The Hit Man’s Tale: How an honors student became a hired killer.

[cali]

incent Smothers thought that it would be a job like any other. In the summer of 2007, he told me, his friend Marzell Black asked him for a gun for his mother’s boyfriend. Smothers didn’t sell guns, and he told him so. A few months later, Marzell amended his request, saying, “That dude who was looking for a gun? He asked me how much he would have to pay to kill somebody.” A murder Smothers could handle. “Marzell wasn’t the killing type,” he said. “I told him, ‘That’s not something for you to do. I’ll talk to him and see what this is all about.’ ”

Smothers drove Marzell in his black Jeep Commander to a gas station on Detroit’s East Side, the rougher part of a rough city. As they waited in the parking lot, a bald black man opened the rear passenger-side door and got in. It was the boyfriend, whom Smothers knew only as Dave. Staring intently at the back of the seat, he explained that the target was his wife; he was leaving her and didn’t want her to be alone. “Who says that?” Smothers asked me, his reedy voice rising with indignation. We were in a visiting room at the Michigan Reformatory, a prison in Ionia. “Tell me she’s fucking the neighbor or that she killed your baby five years ago. But don’t tell me you don’t think she can be alone.”

Smothers is six feet one, with caramel-colored skin and wavy black hair. He has sixteen tattoos on his upper body. Among them are three in memory of loved ones; his nickname, Vito, emblazoned in red on his back; a rebus that spells out “I never hesitate”; and, in Gothic letters, “LOST SOUL.” By the age of twenty-six, he had killed at least a dozen people, most of them drug dealers. As he saw it, he was simply hastening an inevitable conclusion. “When you grow up in the hood, you learn: if you sell drugs, you’re going to end up one of two things—in jail or dead,” he said. “Those are the results of that life.” As for women who got in the line of fire, he reasoned, they’d benefitted from the trade. “When you flock to the ballers”—the nouveau riche of the hood—“you get what they get when it’s your turn.” But he had never set out to kill a woman, much less a civilian with no connection to the trade.

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Smothers waited in his Jeep at the CVS until the call came, just before 9 P.M. A few minutes later, Dave drove up with his wife and walked into the store, nodding slightly. Smothers walked over to the car, broke the passenger window with a tire iron, and, to give the impression of a robbery, demanded the woman’s purse. She screamed and reached for something—her seat belt, Smothers guessed. “She was screaming and fidgeting, doing what, I wasn’t sure,” he said. “I didn’t wait to find out.” He shot her in the head, four times, and she slumped over the middle console. “Even before I pulled the trigger, it was different,” he said. “I thought about how wrong it was, and I was fighting myself about whether to do it.”

Later that night, Smothers felt compelled to return to the scene, by then crowded with police cars and news vans. A cop pulled him over, and Smothers produced a fake I.D. and papers showing that the Jeep belonged to Cecily’s father. The officer explained that a witness to the crime had seen a similar Jeep, and then waved him on. At home, Smothers learned from the news that Dave was Sergeant David Cobb, of the Detroit Police Department. His wife’s name was Rose.

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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/15/the-hit-mans-tale?mbid=ob_ppc_magazine