The Ice Man Read online

  The drive to Detroit took almost ten hours. Everyone but the driver slept most of the way. Richard did not drive. When they arrived in Detroit it was already mid-morning, a hot, humid day. Quiet and stoic and serious—few words said—they checked into a hotel, freshened up, had a light breakfast. They had walkie-talkies with them they would use in the taking of the mark. Richard would have preferred to do this alone, but he accepted the fact that it had to be this way. Murder, he knew, can be a very complicated, political business.

  A phone call came. They left and went to the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, a well-to-do suburb of Detroit. As they pulled into the restaurant, a man who looked vaguely familiar to Richard was standing there waiting for them. Tony P. got out of the car. The two shook hands and talked for a minute, and the mark got back into the car with Tony P. He sat up front. He didn’t seem too happy. They started out. Richard was going to use a knife in a special way. He was just waiting for the nod from Tony P. After they’d gone a few miles, Richard was given the signal. He first knocked the mark unconscious with the jawbreaker. So there would be little blood, less of a mess, Richard pulled out the hunting knife, leaned forward, grabbed the mark’s wide chin, and pulled him up so he’d have access to the lower back of the mark’s head. Now Richard positioned the knife just at the base of his skull, slanted it upward, and with his unusual strength he thrust the knife directly into the mark’s brain. The man shook violently, became still; his last breath came as a rattle. Because of the upward motion directly into the brain, and the fact that Richard left the knife in his skull, there was little bleeding. They soon pulled over at a rest stop, put the mark in a body bag in the trunk. Richard agreed to take the body back to New Jersey. He would have preferred to dump it here, but they wanted it back in Jersey. The others were going to take a bus. Richard dropped them off at a bus depot and headed for Jersey. Now that the job was successfully done, he was relaxed and sang along with the radio as he went.

  Back in New Jersey Richard went straight to a junkyard under the Pulaski Skyway in Kearny, just along the road to Newark. The junkyard was owned by a mob associate. Here the mark was placed into a black fifty-gallon drum. Gasoline was poured all over him. He was set on fire, and they let him burn for a half hour or so. The fetid stink of his burning flesh and organs and bones filled the air. The junkyard dog there was howling and salivating for some meat. They then sealed the drum carefully, welded it, and buried it there in the junkyard.

  The job, for now, was done. Richard was paid forty thousand dollars, a good score. Before he left the junkyard, he made sure to wipe away any fingerprints he may have left in the car; couldn’t be too cautious. Though none of the hit team except Tony P. knew who Richard was or where he lived, he knew who they all were. They only knew him as “the Big Guy.”

  Tired but pleased with how well the job had gone, Richard returned to Dumont, to his family. Dwayne had a new kite, and Richard showed him how to fly it. Barbara was in the pool with Chris and Merrick and some of their girlfriends. It was a very hot day and the cool pool was a welcome reprieve from the stifling heat. The family had a barbecue. Richard did all the cooking, gladly served up burgers and franks for the kids, steaks for the adults. “Well done or rare?” Richard always asked. He very much enjoyed doling out the meats the way people—even the kids—liked it. As the meat cooked he was reminded of the burning union guy.

  Later on one of the brothers, Sal, began talking to the feds, and, because he might try to use this murder to get out of trouble on an unrelated problem, the drum was quickly dug up and placed in the trunk of a car that was smashed down to a four-by-two-foot cube of metal in a giant car compressor. It, along with hundreds of other compacted cars, was then sold to the Japanese as scrap metal and shipped off to Japan to be used in the making of new automobiles that would compete with Detroit carmakers’ products.

  And that, according to Richard, is what happened to Teamsters Union boss Jimmy Hoffa.

  He’s part of a car somewhere in Japan right now, Richard recently confided, a slight smirk about his high-cheekboned face.

  The Big Guy

  Mob guys and their associates, allies, affiliates, and friends are, for the most part, a bitter, vengeful lot. They do not believe in letting bygones be bygones. Thus, Richard’s murder business flourished. The more he worked, the more successful his game, the more new contracts came rolling in from all over the country, then even overseas: in South America and Europe Richard murdered for profit.

  More often than not the job required a quick murder, nothing elaborate. But Richard was killing so many people, he inevitably received special requests, as he refers to them.

  A made man in New Jersey had a very lovely daughter, innocent and wide eyed, drop-dead gorgeous. She was nineteen. She started seeing an older guy, a particularly handsome fellow. The father tried to stop his daughter from seeing this older guy, an obvious playboy type with big white teeth and flashing dark eyes, an earring in his left ear, too good-looking for his own good.

  In frustration the father took the boyfriend to the side and politely asked, “What’re your intentions regarding my daughter?”

  “Intentions?” the playboy asked, perplexed. He had no idea the father was mobbed up.

  “Yeah, we’d like to know, me and her mother.”

  “Just to have some fun, you know.”

  “Fun?” the father asked.

  “Yeah, you know, fool around. Some fun!” the playboy volunteered, smiling his big toothy beguiling grin.

  The father, a Sicilian, turned beet red, though he didn’t say another word.

  Through some friends, this Sicilian father reached out to Richard, told him that he wanted the guy to disappear, but that first “he must suffer!”

  “My pleasure,” Richard said, and he meant it.

  Within two days Richard snatched the playboy and took him to the caves in Bucks County where he knew the rats lived. Richard had with him thin strips of rawhide. He wanted to try out something new. He stripped the playboy, wet the rawhide strips, wrapped one around his testicles, one around each arm, one around his forehead. It was a mild September day. As the rawhide grew taut, Richard watched the playboy suffering, amused, detached, telling the playboy why this was happening. Richard took some Polaroid photos of the playboy’s distress, his now tomato red balls. He stayed there for some time with the playboy, watching him suffer, hearing his pleas. Unfazed, Richard studied the man’s suffering as a scientist doing research would examine infectious bacteria under a microscope. For Richard this was a learning experience, seeing how the rawhide strips cut into his flesh…how the rats began to gather near the mark. So many rats appeared that Richard was finally forced to leave, though he took more Polaroids of the playboy before he left.

  He returned two days later. There was nothing left of the man but some of his gnawed skeleton. The rats had even eaten the rawhide strips. The fetid smell of the rats and their grisly droppings filled the air. Richard threw the paltry remains down a mine shaft.

  When Richard showed the Sicilian father the Polaroids, he was quite pleased, had a smile from ear to ear, and with newfound respect for “the Big Guy” gave Richard an extra ten grand. Another happy customer.

  Richard took to wondering why seeing and doing such things—committing such barbarous acts—didn’t bother him in the least. He thought long and hard on this. It was troubling and, to some degree, disconcerting to him.

  Why, he wondered, could he be so cold, so indifferent to people’s suffering. It made him feel, for a while, that there was something wrong with him. He explained: Since I was a kid I always felt like an outsider, like I didn’t belong, and now, because of these things I did, I was really feeling that way again. But from another angle, for the most part, it didn’t bother me…I got used to it. But why—why, I wondered, am I like this? I mean so cold, so indifferent to people’s feelings. Their pain. Was I born like that, or was I made that way? Even my own family—how mean
I could be to them, the only people I truly ever cared for. I didn’t like that; I didn’t want to be that way, I mean to my family.

  I thought about going to see a psychiatrist, seeing if I could get, you know, some help, maybe some medication, but of course I couldn’t do that. I mean what would I say to a shrink: I torture and kill people for money and I like my work? I don’t think so.

  This “introspective Richard” was much in contrast to the stone-cold killer whose reputation as a homicide superstar was clearly established in mob circles across the country. Known as “the Big Guy,” Richard was becoming a much-sought-out killer. He was efficient and tight-lipped, and did not hang out with wiseguys. He was a true “family man” who happened to be a contract killer. For the longest time, this kept Richard off police and FBI radar. Very few people even knew his real name. He did not socialize with mob guys. He did not go to their weddings, funerals, or family functions.

  People, even Roy DeMeo, had only his beeper number. That was the only way he could be reached, and that’s the way he wanted it. He never brought any mob guys to his home or told them where he lived. He kept all that far away from his family.

  One of the few people that Richard had a personal relationship with was Phil Solimene over in Patterson. Richard considered Solimene a friend, didn’t have designs to kill him (rare for him), and did a lot of business with Solimene: sold him porn, bought and sold hijacked goods from him, murdered people Solimene set up in bogus business deals and rip-offs. Barbara and Richard even socialized with Solimene and his wife, Anne. It would be this one relationship—this one friendship—that would ultimately make Richard vulnerable. It was a chink in his carefully constructed and well-worn armor.

  The Achilles’ heel of his size 14 foot.

  Meanwhile, Roy DeMeo was out of control, a runaway train heading for disaster. He had taken to thinking of himself as invincible, above the law, that he could do anything when and how and where the fuck he pleased. DeMeo had turned the small apartment in the back of the Gemini Lounge into a virtual slaughterhouse. He and his crew of serial killers were murdering, cutting up, and dismembering scores of people; several a week; sometimes two a day. All these murders were going to Roy’s head. He began to think of himself as untouchable, a god among mortals. He had several NYPD detectives on his payroll and thus was given frequent information he was able to use to stay out of trouble, avoid arrest. One of these crooked cops was a beady-eyed detective out of the Brooklyn hot-car unit. His name was Peter Calabro. He had dark, receding hair, dark hooded eyes, full lips, and was in his midthirties, relatively young to be a detective.

  Peter Calabro was in deep with Roy DeMeo. When Calabro wanted to get rid of his estranged wife, Carmella, Roy did the job for him, had her abducted in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, drowned, and left in the ocean. But by chance her body was discovered floating near New Jersey’s Sandy Hook by the Coast Guard. Carmella’s mother, Antonia, was positive Calabro was responsible and told every cop who would listen to her that Peter Calabro killed her daughter, that he was a low-life murderer, “a scumbag,” she said. The case was even presented to a Brooklyn grand jury, but Calabro had an airtight alibi and there was insufficient evidence to indict. It couldn’t clearly be established if Carmella’s death was in fact a homicide or a suicide.

  Richard had nothing to do with the murder of Carmella Calabro, but DeMeo personally drowned her and left her body adrift. DeMeo, unlike Richard, had no qualms about killing women.

  This killing, DeMeo knew, would forever cement his relationship with Calabro, and because of it DeMeo had an everlasting inside track into most of the investigations into his exceedingly nefarious business dealings—particularly his booming, very lucrative stolen-car operation. DeMeo was like a greedy octopus—he had his tentacles in everything. He also paid Calabro handsomely for his assistance. One of the many “favors” Detective Calabro did for DeMeo—and others in the Gambino family—was to provide him with clean VIN numbers for stolen cars.

  Richard’s business with the very busy Roy DeMeo was twofold—murder and porn—and they were now both making money hand over fist. When DeMeo had a special “piece of work,” he called upon Richard, “the Big Guy.” Richard also became known as “the Polack.” He didn’t particularly like that name, though any name, he knew, was better than his real name. It’s no accident all mob guys have nicknames.

  With Richard’s deadly assistance, DeMeo became the well-oiled killing apparatus for the Gambino family, and because DeMeo was not made yet, he was filling murder contracts for almost anyone who wanted someone dead.

  Nino Gaggi, Roy’s rabbi, kept telling Roy to cool it, to be more discreet, to stop killing so many people, but the huge amounts of cash DeMeo was giving Gaggi put to rest most of Gaggi’s concerns. Gaggi was absolutely money hungry, greedy to a fault, and Roy DeMeo regularly gave him brown paper bags filled with cash; and during the holidays DeMeo still showed up at the Gaggi home with truckloads (literally) of presents, expensive jewelry for Nino’s wife, Rose, toys for all the kids. A kind of Italian Santa Claus from hell.

  Over the ensuing months after the Hoffa hit, Richard met with DeMeo a dozen times at the diner near the Tappan Zee Bridge, and every contract DeMeo gave Richard, Richard carried out successfully, without problem or repercussion, complication or mishap.

  It was during this time that Richard brought more and more marks to the caves for the rats to eat and filmed their deaths. He even took to sitting down in his house when everyone was asleep and watching these ghastly videos as he had a late-night snack—turkey on rye, a bit of mayo. He wasn’t so much viewing the films for entertainment as trying to understand himself, his reactions to them…why, he says, such things didn’t trouble him in the least; this…concerned him, he recently explained.

  He even showed one of the films to DeMeo, a bona fide psychopath, to see his reaction—and even DeMeo couldn’t stand to see them. Because of the films, DeMeo knew that Richard was a rare individual, indeed a man—as he thought of him—with no soul.

  “He’s fuckin’ ice,” he told his crew. “I…mean…ice.”

  And, too, these films created a perverse bond—“friendship”—between Roy and Richard, and they actually enjoyed each other’s company…two peas in a bloody pod.

  Still, though, Richard was waiting for the chance to kill Roy, to beat him and humiliate him and end his life. For Richard that was the ultimate cure-all. Richard used murder to get rid of his problems the way people used aspirin to get rid of headaches.

  Besides contract killing, Richard was murdering people he did business with, men he fronted porn to who decided they were not going to pay him. One such individual had a porno shop in downtown Los Angeles, a bear of a man who prided himself on being tough, independent, not afraid of anyone. He owed Richard ten thousand dollars and, arrogantly, stopped even taking Richard’s calls.

  Angry, Richard got on a plane and went to see the guy. He had brought with him in his luggage two fragmentation hand grenades that he’d gotten from DeMeo. A grenade in each pocket, Richard walked unannounced into the guy’s store. The mark was behind the chest-high counter, sitting on a tall, pillow-covered stool, big and heavy and mean faced, not liking the world or anyone in it.

  “Hello, my friend,” Richard said, approaching him, walking on the balls of his feet, his mouth twisted off to the left, that soft clicking sound issuing from it.

  “Hey, Big Guy,” the mark said, not pleased to see Richard suddenly in his shop.

  “Been trying to reach you, my friend,” said Richard.

  “Yeah, well I been busy, you know how it is.”

  “You have a bill with me, my friend.”

  “Yeah, well I don’t have all the money just yet.”

  “What do you have?” asked Richard.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yeah, zero,” he said, smiling, showing cigar-stained crooked teeth. As if he had just heard a joke, a joke Richard was deaf to.

 
“Funny guy,” Richard said.

  “A real comedian: I used to do stand-up before I got into this,” he said, expansively indicating the shop, as though it were an accomplishment of note, something to write home about.

  “What about my money? I need it,” Richard said.

  “How about you come back in…in say, a month.”

  “That wasn’t our agreement.”

  “Yeah, well it is now.”

  “Say you?”

  “Say I.”

  Richard smiled. It was not a pleasant smile to see. Ti-ti-ti came the clicking sound from his lips.

  Richard took out a grenade and pulled the pin, though the shop owner didn’t see it because of the high counter. Richard handed the pin to the guy behind the counter.

  “What’s this?” he demanded.

  “A surprise,” Richard said as he began walking out of the store.

  “What surprise?”

  “This one,” Richard said, and tossed the grenade behind the counter just next to the guy. Richard exited the store. The grenade went off and blew the belligerent guy to pieces.

  This incident, like many others Richard was involved with, was not so much about the money as about the principle of the thing. If one guy on the street could get over on you, everyone would soon be doing the same thing. True, by killing this man, Richard lost ten thousand dollars, but he figured in the long run he’d earn much more because people would pay what they owed. On the street, as Richard had learned so many years ago in Jersey City, might was truly right.

  I didn’t give a flying fuck about the money, Richard explained. I wasn’t about to let this stiff make a fool out of me, and I capped him to make a point. An exclamation point, I guess you could say.

  Again, the cops did not tie Richard to this homicide by hand grenade, as Richard refers to it.