I complained the other day because El País did not provide a copy of the fake “hit man contract” a scammer used to swindle a 52-year-old Spanish woman and her 20-year-old daughter recently. See “Again I Must Remind You That Dealing With a Hit Man is Fraught With Peril” (July 12, 2019). A couple of readers have since pointed out that it did in fact provide the contract in the original version of the article, which I did not read because El País offers an English version and because my Spanish abilities have deteriorated over the years from “not too embarrassing” to “can discuss the weather as long as the weather is not complicated.”

One of those readers was kind enough to take a stab at translating the contract into English (thanks, Zach). You can find the El País article here, but the translation and original are both provided below.

Among the notable features of this particular hit-man contract are the following:

• The purported hit man purports to be acting pursuant to “Protocol EP-241-W2 of the United Nations,” which, surprisingly, does not seem to exist. Security Council Resolution 241 condemned foreign interference in the internal affairs of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but that doesn’t really seem to apply.

• One of the actions to be taken against the target is “annulment of the rights set out in the resolutions of the Magna Carta of the United Nations,” which is a bit of a giveaway because the MC predates the UN by about 750 years. Assuming he means the original MC, the contract doesn’t make clear which right(s) he’s going to annul, but it’s probably not talking about scutage or fish-weirs, for example.

• The contract also says it will annul the target’s right to keep all of his organs, and there’s nothing about that in the Magna Carta, at least not explicitly.

• Paragraph 7 says that a statutory procedure will be followed “[i]n case of the suspect’s refusing to donate his organs voluntarily,” and it’s unfortunate that the citation isn’t clear because they’re probably gonna need it.

• The citation is “section 341 of the [redacted] of the Kingdom of Spain.” If he means Article 341 of the Criminal Code, that one makes it illegal to release nuclear energy or radioactivity, so it doesn’t really seem to apply, either.

• You should be suspicious of anyone who claims to be employed as the “[redacted] of the Kingdom of Spain and First Minister of Special Operations of the C.I.A.-MOSSAD,” or, I suppose, of anyone who claims his job description is “[redacted].”

Setting that aside, though, the second and third pages of the “contract” are actually the alleged hit man’s resumé, and it is quite impressive. There’s a long list of skills in which he has an “advanced” level of training, including weapons, hostage rescue, driving, piloting, impersonation (that one might actually be true), “climate control” (so he can ruthlessly adjust the air conditioning for you), and something called “millennial arts,” (perhaps the most frightening of all). He claims to speak 23 languages, including Hawaiian, and nothing against Hawaiian at all, it just doesn’t seem like the most useful language for an international hit man to devote his limited time to learning. Finally, he claims to have conducted 352 missions during his career, 349 of which were successful, an impressive 99.15% success rate.

Well, I guess now it’s 349 out of 353, but still.