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

  Richard also enjoyed seeing all the gorgeous showgirls. Often he was propositioned by Las Vegas prostitutes. He was hard to miss, with his huge size and decked out in a yellow suit, but he never went with any of the very lovely prostitutes who came on to him. He thought of prostitutes as whores and wasn’t turned on to them. A girl that screwed eight guys that day does nothing for me, he explained.

  The largest score Richard and his crew made—because of Genovese—was taking off an armored truck company in North Bergen, New Jersey. Genovese had given them the combination to the alarm and locking system, and after pressing a few buttons they were inside the small redbrick warehouse, where armored trucks were neatly lined up. There was a huge safe filled with boxes of cash and gold bullion. Carmine told them it couldn’t look like an inside job, so the first thing they did was break a hole in the wall. They then proceeded to blow open the safe and completely fill up one of the armored trucks with bullion, cash, and coins.

  Unfortunately, they put too much weight in the truck, and when they were pulling out of the garage and hit the outside curb, all four rear tires blew out with loud explosions, startling them. They tried to drive to a prearranged warehouse they had rented not far way, but the armored truck couldn’t make it, and the gang was forced to go back and take two more armored trucks. Working triple time they emptied the contents of the first one into the other two trucks right there on the side of the road just near the turnpike and finally took off. If a cop car had come along they would certainly have been busted, but they were lucky and made it to their safe haven just as it was getting light.

  Altogether they stole two million dollars’ worth of currency and gold. Carmine took half, and Richard and his group split one million: two hundred thousand each. A great score for these young toughs still wet behind the ears. The Coming Up Roses gang now really lived it up, squandered their shares, and before any of them knew it the money was gone, mostly lost at the racetrack and poker tables and spent on women.

  Richard made several first-class flights to Vegas and managed to lose all his ill-gotten gains.

  I was a dumb kid. I didn’t know any better, he says; but boy did I have a ball—smiling as he thought about it even now.

  With all their success the gang became more and more bold and began to think they were invincible.

  Two of the Coming Up Roses, John Wheeler and Jack Dubrowski, got it into their heads that it would be okay to stick up a card game sponsored by a made man in the De Cavalcante family. They did this without asking or consulting with Richard, which proved to be a fatal mistake in judgment. One of the group they robbed recognized John, even though they both sported plaid bandannas over their faces. Word quickly reached a De Cavalcante soldier. Knowing Richard led the Coming Up Roses and that they worked with Genovese, this soldier—his name was Albert Parenti—found Richard and solemnly sat him down in a quiet corner of a bar called Phil’s. Parenti was a barrel-chested Italian American of Sicilian extraction, balding, weasel faced, so bowlegged he walked like he just got off a horse. He said, “I know two of your guys stuck up my game on Washington Street. I also know you had nothing to do with it or I wouldn’t be talking nice. I’m coming to you here like this as a courtesy, see. We all know you are a stand-up guy; we hear only good things about you. That’s why I’m talking to you nice like this, see. Those guys of yours gotta go. There ain’t no other way.”

  Angry but controlling himself, Richard knew better than to try and deny his guys’ involvement or to become belligerent in any way. What he did was plead for mercy.

  “First let me say I appreciate you talking to me like this,” he said. “I had no idea ’bout any of this. I’m real sorry. I’ll make sure every fuckin’ penny is paid back, all—”

  “It’s not the money I’m talking about here, it’s the principle.”

  “I know that, I’m just saying—”

  “Look, let me cut to the chase: these guys gotta go. And you gotta do it, see. They’re your responsibility, see.”

  This hit Richard like a bare-knuckled punch in the face. In his own quiet way he loved John and Jack; they were his first and only friends. How could he kill them? But Richard knew enough about the rhyme and rhythm of street justice to know that if he didn’t do what Parenti was asking—actually demanding!—he himself could very well be marked for removal.

  He tried again: “Let me talk to them, let me make sure they leave town and never, I mean never, come back.”

  “They gotta go. That’s it. You do it or we do it, capisce?”

  “Capisce,” Richard said, seeing clearly the handwriting on the wall; and it was written in John and Jack’s blood, and if he was not careful, his blood.

  “Good. I’m glad that’s settled,” Parenti said with solemn finality. He stood up and left, the two goons he traveled with close behind. A heavy life-and-death weight suddenly on his shoulders, Richard sat there as still as a tombstone, knowing he and his small crew could never fight with the De Cavalcantes. They were many, and notoriously violent, and defying or fighting with them would only mean sure death for all of them. Richard knew too that John and Jack had fucked up big-time, gone against the basic tenets of the street, and his strict rule of never taking off any mob guys. They had, he knew, sealed their own fates. Richard got up slowly, left the bar, first found Jack, shot him in the head before he knew it, and left him where he dropped. He then found John leaving his girlfriend’s apartment and shot him down, killing him, leaving him on the street so the De Cavalcantes would know the deed was truly done. They both died without pain—before they knew what hit them.

  Still, Richard felt terrible. He had just killed two of the people he’d been closest to, whom he loved more than brothers. They had done much together. Now they were dead, dead by his hand.

  It was them or me, he kept telling himself, but that didn’t help much, he later confided.

  The De Cavalcantes immediately heard, of course, about what Richard had done, and it didn’t take long for them to realize that Richard Kuklinski could be a great asset to them—a made-to-order killer who knew what to do and how to do it, and kept his mouth shut…something all mob families in all places are always scouting for. True, Richard could never be made, but he could surely work as an independent contractor if he proved he could keep his mouth shut, that he understood that silence was golden. Before they’d approach him with anything more, they’d wait and see if he could be trusted.

  The Jersey City police found no witnesses…no links to Richard; no one knew anything about the murders of John and Jack, and they soon became forgotten; just two hoods that got their just desserts.

  8

  Long Walks, Short Piers

  It was the spring of 1954. Richard was just nineteen years old but comported himself as if he were much older. He had a stoic seriousness about him beyond his years. Perhaps it was because of his parents’ brutality; perhaps it was because he’d always been an outsider, put-upon, victimized; perhaps it was because he’d never had any kind of childhood. Perhaps, because he had killed his two best friends. Whatever it was, Richard was no longer a boy. He was a man about to make his mark on the world.

  Like many Poles, Richard had a penchant for walking, the outdoors and fresh air. He’d regularly walk miles at a time. He didn’t believe in exercise, lifting weights, working out in a gym, jogging, but he loved to walk and think as he went. Though he didn’t exercise, Richard was endowed with unusual strength. He did menial work between his financial highs and lows, loading and unloading trucks—always keeping an eye out for something he could rob and turn into hard cash. His strength, however, seemed something he was born with, in his genes. The Poles from northern Poland, where his father had come from, were a hardy, powerful lot—and all the best physical traits of his bloodline seemed to manifest themselves in Richard. When recently asked if he exercised as a young man, went to a gym, lifted weights, he said: The only exercise I ever got was carrying dead bodies.

  Curious to see more of New
York, Richard took the ferry to Manhattan, marveling as the boat crossed the river at the multicolored, rich skyline—how different it was from Jersey City and Hoboken. He had been to the city several times already with the Coming Up Roses crew, but never by himself. Now the Coming Up Roses were a thing of the past, part of his youth. There were rumors on the street that Richard had killed John and Jack, and the other members steered clear of him. As it happened, they soon began using heroin, and Richard in turn stayed away from them. He did not like drugs, or the people who used them. He viewed drug users as weak and unreliable—people you couldn’t trust. Richard had become a kind of solemn, slow-moving, very dangerous lone wolf—an attribute that would serve him well for many years to come. He enjoyed being alone. He avoided friends.

  When Richard stepped off the ferry near Fortieth Street, he took a right and began to walk downtown along the riverfront, under the West Side Highway. This was a dark, dank, desolate place. Most of the great piers that had once lined West Street, bustling with commerce, ships, and affluent people, were now rusting and dying, mere skeletons of their former selves. Here there were few streetlamps, and the streets were rough cobblestone, slick when wet. Richard now always carried a knife or a gun. He didn’t feel fully dressed unless he was armed, a trait that would stay with him all his professional life. He didn’t, he says, have any designs on hurting anyone on this first lone foray into Manhattan, but a nasty bum with an attitude approached him, asking for money. Richard ignored him. The bum followed, demanding money, and still Richard walked on. The bum, a large, dirty, bearded bear of a man, grabbed Richard by the shoulder and swung him around.

  “Hey, you deaf, motherfucker?” he said. Smiling, Richard quickly turned and, before the bum realized it, pulled out his knife and slammed it into the bum’s chest in two swift movements.

  “Get the fuck away from me!” Richard growled as the bum went to his knees and hit the ground hard. It was all over in a split second. Richard watched the light in his eyes go out, wiped his blade on him, and walked on, knowing he had killed the man, glad he had killed him.

  I enjoy seeing the lights go out. I enjoy killing up close and personal. I always wanted the last image they had to be my face, he explained.

  Richard had come to enjoy having control over who lived and who died. It made him feel omnipotent. He viewed the man he just killed as a vermin, and he kept his eyes open for more vermin. He walked all the way to the Battery Tunnel and solemnly stared at Jersey City just across the water, remembering how he used to read crime magazines over there when he was a kid, remembering his brother Florian, remembering his father’s brutality, remembering the friends he had killed. He could just about see the place where he had shot John Wheeler to death. Hell of a thing, he thought.

  His handsome face a mask of unfeeling granite, Richard turned and made his way back uptown, passing the bum he had killed as he went, enjoying the sight of him there like that, dead at his hand, still lying where he had left him, though now a ghostly pale in the forlorn yellowish light of a streetlamp.

  Richard knew this murder would not be tied to him, that the New York police would definitely not communicate with the Jersey police.

  He came back to Manhattan numerous times over the ensuing weeks and months and killed people, always men, never a female, he says, always someone who rubbed him the wrong way, for some imagined or real slight. He shot and stabbed and bludgeoned men to death. He left some where they dropped. He dumped some in the nearby Hudson River.

  Murder, for Richard, became sport.

  The New York police came to believe that the bums were attacking and killing one another, never suspecting that a full-blown serial killer from Jersey City was coming over to Manhattan’s West Side for the purpose of killing people, to practice and perfect murder.

  Richard made the West Side of Manhattan a kind of lab for murder, a school, he says. He learned the finer points and intricacies of where to put a knife for the maximum effect: in the back of the head and up into the brain; an inverted slice across the throat, at the same time cutting the carotid arteries and windpipe. Directly into the heart was also very effective.

  But in the back of the head and into the brain, he realized, was the quickest way and much less bloody. That, blood, became a constant concern, for Richard did not want to get blood on himself or his clothes. With respect to a gun: a bullet to the head, just above the ear, under the jaw, proved to be the most efficient. He hung a man one time, looped a piece of hemp across the man’s neck, hoisted the man off the ground, holding him with the rope over his shoulder. I became the tree, he explained. He also used an ice pick, which proved to be a good killing tool—easy to conceal—when stuck in the right place: directly into the ear, or directly into the eyeball, it was quite lethal.

  Even back then the darkened cobble streets of Manhattan’s far West Side were a gathering place for gay men. There were numerous dark bars that discreetly accommodated a homosexual clientele. One such place was Scottish Annie’s, a safe haven for men who liked to wear skirts and dress as women. The dark bars on these dark, out-of-the-way streets were the perfect place for men to lead what often amounted to a second, hidden life.

  Richard had nothing against homosexuals, he says, and didn’t seek them out, though his steely-eyed Jimmy Stewart good looks invariably drew gay men to him, and if they were too pushy he hurt them; indeed, he killed them. These murders had, he says, nothing to do with sex; they only had to do with someone being too pushy.

  One evening, Richard was drinking in a bar near Grove Street and a man kept coming on to him….

  “Look,” Richard finally said, “I ain’t into that, okay; go somewhere else, okay?”

  But the guy, a tall gentleman with a military crew cut, wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was so insistent that Richard was forced to leave the bar. The guy followed him outside and propositioned him, saying, “I know you want to. Come on, come on, big guy.” Finally, after two blocks of this, Richard saw a loose cobblestone, picked it up, and struck the fellow in the head so hard that brain matter hit a store window.

  “I fuckin’ told you to leave me alone,” Richard told the dead man, and walked on.

  Richard came to realize that when he drank he became outright mean, and during most of these homicide forays into Manhattan he was drinking—certainly not drunk, but definitely buzzed. He told himself that he should drink less, and beer instead of whiskey. Richard also traveled to other places to kill people: Newark, Rhode Island, and Hoboken too. But those areas were less populated, people seemed more on the lookout, nosy, so Richard kept going back to Manhattan, enjoying the hubbub of his own private killing field.

  Because, for the most part, Richard was murdering “throwaway people,” bums and hobos (and occasional gay men), the New York police did little, if anything, to solve these many sudden, impromptu killings.

  No one cared.

  “Let ’em kill each other,” a police captain told his detectives in the Tenth Precinct. There were no stakeouts set up, no curious detectives asking questions with a notebook in hand, and Richard quickly picked up on this, for he saw no extra police anywhere.

  He didn’t kill someone every time he went to New York. There were times he just walked around, had a drink, thought over different schemes he had in his head. With the Coming Up Roses a thing of the past, and Carmine Genovese in jail on gambling charges, Richard was making far less money and was forced to take a menial job unloading trucks, a thing he didn’t like; but he always had his eye out for a score—something he could steal and turn into cash. He had a friend in the Teamsters union named Tony Pro who always made sure Richard had a job if he wanted to work. Richard still shot a lot of pool. The problem now was that most everyone knew how good a pool shark he was, so he was hard-pressed to find anyone willing to play him for money.

  Then Linda became pregnant. Richard had no feelings about the pending birth. He did not love Linda, didn’t think she was a good homemaker. She was just a warm body in
the bed on cold Jersey City nights, a convenient way to get his rocks off. He wanted her to get an abortion. She wouldn’t. She didn’t believe in abortion. He threatened her. She still wouldn’t get one. Richard had no qualms about hitting Linda. He had been brought up in a household where the beating of women was the norm, and he struck Linda without a second thought if she annoyed him, which she did more and more often: she wanted to get married, he didn’t; she wanted him to get a straight job and hold it, he didn’t; she wanted him to stay home nights, he wanted to go out. Most of their disagreements were settled when Richard slapped her, said “Shut up!” out of the side of his thin-lipped mouth. He even tried to make her lose the baby by punching her in the stomach; that didn’t work. Her stomach became larger and larger still every week.

  As cruel as Richard often was to Linda, he could be sweet and gentle—considerate to a fault. He brought her cute stuffed toys, freshly cut flowers, fancy candies and clothing. But the truth was Linda never knew what he would be like when he walked in the door, kind or mean, with a present or a slap. In the end, Richard wound up marrying Linda at city hall. He didn’t tell anyone he was getting married. He was doing it, he said, “for the kid’s sake.”

  Richard had grown into a particularly moody young man, had extreme highs and lows. When he was in a bad mood—most of the time—he was outright dangerous to be around, for man or beast. By now most everyone in Jersey City and Hoboken knew all about Richard Kuklinski, how dangerous he was, and gladly gave him a wide berth, but he still got into altercations with men, which most often ended with Richard killing them.

  For Richard, murder had become an integral part of everyday life…just as night followed day, and the tides moved in and out of the nearby Hudson River. Richard seemed to have the perfect disposition to kill people without reservation or remorse, indeed, without a second thought. Richard was always careful: if he got it into his head to kill someone, or hurt him, as he says, he tried to pick the time and place. Oddly enough, Richard was most dangerous when he was quiet. If someone did something to offend him and he stayed quiet, it was a good time to run for the hills. When he got angry, when murder filled his eyes, he always made this kind of slight clicking sound out of the left side of his mouth, a trait that would stay with him for the rest of his life.