The Ice Man Read online

  They could have arrested Richard there and then, but Bob Carroll wanted Richard to put the white powder on the sandwich and actually give it to Detective Paul Smith; that, he felt, would strengthen the case, tie Kuklinski directly to the murder of Gary Smith. When Richard returned they’d nail him “red-handed.” The parking lot was saturated with attorney general’s people and ATF and FBI agents, all ready to pounce, to bring down this serial killer who poisoned, shot, and stabbed people with impunity, as though he had some divine right.

  Richard drove out of the rest stop. He went a half mile down the road, pulled over, put on plastic gloves, and carefully opened the vial. It didn’t look, he immediately thought, like cyanide. He ever so carefully sniffed the air—no distinct scent of almonds, the odor of cyanide.

  This is fuckin’ bullshit! he thought, and sat there wondering what was up, more perplexed than anything else. He put the car back in gear and drove a ways, spotted a mangy dog sniffing around a group of garbage pails. He pulled into a restaurant, bought a hamburger, took it to the car, carefully—just in case—put some of the white powder on the burger, and walked over to the large rust-colored mutt. The dog smelled the meat, and his ears perked right up. Richard offered it the burger. With trepidation, as though he’d been tricked before, the dog took the burger and quickly gobbled it down as Richard curiously watched to see what would happen, his head tilted to the left with curiosity.

  Happy, the dog moved off down the road, wagging its scrawny tail as it went.

  Fucking liar! Richard thought. He didn’t yet know what the hell Polifrone was up to, but he wanted nothing more to do with it, whatever it was. He began thinking that Polifrone was maybe a contract killer who was, in fact, trying to set him up.

  “Fuck ’im,” Richard said out loud, and drove to a phone booth and called Barbara to see how she felt. For the last two days her arthritis had been acting up, and she had a slight headache and a low-grade fever.

  “I’m okay. I’m lying down,” she said.

  “Would you like to go for breakfast?” he asked.

  “Sure, I guess…okay.”

  “I’m going to stop and pick up some things at the store and then come home.”

  “Fine,” she said, and hung up. Richard drove over to the Grand Union and bought some groceries. As always, he bought more than was actually needed; one of Richard’s biggest pleasures in life was providing well for his family. He left the Grand Union with four big bags brimming with groceries, put them in the trunk, slid into his car, and slowly drove home, unaware of the gathering law-enforcement storm.

  State detectives Tommy Trainer and Denny Cortez were watching the Kuklinski home that morning. That was their assignment. Every twenty minutes or so they cruised past the split-level Kuklinski residence. It was a damp, very chilly day. The sky was a mass of angry clouds the color of gunpowder. The promise of snow hung in the air. Christmas was just around the corner and all hell was about to break loose on this quiet Dumont street.

  Close to 10:00 that morning Cortez and Trainer drove past the house and there was Richard in the driveway, taking the four bags of groceries from the car’s trunk.

  Shocked to see him just suddenly there like that, not at the rest stop where he was supposed to be, they called the task force, who were equally shocked to learn that Richard was in Dumont. He obviously wasn’t planning on coming back to the Lombardi rest stop. Richard saw the two detectives cruise by, giving him the hairy eyeball. He wondered why they were staring so intently at him. He did not connect these men to Polifrone—kind of strange, given his suspicious nature.

  Deputy Chief Bob Buccino was running the show that morning. He now ordered the strike force to go to Richard’s home and arrest Richard there, and they all started toward Dumont, over fifteen unmarked vehicles, sirens screaming, red lights frantically spinning. More than anything, Buccino wanted to avoid a shoot-out on the residential street. He assumed Richard had all kinds of heavy-duty weapons in the house—assault rifles with armor-piercing rounds, hand grenades, dynamite, God knew what else. Fearing Richard had contacts in the Dumont police force, Buccino did not tell the Dumont police what was about to happen, a courtesy normally given to the local cops when a big bust was about to go down.

  Richard put the groceries on the kitchen counter and began to unpack and put them away. Barbara, feeling weak, a bit pale, only hoped she wasn’t sick for the holidays, the putting up of the tree, all the cooking, the joyful opening of presents. As she watched Richard stow the groceries, she thought about how kind and good he could be when he wanted to, how mean and sadistic he could be at other times. There were, she was thinking, more sure than ever, two Richards. She had married two men.

  “Ready, Lady?” he asked.

  “Ready,” she said.

  By now Richard had forgotten about Polifrone. He had washed his hands of him, would never have anything to do with him again. He planned to call Phil Solimene after breakfast and tell him how Polifrone was full of shit, and ask why the fuck he would vouch for such a jive-ass blowhard. Richard used the bathroom. Barbara slowly slipped on a blue goose-down ski jacket Richard had recently bought her. It was nice and warm but had one of those zippers that went diagonally across the front, from left to right. The zipper often became stuck when she tried to close it, as it did now. She asked Richard to close it for her. She didn’t want to get a chill. Using his pliers-like grip, he easily managed to zip the jacket closed. As mean and violent as Richard could be to Barbara, he loved her dearly. She was the only woman he’d ever loved, and he held her in high esteem, thought the world of her.

  “After we eat, I’m taking you to the doctor,” he said.

  “That’s not necessary. I just need rest, Richard.”

  “Yeah, well let the doctor take a look at you,” he insisted.

  She didn’t answer. She was in no mood to argue. She just wanted a nice breakfast, scrambled eggs with bacon that had “a little wiggle,” as she put it, not too well done. They headed for the door. He opened it for her.

  By now the strike force had reached Dumont and had gathered on the south end of Sunset Street just down the block. Deputy Chief Buccino, the detectives, and the agents were discussing what was the best way to take Richard down. As they spoke, one of the agents spotted Richard and Barbara leaving the house and getting in the car.

  “He’s coming!” he shouted. “He’s with his wife!” he added.

  They all hurried back to their vehicles and got ready to pounce.

  Detective Pat Kane was pumped up. Now, finally, Richard was going down. All his work had paid off. This was it. The moment he’d been hoping for, praying for, was finally here.

  Polifrone wasn’t there. He’d gone to the courthouse in Hackensack at Buccino’s request.

  After Richard helped Barbara into the car, he got behind the wheel, started the car, and drove right toward the gathered strike force, completely unaware he was driving into the proverbial hornet’s nest and then some. Richard had a .25 automatic under the seat. The strike force was armed with machine guns and shotguns. As he slowly made his way south along the street where he had lived seventeen years, he spotted the strike-force vehicles haphazardly lined up.

  “Something must’ve happened,” he said to Barbara—

  Suddenly, all the vehicles surged forward and came barreling directly toward Richard and Barbara, no spinning red lights, no sirens.

  “What the hell?!” Richard said.

  “Watch out!” Barbara exclaimed.

  At first Richard thought it was a hit, that he was going to get killed, that all he had done—or something he’d recently done—had finally caught up to him. He veered to the right. The car hit the curb. Agents and detectives burst from the vehicles and surrounded him. One jumped on the hood of the car and pointed a gun in combat position. Richard thought about reaching for the .25, but he was afraid, knowing many shots would surely be fired at him, at the car, and Barbara might get hit.

  There was a cocked nine-mi
llimeter pointed at his head—“Don’t fuckin’ move!” he was told. The car door was ripped open. Richard was roughly pulled from the car by Kane and men piled on him, trying to push him to the ground, trying to pin his massive arms behind his back so he could be handcuffed. Barbara’s door was torn open. Deputy Chief Buccino grabbed her and made her get on the ground, physically pushing her down. When Richard saw this, rage exploded inside his head.

  “She has nothing to do with this, leave her; leave her be!” he yelled.

  “Fuck yourself,” Buccino said, his animus showing, and he roughly pushed Barbara to the ground and put his boot on her back while she was cuffed.

  “What are you doing?!” she asked. “Richard, help me!”

  Richard went berserk. He got up and made for Buccino, intent on killing him, tearing him apart, not caring if he was shot dead trying.

  Eight strike-force members were now fighting with him, struggling with him, wrestling with him, Pat Kane, Donahue, and Volkman among them, all of them amazed by Richard’s superhuman strength. Richard actually made it to the rear of the car, halfway to Buccino. Now the agents and cops lifted him up off the ground and slammed him to the hood of the car. It took four men to get his hands behind his back, but Kane couldn’t get the handcuffs on his wrists, they were so thick. He finally had to use leg irons to shackle Richard’s arms behind his back.

  Richard was blind with rage at Barbara’s being manhandled, and even shackled with thick leg irons he resisted and still tried to get to Buccino.

  “Calm down, calm down,” Kane told him. “It’s over, Rich, it’s over. You’re under arrest.”

  “There’s no reason to involve her!” Richard bellowed. “She’s innocent. You know that!”

  “It’s out of my hands,” Kane said.

  Barbara was helped up and led to a van. The cops and troopers were still struggling to keep Richard from getting to Deputy Chief Buccino, who was ready to shoot Richard dead. Stunned, people on the block had called the Dumont police, and now two squad cars showed up.

  All his life, throughout his long, sordid career in crime, Richard had always imagined he’d go out in a fierce gun battle to the death. He had, in fact, specifically planned that. He would much rather have been killed in a shoot-out than face the music, see the embarrassment, humiliation, and shame his family would surely suffer if who he really was were ever exposed. Of all things, Richard dreaded that—the humiliation of his cherished family. That’s all he cared about.

  Now a mob of strike-force members boldly picked up Richard and put him in back of the black van. He was literally fit to be tied.

  The Politics of Murder

  Attorney General Al Smit, Bob Carroll’s boss, viewed the arrest of Richard Kuklinski as the absolute milestone of his career, and he wanted to get as much mileage out of it as possible. Knowing the arrest would go down today, he had ordered his office to contact the media so they’d be there in full force to cover the bust. The tagline the media was given was that lawmen were arresting “a serial killer who froze people, who killed with cyanide, guns, knives, and who also happened to be a mob hit man,” which, needless to say, caused a media stampede.

  Al Smit had political aspirations. He was hoping for a shot at the governor’s office, and what better way to get there than this arrest, this media blitz? There is a long list of crime fighters turned politicians who rode well-publicized cases to higher office: the most obvious examples would be Rudy Giuliani using his prosecutions of Mafia bosses in the Southern District of New York to get himself elected mayor of New York, and Thomas E. Dewey using his highly publicized prosecution of Lucky Luciano to become the governor of New York State.

  When, that morning, Richard was on the way to the Hackensack courthouse to be arrested, booked, photographed, and fingerprinted, a call came in that the press was lined up outside the courtroom and Kuklinski should look “presentable for media consumption.” With that the van pulled over, and five detectives helped Richard get out, made sure he didn’t look too messed up, and put him in the back of a black detective’s car. He had calmed down somewhat but was still pissed off that Barbara had been roughed up. He didn’t give a flying fuck what they did to him, but to abuse Barbara, throw her down and cuff her, was unthinkable, unspeakable, an infamy. Until he killed Buccino, he would not rest. If he died doing it he didn’t care; so be it.

  “You know my wife is innocent; you know my wife didn’t do anything,” he kept saying, almost more to himself than to any of the detectives in the car, one of whom was Pat Kane.

  “Nobody hurt her; calm down, Rich. Calm down,” Kane said.

  “She’s sick. There was no reason to treat her like that—no reason!”

  Instead of driving the car directly up to the entrance, they parked a good thirty feet away so Richard would have to walk the distance, giving the mob of wide-eyed, stunned reporters, producers, and cameramen a good look at this giant serial killer who killed and froze human beings. Richard did not try to hide his anger; he huffed and puffed and grumbled, seeming as if he might explode into a homicidal rage at any moment.

  “How many people did you kill?” a reporter asked.

  “Did you really freeze people—how many?” another begged.

  “These cops,” Richard growled, his face a twisted mask of barely contained fury, “have seen too many movies.”

  Inside, Richard was brought up to a holding area, still bellowing about Barbara’s treatment. That’s all he cared about. On the way to a holding cell, he spotted a bewildered, frightened Barbara sitting in the homicide squad room. She was still cuffed, crying, upset. How could she not be?

  “Get those fucking cuffs off her!” he demanded. “She knows nothing, she’s innocent!” He tried to snap the thick chains holding his massive hands behind his back.

  “Get those fuckin’ cuffs off her!” he roared so loudly that the reporters heard him all the way outside, the walls reverberating with his angry words. It took a half dozen detectives to wrestle him into the holding cell. Normally, the cuffs are removed from a prisoner at this point, but no one was taking the cuffs off Richard. It was obvious he’d kill anyone he could get his hands on.

  Now, like a crazed beast suddenly plucked from a dangerous jungle, Richard paced his cell, cursing every cop he saw, taunting them, daring them to take the shackles off of him.

  “I will kill you motherfuckers—I’ll kill you all, you motherfuckers!” he roared.

  Back in Dumont an army of police personnel armed with warrants flooded the Kuklinski home. They were sure they’d find a huge trove of weapons, the freezer Richard used to freeze his victims; but they found no arms, no freezer—nothing illegal at all.

  That night every six o’clock news show across America reported the arrest of Richard Kuklinski. He was big news. The hot leadoff story. Based on what the police told the media, anchormen and anchorwomen in turn told America that Richard had killed five people—naming George Malliband, Louis Masgay, Paul Hoffman, Gary Smith, and Danny Deppner—that he used cyanide to kill, and that he froze some of his victims to confuse the police as to the time of death, hence the moniker: Ice Man.

  Aghast at the thought of such a thing, America watched him being led into the rear of the courthouse, his face twisted into a snarl—over and over again across the country.

  The following day the story was reported in sensational large print on the front pages of New York’s three major newspapers—the Post, the Daily News, and the venerable New York Times. The police had given Richard the perfect nickname. “The Ice Man” was evil and sinister and simple all at the same time, ideal for headlines and taglines for opening news reports. From the East Coast to the West Coast and everywhere in between, America heard about the diabolical machinations of the Ice Man, a contract killer like no other. He killed for fun and he killed for the mob. When the media realized that the Ice Man was married with children, reporters and news trucks swarmed Sunset Street in Dumont, trying to get interviews with the Kuklinskis’ shocked
neighbors, with the Kuklinski children. Richard’s worst fear had come true in bold living color.

  Barbara was released on her own recognizance, but the police charged her with possession of the .25 auto they found under the seat of her car. The police, of course, knew the gun was not Barbara’s, but they filed charges against her, thinking they could use that as leverage against Richard down the road, which is exactly what they did. When Barbara arrived home, her hands were still trembling. A mob of reporters surrounded her. She had to fight her way through them to get inside.

  When Richard was finally allowed to make his mandatory phone call, he phoned Phil Solimene.

  “Hey, Philly, how you doin’?” Richard asked, his voice dripping with syrupy disdain.

  “Rich?” Solimene said, shocked. “What happened—where are you?”

  “I just got off Route 80. I’m coming to see you,” Richard said, and hung up.

  Solimene ran from the store as if his ass were on fire, his face filled with fear and panic and dread.

  Pat Kane was finally at peace. He had done what he’d set out to do. It had taken nearly six years, but he had prevailed. All his hard work and diligence had paid off. Richard Kuklinski was in a cage where he belonged. Though there was still much to do, that night Pat Kane slept like a baby, his wife in his arms.