Richard Iceman Kuklinski, American Serial Killer (April 11,
1935 – March 6, 1986); Victims: 16 - 400 + Was a Contracted Killer - Worked for
several Italian-American crime families.
Richard "Iceman" Kuklinski was a convicted
murderer and notorious contract killer. He worked for several Italian-American
crime families, and claimed to have murdered over 400 people over a career that
lasted thirty years. He was the older brother of the convicted rapist and
murderer Joseph Kuklinski.
1. His Birth and
early life:
Richard Leonard Kuklinski was the second of four children
born to Stanley and Anna Kuklinski of Polish origin. Kuklinski was born on
April 11, 1935 in Jersey City, New Jersey. Stanley Kuklinski worked at a
railroad as a brakeman. He was an alcoholic who regularly beat his wife and
children. Anna Kuklinski, meanwhile, worked at a meat processing plant. She was
extremely strict and a devout Catholic. She, too, would often beat Richard
Kuklinski. When Kuklinski was 5 yrs old, his older brother Florian was killed
by Stanley during one of his many beatings. On discovering he had killed his
son, Stanley ordered Anna to call the hospital and report that Florian had
fallen down the stairs and hit his head. Soon, Stanley left his family, and
Richard was left to fend for himself. By 16, he was already known for his
explosive temper and his willingness to kill.
2. The First murder:
Kuklinski first killed his number one enemy. In 1948,
Kuklinski, 13, ambushed and beat Charley Lane, the leader of a small gang of
teenagers known as "The Project Boys," who had bullied him for some
time. Following a particularly bad beating Richard sought revenge, attacking
Charley Lane with a thick wooden dowel eventually beating him to death.
Although he denied wanting to kill Lane, the bully did not wake up. Kuklinski
then dumped Lane's body off a bridge in South Jersey after removing his teeth
and chopping off his finger tips with a hatchet in an effort to prevent
identification of the body. The body was never found. Kuklinski then went in
search of the other boys in the gang. He seized a metal pole from a trash can
and beat all of them nearly to death. He said in the HBO documentary "Ice
Man: Confessions of a Mafia Hit Man" (1992) that it was the day he killed
Charley Lane that he learned it was "better to give than to receive".
According to his own statements, Kuklinski would hurt someone just for making
him feel bad about something. His number one pet peeve was "loudmouthed
people", because they reminded him of his father. He also stated that he
had abused animals as a young child, such as killing cats and dogs by torturing
them.
3. The Association
with the Gambinos and DeMeo:
Association with the Gambino crime family came through his
relationship with the mobster Roy DeMeo. Kuklinski stated that he started doing
robberies and other assignments for the family, one of which was pirating
pornographic tapes. But soon his talent for killing was realized and he stood
out amongst his associates, standing 6 feet and 5 inches and weighing 300 lb.
DeMeo decided to put him to the test. One day, he took Kuklinski out in his car
and they parked on a city street. DeMeo then selected an apparently random
target, a man out walking his dog. He then told Kuklinski to kill him. Without
questioning the order, Kuklinski got out and walked towards the man. As he
passed him, he turned and shot the man in the back of the head. From then on,
He was DeMeo's favorite enforcer. Over the next thirty years, according to
Kuklinski, he killed numerous people, either by gun, strangulation, knife, or
poison. The exact number has never been settled upon by authorities, and
Kuklinski himself at various times claimed to have killed between 33 and 400
individuals. He favored the use of
cyanide since it killed quickly and was hard to detect in a toxicology test. He
would variously administer it by injection, putting it on a person's food, by
aerosol spray, or by simply spilling it on the victim's skin. One of his
favorite methods of disposing of a body was to place it in a 55-gallon oil
drum. His other disposal methods included dismemberment, burial, or placing the
body in the trunk of a car and having it crushed in a junkyard. He also claimed
to have left bodies sitting on park benches on more than one occasion. Despite
Kuklinski's claims that he was a frequent killer for DeMeo, none of DeMeo's
crew members that later became witnesses for the government claimed that
Kuklinski was involved in the murders they committed. Only photographed on one
occasion at the Gemini Lounge, he reportedly visited the club to purchase a
handgun from the Brooklyn crew. He once claimed to have been responsible for
the 1983 murder of Roy DeMeo, although the available evidence and testimony
points to the murderers being fellow DeMeo crew associates Joseph Testa and
Anthony Senter as well as DeMeo's supervisor in the Gambino family, Anthony
Gaggi. According to Kuklinski, at the same time he was allegedly a career hit
man, he met and married Barbara Pedrici, and later fathered two daughters and a
son. His family and neighbors were never aware of his activities, instead
believing that he was a successful businessman. Sometimes he would get up and
leave the house at any time of the day or night to do a job, even if it was in
the middle of dinner.
Initially nicknamed "The Polack" by his Italian
associates because of his Polish heritage, Kuklinski earned the nickname
"Iceman" following his experiments with disguising the time of death
of his victims by freezing their corpses in an industrial freezer. He himself
claims that he used a Mister Softee ice cream truck for this purpose, although
the FBI doubts the veracity of this claim. Later, he told author Philip Carlo
that he got the idea from a hitman nicknamed "Mister Softee", who
drove a Mister Softee truck to appear inconspicuous. Kuklinski's method was
uncovered by the authorities when Kuklinski once failed to let one of his
victims properly thaw before disposing of the body on a warm summer's night,
and the coroner found chunks of ice in the corpse's heart. Kuklinski became
friendly with a man named Robert Pronge, the man nicknamed Mister Softee.
Pronge supposedly was a military-trained demolitions technician. It was from
him that Kuklinski learned of the different methods of using cyanide to kill
his victims. Kuklinski also stated that Mister Softee was "extremely
crazy". In 1984, Robert Pronge was found shot to death in his truck. Most
believe Kuklinski was the perpetrator, but the killer was never found.
4. The State and
federal manhunt:
When the authorities finally caught up with Kuklinski in
1986, they based their case almost entirely on the testimony of an undercover
agent. New Jersey State Police detective Pat Kane started the case 6 years
prior to the arrest and the investigation involved a joint operation with the
New Jersey Attorney General's office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms. Special Agent Dominick Polifrone had undercover experience
specializing in Mafia cases. The New Jersey State Police and the Bureau began a
joint operation. Detective Kane recruited Phil Solimene, a close friend of
Kuklinski, who introduced undercover agent Polifrone to the killer.
The Bureau agent had acted like he wanted to hire Kuklinski
for a hit and recorded him speaking in detail about how he would do it. When
state police and federal agents went to arrest Kuklinski they blocked off his
street, and it took multiple officers to bring him down. In the process of
doing so Mrs. Kuklinski was also arrested and charged with gun possession
because the car was in fact registered under her name. When Mrs. Kuklinski was
arrested a police officer put his boot on her back while detaining her. This
enraged Kuklinski and that is one the reasons why they needed multiple officers
to bring him down.
5. His
Incarceration and death:
In 1988, a New Jersey court convicted Kuklinski of five
murders and sentenced him to consecutive life sentences, making him ineligible
for parole until age 110. In 2003, he pleaded guilty to the 1980 murder of NYPD
detective Peter Calabro and drew another 30 years. In the Calabro murder, in
which Sammy "The Bull" Gravano was also charged, Kuklinski said he
parked his van on the side of a narrow road, forcing other drivers to slow down
to pass. He lay in a snowbank until Calabro came by at 2 a.m., then stepped out
and shot him with a shotgun. During his incarceration, Kuklinski granted
interviews to prosecutors, psychiatrists, criminologists, writers, and
television producers about his criminal career, upbringing, and personal life.
Two documentaries, featuring interviews of Kuklinski by Dr. Park Dietz
(best-known for his interviews with and analysis of Jeffrey Dahmer) aired on
HBO after interviews in 1991 and 2001. Philip Carlo also wrote a book in 2006,
entitled The Ice Man. In one interview, Kuklinski claimed that he would never
kill a child and "most likely wouldn't kill a woman".
However, according to one of his daughters he once told her
that he would have to kill her and her two siblings should he happen to beat
her mother to death in a fit of rage. At the same time, his wife Barbara has
stated that he never actually did hurt the children. He also confessed that he
once wanted to use a crossbow to carry out a hit but not without "testing"
it first. While driving his car, he asked a random man for directions, shot him
in the forehead with the crossbow, and stated that the arrow "went
half-way into his head." He also claimed that on multiple occasions, he
would kidnap his victims, and rather than conventionally murdering them, he
bound their hands and feet with tape. He then left the victims in a cave in the
wilderness where they were eaten alive by rats attracted by the victim's cries.
Kuklinski claimed he filmed these deaths as proof to the buyer that the people
did suffer before death. In one interview, he confessed that he only regretted
one murder, which he deemed particularly cruel.
As he was about to kill a man, the man began praying to God
for his life. Kuklinski told him that he would give God 30 minutes to save him,
but once the time was up, he would be killed. Forcing the man to wait 30
minutes for his demise struck Kuklinski as his most sadistic murder. Kuklinski
died at the age of 70 at 1:15 a.m. on March 5, 2006. He was in a secure wing at
St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey, at the time, although the
timing of his death has been labeled suspicious; Kuklinski was scheduled to
testify that former Gambino crime family underboss Sammy Gravano had ordered
him to murder New York Police Department Detective Peter Calabro. Kuklinski had
admitted to murdering Calabro with a shotgun on the night of March 14, 1980. He
denied knowing that Calabro was a police officer, but said he would have
murdered him regardless. At the time Kuklinski was scheduled to testify,
Gravano was already incarcerated for an unrelated charge, serving a 19-year
prison sentence for running an ecstasy ring in Arizona. Kuklinski also stated
to family members that he thought "they" were poisoning him. A few
days after Kuklinski's death, prosecutors dropped all charges against Gravano,
saying that without Kuklinski's testimony there was insufficient evidence to
continue. At the request of Kuklinski's family, forensic pathologist Michael
Baden examined the results of Kuklinski's autopsy to determine if there was
evidence of poisoning. Baden concluded he died of natural causes
6. His Involvement
with Jimmy Hoffa disappearance:
In April 2006, news reports surfaced that Kuklinski had
confessed to author Philip Carlo that he was part of a group who kidnapped and
murdered famed union boss Jimmy Hoffa. However, during the earlier HBO
interview he denied any knowledge of Hoffa's fate. Kuklinski claimed that he
had only heard rumors, specifically, that Hoffa had been killed, put in a
barrel, placed into a Japanese car which was compacted with other cars, and
shipped overseas. And who knows the
exact number of his victims, the figures range from a mere 5 to the highest
being over 2500, mankind does not need another serial killer of this magnitude
- Bird.