Philip Carlo - The Ice Man

Richard’s wife, Linda, gave birth to a baby boy they named Richard. Richard felt no love for or emotional attachment to his child. He was a natural extension of a sex act—nothing more. Richard didn’t even go to the hospital when Linda gave birth, nor did he help bring her home. He acted as though it were someone else’s child, not his; but it didn’t take long for Linda to become pregnant again.

Linda saw all of Richard’s weapons but never questioned what they were for. She knew how violent and psychotic Richard could be and acted as if she were blind. She knew too that if she questioned him, demanded information, asked questions, he might very well explode and hit her. In this Richard was a carbon copy of his father—the man he most hated in the world—but he did not, never would, hit his son, or strike any of the five children he would eventually have.

Richard was, for the most part, fond of children, saw them as put-upon innocents, and became enraged when he saw an adult hitting a child. One time he beat the hell out of a man he saw hitting his kids in a parking lot; in years to come he’d kill a friend of his because the man asked him to murder his wife and eight-year-old son.

I don’t kill women and I don’t kill children. And anyone that does doesn’t deserve to live, explained Richard. As cold and completely indifferent as Richard was to the suffering of men, he could not stand to see a child harmed. He also hated rapists— tree jumpers, he calls them—and was always on the lookout for sexual predators. He viewed them as vermin that need immediate eradication.

Richard was still taking trips to Manhattan’s West Side, where he killed anyone who got in his way, was pushy, or rude. He very much enjoyed killing aggressive panhandlers, so quickly that they didn’t even realize what had happened until they hit the ground.

One night Richard came upon two burly leather-clad men raping a young boy behind a red eighteen-wheeler parked just near the Hudson. He was walking along, admiring how the lights on the Jersey side of the river played on the water, the giant piano keys of light they made, when he heard a plaintive cry, moaning, meaty thumps. He slowly walked behind the truck and there he actually saw the rape—a boy was being forced to fellate one man while the other sodomized him. They were laughing. They were drunk. They were now in trouble. Richard pulled out a .38 derringer and without a word shot both the rapists dead.

“Thank you, mister, thank you!” the boy said, pulling up his pants, wiping blood from his nose.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Richard said, and proceeded to cut open the stomach cavities of the two leather-clad men, silently cursing them, then dumped them in the river. Richard knew that with their stomachs eviscerated, gases could not build up, so the bodies would sink and stay down.

He so enjoyed killing these two rapists.

Richard had become addicted to killing people. After he committed a murder he felt relaxed, whole, and good—at peace with himself and the world. Richard was very much like a junkie who needs a fix to soothe the pangs of addiction. Murder, for Richard Kuklinski, became like a fix of pure heroin—the best high ever. And the NYPD never suspected that a huge man of Polish extraction from Jersey City was killing all the men they kept finding. There were no witnesses, no clues; no one knew anything.

Retired NYPD captain of detectives Ken Roe recently said: “Back then there were no citywide records of homicides being kept, as there are today. The local precinct had a file, but that was it, and because most all these killings were of bums, people no one really gave a fuck about, there was no incentive to properly work the case. You see, because he was killing in all different ways, the cops didn’t think one guy was doing it. In a sense… in a very real sense, they were inadvertently giving him a license to kill. Hell of a thing.”

Richard’s mentor, Carmine Genovese, had another special job for him. A man in Chicago named Anthony De Peti owed Carmine seventy thousand dollars, wasn’t paying as promised, had stories instead of the money. After Carmine explained the facts of life to him, De Peti promised he’d have the money in two days, “on Wednesday.”

“Okay, I’ll send Richie to come and get it,” Carmine said, and called Kuklinski.

“You go to Chicago. This guy is going to meet you in the bar-lounge in the Pan Am terminal, give you the money he owes, seventy g’s, you bring it right back, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Be careful; he’s slippery like a fuckin’ wet eel,” Carmine told him.

Richard enjoyed going out to the Newark Airport and flying to Chicago. It made him feel like a successful businessman. These days Richard sported a Fu Manchu mustache and long sideburns that tapered off at sharp angles just above his jawline. Stern and forbidding to begin with, he looked even more scary and unsettling with the curved mustache and long daggerlike burns. Already his hair was thinning on top, highlighting his high, wide brow and the severe planes of his Slavic cheekbones. He had, of course, a .32 and a knife with him, as well as one of his beloved derringers. Back then there was no problem carrying weapons onto a plane.

Richard arrived in Chicago’s sprawling, very busy O’Hare Airport and went straight to the lounge, sat down, and waited for De Peti to show himself, not expecting any bloodshed. This was a simple pickup, he thought. He sat and looked around, wondering where the hell De Peti was, becoming a little annoyed. Finally, he stood up and walked all over the lounge, making certain every man there saw him. He was hard to miss at six foot five and 250 pounds. Nothing, no recognition from anyone. Hmm. He was about to call Carmine when a man who’d been sitting not ten feet away from him all along stood up and said, “Rich?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m Anthony De Peti—”

“Why the hell didn’t you say something—you saw me sittin’ here?”

“I wanted to make sure you were alone,” De Peti said. Richard didn’t like that answer. It immediately made him suspicious. He looked at De Peti with jaundiced eyes.

“You got the money?” he asked.

“Yeah, right here,” said De Peti. He was a head shorter than Richard, though wide in the shoulders, with a long, narrow hatchet face and buckteeth. Hairs, like the antennae of an insect, protruded from his narrow nose. He handed Richard a black attaché case.

“But it’s not all there,” he said.

“How much is here?” Richard asked.

“Thirty-five, half.”

“He’s not going to like that.”

“I’ll have the rest in a day or two.”

“Hey, buddy, I’m here now and you’re supposed to have it all, here now. I gotta get on a plane back to Jersey soon. He ain’t going to like this.”

“I swear I’ll have it in a day or two.”

“Yeah, well I gotta call him. Come on,” Richard said, and led De Peti over to a nearby bank of phones. Richard got Genovese on the line. “You find him all right?” he asked.

“Yeah, he’s right here, but he don’t have it all.”

“Son of a bitch, how much does he have?”

“Half… thirty-five, he says. He says he’ll have the rest in a day or two. What do you want me to do?”

“Put him on the phone!”

Richard handed De Peti the phone. Smiling, De Peti explained how he’d have the money soon, “in a day, the most, I swear,” he proclaimed, making sure Richard saw his smiling face, like all was okay, no problem here; Carmine was his friend; what the hell. He gave the phone back to Richard, flight announcements booming on a nearby loudspeaker.

“Yeah,” said Richard, not liking De Peti. Richard had an uncanny ability to read people, like some kind of animal-in-a-jungle thing, and he did not like this guy, did not trust him.