Endgame | 6

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of Kale List early and ad-free.

Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

Outside the front door of a flat, a group of men in balaclavas are waiting.

They're dressed in dark blue with bulky bulletproof vests and heavy boots.

Some of them wear helmets, others hold guns or heavy batons.

An eagle crest on their sleeve marks them out as Romanian police.

It's the 6th of April 2022, southwest Romania.

One of the policemen hammers the door off its hinges, forcing his way inside.

A startled man, dressed only in a t-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts,

is pushed face down in a hallway, next to a drying rack loaded up with damp clothes.

His pale bare feet peek out behind the officer kneeling on his legs. That same day, at six other homes across the counties of Gorge and Honodwara, more officers break down more doors.
Shortly after, the Romanian authorities release a video of the raids and announce that at the request of the United States, they have arrested an organized crime group suspected of running a hitman-for-hire site. So this is the moment I've been waiting for.
Finally, it looks like someone has done something about the site and its mastermind era. Now, for the first time, it really feels like an end is in sight.
What a morning, hey? Yeah, I mean, this might be it. I get on a call with my producer caroline as soon as i see the press release this day really never felt to me like it was going to come for so many reasons like i never thought we'd know who euro was i never thought that we would be able to get anyone to act on it but it is unbelievable to think with that chain of events almost certainly that we've been involved with it you know all these steps have kind led to these, like, Romanian commandos striding into the flat of a internet organised criminal group in Romania.
I know. I kind of can't believe we're here, like, at this chapter, because we've always had that responsibility of what do we do with the site.
So at least some of that is out of control now. But that sense of relief doesn't last long.
That evening, around 8.30, I get an email from Chris. Change is being made to the site right now.
Someone is still running the website and is making some security improvements. This doesn't feel like police action to me.
If Chris is right, then Yura could still be at large. Support for this podcast comes from Progressive, America's number one boat insurer.

We've all made mistakes on the water, but there's one mistake you shouldn't make, being uninsured.

With Progressive Boat Insurance, you can choose coverage for most mistakes you or other boaters could make,

helping you float carefree all season long.

Quote today, Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates, Number one rating based on boat market share data from ratefilings.com. If you're a parent or share a fridge with someone, Instacart is about to make grocery shopping so much easier.
Because with family carts, you can share a cart with your partner and each add the items you want. Since between the two of you, odds are you'll both remember everything you need.
And this way, you'll never have to eat milkless cereal again. So minimize the stress of the

weekly shop with family carts. Download the Instacart app and get delivery in as fast as

30 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.
Service fees apply.

For three orders in 14 days, excludes restaurants.

From Wondery and Novel, I'm Carl Miller.

This is Kill List, Episode 6, Endgame. I'm on the phone to Chris in the aftermath of the Romania raid, trying to find out what on earth is going on.
All right, Chris. So after the arrest, when was the first time that you realised that the site was changing? Somewhere between 12 and 24 hours after the arrest, there's a whole bunch of updates to the sites.
Hundreds of posts in the site's public forum have been removed. And some of the pages on the back end of the site have been moved or removed altogether.
These kinds of changes could only be made by someone in control of the site. There's no way this could be the police.
So I do not believe in any way, shape or form this is the police doing it.

It doesn't make any sense.

This looks to me like a member of the gang operating the website who wasn't arrested, changing the key pages that they knew about

to lock out other members of the gang

who could probably share that information with the police.

There's literally even some new website features released. If this were the police or the Department of Homeland Security, you might expect to see changes to the security of the site, but you wouldn't expect to see new features.
Is the main question, who in the gang have they actually got? It seems like high confidence they've got some people from that gang. Yes.
It seems reasonably low confidence that they've got everyone from the gang. Definitely not.
And it seems likely that they've missed at least one of the key players. Is that where we are right now? I mean, yeah, I don't feel anyone has got the complete picture of what's going on.
Only one thing seems clear. We were right to suspect there could be multiple people running the site.
Chris sifts through the site messages looking for clues about what might be happening. At first, there's just silence.
And then, three days after the raid, an administrator starts messaging again.

One message catches our attention from an administrator to a customer called Time2Kill.

Time2Kill had placed a hit, only to realize that no hitmen were coming.

And now the admin was reaching out again, but with a very different proposition.

Hi. Have you gave up the idea of killing your target when you was a customer? The admin admitted that the Hitman for Hire site was a scam.
Then they made Time to Kill an offer. I can pay you to use the Eura interface to view all customers and fake Hitman and to do maintaining work.
I can pay a fixed fee per month for this, if you promise you don't do anything wrong on the site. Yes, for sure.
I'd be happy to work as an admin for you and manage the site. I'm interested and have the time to do this.
How much are you thinking about for the fixed monthly payment? I'm thinking $400 per month in the beginning.

If you help a lot with the site and we get lots of customers, this can be increased.

Sounds good.

So, not only is admin activity restarting on the website,

it seems like whoever is left running the site is bringing on more help.

For every scammer who got arrested in the raid, it seems like someone else is willing to step in to keep the site running. I let the FBI know what we found, but our contacts there still won't talk to us.
Neither will DHS, the Romanian police, nor the prosecutor's office. We do end up hearing from the head of the FBI's office in Romania.

But you won't tell us anything that helps us understand what's going on.

There are no charges announced, no hearings, and no news of any court proceedings.

So we can't even check whether the two people in the IDs we were investigating were picked up in the raids. Considering that the Romanian authorities were so keen to publicise the arrests, this silence now is strange.
And to make matters worse, there have been more changes to the site. Two days ago on Sunday, the server rebooted.
And since then, I've lost access to most of the admin pages again. I don't know what to make of this.
I've got access to the payments still, but not the messages. Our access has been heavily restricted.
The messages with the crucial order details are now completely invisible to us.

And if we can't see the orders, we can't help the targets.

Chris can still piece together a few kill orders,

but only if the customer wasn't wise enough to make a public post about the hit

in a forum on the website, instead of just messaging privately.

We keep passing anything Chris sends through to our police contacts, but as weeks turn

to months, the orders are few and far between.

And then, it happens.

On New Year's Eve 2022, Chris loses access to the transactions section of the website.

Now, we can't see the payments or the messages. We're completely locked out.
So, I just used NerdWallet's card finder tool to find a better card for me.

And listeners, this is genius.

All you have to do is answer a few questions,

and in minutes, you'll get matched with recommendations tailored to you.

I'm discovering cards I didn't even know existed,

and the matching was on point.

The best part? No research needed. The nerds already did that for us.

So if you, like me, want to easily find the right card for you, go to nerdwallet.com to get matched today.

Terms and conditions apply. Credit products subject to lender approval.
See nerdwallet.com for details. Now that we're locked out of the website, I finally have a moment to just catch my breath.
It's the first time in two years that I've been able to focus on something other than the next kill order. The first time I've been able to stop and ask myself, what on earth have we been doing? And part of answering that question is a talk with the people we have been able to help.
What did all these years of scrambling around trying to help people really amount to? The first person I speak to is Jennifer. Hi there, Jennifer.
How are you doing? Hi, good. How are you? Nice to see you again.

Good to see you too.

Her ex-husband, Ron, was arrested in April 2021

after placing an order on the site for her to be kidnapped

and forcibly addicted to heroin.

Not surprisingly, the press had a field day.

It's weird to think that, oh, I'm the estranged wife in this story,

like, out of all people in Spokane, Washington.

Like, I don't know.

It's just, it's kind of an odd, odd feeling.

On June 11th, 2021,

Ron appeared for a detention hearing

at the Spokane Federal Court.

The prosecuting team told Jennifer

it might help the case

if the judge could put her face to the story.

So she and her dad went.

I think he was shocked that we showed up

I don't do this type of face, you know, like, I can't believe I'm still in jail. And at one point when he was being handcuffed and led out of the courtroom, he looked at my dad and said, I didn't do it.
Ron pled not guilty. He was going to fight all the charges against him.
But Jennifer was ready for that fight too. She kept going back to court again and again and again to show Ron she wasn't afraid.
There was a few times where I was sitting outside of the courtroom after the hearing and he'd have to walk past me to go to the elevators when he was handcuffed and we would be just inches away. And it didn't bother me.
I don't know, it kind of made me feel empowered. Ron's attorney argued that the order messages were inadmissible

and that Ron was improperly interrogated when they intercepted him at the airport.

But that wasn't Ron's only strategy.

From jail, he wrote a letter to Amanda,

the woman he'd been seeing when he was married to Jennifer I want us to be married We can do that now, even with me in here Importantly, if we are married, we can decide if you testify or not Ron told Amanda he wouldn't make her sign a prenup And he'd pay for Amanda's kids to go to private school. At the end, he added, P.S.
If you love me now or have ever loved me, burn this letter and do not mention it to anyone. Amanda didn't take him up on his offer.
Instead of burning it, she passed the letter to the prosecution. Over a year after his arrest, with the evidence against him still mounting, Ron took the stand.
Jennifer was in the courtroom that day. The judge asked him to say in his own words, what did you do? And he started off saying, well, I was a broken man.
And the judge said,

that's not what I want to hear. I want to hear what you did.
And he said that he had gone on

there and hired people to try to cause harm to me. I cried because I was shocked that he actually

said, I wrote those horrendous messages. And I thought, wow.
And my dad was crying too. I was also angry.
I ended up taking the day off of work and I cried a lot because I was just mad that he put me through all of this for a good year and a half of claiming his innocence and saying that my allegations are false and inflammatory

and he was acting like the victim this whole time.

And this whole time he knows he did it.

So it was a lot of emotion, of just anger but also relief.

Ron took a plea deal. He was sentenced to eight years in prison.
But not every case I've passed to the police has had such a neat resolution. Hi, Anna.
So good to see you. Yes.
Very good. I'm here with my parents, as always.
She's there with her dogs. I'm on a call with Ana and Esperanza, the reporter who helped us track Ana down back in late 2020.
Someone had paid around $24,000 for Ana to be killed in a car accident. The police arrested a suspect in December 2020.
We can't name them for legal reasons, but Anna always doubted they were the real person behind the hit. When the police announced they'd finished their investigation, it looked like Anna might get some answers.
But now... It's completely stopped.
Nothing new. She doesn't have a date for the trial.
She called the civil guard and complained about it because they have had zero results since the last time we spoke. And she's complaining about how the Spanish justice works.
Anna can only speculate about the motive behind the hit.

Can this end

for you, Anna?

Are you able to get closure?

Or is this just something which has been dragging on for you?

I still think there's more people

in this case. And the real masters

of this case are still out there free. It made me change and the biggest change it has been in my security because I was never scared or afraid of what would happen to me.
But since this case, I don't have that safety on my own and I get scared easily. Do you wish that you had known about the order or not? Because I know that us telling you about this probably in no small degree caused the emotional angst that you went through.
So there's a genuine kind of ignorance is bliss possibility here my question I guess to Anna is were we to go through that time again whether she'd have rather us actually not decided to tell her about it no no no no I don't regret and I don't prefer the ignorance

because things could have gone worse if we didn't know what was going on.

I know it was a scam, but it could have been truth.

It could have been really something dangerous.

And the good part is that I got to know the truth and to know you well Anna thank you um

I'm so sorry about this case for you I mean this is such a horrible one where the people doing this

can still remain in the shadows you know it's never been possible really to get closure but

it's always been so nice to talk to you and despite the horrendous subject matter that we've

had to discuss um I wish you all the best. All the best.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
Bye. Bye.
It's hard not to feel frustrated that justice isn't moving quicker for Anna. Living under the uncertainty of not knowing

whether the person who tried to kill you will be brought to justice must be utterly draining. And Anna isn't the only person going through that right now.
So far, I've only been able to tell you about a handful of the lives touched by the kill list.

In total, my team and I have passed over 175 kill orders to law enforcement agencies around the world.

But only a minority of them have resulted in an arrest or a conviction.

Anna is representative of the majority of the cases,

where people still haven't got the answers, nor perhaps the safety, they were looking for. Having the kill list taken out of my hands is something I have to accept.
The years of dealing with it have been terrifying, but at least I had the power to actually make a difference. Now there's a feeling of impotence.

I can't warn any new people on the list. I can't help any of the targets I do know about find justice.
And I can't force the police to take control of the site. Things have ended, but it just doesn't feel like an ending.

But then one morning, I've just finished eating breakfast,

ready to start my day job writing articles and giving talks on tech subjects far less grim than the kill list.

When I open up my inbox,

it's a link to some news.

And it's going to answer almost all the questions that I have about what happened to the kill list. Location The Lab.
Quinton only has 24 hours to sell his car. Is that even possible? he goes to Carvana.com what is this? a movie trailer? he ignores the doubters enters his license plate wow that's a great offer the car is sold but will Carvana pick it up in time for they'll literally pick it up tomorrow morning done with the dramatics? Car selling in record time.

Save your time.

Go to Carvana.com and sell your car today. Pickup fees may apply.
At first glance, what Chris has sent me is a news article. In April 2023, the Department of Homeland Security received a tip-off from a foreign law enforcement agency.
It needs to seem random or accident or plant drugs. Do not want a long investigation.
The article announced the arrest of someone who had placed an order on Eura's website totaling $9,750 for the murder of a woman in Prattville, Alabama. She recently moved in with her new husband.
She works at home in an office. They have three dogs that bark and jump, but nice dogs.
Using the order details, Homeland Security managed to obtain a phone number that had been used to buy the Bitcoin for the hit.

Photographs from an ATM used to buy the cryptocurrency confirmed the identity.

On the 18th of May, a woman in Knoxville, Tennessee was arrested.

It's the same murder for hire site we've been monitoring.

The same back-end messages, the same accusation, and the same methods

of investigation.

But with one difference.

We didn't pass

this case on.

We've been locked out of the site for months.

I'd never seen these messages.

However Homeland Security

got this information, it wasn't

through me or my team.

I get on a call with Chris to try and figure out what might be going on. I believe the only way this information could have been obtained is through a law enforcement agency seizing the server, monitoring it, and with that server access, of course, you can extract information however you need to.
Chris believes the police have figured out their own way into the Hitman for Hire site. If Chris's theory is correct, it doesn't matter whether Jura or his accomplices are still at large.
The police would still be able to intercept every kill order. They should have been doing all of this.
None of this should be us begging and pleading different agencies to take it on, right? Yeah. I suppose we'll kind of have to sit and wait and watch to see whether this replicates itself.
We don't have to wait long. Only weeks later, Chris sends over another article.
It's a new arrest, this time in Austria.

The article says a man was arrested for trying to hire a hitman to kill his wife after a tip-off from the British authorities. Again, it was about the website we were tracking.
Again, we had nothing to do with the case. The Austrian authorities report that 130 investigators and five different police agencies were involved in the operation.
The scale of it is staggering. It's in stark contrast to the sort of reactions I got from police when I first started handing over these kill orders.
A few weeks later, my producer Caroline gets an email. It's from a British police officer from DICE, the Dark Web Intelligence Collection and Exploitation Unit.
She calls me so we can read the email together. Okay, here we go.
All right, it says forward, hitman, dark web. it says morning guys hope you're well i just wanted to whilst i cannot talk about ongoing operations i know that in the past you've struggled to perhaps always elicit the response from law enforcement that might have been warranted hopefully when things do get reported like this it gives you some assurance that this crime type is now being taken seriously.

It is you guys who deserve full credit for highlighting this particular dark web threat through the work you have been doing. Oh, wow.
That is really sensational news. I mean, it feels good, doesn't it? It's about as much of a nod and a wink and another nod and another wink as you can get.
They're in the market. To have someone else keeping an eye on this, actually properly, in a way that's not just we'll take cases whenever you send them, but in a way that is proactive and in a way that probably it always should have been.
Well, I've become used in this world to never being very sure about

anything. There's so many greys and murkinesses, isn't there? And, you know, this actually is about

as clear as you can ever get of them saying, hi, we're in and we're on because of the stuff

that you've all done. That is as much a ending of this chapter, maybe, of this story as we can get.

Since this began, all the way back in the middle of 2020,

there have been 34 arrests across 11 countries.

In 28 of these cases, the suspect has already been convicted. there have been 34 arrests across 11 countries.

In 28 of these cases, the suspect has already been convicted.

So far, over 150 years of prison time has been handed down.

The Kill List has offered me a window into the cruelty people are capable of when they think nobody's watching. The people behind the orders, just like their targets, look like you and me.
They live ordinary lives, or at least it seems that way from the outside. But they're willing to do something almost none of us are, to have another human life snuffed out.
I've seen all kinds of motives. Money, jealousy, fear, lust.
But to me, it seems what really drives most customers to Eura is a desire for control. Control over a person, over a situation, over a relationship.
The moment they order the hit is often also the one where they feel that control slipping. They're spiraling and this is their desperate attempt to finally claw back command.
I wasn't prepared to bear witness to all of that. Every time I sat down to open my email, I'd face a prospect of a new kill order sitting there in my inbox.
New payer, the subject would announce. And then, one click, and I'm launched back into a world brimming with violence and fear.
My team and I did our best.

We never had enough information.

We never had enough time.

And the stakes, they were always ludicrously too high

for it to ever feel normal.

To be in situations where what you do

can be a matter of life or death

is, well for me at least, traumatizing.

Not that I'm a victim in this story, far from it,

but grappling with the list has had a profound,

probably lifelong impact on me and everyone

in the small team we threw together to cope with it.

The kill list still exists,

and whilst it continues to save lives, long may may it But we don't hold it anymore Me, Chris, Caroline We've been a chapter in the story of the kill list A chapter that has now, thank God Come to an end With the police now in all likelihood Operating their international investigation of the site, it feels like, finally, we can move on. Yeah, yeah, I just want to talk to you about what it is that we're about to do.
For something to have begun on the dark net, a realm which is so digital and so anonymous, and you can hear it.

Now we're in the physical world

and there are pigeons

and there are tourists. There's traffic all around

us and there's people cycling.

It's a sunny day in London

and I'm at the busy tourist hub

of Mubble Arch.

Elena, the first person on the kill list

I was able to actually help,

is in town.

You had a nice time.

We arrived the earliest

Thank you. Elena, the first person on the kill list I was able to actually help, is in town.
You had a nice time. We arrived early yesterday morning and we're going back late tomorrow night.
We find a table outside a cafe on a side street and sit down. Elena smiles as she peers at me over the rims of her glasses.
When did we last speak? Over a year ago, isn't it? More than a year, much more. Well, it's very weird to meet someone in those circumstances and now to be in a place which is so normal and so conventional.
Yeah, exactly. Elena is as matter of fact as ever.
It would actually have been quite easy to kill me. He could have followed me, you know, where to park my car

and just wait there, just shoot through the window.

I read a lot of thrillers.

Well, I mean, you don't need to, I mean,

sometimes life is strange in the direction, right?

I mean, you've lived for a thriller.

You don't need to necessarily just read about it. Yeah, but I do.
I love it. The last time I spoke to Elena was after her husband, who we're calling Bruno, had been arrested.
That was when the police discovered he'd rented a room full of weapons near her house. I had nightmares about that room and about Bruno.

I can remember the tension in her voice then.

I always thought she was tough and practical,

but I'd never heard her sound happy.

Now, Elena is ticking things off her bucket list.

That's why she's here in London.

The night before, she went to see Phantom of the Opera

and she's booked two days of back-to-back afternoon high-teas at the Ritz and the Torchester hotels. And in September, I'm going to Brazil.
Oh my God. Amazonas.
Oh my God. Yeah, I always wanted to do that.
I wanted to do that 30 years ago. And that's also been very long on my pocket.
Elena g gathers her things and we walk back to the hotel together. White clouds pass quickly across the blue sky as people push past us in the building rush hour traffic.
By the way, just once again to reiterate how lovely it is to see you in such a great mood in the sun in London and saying, my life has moved on.

That's so wonderful to hear.

Have you learned anything from this?

It just made me realise I can't take anything.

Yeah.

Am I still standing?

Yeah.

That's what I think is surprising.

You know, anything that you throw at me, I'm just still standing. The End Thank you.
If you like Kill List, you can binge all episodes ad-free right now

by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music.

Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wandery.com.

From Wandery and Novel, this is episode six of Kill List.

Kill List is hosted by me, Kyle Miller.

It was written by me, Caroline Thornham, and Tom Wright.

Our lead producer is Caroline Thornham. Our producer is Tom Wright.
For Wondery, our story editor is Chris Siegel, and our senior producer is Russell Finch. Our assistant producer is Amalia Sortland.
And our researchers are Megan Oyinka and Lina Chang. Additional research from Chris Montero, Kuzman Meyer, Attila Biro from the Context Investigative Reporting Project Romania, and from Anik Mosu, Fuka Park.
Thank you. Sound design and mixing by Nicholas Alexander.
Additional engineering by Daniel Kempson. With special thanks to Mandy Gornstein, Alex Wade, Jason Phipps, Jeff Oswald, Joe Wheeler, Jake Otayevich, Saskia Edwards, David Waters, Neil Krishnan, Julia Bromberg, Carly Frankel, and all the team at WME.
For Novel, Willard Foxton is Creative Director of Development.

Our executive producers are Sean Glynn, Austin Mitchell, Max O'Brien, and Craig Strachan for Novel. Executive producers for Wondery are George Lavender, Marshall Louis, and Jen Sargent.
In the early hours of December 4th, 2024,

CEO Brian Thompson stepped out onto the streets of Midtown Manhattan. This assailant pulls out a weapon and starts firing at him.
We're talking about the CEO of the biggest private health insurance corporation in the world. And the suspect.
He has been identified as Luigi Nicholas Mangione. Became one of the most divisive figures in modern criminal history.
I was targeted, premeditated, and meant to sow terror. I'm Jesse Weber, host of Luigi, produced by Law & Crime and Twist.
This is more than a true crime investigation. We explore a uniquely American moment that could change the country forever.
He's awoken the people to a true issue.

Finally, maybe this would lead rich and powerful people to acknowledge the barbaric nature of our healthcare system. Listen to Law and Crimes Luigi exclusively on Wondery Plus.

You can join Wondery Plus on the Wondery app, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.