The Ice Man Read online

  Finished with James, Richard turned his wrath on Linda, drew out a knife.

  “If you weren’t the mother of my sons,” he said, “I’d kill you, but now I’m just going to teach you a lesson you will never forget.” He grabbed for her left breast. She tried to resist him. He slapped her unconscious, grabbed her left breast, and cut off its nipple. He then did the same thing to her other breast and left her there like that, storming out of the room like a hurricane.

  From that day on Richard had little to do with Linda. He’d see his boys now and then; that was it. James left town and never came back to Jersey City.

  Philip Marable was a captain in the Genovese crime family. He owned a popular Italian restaurant in Hoboken and lived in nearby Bloomfield. The name of the restaurant was Bella Luna. They served good southern Italian food at reasonable prices. There were yellow oilcloths on each table and candles in empty wine bottles covered with different-colored wax.

  Marable was a good dresser, always perfectly coiffed, handsome with thick black hair and dark menacing eyes…a dandy. He reached out to Richard and had him come to the restaurant, greeted him warmly, sat him down, insisted he eat a good meal. Richard kept wondering what he wanted. After they finished eating and had anisette-infused espresso, Marable said, “You know George West, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Richard said.

  “We have a problem with this guy. He’s been holding up my runners”—people who collect bets on the numbers racket—“and I don’t want him around no more,” Marable explained.

  “Could be arranged,” Richard said.

  “Make sure a message is sent—understand—that this kind’a shit can’t be goin’ on, okay?”

  “I understand,” Richard said, pleased, seeing his career horizons broadening.

  With that Marable adroitly slipped a white envelope across the table, as if it were a practiced trick. The envelope was filled with cash. Richard pocketed it. Dinner was over. Richard knew that Marable’s giving him a piece of work was a good opportunity, and Richard immediately went looking for George West. He searched high and low for West but couldn’t find him. He staked out his house, bars he frequented, kept missing him. But Richard was determined to fill the contract quickly and successfully, and he kept looking for West, like a shark following the scent of blood. Under the front seat of his car Richard had a cut-down .22 Magnum rifle with a silencer and a thirty-clip magazine. It was a vicious little weapon, an assassin’s tool, easy to carry, easy to conceal—deadly. Richard had an unlimited, convenient supply of weapons. He knew a guy named Robert, known as “Motorboat” because his ears protruded excessively, who sold all kinds of guns out of the trunk of his car, new guns still in boxes. Richard never killed two people with the same weapon. As soon as he used one in a killing, he got rid of it. This habit would serve him well for many years to come, for it kept his activities off police radar. He also purposely shot people to death with two different-caliber weapons, so it would appear as if there were two shooters. Motorboat the gun salesman had a big old Lincoln Continental with a huge trunk filled with handguns, rifles, and silencers. He was a tall, skinny guy with thick rose-colored glasses. He was also a mechanic and made suppressors for nearly all the guns he sold. When in need, all Richard had to do was call Motorboat, and he’d come around with his wide-ass Lincoln. Richard even bought hand grenades from Motorboat. The cut-down .22 he was going to use on George West he’d gotten from Motorboat.

  For nine days Richard couldn’t find West, no matter how hard he searched for him, yet he knew West was in town because people saw him. It was the end of April 1958 now and it rained just about every day.

  By happenstance as Richard was driving away from a bar in Bayonne where he’d picked up money for Carmine Genovese, he passed an old-fashioned silver boxcar diner a little way down the road, and George West was sitting there plain as day eating a sandwich. Not believing this bit of luck, Richard nearly hit the car in front of him, he was staring at West so hard. He made a U-turn and pulled into a parking lot next to the diner, found West’s car, and positioned his own car so he’d have a clear shot. It was raining hard. Richard liked to kill in the rain. There were fewer people about. Everyone was in a hurry, not paying attention to anything but where he was going.

  Soon West left the diner and made his way to his car, using a toothpick as he went. Richard calmly took a bead on him, pulled the trigger of the semiauto .22, and in two seconds shot West numerous times. Because of the silencer the gun made only a soft popping sound, like a ladyfinger firecracker going off, Richard explained. Wanting to be sure West was dead, Richard calmly got out of his car and walked over to West. No one noticed Richard. No one cared. West was still alive. Blood was squirting from a dime-sized bullet hole in his neck. Richard made sure he was unobserved and put two slugs in West’s head, walked back to his car and returned to Jersey City. He would’ve liked to torture West a bit, that had been the directive, but circumstances hadn’t permitted such a luxury. It had taken him nine days to find West, and he hadn’t wanted to give him a chance to get away. Richard did not tell Marable of the hit, how it had happened; he’d find out soon enough, Richard knew; indeed, it was bad form to talk about a murder after it was ordered and went down.

  Marable liked what Richard had done and gave him several more contracts over the next year. One was a man who owed Marable over fifty thousand dollars from gambling debts but refused to pay, was bragging to people all over Jersey that he wasn’t going to pay, that he wasn’t afraid of Marable—“Fuck him!” Richard gave this guy a flat, and as he was changing the tire, Richard crept up on him and struck him with an L-shaped tire iron in the head so hard he actually opened his skull up and the mark’s brain splashed all over the car and on Richard’s trousers. Bummer.

  Richard soon began to carry a change of clothes with him all the time because murdering people, he came to know, could be a messy business. The next hit for Philip Marable was a man who owned a boat in Edgewater. Richard didn’t know why the guy had to die; he didn’t care; that was not his business. However, he had known the mark for a few years and didn’t like anything about him, thought of him as a loudmouth braggart. On the evening Richard went to see him it was the middle of July, a hot, humid night. The boat was moored at a quiet marina, and Richard parked in the dirt lot there, found the boat in a slip at the end of the dock, a small blue-and-white cabin cruiser. It was 11:00 P.M. Richard could see inside the little portal windows of the boat, and there was the mark, having sex with a young woman, not his wife, Richard knew. He could easily have sneaked up on them, but he did not want to hurt the girl, so he went back to his car and waited for the mark to finish. He sat there for three hours, thinking, You better enjoy it because it’s the last piece of ass you’ll ever have.

  By 2:00 A.M. Richard was beginning to think she’d sleep there, but at 2:30 she walked off the boat and got into a red car, and off she went. Immediately, Richard got out of his car and walked to the boat, a .38 with a suppressor he had bought from Motorboat in his pocket. Catlike, silently, as deadly as a puff of cyanide gas, Richard stepped onto the boat, walked to the cabin and inside, the gun in his hand. When the mark saw him, big and mean and deadly serious, he was so stunned he nearly fell over.

  “What da fuck?” he demanded.

  “You’ve made some enemies,” Richard said. “How do you want it, quick or slow?” he asked, subtly tormenting the mark.

  “Please, man, I got kids, a wife—”

  “That your wife that just left?” Richard asked.

  “No, my gomatta. Please, Rich, I got money, I’ll give it all to you, please, Richie, please…you know me, I—”

  “My friend,” Richard calmly told him, “when you see me it’s the end of the line. I’m the grim reaper, my friend,” he said, a nasty, sardonic smile playing on his stone-cold face.

  “Please, no, please,” the mark begged, now getting down on his knees, his hands in a twisted knot as if he were fervently praying.

&n
bsp; “I’ll do you a favor,” Richard said.

  “What?”

  “I’ll kill you quickly.” And with that Richard shot him in the forehead, just above the ridge of his nose. A finger of blood came squirting out of the sudden hole. Richard waited for the blood to stop, for his heart to cease. When that happened, he dragged the mark, careful not to step in the blood, onto the deck and threw him in the water, cursing him silently. He then walked back to his car.

  Off in the distance, out at sea, a lightning storm started up and for a while Richard sat in his car and watched giant lightning bolts dance madly across an ominous velvet black sky, knowing fish and crabs would eat the mark, piece by piece.

  He was lucky I didn’t torture him. I was in…a good mood, I guess, he thought.

  Tough and Rough and Ready to Go

  It was 1959. Richard was twenty-four years old and had acquired a serious drinking problem; he often got drunk, became nasty and belligerent—just like his father—and inevitably got into fights, which all too often ended in a spur-of-the-moment murder.

  He was in a bar called the Pelican Lounge in Union City, drinking boilermakers—hard whiskey followed by beer chasers. He had words with another man at the bar, and the guy hauled off and slugged Richard. Before Richard could do anything though, the bartender, a guy Richard knew, asked him to “take it outside.”

  “Come on,” Richard encouraged the man. As they made their way onto the sidewalk, Richard took hold of his hunting knife, secreted in his coat pocket, and just when they reached the sidewalk, Richard turned quickly, and in one swift movement, like the strike of a rattlesnake, brought up the blade, and stuck it directly into the man’s throat, at an upward angle, the blade immediately entering his brain.

  Dead, he hit the ground.

  Calmly, Richard walked off. When the police came around asking questions, no one knew anything.

  Richard was in the Orchid Bar in Union City, drunk and a bit rowdy. A huge, burly bouncer made him leave, pushed him outside, which Richard accepted, but the bouncer kicked him in the ass as he went; this outraged Richard. Knowing, however, he was too drunk to defend himself properly, he vowed to return. The bouncer spat at him—his second mistake. Richard didn’t like bouncers. Most of them, he felt, were bullies: Richard despised bullies. Richard was, in fact, a slayer of bullies.

  Two days later Richard was back, sober, deadly—murder on his mind. He waited in his car for the bar to close, the bouncer to leave, which he did. Richard stepped from his car, carrying a hammer. He followed the bouncer, who got into his car and started it up. Richard approached. “Hey, big guy, remember me?” he asked.

  “What da fuck you want?” snarled the bouncer.

  In the bat of an eye Richard swung the hammer and struck him in the side of the head so hard that the hammer entered his skull. Richard hit him again, again, and again. When he finished, the bouncer was dead—destroyed, unrecognizable. Now Richard spat on him and walked away.

  No matter how much money Richard made, he was often broke, for he was a chronic degenerate gambler and most often lost. He also tended to gamble when he was drinking, which only compounded his losing and his problems….

  He wasn’t happy with his life, where it was going: essentially, Richard had come to hate the world and most everyone in it. He viewed the world as a mean, hostile jungle crowded with dangerous creatures, a dog-eat-dog place filled with brutal iniquities. He did, however, realize that his drinking and gambling were becoming a problem, though he didn’t know how to stop either one. In the circles Richard was moving in, everyone drank and everyone gambled, everyone hustled, everyone lied and cheat and stole. He trusted no one; at the drop of a hat he’d kill. For him it was a simple equation: Kill or be killed—eat or be eaten.

  Unsettling rumors about Richard’s younger brother Joseph were circulating. Richard kept hearing these rumors—that Joseph was taking drugs, that Joseph was gay—and became disturbed. Richard viewed drugs as a one-way trip to nowhere, an early grave.

  Richard heard that Joseph was hanging out in a gay bar called Another Way in Guttenberg, New Jersey.

  How could that be? he wondered: he saw Joseph with girls on numerous occasions. The thought of this, that his brother was gay, a fag, was for him unsettling. Not believing such a thing, wanting to see it with his own eyes, Richard went to the bar on a Friday night. The place was crowded with men and boys who openly showed affection to one another, and there was Joseph, kissing a man dressed as a woman. Richard’s face reddened at such a sight. He ordered a beer with no glass, not even wanting to drink from a glass in that place. Back then, Richard would later say, there was a big stigma associated with, you know, being homosexual, and I wasn’t at all at ease in this joint, where men were kissing and holding hands right out in the open. Probably my own shortcoming, but I couldn’t help it; I didn’t know any better. I mean, I know people don’t really have much say over that, their sexuality…but, still.

  When Richard looked up, his brother and his friend were suddenly gone. Where had he disappeared to so quickly? Richard looked all over the place but couldn’t find Joseph. He wanted to talk with him, tell him he was doing the wrong thing. He went to the bathroom and saw under the toilet stall door that two people were inside. He heard his brother’s voice. His stomach turned at the thought of what he was doing. A strange kind of rage came welling inside him. He kicked open the locked door and there was his brother, performing fellatio on the other guy—an infamy right there before his eyes.

  Shocked, Joseph stood. Before he could say anything, Richard struck him and knocked him down to the floor, out cold. He also hit the transvestite and knocked him out, too. Oh, how he wanted to commit more violence, break bones, draw blood, but instead Richard turned and left, his mind reeling with the implications, enraged.

  Like some kind of wounded animal, he went back to Hoboken, to the Ringside Inn, in a foul mood. He walked up to the bar and began drinking. He had a rule of never getting drunk here. This was his home base, his regular hangout, and he was afraid he’d hurt someone—maybe kill someone—and not be able to come back, as had happened in numerous drinking establishments.

  The Ringside Inn was owned by a cantankerous, tough woman, ugly as sin, says Richard. Her name was Sylvia and she looked like a chimpanzee who’d been struck with an ugly stick in the face a few times. One eye was bigger than the other; her nose was flat like a pancake with two holes—her nostrils; her face was framed by wirelike tendrils of frizzy bleach blond hair. Sylvia liked Richard because he was handsome and he played high-stakes pool games in her place that brought in business. Men—and some women—came from all over the East Coast to play pool with Richard for as much as two hundred dollars a ball.

  Rather than get into trouble in here, Richard left and found his way to Manhattan’s West Side, where he murdered a man for asking him for a light with a belligerent tone.

  After the incident in the gay bar, Richard and Joseph did not talk again for several years.

  Richard had a long-running streak of bad luck; he lost most of the pool games he was in; he lost at all kinds of bets he made, on football or baseball, on what roach would climb up on the wall of Sylvia’s place first. And he kept drinking more and more.

  Angry, Richard made more trips to New York, back to Manhattan’s West Side, where he expressed his rage, where he continued to kill people to vent his hatred for the world. When asked recently how many men he killed on Manhattan’s far West Side, Richard said, deadpan, All the fingers on both your hands five times.

  I swear if someone just looked at me the wrong way, I killed ’im, he explained.

  And still the NYPD did little to find out who was committing all these murders under the rusting, noisy, antiquated West Side Highway. Because Richard killed in dark shadows in so many different ways, with different-caliber guns, clubs, bricks and bats, knives and rope and ice picks, the NYPD never thought it was one man; that Richard Kuklinski of Jersey City had created his own personal hunting grou
nd; that he was stalking and killing human beings as if the West Side were his private hunting reserve. Richard was, of course, killing purposely in many different ways, knowing that would confuse and misdirect the police, and he was right.

  Dead right.

  Spurred on by the inner demons that plagued him, the growing, raging psychosis inside him, Richard was hitting bottom. He kept hoping a nice score would come his way, a profitable murder contract, a lucrative hijacking, but business was slow.

  Carmine Genovese had been murdered, shot in the head as he was cooking in his kitchen: another unsolved mob hit. Richard had nothing to do with it. He liked Carmine, as much as he could care for anyone. He did not go to Carmine’s funeral. He knew the cops would have it staked out, so he stayed away.

  Life, for Richard, held little promise….

  A friend of Richard’s, a guy known as Tony Pro who ran Local 560 of the Teamsters union, managed to get Richard a plum job at the Swiftline Trucking Company in North Bergen. The money was good, the work not that difficult. But still Richard didn’t like it. He hated it, in fact. It was a straight job, a thing he always wanted to avoid. He was a player, a hustler, an assassin. What the fuck was he doing here? He resigned himself, however, to keep the job and keep his eye out for a good load to steal—televisions, jeans, anything he could sell quickly and turn into cash, which, no doubt, he would only gamble away. His plan was to turn this straight job into a way he could make a score by setting up specific trucks to be hijacked.

  It was the spring of 1961. Richard Kuklinski was twenty-six years old and going nowhere fast. He had, by his own account, killed more than sixty-five men.