Philip Carlo - The Ice Man

“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.

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.