The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer Read online

  Richard became better and better at shooting pool and actually did start making money. With his shy ways and innocent baby face most people he played were sure they could beat him, but would inevitably lose to him. He got into arguments and fights with guys in pool halls and bars, and he was quick to smack with a pool stick anyone who got in his face or reneged on a bet. He quickly came to realize that if you struck first with a lot of force, you won, the fight was over, the dispute settled. End of story. Might really was always right.

  His reputation quickly spread all over Jersey City and Hoboken and few wanted to tangle with Richard Kuklinski. Several times Richard got into runs-ins with guys who were with friends, and even then he wouldn’t back down. He was fearless to the point of being reckless. One such time he fought two brothers who with a third guy got the better of him. But Richard waited for these three guys to leave the bar, followed them home, found out where they lived, and went back a few nights later. He waited in the shadows for the right moment and stabbed, from behind, one of the brothers. He then went after the friend and stabbed him in the stomach as he went up the stairs to his home. He tried to find the second brother, but he had hightailed it out of Jersey City. Richard earned a reputation as a genuinely dangerous guy. Other toughs his age quickly gravitated to him. He was a natural leader, had a quick acerbic wit, and would cut a throat as readily as spit on a soiled sidewalk.

  Soon Richard had his own gang of sorts. There were five of them—three Polish guys (including Richard), an Irish kid, and an Italian. They called themselves the Coming Up Roses, and each of them got a tattoo on his left hand of a parchment scroll with those words, “Coming Up Roses.” For them the words meant that there were bright things ahead, and that if anyone fucked with any of them he’d end up plant fertilizer. They swore an oath of loyalty and soon began plotting robberies and stick-ups together.

  Richard bought his first gun from a guy he played pool with. It was an old .38 revolver with a six-inch barrel. He and his gang went to the abandoned Jersey City waterfront and took target practice. They were all the children of two-fisted, heavy-drinking, blue-collar people, high school dropouts, antisocial toughs, fearless and reckless; trouble waiting to happen.

  The second individual Richard killed was a man named Doyle, a red-faced Irishman that talked out the side of a thin-lipped mouth. He hung around a pool hall–bar in Hoboken called Danny’s. He drank a lot, and when he drank he became loud, mean, and abusive. Richard was playing pool for money with Doyle, winning game after game, and Doyle began calling Richard names—“dumb Polack,” “cheater.”

  Everyone knew Doyle was a Jersey City cop, and even Richard, with his homicidal hair-trigger temper, would not assault him out in the open. But the more Doyle abused Richard, the madder Richard became. Doyle very much reminded Richard of his father—a fatal resemblance. Rather than tangle with Doyle in the open, Richard quietly put down the pool cue, left the bar, and waited for Doyle. After a time Doyle also left the bar, got into his car parked down the block, lit up a cigarette, and just sat there. Richard soon realized that Doyle had fallen asleep. As always, Richard had a knife on him. But Doyle was a cop, and if Richard stabbed him he’d have to kill him, and he’d be first on the list of likely suspects, a thing Richard was intent upon avoiding. He turned away, went to a nearby gas station, bought a quart of gas, and quickly made his way back to the sleeping Doyle. The driver’s window was open. Without a second thought, Richard quickly and silently poured the gas into the car, on Doyle, struck a match, and threw it in the car. A fireball exploded. Doyle was quickly consumed and killed by the ferocious flames and intense heat. Richard stayed nearby and actually enjoyed hearing Doyle scream, the smell of his burned flesh coming to him on a strong breeze off the nearby Hudson River. Satisfied, actually smiling, Richard made his way home; he never said a word to anyone about what he had done, not even his Coming Up Roses cronies.

  Richard had grown into a very tall, handsome young man. He had light blond hair, honey colored almond-shaped eyes, wide Slavic cheekbones, and heart-shaped lips. He looked like a young Jimmy Stewart and had a beguiling shy way about him that women were drawn to. In most all the bars and pool halls where Richard hung out, there were older women, as he had come to think of them, and they soon found their way to Richard and invited him home with them, and thus Richard lost his virginity. It didn’t take him long to realize that women found him attractive, which he enjoyed, and he began dressing to please women, but he was still painfully shy and unless a woman approached him he was hard-pressed to strike up a conversation.

  Often, however, women approached him.

  One such woman, a twenty-five-year-old named Linda, took Richard home when he was sixteen, and he began to live with her. She always wanted to have sex and he was always happy to accommodate her. She was short with black hair, attractive in a simple way. But she was always “in the mood,” it seemed, and Richard gave her what she wanted, when she wanted it—and how and where she wanted it. He had a particularly large member she couldn’t seem to get enough of.

  By now Richard had come to hate his mother and visited her less and less. His sister, Roberta, had acquired a reputation as a loose girl, easy to have, and Richard didn’t like that. He warned her several times to “keep your drawers on,” to no avail. His younger brother, Joseph, like him, was tall and thin with a thick mop of blond hair. Joseph did not do well in school, was always in fights; he had punched out a teacher. At Anna’s urging Richard spoke to Joe, tried to get him to behave, but it was like talking to a wall.

  Joseph, like Richard, had an antisocial personality, was clearly a budding psychopath…would think nothing of breaking a bottle and cutting someone’s face wide open. Richard’s father, Stanley, was a short man with black hair, five foot seven or so, yet both Richard and Joseph were well over six feet and still growing. This sometimes caused Richard to wonder if Stanley was really his father. Richard had come to think of his mother as an unkempt, slovenly whore and had little use for her. However, when he found out that Stanley came around the house, yelling at and slapping Anna, he went and found his father, put a .38 to his head, pulled the hammer back, and warned him through tight lips and clenched teeth that if he ever went near his family again, he’d kill him and dump him in the river. After that, Richard didn’t speak to his father for many years, and Stanley never troubled Anna again. Truth is, Richard was heartfelt sorry he didn’t kill Stanley and often thought about going back and finishing the job.

  Even now, so many years later, Richard regrets not having blown Stanley away. He confided: Stanley was a first-grade, sadistic prick. He shouldn’t’ve never been allowed to have children. A thousand times if once I wondered why I didn’t kill him. If I had to do it over, I would’ve done the job right for sure.

  6

  The De Cavalcantes

  The Coming Up Roses gang, under Richard’s leadership, committed more and more crimes: broke into warehouses, held up liquor stores and drugstores, burglarized rich people with nice homes in Jersey City Heights and Lincoln Park, the most exclusive areas in Jersey City. Because Richard was cautious and carefully planned all their jobs, thought about them from numerous angles, they were successful. In all his short life Richard excelled at three things: playing pool, sudden violence, and crime.

  Richard began making good money and usually walked around with a large roll of bills. He soon acquired a penchant for gambling, playing cards and going to the racetracks, and as quickly as he made money, he pissed it away. He said he was “nigger rich,” and had no comprehensive concept of money, how to manage it, save it, and parlay it into more. For him, money was for spending, when and where and how he wished. Easy come, easy go.

  Wanting to look good—sharp, as he says—he bought garish suits for himself, bright yellows and pinks. Thus attired, Richard and the Coming Up Roses made the rounds of all the Hoboken bars. There were, literally, two or three bars on every block, more bars per capita than anywhere in the country. They also went
to dance halls. Once in a while men made comments about how Richard dressed, and he assaulted these individuals quickly and violently. He’d pull out his knife and use it at the drop of a hat, and it got so that no one commented on his outlandish outfits. Still, he was quite a sight in a pink, large-collared suit, tall and thin and gangly, particularly broad at the shoulders, with his light blond hair combed straight back and his intense honey-colored eyes. Even then it was an unsettling experience, having Richard Kuklinski stare directly at you with his pale, deadpan face.

  Richard took to drinking more than he should, and when he drank he, like his father and more than likely his grandfather, became mean and belligerent. He and the Coming Up Roses often got into bar brawls, and they rarely, if ever, lost a fight, because all of them were vicious in the extreme and were always sending people to the hospital with gaping knife wounds, cracked heads, broken bones. Richard and his friends became notorious, not an easy feat in the tough blue-collar cities of Hoboken and Jersey City, each filled with the notorious. It didn’t take long for members of the De Cavalcante crime family to notice the Coming Up Roses gang.

  His name was Carmine Genovese, no relationship to the infamous Vito Genovese. Carmine was a made man, a cunning individual who had his sausage-thick fingers in many juicy pies. He was short and round like a meatball, with a large round head that was also round like a meatball. Indeed, his nickname was “Meatball.” Carmine heard about the Coming Up Roses crew many times over the years, that they were very violent, stand-up and fearless, all neighborhood kids who had come up the hard way, looking to earn. He invited them to his home one afternoon and sat them down in the kitchen as he prepared a meat gravy sauce for pasta. With his heavy tough-guy accent, talking out of the left side of his mouth, he said, “I’m hearing all the time about you and I like what I hear. I got a piece a work for you. You do this good, I’ll make sure you earn big.” He added some hot sausages to the gravy pot. “There’s this guy in Lincoln Park. Here’s his address and his picture. He’s a problem. He’s got his head up his ass; he’s gotta go. You do a good job, I make sure you earn, capisce? I did everything for you already—just finish the work. He’s gotta go…understand?” With that he handed Richard a black-and-white photograph of a man getting in his car, a black Lincoln. Richard passed it to the others. They all looked. Richard knew this could be a golden opportunity for his crew, that the door was opening to a bona fide in with organized crime—a thing they had always hoped for. Because four of them were not Italians, they could never be made, but they could become “independent contractors.”

  The mob, they all knew, controlled New Jersey commerce, had an absolute stranglehold on the unions, the piers, all vices, hijackings, robberies, shylocking, and murder.

  Carmine then added a pile of neat, round meatballs to the gravy. “You want the work?” he asked, looking at them out of the corner of his reptilian eyes.

  “Yeah, absolutely,” Richard said.

  “Good. This gotta happen quick, understand? Anything goes wrong, you call me. We own the cops here, okay?”

  “Okay,” Richard said as the others nodded in solemn agreement.

  “You guys stay. Eat lunch with me,” Carmine said, and soon they all sat down to a simple though hearty meal of spaghetti, meat sauce, and salad with big green Sicilian olives that Carmine had cured—one of his hobbies, he explained.

  When the Coming Up Roses left Carmine, they went to a Hoboken bar near the waterfront called the Final Round. There they sat down to discuss this sudden opportunity, all of them except Richard nervous and unsure. Barroom brawls were one thing, but cold-blooded murder was a horse of another color. The baddest of the group was a tall, bull-like guy named John Wheeler. He was an amateur heavyweight boxer, tough as nails. Despite his anxiety he said, “I’ll do it. I’ll pull the trigger. No problem.”

  Good, okay, that was settled. Richard said, “Let’s do this quick and let’s do it right. Guys, this is a great chance for us, okay? We don’t wanna blow it.”

  They all agreed and piled into John’s car and drove over to Lincoln Park. Richard was behind the wheel. John had the gun, a mean little .32 revolver. This was a good neighborhood. People who lived here were rich. The Coming Up Roses had robbed numerous houses in the area. They found the address, a stately wood-frame house with fancy columns and porticoes and a beautiful, well-tended garden. It was early spring and already the grounds were bursting with young flowers. This was a far cry from where these guys had grown up; this was the proverbial other side of the tracks. As they sat there discussing how to do the job, the mark walked right out the front door, as if on cue, without a care in the world it seemed. All of the Coming Up Roses were nervous, had butterflies in their stomachs.

  “There he is, go do it, John,” Richard said.

  But John didn’t move. He froze, got pale. The mark slid into his fancy Lincoln and drove away.

  “What happened?” Richard asked, annoyed.

  “I don’t know…. I just, I just—I don’t know,” big, tough-as-nails Wheeler said.

  “Okay, not to worry, we’ll follow him, nail him in his car, okay, at a light,” Richard said.

  “Yeah—yeah, okay,” Wheeler said. Richard put the car in gear and off they went, this inexperienced impromptu hit team.

  They caught up with the Lincoln at a light on West Side Avenue. “Get ready,” Richard said, easing up right next to the Lincoln. Wheeler’s hands, however, were trembling so much he couldn’t even take proper aim.

  “What’s wrong?” Richard asked, and the others asked the same thing.

  “I don’t fuckin’ know. I can’t.”

  The light turned green. The mark drove off.

  “We have to do this,” Richard said. “We have no choice anymore.” They trailed the mark to a Hoboken bar, watched him belly up to the bar, have a drink and shoot the breeze with the bartender.

  “I’ll do it,” Richard solemnly said, and took the gun from Wheeler. Silently, contemplatively, they sat there. Night came on quickly. It began to rain. The mark left the bar and headed for his Lincoln. He seemed a little wobbly now. The coast was clear. Without a word, Richard stepped from the car, quickly made his way to the Lincoln, deadly purpose in each step, made sure no one was looking, put the gun up close to the mark’s head, and pulled the trigger, boom, one shot to the left side of his head, just above the ear. It was done.

  Calm, cool, collected, Richard walked back to the car and got in, and they drove away. Wow! was the collective feeling of the others, but no one said anything, each of them looking at Richard with a newfound respect.

  Finally, after several blocks, the big, bad Wheeler said, “Man, Rich, you’re cold like ice.”

  “Cool as a fuckin’ cucumber,” another said.

  Richard enjoyed the adulation. He felt no pangs of conscience, no emotion, no guilt at all. Indeed, he felt nothing. He had killed the mark as easily as belching and never looked back.

  Near noon the following day, the Coming Up Roses went back to Carmine’s place. Richard knocked on the door. Carmine opened it.

  “What’s up?” he said. “I told you not to come back till you did the thing.”

  “You see the papers?” Richard asked.

  “No…why?” Carmine asked.

  Richard’s answer was a slight, coy smile.

  “Ah, you sons of bitches, you did it, bravo. You sons of bitches,” Carmine exclaimed, and he invited them in, graciously poured drinks for them, gave them each five hundred dollars, and thus the door to organized crime opened wide.

  7

  Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

  True to his word, Carmine gave Richard and his crew a lot of work. Suddenly they were making money hand over fist. They proved without question they could be trusted, were ruthless, and got the job done, no matter what it was. Carmine knew the best way to test potential associates was for them to commit a murder. Once that was done, they could, theoretically, be trusted, for they had incriminated themselves in a serious
crime. In those days there were few people involved with La Cosa Nostra—“Our Thing”—who became “rats,” and the best way to guarantee someone’s loyalty was to have him commit a murder, which is exactly what Carmine had done with the Coming Up Roses. Indeed, the first step into the induction of any Mafia family was carrying out a killing, or making one’s “bones.” That created the lifetime bond that proved so successful for so many years, first in Italy, then around the world: the Italian Mafia was, still is, the most successful criminal enterprise of all time, and Richard Kuklinski would become one of its premiere killers—a homicide superstar.

  Carmine Genovese had amazing sources of information all over New Jersey. He knew what trucks to hijack, when and where and what they were carrying, even had the truck numbers, which he gave to Richard’s crew. Carmine received half of the proceeds of all the ill-gotten gains they made, and the gang split the other half five ways among themselves. They hijacked trucks that were filled with appliances, jewelry, clothing, albums, razor blades, furniture, tools and machinery, even fancy foods such as steak and loads of caviar—anything that could be turned into hard cash quickly.

  No matter how much Richard’s crew made, they spent it all, gambled and lived large. Richard was not too fond of the horse tracks, but he loved Las Vegas, and he went there by himself and with Linda—the older woman he was still living with—and gambled up a storm. He also very much enjoyed watching the garish, extravagant Las Vegas shows. His favorite entertainer was Liberace, of all people. He loved the game of baccarat, won a lot, but lost far more. He recently explained: I had no idea what money was, and I spent it like water. I should’ve been investing it, buying property, but I threw it all away.