The Ice Man Read online

  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.

  If I was going to hurt someone, I’d never tell him. Why let him know what your intention is? he recently asked.

  A Triple Play

  It was the middle of February 1956. Horrific cold winds came barreling down the Hudson River from upstate New York and whipping off the Atlantic. The water in the river was choppy and rough, filled with large, sharp-edged pieces of ice the color of nicotine-stained fingers. Richard was in a bar called Rosie’s Place in Hoboken, playing eight ball with a large square-shouldered truck driver with a glistening bald head and hands as big as ham hocks. There were a few pool tables, a long slat bar, some wobbly tables and chairs. It was a Friday night. Considering the weather, the place was crowded, cigarette smoke hanging in the air like a thick, fallen cloud. There was a jukebox, and country music came from it. Richard kept winning. He seemed to make every shot. The bald-headed truck driver became more and more angry and started making nasty comments to his two friends at the bar, who were trying to pick up girls.

  Staying quiet, Richard kept running all the balls, not missing a shot. Soon the truck driver started calling Richard “Polack.” “Hey, Polack, you got a rabbit’s foot up your ass? Hey, Polack, how ’bout you give me a chance to shoot? Hey, Polack, where’d you get that fuckin’ fag suit?”

  Richard abruptly stopped playing, quietly walked to the truck driver, and without a single word smashed him alongside the head with his pool cue, breaking the pool stick into pieces. The truck driver went right down. His friends at the bar stayed put. Richard started toward the door. “Fuck you,” he said as he went. Before he knew it, however, the truck driver was up and throwing fast, furious punches at him, well-placed combinations, like a boxer would. He was exceedingly strong and was beating Richard. The fight moved to a pool table. The truck driver managed to get Richard down on top of it and proceeded to pummel him. Richard grabbed an eight ball and, with all his strength, struck the guy alongside his bald head; again, he went down.

  Richard didn’t want anything more to do with this situation—fighting for dear life in a bar over what amounted to nonsense. He left the Hoboken bar, got into a blue Chevy he had, and drove toward Jersey City, licking his wounds as he went. The bald-headed truck driver was the toughest, strongest guy he’d ever gone up against, and it was all over nothing. Thinking he had to learn to control his drinking and homicidal impulses, Richard went under a low train trestle between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Streets, where a car suddenly cut him off and made him come to a screeching stop. The truck driver jumped out of the car, all red-faced mad, followed by his friends; they were carrying pipes, storming toward Richard.

  Under the seat of the car, Richard had a snub-nosed .38. He quickly grabbed it, and as the truck driver reached him, cursing, raising the length of pipe he had, Richard shot him square in the forehead. He went down and this time he stayed there, a finger of blood gushing in squirts from th
e sudden dime-sized hole in his head. Richard got out of the car and proceeded to shoot the other two dead, the report of the gunshots deafeningly loud under the cold metal trestle. Shaking his head in disbelief, Richard knew he had to move and move fast unless he wanted to go to jail. His mind raced. Quickly, he put the three bodies into the back of the bald-headed guy’s car and drove it down to the frozen, bleak waterfront, only a few blocks away. He retrieved his own car, parked it near the car with the bodies, put the three of them in the trunk, and took off for Pennsylvania’s Bucks County. He knew he had to get rid of the bodies, that they could never be found; if they were it would be a foregone conclusion that he had killed them. He had thought about just driving the car into the river, but he was concerned it would be spotted there and the bodies would be found, and of course tied to him.

  The year before Richard had been in Bucks County hunting deer and had come across some interesting caves in which there were bottomless pits. He made a mental note then of these endless holes in the ground as a good place to get rid of a body, never imagining he’d have three bodies to dispose of. Richard had an uncanny sense of direction, and without much difficulty he managed to find the caves; one by one he carried the bodies inside and tossed them down a gaping, ominous hole. He could hear them banging along the sides of the hole as they went down, but not hit bottom. Huffing and puffing, his breath fogging in the February cold, he hurried back and forth, throwing each body in turn down the hole, amazed at how heavy a body became when life left it.

  Deadweight. There really is such a thing as deadweight, he explained.

  Finished, a job well done, Richard drove back to Jersey City listening to country music, resolved to stop getting into barroom brawls, fights over nothing. But that never happened. If someone, anyone, insulted Richard, spoke down to him, or was disrespectful, Richard wanted to kill him, and often did. This would be a recurring theme that played out often and tragically in Richard’s incredibly violent life.

  Back in Jersey City, Richard carefully wiped his prints off the car, took off the license plates, drove it to the edge of a pier along the Hudson where he knew the water was deep, and eased it into the frigid, secret-holding, accommodating river. The car quickly disappeared. If the car was found at some point without any bodies inside of it, he’d have no problems. The sky was still dark, but a thick leaden dawn was coming on quickly. The wind blew hard. Richard walked back to his car and drove home, proud of his quick thinking, proud of the fact that he had met the enemy head-on and prevailed.

  He felt they had gotten what they deserved, and he was, in the end, glad he had killed them. The last thought before he went to sleep, the February winds whistling, rattling the windows, was They got what they deserved.

  Oddly enough, Richard wasn’t even questioned about the disappearance of the three men. He had, it seemed, amazing luck. He’d killed them on a quiet, desolate street with few houses nearby; a passing car could very well have come along, but none did. This luck would follow Richard for many years. It was almost as if he had some kind of dark, demonic archangel watching over him, keeping him safe…off police radar.

  There were rumors that Richard had done in the three guys, but no one ever asked him, no cops questioned him, and Richard certainly wasn’t about to tell anyone what he’d done. He was tight-lipped in the extreme—another aspect of his personality that would serve him well for many years to come.

  Murder for Hire

  Carmine Genovese was out of jail and needed another man killed, though this time, he told Richard, the mark had to “suffer” before he died and the body had to “disappear.”

  “This guy,” Carmine said, “did something to a friend of mine’s wife; something very disrespectful. You make sure he suffers—understand? Do it good and I’ll pay you double…okay?”

  “Okay, sure, no problem,” Richard said. He did not ask what the man had done, why he had to suffer. That was irrelevant; none of his business.

  Again, Carmine gave Richard a photograph of the mark and the address of the place he worked, a used-car lot on Raymond Boulevard in Newark. The mark was standing in the lot next to a woman that looked kind of like him.

  “You do this right, I pay you very well, capisce?”

  “Capisce,” Richard said.

  “Maybe you can bring me a little piece a him so I can see for myself and tell my friend how he suffered.”

  “A piece of him?” Richard repeated, a little confused.

  “Yeah, so I can show my friend.”

  “How big a piece?” Richard asked.

  “Not so big, maybe like his hand…some toes, okay?”

  “Yeah…sure, okay,” Richard said. “No problem. I aim to please.”

  “Good,” Genovese said. They shook hands. The contract was sealed.

  Glad Carmine was giving him another “piece of work,” Richard left his place, his mind suddenly filled with the job before him. This was, he would later reveal, the part he liked the most—the stalking of a victim. Richard immediately knew how to do this and looked forward to it. Clearly, Richard had grown into a psychotic sadist who had discovered a way to hurt and kill people, and get paid for it. Life was good.

  It was a sprawling used-car lot. Colorful flags were strung across it every which way. Richard quickly found the mark. He was tall and thin and was often walking about the lot with customers. He even went on test drives with people. Before Richard made any kind of move he surveyed the place for two days—found out when the most people were there, when the mark arrived, and when he left. When Richard had a clear plan in his mind, he parked his car a few blocks away, on a quiet street lined with broken-down warehouses. There were fewer people shopping for cars about 11:00 A.M., just before lunch, and that’s when Richard walked onto the lot, straight up to the mark, a friendly smile about his high-cheekboned face. It was late March. The weather had become mild. Richard wore a baggy sport coat. In one pocket he had a .38 derringer, in the other a jawbreaker—a kind of blackjack with a piece of solid lead the size of a cigarette pack encased in black leather with a short, thin handle—perfect for knocking people unconscious with one blow. Smiling, Richard told the mark he needed an inexpensive car quickly, that his car had been stolen and that he needed wheels for work.

  “Something reliable,” he said. “I’m not handy with engines and I don’t want to get stuck somewhere at night,” he explained, his face suddenly grave. Richard was, in fact, a consummate actor. He had a natural ability, no doubt acquired on the street, of looking someone square in the eye and lying through his teeth.

  “Got the perfect car for you,” the mark said, and led him over to a two-door Ford. Richard looked it over carefully, kicked the tires.

  “Can I take it for a spin?” he asked.

  “Of course,” the mark said. “Let me get the keys.” He walked into the little office on the left. Richard had set the trap; soon he’d spring it. They piled into the car. Off they went. Richard drove a few blocks, talking about how well the car handled, then headed directly toward his car. Completely unaware of what was about to happen, the mark was no doubt calculating his commission. Richard pulled up to his car and stopped, said he wanted to check under the hood.

  “Is that okay?” he politely asked, smiling.

  “Sure, no problem. Got nothing to hide here. Clean as a whistle.” The mark was caught up in the moment, having no idea about the hatchet, rope, and shovel in the trunk of Richard’s car. Richard slid out of the Ford and opened the hood. The mark, of course, followed. As he was looking down at something Richard pointed to, Richard struck him with the jawbreaker just above the ear. He went right down, out cold. In seconds Richard put him in the trunk of his car, taped his mouth shut with industrial duct tape, hog-tied his feet and hands behind his back. Calm and cool, Richard got on the turnpike and drove south to the Jersey Pine Barrens, desolate forests that were perfect for what he had in mind. This was where he had disposed of Charley Lane—the projects bully—so many years ago. Richard had a
lready scoped out a good spot, where he hid his car behind a thick stand of accommodating pines. Here he opened the trunk and dragged the panic-stricken mark from his car and tied him to one of the trees, his back tight up against it. Richard took a length of rope, forced it into the mark’s mouth, and tied it tightly to the rough pine tree, forcing the mark’s tongue up against the back of his rapidly constricting throat. The mark was crying now, trying to talk, to beg, to plead, but he only made muffled, unintelligible grunts. He seemed to know why this was happening, as if, in a way, he had expected it. Richard now actually told him that he had to suffer before he died, and went back to his car and retrieved the hatchet and shovel, very much enjoying this.

  He made sure the mark saw the hatchet and shovel, watched the reality of their meaning in Richard’s enormous hands sink in. The mark began to scream, to try and break free, but that was impossible. He wet himself, a thing Richard would see many times in years to come. Richard proceeded now to smash the mark’s ankles and knees with the hatchet. Then he chopped off his fingers, one at a time. Richard stepped back to see the degree of pain the mark was suffering. He’d been planning to take the fingers back to Genovese as proof of the suffering, but suddenly got a better idea, as he put it….

  When Richard finally killed the mark, he dug a hole in the pine-needle-covered ground, threw what was left of the hapless man into the hole, retrieved the proof Genovese had asked for, and returned to Hoboken, carrying it in a plastic bag he’d brought along, listening to country music as he went.

  He found Genovese at home.

  “Did you do the job?” Genovese asked.

  “Yeah, it’s done,” said Richard.

  “You bring me something good?” Genovese asked.

  “Sure did,” Richard said, amused, placing the bag on the kitchen table. Curious, Genovese looked inside, and there was the mark’s head. A big smile spread over Genovese’s large, round face.