Hitman No Longer for Hire

Extortion is what they got him for, but authorities are saying Essam Ahmed Eid is guilty of much more. He’s a 56-year-old man from Las Vegas, and, until recently, the proprietor of a Web site called HitmanForHire.net. The way it would work, allegedly, is that Eid would get a request to kill someone, for a fee, and then, upon encountering the person he’d been contracted to kill, generously offer to forego his assigned mission, so long as the would-be victim could come up with enough money to make it worth Eid’s while. Authorities, meanwhile, have evidence that he’d been looking into how to make ricin and gun-barrel silencers. The alleged extortions first happened in Los Angeles, which is what got the investigation started, and then more of them happened in Ireland, which is where the investigation ultimately turned Eid up–and from where he’s been extradited, after serving six years in prison. Meanwhile, the sentence he received in L.A. county yesterday, for extortion, came to a grand total of 33 months.