Philip Carlo - The Ice Man

Meanwhile, Richard had Danny stay in Richie Peterson’s apartment while Kuklinski let Richie stay in the spare room in his house. At first he didn’t want to kill Danny; but that would change soon enough.

Detective Pat Kane quickly found out that a body had, in fact, been discovered in room 31. That didn’t necessarily prove that what Barbara had said was true, he was thinking, but it sure as hell pointed in that direction. He asked the North Bergen police if they’d return to the room and see if a lamp cord had been taken from the lamp there. Within a half hour they called Kane back. The lamp cord was missing from the lamp.

Now, sure that Barbara Deppner had told the truth, knew the inside story, Kane was confronted with a diabolical homicide—and the possibility of another one. If this Richard Kuklinski killed Gary for just going to see his kid, surely he’d kill Danny Deppner, and God knew who else. Kane first made sure to find a safe place for Barbara and her eight children. He then focused his energy on locating Danny Deppner, getting to the bottom of what had happened, and finding this Richard Kuklinski. Kane couldn’t quite get out of his head how Barbara kept saying Kuklinski was the devil, how terrified she was. It was “disconcerting,” he would later say.

Kane now directed his attention to finding Richard Kuklinski. It didn’t take him long. He soon learned that Kuklinski actually lived close to him, only two towns away, and that Kuklinski was married and had three children. He found out too that Kuklinski was a film distributor. Kane phoned up the Dumont police, spoke to a detective, and learned that Kuklinski apparently had a very bad temper: on two occasions he had broken the car windows of people whose driving had somehow offended him. First he punched a hole with his bare fist in the windshield of a car filled with teenaged boys, and in the second incident a woman at a red light ticked him off, and he got out of his car and punched a hole in the passenger window. This was no easy task, Kane knew, punching holes in car windows, but this Kuklinski guy had done it twice. He was, Kane learned, six foot five, 280 pounds, and he was obviously endowed with great physical strength.

His curiosity piqued—the hunt on—Kane took a drive over to Dumont. He cruised past the Kuklinski residence. There were two cars in the driveway. He copied down their license-plate numbers and made his way over to the Dumont police barracks. There he met a detective he knew, and found out that the year before, Kuklinski had been brought in on a bad-check incident, but the case never went anywhere because Kuklinski made the check good.

“But we took his mug shot.”

“Mug shot,” beamed Kane.

“Sure,” the detective said, and he rummaged through his desk and handed the mug shot to Kane. He was looking at a balding man with severe eyes, who sported a well-trimmed goatee. The Dumont detective made a copy for Kane, who soon returned to his office, pulled out a yellow manila file, wrote the name Richard Kuklinski on it, and put it in his top right drawer. Thus began an exhausting investigation that would take four and a half years, strain Kane’s marriage, cause him to be ridiculed by his colleagues; an investigation that would, ultimately, expose one of the most prolific killers in modern times; an investigation that would put Pat Kane in the crosshairs of Richard Kuklinski’s .22 Ruger rifle.

Now, Kane knew, he had to find Danny Deppner, which proved to be a difficult thing to do. But Kane kept digging, and soon found out that Richard Kuklinski was a large distributor of porno movies, and had possible links to organized crime. He added this to the Kuklinski file in his desk.

For Richard the killing of Gary Smith was nothing more than swatting a nuisance fly. Richard knew that Gary could and probably would implicate him in the burglaries, and he wanted to be safe, not sorry. As always, Richard’s way of dealing with potential problems was murder, and thus he killed Gary. Now he had to deal with Danny Deppner. At first he tried to help Danny, hid him from police scrutiny, but it didn’t take long for Richard to learn that Danny had told his former wife (Barbara) all about Gary’s murder, and for Richard, that was reason enough to kill Danny, which he did two weeks after killing Gary Smith.

Danny had been staying in Richie Peterson’s apartment, where Richard had been bringing him meals. When Richard made up his mind to kill Deppner, he did so with cyanide. Deppner readily ate a roast beef sandwich Richard bought him, and soon he was near death. Richard then shot him in the head with a .22 equipped with a silencer. The problem was that Richard had hurt his back and wasn’t able to carry Deppner’s body so he could get rid of it. Because of that, he says, he asked Richie Peterson, his daughter’s boyfriend, to help him get rid of the corpse, and Peterson obliged. Richard told Peterson that Deppner had died of a drug overdose, and he believed him. Peterson set fence posts for a living and was particularly strong; after Richard wrapped the large, two-hundred-pound body in black leaf bags, Peterson carried it to Richard’s car. They drove to Clinton Road in West Milford and dumped the now stiff body in a desolate spot, near a reservoir, and there the body became a feast for all manner of creatures that feed on the dead.

Paul Hoffman, the larcenous pharmacist who had been selling Richard lethal poisons for several years, wanted to buy hijacked Tagamet, a popular drug used to treat the pain caused by ulcers. It was easy to sell, and he kept badgering both Richard and Phil Solimene to find him a stolen load.

“I have cash money,” he kept telling Phil, who of course reported this directly to Richard. Paul Hoffman was writing his own death warrant by telling the likes of Richard Kuklinski and Phil Solimene that he had all this cash he was so anxious to spend. Richard had never liked Hoffman. He thought of him as a greedy scumbag that would sell his own mother to turn a buck. If it wasn’t for the poisons Hoffman had been providing him, Richard might well have killed him long ago.

On April 21, 1982, Paul Hoffman showed up at Solimene’s store, saying he had twenty-five thousand dollars with him and he wanted Tagamet. The going rate was thirty-six dollars for one hundred tablets. Hoffman believed he’d be paying nine. Richard had offhandedly mentioned to Hoffman several times that he might be getting a load, but it hadn’t come to pass yet. He was in a very real sense setting out the bait. Phil now called Richard and told him that Hoffman was in the store claiming to have all this money with him.

“I’ll be right there,” Richard said, and left his house and drove over to Paterson.

Richard knew a state police detective had been asking questions about him, driving past his house, but with both Deppner and Smith dead he figured, incorrectly, he had nothing to worry about. Percy House was still in jail, couldn’t make bail, but Phil had assured Richard a dozen times that Percy was “stand-up,” that he’d keep his mouth shut. Richard had even given Phil money for Percy’s lawyer. He was, he recently explained, trying to do the right thing. Richard was thinking that this state detective smelled the smoke but had no idea where the fire was, as he put it, and wasn’t overly concerned now that Smith and Deppner were dead. Richard drove over to Paterson without concern that day. As always he was armed, had two handguns on him and a hunting knife strapped to his massive calf. As always, he made sure he wasn’t being tailed, made sudden U turns, pulled onto the side of the road, sat there, waited, moved on. It was a nice spring day, a comfortable seventy-one degrees.

Richard met Hoffman at the store; they talked; Hoffman assured him he had the money, and Richard said the load of Tagamet had come in and that it was at his garage in North Bergen, where Louis Masgay was still stashed in the well with the ice-cold water. The garage was perfect for what Richard had in mind—sudden murder. Richard now drove over to North Bergen and Hoffman followed him.