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

  However, some weeks later he found out that there had been a kilo of heroin in the suitcase. He was furious. If he had been busted with it, he’d have gone to jail, no doubt for a long time. He kept his anger to himself, but when the right time came he did get even with O’Brian—he killed him by shooting him in the head, and got rid of his body in South Jersey, not far from the car salesman whose head he gave to Genovese; and no one had any idea that O’Brian was done in for manipulating Richard Kuklinski, putting his life on the line without having the courtesy of even telling him. Richard, of course, didn’t say a word about what he’d done…not even to his mentor and rabbi, Carmine Genovese. The way Richard saw it, a crooked cop had gotten exactly what he deserved, and he was only too happy to serve it up.

  An unusual piece of work now came Richard’s way. A mob boss named Arthur De Gillio had to go. He was stealing from his boss, the head of the family, and a death contract was issued. Carmine tapped Richard to do the job, called him to his home, solemnly sat him down, said: “This here is the most important piece of work I’ve given you. This guy is a boss. He’s gotta die. You are doing the job. There’s a special requirement with this job—you need to take his credit cards, you understand, and after you kill him, you stuff the credit cards up his ass.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Richard.

  “No. That’s the way it has to be. That’s what the skipper wants. And before you kill him, make him suffer and make sure he knows why he’s dying and what you’re gonna do,” Carmine said, his meatball-shaped face all serious.

  “You’re kidding,” Richard repeated.

  “I look like I’m kiddin’?”

  “No.”

  “And so?”

  “Okay, no problem,” Richard said, thinking these Italians were a crazy lot, had all kinds of nutty rules and regulations, but his job was not to question the ways of the Mafia; his job was to carry out orders. End of story.

  “This will be tricky—and dangerous. He always has bodyguards around,” Genovese said, and gave Richard the mark’s home and business addresses. “You do this job good, it’ll be a big feather in your cap, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t hurry it. Do it right. Take’a your time. Make sure no one makes you. If they do, it’ll come right back to me—you understand?”

  “I understand.”

  “You cap anyone that gets in your way—no matter who.”

  “Okay,” Richard said, and soon left.

  This, he knew, was a very important piece of work, and he felt honored to be given it; he was moving up in the world. It would put him at the front of the line. It was like an actor being given the role of his life…a part that would surely make him a star, a bright light in the galaxy of organized crime.

  Richard plotted this murder meticulously for ten days. As Carmine had said, De Gillio always had bodyguards around, but he had a girlfriend over in a residential area in Montclair, and when he went there, every few days, he did so with only a driver-gofer, a skinny kid who was his nephew. The girlfriend lived in a quiet, two-story yellow building with a parking lot off to the left. The nephew waited outside, in a quiet corner of the parking lot, near a grated wood fence, as De Gillio, a heavyset man who had a large belly and short bandy legs, went inside, did the job with his girlfriend, and came out. He wasn’t inside more than an hour—an afternoon quickie. On the day Richard planned to move, he trailed De Gillio to the Montclair apartment. De Gillio got out of the car and waddled inside. Richard waited fifteen minutes, walked up to the nephew, and without a word shot him in the side of the head with a .22 onto which was attached a suppressor, better known as a silencer. The small-caliber bullet instantly made mush of the driver’s brain, and he was dead before he even knew he’d been shot.

  Casually, slowly, Richard walked back to his car, got in, pulled it up near De Gillio’s car, opened his trunk, and began to change his tire, moving slowly, taking his time, not drawing any suspicion to himself, just another guy with a flat in a mostly empty parking lot. Almost like clockwork, De Gillio came waddling out of the house, apelike, not taking any particular notice of the guy with a flat. When he reached his car, however, his face creased with anger because he thought his nephew had fallen asleep. Richard now began walking toward him. As Richard neared De Gillio, he pulled out the .22 with the silencer, an assassin’s weapon that immediately stopped De Gillio.

  “Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me here?!” De Gillio demanded. “You know who da fuck I am?”

  “Yeah, I know who you are. You’re the guy who’s coming with me,” and with that Richard discreetly though firmly pressed the .22 up against De Gillio’s stomach, took him by the arm, and led him toward his car. “Someone wants to talk to you,” Richard said.

  “Yeah, who?”

  “A friend.”

  “A friend—you’re fucking dead! You and your friend are dead!” Richard’s answer was to push the .22 into De Gillio’s chest, hard. He pulled back the hammer. De Gillio’s face paled. Richard led him to the rear of his car; the trunk was opened already. Before De Gillio knew it Richard pushed him inside the trunk. Here De Gillio tried to resist. Richard cracked him in the head with his jawbreaker, knocking De Gillio out cold. Richard cuffed his hands behind his back, put duct tape across his mouth, closed the trunk, and drove to a desolate area in Jersey City, down by the water.

  Here, Richard calmly got out of the car, pulled De Gillio from the trunk, and laid him on the ground. Richard took a bat from the trunk and without preamble beat De Gillio in the legs, breaking bones every time he struck, saying, “This is happening because you stole from your boss. This is happening because you’re a greedy fucking pig,” and he smashed De Gillio with terrific force, now in the arms, the elbows, the shoulders, the collarbones. Richard then went to work on his chest, and broke his ribs.

  Next, Richard slipped on a pair of blue rubber gloves, took De Gillio’s wallet, pocketed the cash he had, found his credit cards, said: “They want me to stick these up your ass. You believe that? I still don’t believe it myself. Fuckin’ Italians are crazy.” De Gillio’s eyes were bulging with fear and pain; he tried to plead with Richard, offer him money, all the money he had, but the duct tape held. Richard was deaf to his mumbled entreaties.

  “Say good-bye to the world,” Richard said, and struck De Gillio square in the head, smashing his skull, destroying his brain—finally killing him.

  Richard viciously pulled down his pants and underwear and rammed the credit cards where the sun don’t shine. He rolled De Gillio in a plastic tarp, took him to Bayonne, and left him in an abandoned lot down by the water, there for all the world to see.

  Finished, Richard went to see Carmine and told him exactly what had been done.

  “You’re a good man, the best!” exclaimed Genovese, patting Richard warmly, and paying him handsomely for a job well done. When De Gillio was discovered, the police were summoned, but there were no witnesses and no connection to Richard—another organized-crime killing, nothing new in Jersey City, Hoboken, or Bayonne.

  Richard’s reputation as an efficient, cold-blooded killer spread. He began taking pieces of work from men in different Mafia families, not only the Ponti and De Cavalcante Jersey families, but New York crime families as well. Because he hadn’t been “made,” he was able to work as a giovane d’honore, an independent contractor, without trouble. He carefully planned each hit, and scrupulously followed instructions.

  If, he recently explained, they wanted a guy tortured, I did that; if they wanted a mark to disappear, I did that. I got to really enjoy the planning—and the hunt; it was kind of like…a science.

  Still, most of the money Richard earned he lost gambling. His pockets would be bulging with hundred-dollar bills, then he’d get into a few high-stakes card games and lose it all. Easy come, easy go. That was his attitude. One time he not only lost all the cash he had, he lost his car in a card game in Hoboken and actually had to take a bus back home.

  13

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  Linda gave birth to a second male child and they named him David. Richard was still completely indifferent to his sons. He viewed them as though they were someone else’s kids. The relationship with Linda had become more and more strained, and they weren’t even having intimate relations anymore. Richard gave her some money now and then, but that was the sum of it.

  However, he was protective of Linda and the boys in the extreme. He viewed them as his personal property—her especially—and became enraged if anyone abused or took advantage of either Linda or his sons.

  In the low-income housing complex where Linda and the boys lived there was a superintendent who was sweet on Linda and kept making overtures that became more and more bold. She kept ignoring him. After a time he became abusive, loud, vulgar. She wanted to tell Richard but didn’t want any trouble. She knew Richard had a fiery hair-trigger temper, could be extremely violent, had all kinds of guns and knives and terrible weapons, so she kept quiet about the abusive superintendent.

  But one day the superintendent slapped both of Linda’s children, claiming they were making too much noise. This was too much for Linda to bear, and she called Richard at a bar he hung out in, the Final Round in nearby Hoboken. When Richard heard that the super had slapped his kids, he slammed down the phone, jumped in his car, and sped to the house. His sons confirmed that the super had hit them for playing in the hall. Richard went looking for him with violence on his mind, planning to kill him and dump his body somewhere no one would ever find it; that would become one of Richard’s noted specialties: getting rid of bodies.

  The super, he soon found out, was in a bar just across the street that Richard sometimes went to. It was nearly four thirty in the afternoon and the bar was crowded with men having a drink after work before they went home to their families or to empty apartments. His lips twisted to the left and making that soft clicking sound through his clenched teeth, Richard opened the door and walked in. The smells of whiskey, cigarettes, and hardworking men drinking hard liquor greeted him. He spotted the superintendent standing at the bar. He was a large man with a chip on his shoulder—a bully—the kind of man Richard hated most.

  Calmly, Richard walked up to him. “What right you got hitting my kids?”

  “They wouldn’t shut up—,” the super began, but before he could finish, Richard hit him so hard he seemed to fly across the room as in a cartoon. Richard went after him and beat him to a bloody pulp. The bartender, Richard knew, was a moonlighting cop, but he didn’t care. As Richard was making his way to the door, the bartender showed him his badge and demanded to see his ID. Richard answered him with a vicious roundhouse right that knocked him out cold. Richard would surely have killed the super right then and there if there hadn’t been so many witnesses.

  It didn’t take long before angry-faced detectives came around looking for Richard because he had punched out the bartender-cop. Richard went to Carmine Genovese and told him what had happened, Genovese reached out to some friends in the PD, and Richard had to pay three thousand dollars for the matter to be over and done with. The super was in the hospital for three weeks, had a broken cheekbone and jaw. Upon release from the hospital, he quit his job and hightailed it the hell out of Jersey City. Smart move. Richard was planning to kill him.

  Some months later, Richard was leaving the Final Round when his brother Joe called to him from across the street.

  Joe, like Richard, was now nearly six foot five, blond, and handsome.

  “Hey, Rich!”

  “How you doing, Joe?”

  “Same old same old.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Rich…I have…I have something to tell you.”

  “About ma?”

  “No…Linda.”

  “Linda? What?”

  Joe stared at his brother. He, like everyone in Jersey, knew Richard was always armed, always dangerous. “I don’t know how to say this,” Joe began.

  “Say what?”

  “Rich, I saw Linda and Sammy James go into a room at the Hudson Hotel.”

  “What!” Richard demanded, his voice rising, his face flushing strawberry red.

  “Don’t go getting mad at me, Rich; I just thought you should know.”

  “What room, you know?”

  “Yeah, number sixteen, on the ground floor, just near the Coke machine.”

  “Thanks, Joe,” Richard said, and he jumped into his car and sped over to the Hudson Hotel.

  True, Richard and Linda were mostly estranged at this point, but Richard still thought of her as his wife—and as his property. He pulled into the parking lot of the hotel, which was in a secluded area near the river. It was a place where people went to have sex, for the most part. Richard knew Sammy James. They had played pool as partners. Richard stormed up to number 16 and smashed the door wide open with his enormous right foot.

  There they were, both naked, in bed, actually having intercourse. Linda’s eyes nearly popped out of her shocked face. Richard grabbed James, a tall, muscular guy with curly black hair, and pummeled him. Linda, in shock, looked on.

  “You treacherous bastard!” Richard told James. “I’m going to break every bone in your body but one, and you go near her again, I’ll find out and break that bone.” And Richard proceeded to methodically smash and break almost every bone in James’s body but the femur of his left leg, repeatedly getting on the bed and jumping on him, kicking him, stomping him, punching him.

  Finished with James, Richard turned his wrath on Linda, drew out a knife.

  “If you weren’t the mother of my sons,” he said, “I’d kill you, but now I’m just going to teach you a lesson you will never forget.” He grabbed for her left breast. She tried to resist him. He slapped her unconscious, grabbed her left breast, and cut off its nipple. He then did the same thing to her other breast and left her there like that, storming out of the room like a hurricane.

  From that day on Richard had little to do with Linda. He’d see his boys now and then; that was it. James left town and never came back to Jersey City.

  Philip Marable was a captain in the Genovese crime family. He owned a popular Italian restaurant in Hoboken and lived in nearby Bloomfield. The name of the restaurant was Bella Luna. They served good southern Italian food at reasonable prices. There were yellow oilcloths on each table and candles in empty wine bottles covered with different-colored wax.

  Marable was a good dresser, always perfectly coiffed, handsome with thick black hair and dark menacing eyes…a dandy. He reached out to Richard and had him come to the restaurant, greeted him warmly, sat him down, insisted he eat a good meal. Richard kept wondering what he wanted. After they finished eating and had anisette-infused espresso, Marable said, “You know George West, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” Richard said.

  “We have a problem with this guy. He’s been holding up my runners”—people who collect bets on the numbers racket—“and I don’t want him around no more,” Marable explained.

  “Could be arranged,” Richard said.

  “Make sure a message is sent—understand—that this kind’a shit can’t be goin’ on, okay?”

  “I understand,” Richard said, pleased, seeing his career horizons broadening.

  With that Marable adroitly slipped a white envelope across the table, as if it were a practiced trick. The envelope was filled with cash. Richard pocketed it. Dinner was over. Richard knew that Marable’s giving him a piece of work was a good opportunity, and Richard immediately went looking for George West. He searched high and low for West but couldn’t find him. He staked out his house, bars he frequented, kept missing him. But Richard was determined to fill the contract quickly and successfully, and he kept looking for West, like a shark following the scent of blood. Under the front seat of his car Richard had a cut-down .22 Magnum rifle with a silencer and a thirty-clip magazine. It was a vicious little weapon, an assassin’s tool, easy to carry, easy to conceal—deadly. Richard had an unlimited, conven
ient supply of weapons. He knew a guy named Robert, known as “Motorboat” because his ears protruded excessively, who sold all kinds of guns out of the trunk of his car, new guns still in boxes. Richard never killed two people with the same weapon. As soon as he used one in a killing, he got rid of it. This habit would serve him well for many years to come, for it kept his activities off police radar. He also purposely shot people to death with two different-caliber weapons, so it would appear as if there were two shooters. Motorboat the gun salesman had a big old Lincoln Continental with a huge trunk filled with handguns, rifles, and silencers. He was a tall, skinny guy with thick rose-colored glasses. He was also a mechanic and made suppressors for nearly all the guns he sold. When in need, all Richard had to do was call Motorboat, and he’d come around with his wide-ass Lincoln. Richard even bought hand grenades from Motorboat. The cut-down .22 he was going to use on George West he’d gotten from Motorboat.

  For nine days Richard couldn’t find West, no matter how hard he searched for him, yet he knew West was in town because people saw him. It was the end of April 1958 now and it rained just about every day.

  By happenstance as Richard was driving away from a bar in Bayonne where he’d picked up money for Carmine Genovese, he passed an old-fashioned silver boxcar diner a little way down the road, and George West was sitting there plain as day eating a sandwich. Not believing this bit of luck, Richard nearly hit the car in front of him, he was staring at West so hard. He made a U-turn and pulled into a parking lot next to the diner, found West’s car, and positioned his own car so he’d have a clear shot. It was raining hard. Richard liked to kill in the rain. There were fewer people about. Everyone was in a hurry, not paying attention to anything but where he was going.

  Soon West left the diner and made his way to his car, using a toothpick as he went. Richard calmly took a bead on him, pulled the trigger of the semiauto .22, and in two seconds shot West numerous times. Because of the silencer the gun made only a soft popping sound, like a ladyfinger firecracker going off, Richard explained. Wanting to be sure West was dead, Richard calmly got out of his car and walked over to West. No one noticed Richard. No one cared. West was still alive. Blood was squirting from a dime-sized bullet hole in his neck. Richard made sure he was unobserved and put two slugs in West’s head, walked back to his car and returned to Jersey City. He would’ve liked to torture West a bit, that had been the directive, but circumstances hadn’t permitted such a luxury. It had taken him nine days to find West, and he hadn’t wanted to give him a chance to get away. Richard did not tell Marable of the hit, how it had happened; he’d find out soon enough, Richard knew; indeed, it was bad form to talk about a murder after it was ordered and went down.