triggering world events that have claimed the lives of millions.

So President Abraham Lincoln was shot in the back of the head at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC by actor John Wilkes Booth, wielding a Philadelphia Derringer with a black walnut stock inlaid with silver.
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Archduke Franz Ferdinand was gunned down in the streets of Sarajevo in 1914, wearing such a tight uniform that some speculate it even helped speed his death.
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And a host of others have fallen to the assassin’s bullet, Tsar Nicholas II, Mahatma Gandhi, President Kennedy, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X among them, victims of the powerful political symbolism the assassin’s bullet delivers; potent propaganda in a bloody deed.

Like the best propaganda, the world of the assassin does not easily show its true face. But glimpses of it fascinate and endlessly inform the subject of films and dramas, which, in a way, seems ironic when you read that the father of Woody Harrelson, the star of
Natural Born Killers
, was actually a contract killer. Charles Harrelson was given two life sentences in 1981 for the assassination of district judge
John H. Wood, the first murder of an American judge in the twentieth century.
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The killing was carried out with a high-powered rifle in return for $250,000.
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Other shadows emerge from this world, such as the thirteen-year-old hitman working for the Mexican drug cartel. In 2013 Jose Armando Moreno Leos confessed he had participated in at least ten homicides, hired for his skill at shooting a high-calibre weapon. He was freed, because the Mexican constitution prohibits the incarceration of those under fourteen, but a few months later Jose too was found murdered, execution style.
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Or there is the story of infamous Russian hitman Alexander Solonik, better known as Alexander the Great, who confessed to assassinating a string of Moscow underworld figures in the 1990s. He had a unique skill: he could shoot with both hands.
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Or the time when, in 2011, Indian police arrested one of their most notorious contract killers, Jaggu Pehelwan, a man believed to be behind the deaths of over 150 people. He charged, it was claimed, between £12,500 and £32,500 for each kill and had even done a deal agreeing to two dozen murders for £200,000.
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He died as he lived, shot by rival gang members in 2012.
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Even Britain, with its hard gun laws, has had its share of hitmen. Santre Sanchez Gayle was Britain’s youngest, just fifteen when he shot a young mother for £200 in Hackney in London.
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He was ripped off. Researchers found the average cost of a hit in Britain between 1974 and 2013 was just over £15,000. The highest was £100,000, £200 easily the lowest.
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The assassin’s bullet, of course, is used for many reasons. For the assassin, cash has to be their sole motivation. ‘Don’t take it personally,’ is their cinematic shrug as the gunman leads a cowering accountant into a secluded wood with a shovel.

But what happens when the killer’s art is used for a darker purpose – for the pursuit of power?

It was a question that led my focus and research away from the depraved minds of psychotic killers and guns-for-hire towards the more calculated horrors of gangland murderers – the domain of the criminal with a gun.

6. THE CRIMINALS

A surprising video and gangland killings – El Salvador – meeting ‘the Shooter’ and drinking to the Beast – tea with a spook – secret graves and grave secrets – Holland and Ecuador
–
personal trauma of guns recalled – memories of Papua New Guinea – a gunpoint mugging and hard justice seen

The video was of a New York that no longer exists. Mean streets against a dripping industrial grime. So far removed from today’s Manhattan’s chic and West Village bearded hipster irony, it wasn’t even New York. They called the song ‘Gotham Fucking City’. The three-minute, twenty-second video was the story of Paris Lane’s death – a suicide captured in song. A eulogy in gritty rap by the singers Smoke DZA and Joey Bada$$, with lyrics as hard as the story it was telling.

The video told how Paris Lane had not killed himself in that New York lift lobby because of depression or demons or other silent assassins, but because of a drugs deal gone wrong. Having read the comments under Paris’s suicide video, I had searched some more and found this rap video. It was not a story I had visualised. Only the ending was familiar. The last frames in the music video showed the
image of a young man stood before a closing lift, a gun in his mouth, but this scene was intercut with others: young thugs with guns seeking vengeance, lurking at the tower block’s doorway.

The hooded men were shown in the film being robbed twice. The first time Paris had seized their drugs. The second time he had denied them their chance at dispensing a brutal form of street justice. Perhaps Paris knew, schooled as he was on the city’s sidewalks, that he couldn’t get away with what he had done, so he chose a different road.

The comments below the online video were illuminating. ‘R.I.P. paradise he killed his self before everybody he robbed killed him first,’ someone had written. Underneath it another said: ‘Supposedly he wanted out of a gang and they were going to kill him so the last thing he did was say goodbye to his girl before leaving on his own terms.’

Perhaps it wasn’t a suicide at all. Not in the strictest sense, at least. Rather just the bloody ending of a gangland disagreement. Something that had gone so far south that the only way for Paris to find a way out was to put gunmetal in his mouth.

Truth is sometimes hard to see. It’s even harder when there’s a gun in the way.

I began to search for the people who wrote the comments. They had indurate street names. One emailed a reply but I won’t say who because in the world of street gangs, that can be as good as chiselling a name on a gravestone. He told me Paris was in no mood for suicide.

‘i [
sic
] can’t tell you who he was in trouble with. Some guys from the hood. I heard his old gang friends tried to get him but nobody talks about this shit.’

I looked at five of those tight words and realised I had been expecting them all along.
Some guys from the hood –
because you can’t travel into the closed world of the gun without meeting the gangs who run the city’s night streets.

There are an estimated ten million criminal gang members in the world, and it was clear I had to meet some of them.
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To really understand the world of the gun I had to cross over into the criminal badlands.
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The question was: where?

Considering this, my eye had fallen back on Latin America, because
one in seven of all homicide victims globally happens to be a young man aged between fifteen and twenty-nine and living in the Americas.
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And in Latin America 30 per cent of all homicides are linked to organised gangs.
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At first, Mexico seemed a good choice. Mexican cartels’ firearms of choice include .50-calibre sniper rifles and a Belgian bulletproof vest-piercing pistol they call the ‘cop-killer’.
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But I had once reported on just how badly the gangs there tortured people, and I feared them. Nothing is worth being skinned alive for.

Then I read how El Salvador had 60,000 gang members in a country with a police force of just 25,000. About 80 per cent of all murders are with firearms; there were over 3,000 gang-related deaths in 2009 alone.
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This worked out at a thousand more gang-related deaths in one year in El Salvador than in the whole of the US, a country fifty times its size. My curiosity was piqued.

I learned that El Salvador has two main gangs. There’s the 18th Street Gang, or the 18. Having originated in California, the 18 had grown to become an international gang with 65,000 members in 120 cities. They are renowned for rituals like having large tattoos of the number 18 inked across their faces, or initiating gang members with a vicious ‘18 seconds’ beating’. Their rivals are the Mara Salvatruchas, the Maras, or the MS-13. They have over 70,000 members worldwide and are heavily involved in black-market gun sales, human trafficking and homicides, especially of law enforcement officers.

On 8 March 2012, the leaders of these two gangs in El Salvador had called a truce to the bitter war they had been fighting. In exchange for peace on the streets, they wanted a promise from the state for an improvement in the living conditions of their gang members in jail. The government, in an unprecedented act, was said to have negotiated with the gangs and come to a deal.
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Whatever the reason, a truce was struck. Almost immediately, homicide rates dropped off a cliff; the usual seventeen killings a day fell to an average of just over five a day.
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