Richard Kuklinski

Richard Kuklinski
Police mug shot of Richard Kuklinski in 1982 at the age of 47, four years before his final arrest
Born	Richard Leonard Kuklinski[1] (1935-04-11)April 11, 1935 Jersey City, New Jersey, United States
Died	March 5, 2006(2006-03-05) (aged 70) Trenton, New Jersey, United States
Cause of death	Natural causes
Other names	The Iceman, Big Rich[2]
Occupation	Contract killer
Criminal charge	Murder (5 counts)
Criminal penalty	2 life sentences
Criminal status	Deceased
Spouse(s)	Barbara Kuklinski (divorced)
Children	2 daughters, 1 son
Conviction(s)	5 murders

Richard Leonard Kuklinski (April 11, 1935 – March 5, 2006) was an American contract killer who was convicted for five murders.

Kuklinski was given the nickname "Iceman" for his method of freezing a victim to mask the time of death. During his criminal career, fellow mobsters called Kuklinski "the one-man army" or "the devil himself"^[3] due to his fearsome reputation and imposing physique of 6'5" (196 cm) and 270 pounds (122 kg). Kuklinski lived with his wife and children in the suburb of Dumont, New Jersey. His family was apparently unaware of Kuklinski's double life and crimes.^[4] A New Jersey Police task force was formed after Kuklinski was suspected of two murders. An eighteen month long undercover investigation led to his arrest in 1986. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1988.

By the early to mid-1980s, Kuklinski was involved in narcotics, pornography, arms dealing, money laundering, hijacking and contract killing on a global basis. While his range of criminal activities expanded, he began to make mistakes. Although Kuklinski is claimed to have killed anyone who could testify against him, he got sloppy about disposing of his victims. Law enforcement began to suspect Kuklinski and started an investigation, gathering evidence about the various crimes he had committed.^[5]

Kuklinski was a contract killer for Newark's DeCavalcante crime family and New York City's Five Families of the American Mafia. After his murder convictions, Kuklinski took part in a number of interviews during which he claimed to have murdered from over 100^[6] to 250 men between 1948 and 1986, though his recollection of events sometimes varied. Though some have expressed skepticism about the extent of Kuklinski's alleged murders, police are confident in their belief that he was a serial killer who killed at least several dozen people both at the behest of organized crime bosses and on his own initiative.^[3] Many of Kuklinski's claims were substantiated by author Philip Carlo in over 240 hours of interviews and via the dozens of cases Kuklinski helped New Jersey police clear after his incarceration.

Three documentaries, two biographies and a feature film have been produced on Kuklinski based on his interviews and the results of the task force that brought Kuklinski to justice.

Personal life

Early life

Kuklinski was born in the family apartment on 4th Street in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Stanley Kuklinski, a Polish immigrant from Karwacz, Masovian Voivodeship^[7] and a brakeman on the railroad, and Anna McNally,^[8] a daughter of Catholic Irish immigrants from Dublin, who worked in a meat-packing plant during Richard's childhood.^[9]

Richard was constantly abused by his parents, especially by his father, who repeatedly beat him.^[10] His mother also beat him with broom handles (sometimes breaking the handle) and other household objects. She believed that stern discipline should be accompanied by a strict religious upbringing, and raised her son in the Catholic Church, where he became an altar boy.^[9] The New York Times reports that Kuklinski killed cats while a boy.^[11]

Richard had three siblings. His older brother Florian died of injuries suffered from abuse by his father.^[12] The Kuklinski family lied to the police, saying that he had fallen down a flight of steps.^[12] He had a younger sister, Roberta, and a younger brother, Joseph (1944–2003), who was convicted of raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl.^[13][14] When asked about his brother Joseph's crimes, Richard replied: "We come from the same father."^[15]

Marriage and Children

Before he became a contract killer, Kuklinski worked in a warehouse in New Jersey, and met and married Barbara Pedrici. She claimed in an interview on The Biography Channel show Mobsters that once, during an argument in a car, she told Richard she did not want to stay in the car, felt a pain in her neck and when she touched it with her hand she felt and saw blood. Kuklinski told her, "that is an object lesson, never leave me". She claimed he stabbed her.

Kuklinski and his wife had two daughters and a son. Barbara described his behavior as alternating between "good Richie" and "bad Richie."^[3] Good Richie was a hard-working provider for his family's needs, and an affectionate father and husband who enjoyed time with his family. In contrast, Bad Richie would appear at irregular intervals: sometimes one day after another, other times not appearing for months. Bad Richie was prone to unpredictable fits of rage and violence; he was physically abusive mainly to his wife and emotionally abusive towards his children.

His family and neighbors were never aware of his activities, instead believing that he was a successful businessman. Barbara suspected that Kuklinski was at least occasionally involved in crime due in part to his possession of large amounts of cash, but she never expressed these worries to him.^[3]

Authorities described him as unusual amongst both mobsters and killers.^[3] Apart from his violent temper, he had none of the vices common among criminals; he was not an abuser of drugs or alcohol, he was not a womanizer, he did not gamble. His motives for murder were also unusual, not fitting neatly into standard serial killer categories of lust-murder, revenge-murder, or "angels of mercy", etc.

Criminal career

Kuklinski claimed that he first killed in adolescence, allegedly using a closet clothes-hanging rod to bludgeon a neighborhood boy who had bullied and teased him.^[3]

By the mid-1950s, Kuklinski had earned a reputation as an explosive pool shark who would beat or kill those who annoyed him. Eventually, Kuklinski claimed his criminal activity brought him to the attention of Newark's DeCavalcante crime family, who hired him for his first gangland slayings.

Beginning in the spring of 1954, Kuklinski began prowling Hell's Kitchen searching for victims. According to author Philip Carlo,

He came to Manhattan numerous times over the ensuing weeks and months and killed people, always men, never a female, he says, always someone who rubbed him the wrong way, for some imagined or extremely slight reason. He shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned men to death. He left some where they dropped. He dumped some into the nearby Hudson River. Murder, for Richard, became sport. The New York police came to believe that the bums were attacking and killing one another, never suspecting that a full-fledged serial killer from Jersey City was coming over to Manhattan's West Side for the purpose of killing people, to practice and perfect murder. Richard made the West Side of Manhattan a kind of lab for murder, a school, he says.^[16]

Kuklinski later recalled,

By now you know what I liked most was the hunt, the challenge of what the thing was. The killing for me was secondary. I got no rise as such out of it…for the most part. But the figuring it out, the challenge—the stalking and doing it right, successfully—that excited me a lot. The greater the odds against me, the more juice I got out of it.^[17]

According to Carlo,

Richard was bipolar and should have been taking medication to stabilise his behavior, his sudden highs and lows, but going to see a psychiatrist was out of the question. He'd be admitting something was wrong with him, and he'd never do that.^[17]

In contrast to Carlo's opinion, however, Kuklinski was interviewed by psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz in 2002 at Trenton State Prison. Kuklinski and Dietz spoke at length, in a videotaped interview, about Kuklinski's upbringing, family life, crimes, and other events in his past. Kuklinski told the doctor that he wanted to know what events or mental irregularities made him able to perform the acts of which he was accused. After a lengthy discussion, the doctor cited nature vs. nurture, stating that his professional opinion was that both played a part in Kuklinski's development into a hitman who could be functional in other aspects of life. The doctor elaborated that Kuklinski likely inherited antisocial personality disorder from his abusive parents and that the abuse he claims to have suffered from his father reinforced violence, activities requiring a lack of conscience, and a lack of love. Dietz also stated that Kuklinski suffered from paranoid personality disorder, which caused him to kill people for minor slights or criticisms, often long after they occurred.^[18]

Gambinos and Roy DeMeo

Kuklinski became associated with the Gambino crime family through his relationship with the soldato Roy DeMeo, which started because of a debt Kuklinski owed to a DeMeo crew member. DeMeo and several members of his crew were sent to intimidate Kuklinski and proceeded to beat and pistol whip him. After Kuklinski repaid his debt, he continued working with the DeMeo gang, earning their respect for continually earning cash and gradually drifting into other criminal activities.^[3]

After Kuklinski paid back the money he owed, he began staging robberies and other assignments for DeMeo and the Gambino family, one of which was making unauthorized copies of pornographic tapes. In 2011, former Gambino associate Greg Bucceroni alleged that Kuklinski often traveled between Philadelphia, New Jersey and NYC handling a variety of concerns involving the Gambino crime family's pornography establishments including trafficking illegal pornography, debt collection and murder for hire on behalf of Robert "DB" DiBernardo and Roy DeMeo.

According to Kuklinski, DeMeo took him out in his car one day and they parked on a city street. DeMeo then selected a random target, a man walking his dog. He then ordered Kuklinski to kill him. Without hesitating, Kuklinski got out, walked towards the man and shot him in the back of the head as he passed by. From then on, Kuklinski was DeMeo's favorite enforcer.^[15]

According to Kuklinski, he killed numerous people over the next 30 years. Lack of attention from law enforcement was partly due to Kuklinski's ever-changing methods: he used guns, knives, explosives, tire irons, fire, poison, asphyxiation, and even bare-handed beatings, "just for the exercise". The exact number has never been settled upon by authorities, and Kuklinski himself at various times claimed to have killed more than 200 people.^[6] He favored the use of cyanide, since it killed quickly and was hard to detect in a toxicology test. He would variously administer it by injection, by putting it on a person's food, by aerosol spray, or by simply spilling it on the victim's skin. One of his favorite methods of disposing of a body was to place it in a 55-gallon oil drum. His other disposal methods included dismemberment, burial, or placing the body in the trunk of a car and having it crushed in a junkyard. He also claimed to have fed living human beings to huge cave rats in Pennsylvania and recorded footage in order to collect torture contracts and for convenient disposal. Upon viewing one of these tapes Roy Demeo reportedly could not finish watching and said Kuklinski truly "had no soul".

Despite Kuklinski's claims that he was a frequent killer for DeMeo, none of DeMeo's crew members who later became witnesses for the government admitted that Kuklinski was involved in the murders they committed. He was only photographed on one occasion at the Gemini Lounge, having reportedly visited the club to purchase a handgun from the Brooklyn crew. Kuklinski claimed to have killed DeMeo, although available evidence and testimony implicated DeMeo associates Joseph Testa and Anthony Senter, as well as DeMeo's supervisor in the Gambino crime family, Anthony Gaggi.

Kuklinski earned the nickname "Iceman" because of his experiments in disguising the time of death of his victims by freezing their corpses in an industrial freezer. Later, he told author Philip Carlo that he got the idea from fellow hitman Robert Pronge, nicknamed "Mister Softee", who drove a Mister Softee truck to appear inconspicuous. Pronge taught Kuklinski the different methods of using cyanide to kill his victims. Kuklinski also claimed to have purchased remotely detonated hand grenades from Pronge. Pronge allegedly asked him to carry out a hit on Pronge's own wife and child. In 1984, Pronge was found shot to death in his truck.

In the book The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, Kuklinski claims to know the fate of Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa's body was placed in a drum and set on fire. He was allowed to burn for "a half hour or so" and then the drum was welded shut and buried in a junkyard. Later, when an accomplice started to talk to federal authorities, there was a fear that he would use the information to try to get out of trouble. The drum was dug up, placed in the trunk of a car and compacted to a 4 × 2 foot rectangular prism. It was sold, along with hundreds of other compacted cars, as scrap metal. It was shipped off to Japan to be used in making new cars.^[19]

Independent experimentation and decline

By the 1980s, after 25 years of working as a hitman for the mafia, Kuklinski started his own crime ring, and devised new ways to profit from killing people. The case of pharmacist Paul Hoffman was typical of Kuklinski's methodology. Hoffman hoped to make a large profit by illegally purchasing at a low cost large quantities of Tagamet, the most popular drug used to treat peptic ulcers at the time, to resell through his pharmacy.

On the afternoon of April 29, 1982, Hoffman met Kuklinski at a warehouse Kuklinski leased to buy the Tagamet for USD$25,000. After Hoffman gave him the money, Kuklinski told Hoffman that the business deal was a ruse. Kuklinski placed the barrel of his pistol under Hoffman's chin and pulled the trigger. The shot did not kill Hoffman so Kuklinski tried to shoot him again, but the gun jammed. Kuklinski then resorted to killing Hoffman by beating him to death with a tire iron. Kuklinski then placed Hoffman's corpse inside a fifty-gallon drum and brazenly left the drum on the sidewalk outside a motel behind a luncheonette named Harry's Corner. Kuklinski monitored the drum for some time, sitting in Harry's Corner every day to listen for talk amongst the patrons that would indicate the corpse's discovery. After the corpse remained there for what Kuklinski related as a long time, he noticed one day that the drum was no longer there, but could not discern any details about its fate from listening to Harry's patrons.^[5]

Murder of Gary Smith discovered

The first major mistake Kuklinski made was discovered on December 27, 1982, when the decomposing body of 37-year-old Gary Smith was discovered under the bed in Room 31 at the York Motel in North Bergen, New Jersey. Smith had been a frequent collaborator of Kuklinski's who often ran auto theft scams with him and another man, Daniel Deppner. Kuklinski and Deppner decided to kill Smith, which they did on December 23 by feeding him a cyanide-laced hamburger in their room at the York Motel. When Smith took longer to die from the cyanide than Kuklinski foresaw, Kuklinski grew impatient and had Deppner strangle Smith with a lamp cord. When Deppner's ex-wife, Barbara, failed to return with a car to remove the body, they placed Smith's body in between the mattress and box springs. Over the next four days, a number of patrons rented the room, and although they thought the smell in the room odd, most of them did not think to look under the bed.^[5][20] According to forensic pathologist Michael Baden, Smith's death would likely have been attributed to something non-homicidal in nature had Kuklinski relied solely on the cyanide; however, the ligature mark around Smith's neck created by his strangulation proved to investigators that he was murdered.^[5]

Daniel Deppner's murder

Daniel Deppner's body was found on May 14, 1983, when it was preyed on by a turkey vulture. A bicyclist riding down a secluded road in a wooded area of West Milford, New Jersey, spotted the bird and found the corpse. Kuklinski had put the body inside green garbage bags before dumping the body there.^[5] Investigators noted that the site of the body's discovery was just over three miles from a ranch where the Kuklinski family often went riding. Medical examiners listed Deppner's cause of death as "undetermined", although they noted pinkish spots on his skin. He was the third business associate of Kuklinski's to have been found dead.

Louis Masgay found in park

On September 25, 1983, Kuklinski made another significant mistake when Louis Masgay was found dead near a town park off Clausland Mountain Road in Orangetown, New York, with a bullet hole in his head. Kuklinski, as he had done many times before, attempted to disguise Masgay's time of death by storing his corpse in an industrial freezer for two years. This time Kuklinski did not allow the body to thaw completely before he dumped it. The Rockland County medical examiner found ice crystals inside Masgay's body on a warm September day. Had the body thawed completely before discovery, the medical examiner stated that he probably would have never noticed Kuklinski's trickery.^[3] This discovery helped authorities to figure out that Kuklinski used a freezer as part of his modus operandi and led them to give Kuklinski the nickname "Iceman".^[5][6]

Eventually five unsolved homicides, including the deaths of Hoffman, Smith, Deppner, Masgay, and George Malliband (found in Jersey City on February 5, 1980) were linked to Kuklinski because he had been the last person to see each of them alive.^[5]

State and federal manhunt

In 1985 a division of the New Jersey Criminal Justice Department created a task force composed of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, including New Jersey Attorney General's office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, dedicated to arresting and convicting Richard Kuklinski. The task force, nicknamed "Operation Iceman", based its case almost entirely on the testimony of undercover agent Dominick Polifrone and the evidence built by New Jersey State Police detective Pat Kane, who began the case against Kuklinski six years earlier.^[5][21]

Starting in 1985, Detective Kane and ATF Special Agent Dominick Polifrone worked with Phil Solimene, a close friend of Kuklinski, to get Polifrone close to Kuklinski. Polifrone posed to Kuklinski as a fellow hitman, Dominic Michael Provenzano.^[22] Polifrone told Kuklinski he wanted to hire him for a hit, and recorded Kuklinski speaking in detail about how he would do it.^[23] Kuklinski claims in the HBO interview that Solimene was the only friend he did not kill.

On December 17, 1986, it was arranged for Kuklinski to meet Polifrone to get cyanide for a planned murder, which was to be an attempt on a police detective working undercover. After being recorded by Polifrone, Kuklinski went for a walk by himself. He tested Polifrone's (purported) cyanide on a stray dog and saw it was not poison. Suspicious, Kuklinski decided not to go through with the planned murder and went home instead.^[24] He was arrested at a roadblock two hours later. A gun was found in the car, and his wife was charged with trying to prevent his arrest.

Prosecutors charged Kuklinski with five murder counts and six weapons violations, as well as attempted murder, robbery, and attempted robbery. Officials said Kuklinski had large sums of money in Swiss bank accounts and a reservation on a flight to that country.^[21] Kuklinski was held on a $2 million bail bond and made to surrender his passport.^[21][25] In March 1988, a jury found Kuklinski guilty of two murders, but found that the deaths were not proven to be by Kuklinski's own conduct, meaning he would not face the death penalty.^[26] In all, Kuklinski was convicted of five murders and sentenced to consecutive life sentences, making him ineligible for parole until age 110.^[4]

Statements made during interviews

During his incarceration, Kuklinski granted interviews to prosecutors, psychiatrists, criminologists, writers, and television producers about his criminal career, upbringing, and personal life. Three documentaries, the last featuring interviews of Kuklinski by forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, aired on HBO in 1992, 2001 and 2003. Writers Anthony Bruno, Michael Wells Jr. and Philip Carlo each wrote a biography of Kuklinski.

In one interview, Kuklinski claimed that he would never kill a child and "most likely wouldn't kill a woman". However, according to one of his daughters he once told her that he would have to kill her and her two siblings should he happen to beat her mother to death in a fit of rage.^[27] At the same time, his wife Barbara has stated that he never hurt the children.^[28] However, she says that he frequently beat her up, breaking her nose several times.^[29] According to the New York Times, Kuklinski tried to smother her with a pillow, pointed a gun at her and tried to run her over with a car.^[4]

Attesting to the randomness of his crimes and violence, Kuklinski confessed he wanted to use a crossbow to carry out a hit, but not without testing its lethality first. While driving his car he asked a stranger for directions and used the crossbow to shoot the man in the forehead. Kuklinski described that the arrow "went half-way into his head".^[15]

In a 1991 interview, Kuklinski recalled one of the few murders he later regretted committing:

It was a man and he was begging, and pleading, and praying, I guess. And he was 'Please, God'n all over the place. So I told him he could have a half an hour to pray to God and if God could come down and change the circumstances, he'd have that time. But God never showed up and he never changed the circumstances and that was that. It wasn't too nice. That's one thing, I shouldn't have done that one. I shouldn't have done it that way.^[5]

In 2003, Kuklinski pleaded guilty to the 1980 murder of New York Police Department Detective Peter Calabro. He received another sentence of 30 years.^[4] In the Calabro murder, in which Gambino crime family underboss Sammy "The Bull" Gravano was also charged, Kuklinski said he parked his van on the side of a narrow road, forcing other drivers to slow down to pass. He lay in a snowbank until Calabro came by at 2 a.m., then stepped out and shot him with a shotgun.^[30] He denied knowing that Calabro was a police officer, but said he more than likely would have murdered him anyway.^[31]

Death

In October 2005, after 17 years in prison, Kuklinski was diagnosed with a rare and incurable inflammation of the blood vessels and was transferred to a secure wing at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey. Although he had asked doctors to make sure they revived him if he flatlined, his wife had signed a “do not resuscitate” order. A week before his death, the hospital called Barbara to ask if she wished to rescind the instruction, but she declined.^[32] Kuklinski died at age 70 on March 5, 2006.^[4]

Film

Michael Shannon plays Kuklinski in the 2012 film The Iceman based on Anthony Bruno's book The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer.^[33] The film also stars Winona Ryder as Kuklinski's wife (renamed Deborah), Ray Liotta as Roy DeMeo, Stephen Dorff as Richard's younger brother Joey, and Chris Evans as Robert "Mr. Softee" (renamed "Mr. Freezy") Pronge.

Cultural references

The american death metal band Macabre release a song called The Iceman on their 2003 album Murder Metal. The song is about his double life, a family man and a hitman.

On The Sopranos episode, “A Hit is a Hit,” Tony Soprano is invited on a golf outing by his neighbor, where he is pestered for stories about life in the Mafia. Tony makes up a story about John Gotti outbidding him for a popular ice cream truck when the company went out of business.

See also

• The Iceman Confesses

References

Additional reading

• Carlo, Philip (2006). The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer. New York, New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-34928-8. 
• HBO documentary (1992), The Iceman Tapes: Conversations with a Killer.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Richard Kuklinski

• The Iceman Confesses: Secrets of a Mafia Hitman at the Internet Movie Database
• Entry on murderpedia.org
• Married to The Iceman