FILE - In this Sept. 26, 2013 file photo, Joseph Hunter, center, a former U.S. Army sniper who became a private mercenary, is in the custody of Thai police commandos after being arrested in Bangkok, Thailand.... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this Sept. 26, 2013 file photo, Joseph Hunter, center, a former U.S. Army sniper who became a private mercenary, is in the custody of Thai police commandos after being arrested in Bangkok, Thailand. Hunter, already serving a 20 year term for plotting to kill a DEA agent, goes on trial in New... (Associated Press) 
 
 NEW YORK (AP) — A former U.S. Army sniper and two other ex-American soldiers agreed to become contract killers for an international crime boss who wanted to settle a score with a real estate agent in the Philippines he thought had cheated him on a land deal, a prosecutor said Tuesday in opening statements at the trial of the three men. 
 
 Joseph Hunter, a onetime sergeant with a Special Forces background, Adam Samia and Carl David Stillwell have denied they planned the 2012 execution-style hit — a case that's provided an inside glimpse into the secret fraternity of private mercenaries willing to kill in cold blood for cash. 
 
 Prosecutors said the 52-year-old Hunter was working as a security chief for weapons and drug trafficker Paul Le Roux when he recruited Samia and Stillwell to travel from their homes in Roxboro, North Carolina, to the Philippines for what was called "ninja work." Hunter provided firearms and silencers and told them Le Roux would pay them $35,000 a piece to get the job done, Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Egan said in federal court in Manhattan. 
 
 The broker, Catherine Lee, was on a "kill list" that self-styled assassins with military backgrounds saw as a golden opportunity, Egan said. 
 
 "If Paul Le Roux wanted somebody killed, these guys got the call," he said. "For these men, more murders meant more money." 
 
 Samia, 43, and Stillwell, 50, did surveillance on Lee before contacting her pretending to be potential clients, the prosecutor said. While returning from a trip to the countryside outside of Manila, Samia pulled out a .22-caliber gun and killed Lee by shooting her twice in the face as she sat in the back seat of a van, he said. 
 
 Lee's body was found on a pile of garbage on the side of the road, Egan said. After being paid, her killers were ordered back to the United States, where they were arrested in 2015. 
 
 An investigation turned up a picture on Stillwell's phone of a bloody head wrapped in a towel that was taken around the time of Lee's death, authorities said. He also admitted being behind the wheel of the van when she was shot, they added. 
 
 Prosecutors said other evidence includes a secretly recorded video of Hunter from a sting in Thailand that resulted in a separate conviction for plotting to kill a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. They said he's overheard talking about killing people for Le Roux, including a Filipino real-estate agent. 
 
 On Tuesday, defense attorneys asked jurors to keep an open mind, saying the case lacked eyewitness, forensic and other conclusive evidence needed to convict. They also told them not to trust shady government witnesses like Le Roux, who has pleaded guilty and is cooperating. 
 
 Hunter's attorney, Cesar De Castro, suggested the government couldn't prove its case. 
 
 Samia only agreed "to do legitimate, legal security work," said his lawyer, Jeremy Schneider. Stillman's lawyer, Robert Ray, didn't deny his client's statements about being in the van but claimed he never joined a murder conspiracy. 
 
 "It just didn't happen," Ray said. 

 The other two defendants, Adam Samia, a former Army sniper, and Carl D. Stillwell, a onetime weapons trainer, are accused of carrying out the murder on Mr. Hunter’s orders. All three have pleaded not guilty and deny the charges. The trial began on Monday with jury selection. 
 
 Mr. Le Roux oversaw smuggling rings on four continents, prosecutors say, and is expected to emerge from the shadows for the first time to testify against his former henchmen. 
 
 For more than 20 years, Mr. Le Roux was an enterprising kingpin with illicit businesses that included running weapons in the Philippines, smuggling opioids from Mexico to Texas and cultivating hallucinogenic plants at a secret compound in Somalia, authorities said. 
 
 All of that ended in late 2012 when Mr. Le Roux, now in his 40s, was arrested in Liberia by the Drug Enforcement Administration and began to cooperate with the American authorities. In one of his first clandestine jobs, he helped the government arrange a sting operation in Phuket, Thailand, in 2013 that led to the arrests of Mr. Hunter and a group of other men, who were charged with planning to assassinate a D.E.A. agent and one of his informants. 
 
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 Mr. Hunter pleaded guilty to those charges and was ultimately sentenced to 20 years in prison. But in October, federal prosecutors in New York unsealed a new indictment charging him with a different crime: orchestrating the plot to kill Ms. Lee, a real-estate agent, on Mr. Le Roux’s behalf. 
 
 Because the case in Thailand included allegations that Mr. Hunter and his partners had conspired to ship cocaine into New York, it was prosecuted by the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan. Manhattan prosecutors are handling the current case as well, saying it emerged from the same investigation. 
 
 On the witness stand, Mr. Le Roux is expected to explain how in 2008 two of his employees, David Smith and John O’Donoghue, set up a company called Echelon Associates, which hired former soldiers to provide security on his gold-buying trips to Africa and to oversee his illegal shipments of military weapons, according to court papers. 
 
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 He is also likely to recount how Mr. Smith was murdered in 2010 (after he was caught stealing gold) and how Mr. Hunter — promoted to replace him — went on to hire Mr. Samia and Mr. Stillwell in the plot to kill Ms. Lee, according to court papers. 
 
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 Some of the evidence corroborating Mr. Le Roux’s account came from secret video recordings made in a villa in Phuket where Mr. Hunter was living at the time of his arrest. In those recordings, Mr. Hunter can be heard telling the men he recruited in the plot against the D.E.A. agent that he had killed other people for Mr. Le Roux in the past — among them, a Filipino real-estate agent. 
 
 Mr. Hunter’s lawyer, Cesar de Castro, tried unsuccessfully to have the recordings thrown out, arguing they were obtained illegally and were not proof of a crime. 
 
 While the government has never detailed a specific motive for Ms. Lee’s murder, it has provided evidence that Mr. Hunter helped get Mr. Samia, 43, and Mr. Stillwell, 50, firearms and silencers, and later paid them $35,000 each for what court papers say he called an act of “ninja work.” 
 
 Prosecutors say the two men sent the payments back to their loved ones in North Carolina in illegal “structured transfers” intended to evade detection. They have also said that Mr. Stillwell kept a photo on his cellphone of “a wounded human head” taken around the time Ms. Lee was killed. 
 
 When Mr. Samia was arrested in North Carolina in 2013, he told two agents from the D.E.A. that he had worked with Mr. Hunter in Africa, mostly providing protection to a business owner who bought gold on the continent and shipped it to Hong Kong and Dubai, court papers say. Mr. Samia acknowledged that he had also traveled to the Philippines on Mr. Hunter’s orders, but only, he said, to perform “security work and advance work,” according to the court papers. 
 
 In his own interview with the D.E.A., however, Mr. Stillwell admitted that he and Mr. Samia had met Ms. Lee in the Philippines under the guise of asking her to take them on a tour of real-estate properties in the countryside. He said he was driving the van when Mr. Samia abruptly shot the woman in the face. According to court papers, Mr. Samia later disposed of her body, leaving it lying on a pile of garbage, Mr. Stillwell told the agents.
– Upon leaving the US Army, some seek a quiet life. That wasn't the case for Joseph Hunter, or two veterans he recruited for "ninja work," including hit jobs earning them $35,000 each, Assistant US Attorney Patrick Egan said Tuesday in opening statements at the men's trial in New York. Prosecutors say 52-year-old Hunter, a former sergeant with Special Forces training, was head of security for South African crime boss Paul Le Roux before recruiting Adam Samia, 43, and Carl David Stillwell, 50, per the AP. Samia, a former sniper, and Stillwell, an ex-weapons trainer, then traveled to the Philippines, where they allegedly set their sights on a real estate agent on Le Roux's "kill list." Pretending to be potential clients, the men drove Catherine Lee to the countryside outside Manila in 2012 before Samia shot her twice in the face, Egan says. The murder is just one element of a bizarre case covering drug trafficking, the sinking of a smuggling ship, and other events in the Philippines, Africa, Mexico, and the Seychelles, the New York Times reports. Le Roux, arrested by DEA agents in Liberia in 2012, is expected to testify against the alleged henchmen, all three of whom deny the murder charges. Le Roux previously helped the government set up a sting operation that saw Hunter admit to planning to kill a DEA agent and an informant on Le Roux's orders. Hunter was sentenced to 20 years in prison but will see his sentence grow if convicted of the latest charges. Defense attorneys say Le Roux isn't to be believed, per the AP. The trial, held in federal court in Manhattan as the investigation stemmed from alleged drug trafficking in New York, is expected to last a few weeks.