How DO you hire a hit man?

In bed this morning, I heard the news today (oh, boy) about a woman arrested in Washington state for trying to hire a hit man to kill her ex-husband and his family (bulk rate?). The man she was trying to hire, however, was an undercover police officer. Oops.

Now, call me naive, but how on Earth does one find a killer-for-hire?

I assume Google and the Yellow Pages don't help. Nor would I think that this is the kind of service about which one might pick up a tip at parties, in the way one might learn about an exceptionally good plumber, podiatrist, or landscaper...

"Have you heard about the untimely death of my ex? Tell me if you're interested, I KNOW someone."

May I assume this isn't the way it is?

Readers of this blog, even for as brief a time as I've been writing it, can tell, I'm sure, that I'm no man of the world. I don't have a clue about where to go to buy illegal weapons, or drugs, or stolen property, or even a "good neighborhood" for prostitution or bookmaking (the gambling, not the publishing, kind).

And thus it always has been for me.

When I lived in Washington, DC, while pursuing my doctorate in the mid-to-late 1980s, back when DC was first among US cities in murders committed (mostly due to drugs and gangs), I remember the police regularly raiding "known crack houses," some quite close to the boarding house in which I was living.

"Known to whom exactly?," I would ask myself. "I didn't know it was a crack house. And, if the police knew, why didn't they bust it before everyone else (well, everyone else except me) found out too?"

Since I still don't know what's out there to know, I've clearly got to get out more.

Now, THERE'S a New Year's resolution.