The Ice Man Read online

  The CAT scan indicated no stroke. The biopsy indicated no cancer. Yet, Richard’s health continued to decline. His blood pressure fluctuated abnormally: first it was high, then low.

  The holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, all passed, and Richard didn’t call his family, as he always had done. The family became very concerned. I now tried to visit Richard at the hospital, but was told by a prison official that was not possible, that only immediate family could visit. Barbara and Chris did go to see him and were shocked by his gaunt appearance due to his loss of weight.

  “It looked,” Barbara recently explained, “like he lost a hundred pounds. He spoke in little more than a whisper. He told us ‘they’re trying to kill me,’ that we should call the police; ‘call the media,’ he said. At this point I thought—perhaps incorrectly, I’m thinking now—that he was just delusional. The police were there, I mean guarding him, three guys in plainclothes and two uniform cops. He was in a nice room at the end of the hall. We sat there for forty-five minutes. He was drifting in and out. He then said, ‘If I don’t leave the hospital it’s because I was murdered.’”

  “‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why are you saying that, Richard?’ He did not answer me. Chris had not seen him in quite a few years, and she was shocked at how thin he’d become; for that matter I was, too. I now asked him why he had signed himself out of the hospital. He said he did not sign himself out, which, of course, I thought was…strange.”

  Barbara explained that she absolutely did not love Richard, that any warm feelings she once had for him were long gone, but still he was the father of her children and she wanted to make sure anything that could be done for him was done.

  Richard’s health continued to fail. Doctor Wong told Barbara he didn’t think Richard would survive. Barbara and her daughter Merrick visited him again on February 9. He looked still worse. He could now barely speak. Though he did, again, tell Barbara and now Merrick that he was being killed…murdered, he said.

  Merrick was very traumatized by her father’s appearance due to his illness. She still very much loved her dad, indeed loved him more than ever, and she prayed for him and tried to tell him he’d be OK, that he should will himself to get better. Again, however, he just managed to say that he was being “murdered.”

  “By who, Dad—who?” Merrick asked.

  “Them,” he whispered. “If I don’t get out of here alive, it’s because I was murdered,” he said yet again.

  Distraught, Merrick held her father’s hand, a once powerful killing tool, now weak and frail, pocked with black and blue marks from the IV needles. That day there were four IVs feeding him different fluids and medications. Barbara was informed that he was also bleeding internally, that blood was in his urine, and issuing from his rectum. Doctor Wong said it was probably an ulcer, which Barbara found kind of odd for Richard had no history at all of ulcers.

  Merrick left her father that day crying, upset, and traumatized, remembering how he so diligently cared for her when she was a child, when she was in the hospital. She was heartbroken to see her father, a mere shell of the powerful, omnipotent man he had once been.

  Doctor Wong called Barbara on the evening of February 28th and said Richard did not have long, and, in fact, he passed away Sunday morning March 5. Barbara was relieved. “We finally have closure,” she said.

  Richard was laid out at the Gaiga Funeral Home in Little Falls, New Jersey. The service was attended by only the immediate family, me, Gaby Monet, and friends of Merrick, Chris, and Dwayne. There was no priest.

  Barbara said, “If we had a priest eulogize him, Richard would have sat up in his coffin and said ‘get him the f—out of here!’”

  In all the time I spent with Richard, it was hard not to grow fond of him. I know people will be offended by my saying this, ask how I could feel warmly about such a cold-blooded killer. I did not know Richard on the outside world. By the time I’d met him he’d been incarcerated for many years. I found Richard to be warm and considerate and very polite, in a word—a gentleman. He always asked after me and my family and was solicitous and thoughtful when I couldn’t visit because I had the flu. Truth is, he was a hell of a nice guy, and certainly one of the funniest people I’d ever known. He had a keen, dead-pan sense of humor (pun intended), that was very rare indeed. One time, I remember, I told him, “Richard you are the funniest guy I’ve ever known; you should have been a stand-up comedian.”

  He said, “Yeah, I’ll come out on stage with my tacky prison garb, say good evening ladies and gents. I got a hundred jokes that’ll kill you, and if they don’t kill you, I will,” laughing as he said this.

  My meeting and getting to know Richard Kuklinski so intimately was a unique, sobering experience—an education—and made me much more aware of the nuts and bolts, the wheels and pulleys that make a psychopath work. Regardless of my warm feelings for Richard, however, I have no doubt that he was a particularly cunning, highly motivated psychopath. In all my interaction with him, I never lost sight of the fact that he was a very dangerous man, a human predator the likes of which have not been seen in modern times. Personally, I came to view Richard’s life as a classic case of a severely abused child, filled with seething rage, becoming an abuser, and turning into a remorseless killer. As of this writing the tests to determine if Richard had been poisoned have not been completed.

  Rest in peace Richard Leonard Kuklinski.

  POSTSCRIPT

  Detective Pat Kane was promoted to lieutenant before retiring from the New Jersey State Police. Today he is working as a fire ranger and loves being outdoors.

  ATF Agent Dominick Polifrone is presently retired. He had been training younger agents in successful undercover work.

  Bob Carroll retired from the state attorney general’s office and today is a practicing attorney; his specialty is criminal law.

  Stanley Kuklinski died of a heart attack in 1979. Until the end of his life Richard regretted not having killed him.

  Richard’s sister, Roberta, moved to the West Coast, and he didn’t hear from her in the thirty years leading up to his death.

  Barbara Kuklinski has severe arthritis, chain-smokes, loves to read, loves her grandchildren. “My whole life,” she says, “is my children and grandchildren.”

  Charges against Sammy Gravano for the murder of NYPD detective Peter Calabro were dropped the day after Richard Kuklinski died.

  Roy DeMeo’s boss, Nino Gaggi, died in a federal prison of a heart attack.

  The police never discovered any of the videos Richard made of feeding people to rats.

  HBO’s Gaby Monet had been planning to do yet another special on Richard Kuklinski, this one entitled The Ice Man Cold Case File, which would have explored more unsolved murders of Richard’s.

  Detective Robert Anzalotti was promoted to sergeant because he was able to get Richard to talk about murders he committed that the police knew nothing about.

  Richard’s three children, Merrick, Chris, and Dwayne, are doing very well; all of them live in New Jersey.

  Author Philip Carlo is living in southern Italy, working on a new book.

  You may contact author Philip Carlo at:

  [email protected]

  www.philipcarlo.com

  INDEX

  abortion

  Academy of Holy Angels (Demarest)

  Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau of (ATF)

  Allstate Insurance Company

  Anastasia, Albert

  animals, torture of

  Another Way (Guttenberg, New Jersey)

  Anzalotti, Robert

  Archer’s (Cliffside Park)

  Argrila, Anthony

  DeMeo and

  Armond (Barbara’s uncle)

  Armond Meatpacking Company (Jersey City)

  Arnold, Louis

  assassination techniques See also poisons; rats

  Ativan

  Atkins, Jon

  Baden, Michael

  Bella Luna (Hoboken)

  Bennul
, Mark

  Bensonhurst, Brooklyn

  Bergen County Superior Court

  Bergin Hunt and Fish Club (Queens)

  bestiality

  Bilotti, Tommy

  Bob (Roy DeMeo’s fishing trip murder victim)

  boilermakers

  Bonanno crime family

  Bonanno, Joe

  Bonventre, Caesar

  Borelli, Henry

  Brasi, Luca

  Brazil

  breaking-and-entering operations

  Briguglio, Sal

  Bronson, Charles

  Brooklyn Credit Union

  Buccino, Bob

  Bucks County (PA) caves

  Bufalino, Russi

  bullies (bullying)

  Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF)

  Calabro, Carmella

  Calabro, Melissa

  Calabro, Peter

  contract killing of

  Camorra crime family

  Canarsie, Brooklyn

  Capeci, Jerry

  capo, defined

  Capone, Al

  caporegime (capodecina), defined

  Caracappa, Steven

  Carl (Barbara’s cousin)

  Carmella (Barbara’s grandmother)

  Carroll, Bob

  current update on

  Operation Ice Man and

  trial of Kuklinski and

  cartoons, pirating of

  Casper the Friendly Ghost

  Casso, Anthony “Gaspipe”

  Castaway, The (Miami)

  Castellano, Kathy Gambino

  Castellano, Paul

  appointment to head Gambino family

  contract killing of

  DeMeo induction and

  Esposito killings and

  Galante killing and

  Catholic Church

  caves of Bucks County Pennsylvania

  Cayman Islands

  Chemtex Plant (Jersey City)

  Chicago, and De Peti

  children, love of

  Christmas

  Cisek, Veronica

  cocaine

  Coming Up Roses gang

  consigliere, defined

  contabile, defined

  contract killings See also specific figures

  Coonan, James

  Copacabana Palace (Rio de Janeiro)

  Coppola, Nino

  corporal punishment

  corruption, in Jersey City government

  Cortez, Denny

  Cosa Nostra

  counterfeiting

  currency-exchange deal

  cyanide

  cyanide sprays

  Dahmer, Jeffrey

  De Cavalcante crime family

  De Gillio, Arthur

  Dellacroce, Aniello

  Dellacroce, Armand

  Demarest Pond

  DeMeo, Anthony

  DeMeo, Gladys

  DeMeo, Paul

  DeMeo, Roy

  Argrila and

  background of

  Castellano killing and

  contract killings

  drug dealing

  Esposito killings and

  fishing trip

  Galante killing and

  Gambino family induction

  Gotti brothers and

  Governara killing and

  killing by Kuklinski of

  Rothenberg killing and

  Denning, Ed

  Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV)

  De Peti, Anthony

  Deppner, Barbara

  Deppner, Danny

  breaking and entering jobs

  murder of

  Smith killing and

  Detroit, contract killing in

  Devonshire Academy

  Dewey, Thomas E.

  DeWitt Clinton Park (Manhattan)

  Dial, Pamela

  Dietz, Park

  DiNome, Freddie

  Disney cartoons, pirating of

  Disney World (Orlando)

  disposal of bodies See also Bucks County caves

  DiVita, Jimmy

  DMSO

  documentaries

  Donahue, Ron

  Dougherty, John

  drinking problem

  drug dealing See also cocaine

  Dubrowski, Jack

  Duke (dog)

  Dumont, New Jersey

  dyslexia

  Eastwood, Clint

  egg sandwiches

  Eppolito, Louis

  Esposito, Jimmy, Jr.

  Esposito, Jimmy, Sr.

  Exodus (movie)

  Favara, John

  Featherstone, Micky

  Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

  female contract killers (femme fatales)

  Ferret Face

  Final Round (Hoboken)

  Florida vacations

  food, stealing of

  fragmentation grenades

  Frank, Neal

  French Connection

  Gabe (hit man)

  Gacy, John Wayne

  Gaggi, Marie

  Gaggi, Nino

  death of

  DeMeo induction and

  drug dealing

  Esposito killings and

  Galante killing and

  Governara killing and

  Rothenberg killing and

  Gaggi, Rose

  Galante, Carmine

  Gambino crime family

  Castellano and

  contract killings

  DeMeo and

  Galante killing and

  Gotti and

  Gravano and

  Gambino, Carlo

  gambling

  Garofalo, Eddie

  gay bars

  Gemini Lounge (Brooklyn)

  Genovese crime family

  Genovese, Carmine “Meatball”

  contract killing of

  contracts for killing

  incarceration for gambling charges

  Genovese, Vito

  Gigante crime family

  giovane d’honore (independent contrator)

  Giuliani, Rudolph

  Glasser, Leo

  Goldberg, Chris

  Goldfarb, Sol

  Gone with the Wind (movie)

  Gotti, Frank

  Gotti, Gene

  Gotti, John

  Castellano killing and

  Governara, Vincent (aka Vinnie Mook)

  Gravano, Gerald

  Gravano, Sammy “the Bull,”

  Calabro killing and

  Castellano killing and

  contracts for killing

  current update on

  trials of

  Guglielmo, Joe “Dracula,”

  Hamil, John

  Harry’s (Jersey City)

  Harry’s Luncheonette (Hackensack)

  HBO

  heroin

  High Noon (movie)

  hijackings

  Hoboken, New Jersey

  Hoffa, Jimmy

  Hoffman, Paul

  Holy Angels Academy (Demarest)

  homosexuality

  House, Percy

  arrest of

  breaking and entering jobs

  Kane investigation and

  Masgay killing and

  Smith killing and

  Howard Johnson (Los Angeles)

  Hudson Hotel (Hoboken)

  Hy Tulip (Brooklyn)

  Ice Man and the Psychiatrist (documentary)

  Ice Man Cold Case File (documentary)

  Ice Man: Secrets of a Mafia Hit Man (documentary)

  Ice Man Tapes: Conversations with a Killer (documentary)

  James, Sammy

  Jersey City, New Jersey

  JFK International Airport (New York City)

  Joe and Mary’s (Brooklyn)

  Kane, Ed

  Kane, Helene

  Kane, Patrick

  arrest of Kuklinski

  background on

  Castellano hit and

  current update on

  Deppner and<
br />
  Dumont residence, visits to

  House and

  initial burglary investigation

  Kuklinski’s desire to kill

  Operation Ice Man

  Polifrone and

  Smith and

  Solimene and

  Kane, Patrick, Sr.

  Kane, Terry McLeod

  Kassner, Herb

  Kennedy International Airport (New York City)