THE PRICE OF HIT MEN

Michael Kruse, Tampa Bay Times - A check for $1,000, another $1,100 in cash, a gift card to Westshore Pizza for $13.06. To kill someone?

That's the sum authorities say Edward Graziano of Palm Harbor paid a man to kill his wife. The man ended up being an undercover Pinellas County deputy. Graziano was charged with murder solicitation.

The price for the hit sounds low. It's not.

"It didn't strike me as low, to be quite candid," longtime Pasco County prosecutor Mike Halkitis said Friday from his office in New Port Richey.

"I've heard of people killed for as little as a carton of cigarettes," retired prosecutor Bob Dekle said from Gainesville. He worked out of Lake City for 30 years and prosecuted Ted Bundy. He now teaches at the University of Florida's law school. "I wish I had kept a list," he said, "of all the piddling amounts people killed for.". . .

The Australian Institute of Criminology five years ago released a study on 163 attempted contract killings in that country between 1989 and 2002. The lowest price was $250. The highest was almost $50,000. The average was $8,200.

A wealthy socialite in Texas once offered an undercover investigator $200,000 in jewels as a down payment to kill her husband - but the same investigator on another occasion was offered seven Atari computer games, three dollar bills and $2.30 in nickels and dimes. A teenage boy wanted him to kill a classmate who liked the same girl.