Philip Carlo - The Ice Man

“I’ll pay you when it’s done, okay?” Gravano asked.

“Sure. I know you, you know me, no problem,” Richard said, and it was done.

Peter Calabro lived with his young daughter, Melissa, and another detective, John Dougherty—also a widower—in a simple ranch-style house in Saddle River, New Jersey, a secluded wooded area. Richard checked out the house but decided not to do the murder there. He saw Calabro’s young daughter with some other young girls and opted to do the hit down the road from the house, a narrow, little-used road with few homes.

The plan was for Calabro to be followed from work, and Richard would be informed via the walkie-talkie when Calabro was approaching the house. Calabro knew he was marked—there had been threats against his life—and as he made his way from Brooklyn back home that evening he took a secondary route, traveled on back roads, not Route 17. But still he was followed, and Richard knew when and from which direction he was coming. It was March 14, 1980, a cold night, snowing heavily.

Richard parked his van on the snow-covered road, put on his emergency lights, grabbed the shotgun, crouched in front of the van, and waited for just the right moment. Richard was able to see the approaching car, its headlights reflecting off the snow as it came. He had parked his van so that Calabro was forced to go slowly; Richard raised the shotgun and, at just the right moment, when Calabro was abreast of Richard, cut loose with both barrels of the blue-black twelve-gauge, shooting Calabro in the side of the head with the double-ought buckshot rounds. Calabro was killed instantly. His brown Honda meandered for a ways, then careened down a thirty-foot embankment and crashed into a stand of trees.

Calmly, Richard got back into his van and left, still not knowing he had just killed a cop.

As Richard made his way back to Dumont he dumped the shotgun into a stream near his home and went into the house. It was a Friday night. His daughters Chris and Merrick were in the living room with some friends. Barbara was sleeping. Richard made himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and retired.

At 2:15 A.M. Saturday morning a snowplow crew clearing the road found Calabro’s car. In the morning Richard first learned that the man he had killed was a decorated NYPD detective. It didn’t make any difference to Richard that he had killed a cop, but it would have been nice, the right thing to do, if Gravano had told him. Be that as it may, Gravano called Richard a few days later and made arrangements to give Richard the twenty-five thousand.

It was over and done… for now.

In years to come, though, this murder would take on a life of its own and come back to haunt not only Sammy Gravano, but the United States Justice Department as well.

The accident occurred on March 18 of that same year. John Gotti’s youngest son, Frank, borrowed a friend’s motorized minibike, shot out onto the street where the Gottis lived, and was struck and killed by a car driven by one John Favara.

Surely, Favara should immediately have left town, but what he did do was to continue driving the car about the neighborhood, infuriating Mrs. Gotti and her husband, John. He also should certainly have gone to the Gotti home and told the family how genuinely sorry he was. He did neither. His days were numbered. It was by now well known that Richard did “special work,” and Gravano asked him that July if he’d be interested in applying his special talent to the man who had killed John Gotti’s son. Richard knew all about what had happened.

“Sure, be happy to,” he said.

On July 28, Richard met with a few other men, one of whom was Gene Gotti. They drove in a van to where Favara worked and grabbed him as he made his way to his car—the same car he’d run the young Frank Gotti over with. They drove to a junkyard in East New York. There, Gene Gotti and the others beat Favara to a bloody pulp, broke his bones, knocked out his teeth, knocked out an eye. Richard then went to work on him, bound him and tore off his clothes and used emergency flares to torture him, to burn off his genitals. He then stuffed the burning flare up Favara’s anus. They all stood about and watched what was left of him suffer terribly, though not die. Gene Gotti then used a pipe to mercilessly beat Favara and finally kill him. Favara was then stuffed into a fifty-five-gallon drum.

Among the many criminal enterprises Richard had become involved with, he also ran a breaking-and-entering crew. It consisted of Al Rinke, Gary Smith, Danny Deppner, and Percy House. Richard had met each of them, over a period of years, at Phil Solimene’s store. They broke into homes all over New Jersey and stole anything of value they could carry, much of which Phil Solimene sold, splitting the proceeds with the gang. They even stole cars from people’s garages. Richard was both the muscle and the brains behind the operation; and he was the discipline of the operation: he made sure none of them talked or did anything that would compromise the gang—and more important, compromise him.

Percy House was the foreman. He was a short, squat, gruff man that always looked dirty and in need of a shave—a nasty piece of work indeed. Gary Smith was tall and lanky and wore thick black plastic glasses and an Abe Lincoln–type beard, had a hare lip. Danny Deppner was also tall and thin, broad shouldered and strong, had a mop of unruly black hair that always looked windblown. Al Rinke was small and frail and looked like a mouse. None of them had so much as a high school education, and they were not too swift, but they took orders relatively well and, for the most part, did what Richard told them. They were all deathly afraid of Richard. By now Richard had garnered a very well-deserved reputation as a dangerous man, a stone-cold killer, and was the indisputable alpha predator in the criminal food chain. What he said went. He was the boss. The final arbitrator. God.

In this world might was always right.

Richard had always wanted his own gang, styled after a Mafia family. He, too, pined to be inducted into a Mafia family. But he knew that could never happen, because he was not Italian, so he was kind of developing his own crime empire, in his own way. Problem was, these guys were all undisciplined and dumb. They would ultimately become the chink in Richard’s armor of invisibility, breaking his incredible run of luck.

Louis Masgay had a variety store in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania. He bought a lot of swag from Phil Solimene, which he sold out of his shop. He also played cards in the weekend games in Solimene’s store. Masgay had bought hijacked blank videos from Solimene and Richard. He wanted more of them and kept badgering Richard: “When will you have more; I’ll take all you can get; I got cash money, no questions asked.”

This went on for months. Masgay was beginning to annoy Richard, and Richard began ducking him. Still, Masgay kept showing up at Solimene’s store, looking for a big load of blank tapes, saying he had “cash money.”

Finally, on July 1, 1981, Masgay came into Solimene’s store late in the day. Solimene told him a new load of hijacked tapes had come in. Masgay was excited. Solimene asked if he had the money. Trusting Solimene, Louis Masgay told him he did, that it was hidden inside the door panel of his van. With that Solimene picked up the phone and called Richard (he was one of the few people who had Richard’s home phone number) and told him what was up. Richard said he’d be there in one hour. Masgay was excited.

Richard walked in the store an hour later. He had a .22 pistol with a silencer in his pocket. By now the store was closed.