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Richard Kuklinski

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Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski
Police mugshot of Richard Kuklinski, four years before his final arrest
StatusDeceased
OccupationContract killer
SpouseBarbara Kuklinski (divorced)
Criminal chargeMurder (5 counts)
PenaltyLife imprisonment from 1988

Richard "The Iceman" Kuklinski (April 11, 1935March 5, 2006) was a convicted murderer and notorious contract killer. He worked for several Italian-American crime families, and claimed to have murdered over 200 men over a career that lasted 30 years; he killed his first victim at age 13.[1] He was the older brother of the convicted rapist and murderer Joseph Kuklinski.

Early Life

Richard Leonard Kuklinski was born in the projects in Jersey City, New Jersey to Stanley and Anna Kuklinski. Stanley was a severely abusive alcoholic who beat his wife and children. Anna was also abusive to her children, sometimes beating them with broom handles.

In 1940, Stanley's beatings resulted in the death of Kuklinski's old brother, Florian. Stanley and Anna hid the cause of the child's death from the authorities, saying he had fallen down a flight of steps.

By the age of 10, Richard Kuklinski was filled with rage and began acting out. For fun he would torture animals and by the age of 14, he had committed his first murder.

Taking a steel clothing rod from his closet, he ambushed Charlie Lane, a local bully and leader of a small gang who had picked on him. Unintentionally he beat Lane to death. Kuklinski felt remorse for Lane's death for a brief period, but then saw it as a way to feel powerful and in control. He then went on and nearly beat to death the remaining six gang members.

By his early twenties Kuklinski had earned the reputation as being an explosive tough street hustler who would beat or kill those who he didn't like or who offended him. According to Kuklinski it was during this time that his association with Roy DeMeo, a member of the Gambino Crime Family, was established.

Association with the Gambinos and Roy DeMeo

Association with the Gambino crime family came through his relationship with the mobster Roy DeMeo. This relationship started because Kuklinski owed an associate of DeMeo's a lot of money, so DeMeo was sent to 'talk' with him. He and his gang pistol whipped Kuklinski. After he paid back the money he owed, he began staging robberies and other assignments for the family, one of which was pirating pornographic tapes.

According to Kuklinski, one day, DeMeo took Kuklinski out in his car and they parked on a city street. DeMeo then selected an apparently random target, a man out walking his dog. He then told Kuklinski to kill him. Without questioning the order, 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.

Over the next 30 years, according to Kuklinski, he killed numerous people, either by gun, strangulation, knife, or poison. The exact number has never been settled upon by authorities, and Kuklinski himself at various times claimed to have killed between 100 and 130 individuals. 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, 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 left bodies sitting on park benches, thrown bodies down "bottomless pits" and fed still-alive victims to giant rats in Pennsylvania.

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

According to Kuklinski, at the same time he was allegedly a career hit man, he met and married Barbara Pedrici, and later fathered two daughters and a son. His family and neighbors were never aware of his activities, instead believing that he was a successful businessman. Sometimes he would get up and leave the house at any time of the day or night to do a job, even if it was in the middle of dinner.

Initially nicknamed "The Polack" by his Italian associates because of his Polish heritage, Kuklinski earned the nickname "Iceman" following his experiments with 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.

Kuklinski's method was uncovered by the authorities when he failed to let one of his victims properly thaw before disposing of the body on a warm summer's night, and the coroner found chunks of ice in the victim's heart.[2]

State and federal manhunt

When the authorities finally caught up with Kuklinski in 1986, they based their case almost entirely on the testimony of an undercover agent. New Jersey State Police detective Pat Kane started the case six years prior to the arrest and the investigation involved a joint operation with the New Jersey Attorney General's office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Special Agent Dominick Polifrone had undercover experience specializing in Mafia cases. The New Jersey State Police and the Bureau began a joint operation. Detective Kane recruited Phil Solimene, a close friend of Kuklinski, who introduced undercover agent Polifrone to the killer.[3] The Bureau agent had acted like he wanted to hire Kuklinski for a hit, and recorded him speaking in detail about how he would do it. When state police and federal agents went to arrest Kuklinski they blocked off his street, and it took multiple officers to bring him down. In the process of doing so Mrs. Kuklinski was also arrested and charged with gun possession because the car was in fact registered under her name. When Mrs. Kuklinski was arrested, a police officer put his boot on her back while detaining her. This enraged Kuklinski, and that is one of the reasons why they needed multiple officers to bring him down.

Incarceration and Death

During his incarceration, Kuklinski granted interviews to prosecutors, psychiatrists, criminologists, writers, and television producers about his criminal career, upbringing, and personal life. Two documentaries, featuring interviews of Kuklinski by Dr. Park Dietz (best-known for his interviews with and analysis of Jeffrey Dahmer) aired on HBO after interviews in 1991 and 2001. Philip Carlo also wrote a book in 2006, entitled The Ice Man.

In one interview, Kuklinski claimed that he would never kill a child and "most likely wouldn't kill a woman". He also confessed that once he had wanted to use a crossbow to carry out a hit but did not want to use the method without having "tested" it first. While driving his car, he picked a man at random to stop and ask for directions. Kuklinski told the HBO interviewer that when the man bent forward, he shot him in the forehead with the crossbow and stated "it went half-way into his head".

He also claimed that he once kidnapped one of his victims, and rather than conventionally murder him, bound his hands and feet with tape. He then left the man in a "cave" in the "wilderness" where he was eaten alive by rats that were attracted by the man's cries. Kuklinski claimed he filmed the man’s death as proof to the buyer that the man suffered before he died.

In one interview, Kuklinski confessed that he only regretted one murder, which he deemed particularly cruel. As he was about to kill a man, the man began praying to God for his life. Kuklinski told him that he would give God 30 minutes to save him, but once the time was up, he would be killed. Forcing the man to wait 30 minutes for his demise struck Kuklinski as his most sadistic murder of all. (Watch the video of Kuklinksi discussing this incident.)

Kuklinski died at the age of 70 at 1:15 a.m. on March 5, 2006. He was in a secure wing at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey at the time, although the timing of his death has been labeled suspicious; Kuklinski was scheduled to testify that former Gambino crime family underboss Sammy Gravano had ordered him to murder New York Police Department Detective Peter Calabro. Kuklinski had admitted to murdering Calabro with a shotgun on the night of March 14, 1980. He denied knowing that Calabro was a police officer, but said he would have murdered him regardless.[4] At the time, Gravano was already incarcerated for an unrelated charge, serving a 19-year prison sentence for running an ecstasy ring in Arizona. Kuklinski also stated to family members that he thought "they" were poisoning him. A few days after Kuklinski's death, prosecutors dropped all charges against Gravano, saying that without Kuklinski's testimony there was insufficient evidence to continue. At the request of Kuklinski's family, forensic pathologist Michael Baden examined the results of Kuklinski's autopsy to determine if there was evidence of poisoning. Baden's conclusion was that the death was of natural causes.

Mickey Rourke has announced that he will star and co-produce a feature film based on Philip Carlo's book on the Iceman.

References

  1. ^ Carlo, Philip The Ice Man, Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer, p. 26, paragraph 1, Line 8, and rear cover, HarperCollinsPublishers, 2006, Sydney ISBN 978-0-7322-8496-1 ISBN 0-7322-8496-1
  2. ^ Zugibe, F.T, & Costello, J.F. (1993): “The Iceman Murder” - One of a Series of Contract Murders. Journal of Forensic Sciences, 38:1404-1408.
  3. ^ Carlo, Philip The Ice Man, p. 299, St. Martin's Griffin, 2006, New York ISBN 978-0-312-37465-5 ISBN 0-312-37465-8
  4. ^ Carlo, Philip The Ice Man. p. 257, St. Martin's Griffin, 2006