Richard Kuklinski

Richard Kuklinski was born in his family's apartment on 4th Street in Jersey City, New Jersey, to Stanisław "Stanley" Kukliński (1906–1977), a Polish immigrant from Karwacz, Masovian Voivodeship[10] who worked as a brakeman on the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, and Anna McNally (1911–1972) from Harsimus,[11] a daughter of Catholic Irish immigrants from Dublin, who worked in a meat-packing plant during Richard's childhood.[12] He was the second of four children.

According to Richard Kuklinski, Stanley Kuklinski was a violent alcoholic who beat his children regularly and sometimes beat his wife.[6] Stanley abandoned the family while Richard was still a child, but returned periodically, usually drunk, and his returns were often followed by more beatings for Richard.[13] Anna was also often abusive. She would beat Richard with broom handles (sometimes breaking the handle on his body during the assaults) and other household objects. He recalled an incident during his pre-teen years when his mother attempted to kill Stanley with a kitchen knife.[6] Anna was a zealous Catholic and believed that stern discipline should be accompanied by a strict religious upbringing, the same way she was raised. She raised her son in the Roman Catholic Church, where he became an altar boy.[12] Kuklinski later rejected Catholicism. Kuklinski regarded his mother as a "cancer" who destroyed everything she touched.[14]

Kuklinski had three siblings. His older brother Florian (1933–1941) died at the age of seven from injuries inflicted by his father during a violent beating.[15] The family lied to the police, saying that Florian had accidentally fallen down a flight of steps.[15] Stanley abandoned the family shortly after he murdered his first son. Kuklinski, who was the second son, had a younger sister, Roberta (1942–2010), and a younger brother, Joseph (1944–2003), who in 1970 was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl and murdering her by throwing her off the top of a five-story building (along with her pet dog).[16][17] When asked about his brother's crimes, Kuklinski replied: "We come from the same father."[12]

In the mid-1960s, Kuklinski began working at a Manhattan film lab. Through the lab he had access to master copies of popular films, and he began making bootleg copies of Disney animated films which he could then sell. Kuklinski discovered there was a lucrative market for tapes of pornographic movies too; copying and distributing pornography became a regular source of income for him.[18] He was once arrested for passing a bad check, the only crime he was charged with prior to his arrest for murder. He was photographed and fingerprinted, but the charges were dropped when he agreed to pay back the money owed.[1] Several of his known murder victims were men he had met through trafficking pornography and drugs.[19] He also headed a group which specialized in carrying out burglaries. This group consisted of Gary Smith, Barbara Deppner, Daniel Deppner, Percy House, and Richard Kuklinski himself.[20][1]

On January 30, 1980, Kuklinski killed George Mallibrand. He had met Kuklinski who promised to sell him tapes.[3] Malliband was reportedly carrying $27,000 at the time.[19] Malliband's body was shot multiple times and was found in a 55-gallon drum.[3] Kuklinski would later accept a plea deal, where he admitted to shooting him five times and explained that "It was due to business".[21]

The drum was located near the Chemitex chemical plant in Jersey City. Kuklinski had cut the tendons of Malliband's leg in order to force it into the barrel.[22] This was the first murder to be directly linked to Kuklinski, as Malliband's brother told police that he had been on his way to meet Kuklinski the day he disappeared.[1]

In 1982, Kuklinski met Paul Hoffman, a 51-year-old pharmacist who occasionally frequented "the store" in Paterson, New Jersey, a storefront with a large backroom where a wide variety of stolen items could be bought and sold. Hoffman hoped to make a big profit by purchasing, at a low cost, large quantities of stolen Tagamet, a popular drug used to treat peptic ulcers, which he could then resell through his pharmacy. He believed that Kuklinski could supply the drug and badgered him to make a deal.[23] Hoffman was last seen on his way to meet Kuklinski with $22,000 to buy prescription drugs from Kuklinski.[3][19] Kuklinski would later accept a plea deal where he admitted to killing Hoffman on April 29, 1982.[2]

By the early 1980s, Kuklinski's burglary gang was coming under more scrutiny from law enforcement. In December 1982, Percy House, a member of the gang, was arrested. House would later agree to testify against Kuklinski and was placed in protective custody.[24] Warrants were also issued for the arrest of two more gang members, Gary Smith and Daniel Deppner. Kuklinski urged them to lie low and rented them a room at the York Motel in North Bergen, New Jersey. Kuklinski was angered when he learned that Smith had left the motel to visit his daughter and also feared that Smith, who had recently spoken of giving up crime and going straight, might become an informant against him.[25]

According to the testimony of Barbara Deppner, Kuklinski, Daniel Deppner and House (who was still in jail at the time) decided that Smith had to be killed. Kuklinski therefore fed Smith a hamburger laced with poison followed by Daniel Deppner strangling Smith with a lamp cord.[20] According to forensic pathologist Michael Baden, Smith's death would probably have been attributed to something non-homicidal in nature (like drug overdose for instance) had Kuklinski relied solely on the cyanide. However, the ligature mark around Smith's neck proved to investigators that he was murdered.[6]

When Deppner's ex-wife, Barbara, failed to return with a car to remove the body, they placed it in between the mattress and box spring. Over the next four days, a number of patrons rented the room, and although they thought the smell in the room was odd, most of them did not think to look under the bed.[6][26] Finally, on December 27, 1982, after more complaints from guests about the smell, the motel manager investigated and found Smith's decomposing body.

After Smith's murder, Kuklinski moved Deppner to an apartment in Bergenfield, New Jersey, belonging to Rich Patterson, then-fiancé of Kuklinski's daughter Merrick. Patterson was away at the time, but Kuklinski had access to the apartment.[27] At some point between February and May 1983, Deppner was killed by Kuklinski.[27] Investigators later deduced that he was murdered in Patterson's apartment after finding a bloodstain on the carpet.[28] Kuklinski enlisted Patterson's help to dispose of Deppner's body, telling Patterson that the victim was a friend who had been in trouble with the law, and that someone must have broken in and killed him over the weekend. He added that it was best to dump the body to avoid trouble with the police. Afterwards Kuklinski urged Patterson to just forget about the incident.[28] Kuklinski made another mistake when he told an associate that he had killed Deppner.[29]

Deppner's body was found on May 14, 1983, when a cyclist riding down Clinton Road in a wooded area of West Milford, New Jersey, spotted the corpse being eaten by a turkey vulture. Kuklinski had wrapped the body inside green garbage bags before dumping it.[1] Medical examiners listed Deppner's cause of death as "undetermined", although they noted pinkish spots on his skin, a possible sign of cyanide poisoning. Deppner had also been strangled. Law enforcement theorized that Deppner must have already been incapacitated, such as by poison, as he had no defensive wounds and healthy adult men are rarely killed by strangulation.[28] The medical examiner found that Deppner's stomach was full of undigested food, meaning he had died shortly after (or during) a meal. The beans that Deppner had eaten were burned, so they reasoned that it must have been a home-cooked meal, as a restaurant would probably not get away with serving burned food to a customer.[27] Investigators noted that the body had been discovered just three miles (5 kilometers) from a ranch where Kuklinski's family often went horseback riding. Deppner was the third associate of Kuklinski's to have been found dead.

On September 25, 1983, the body of Louis Masgay was found near a town park off Clausland Mountain Road in Orangetown, New York, with a bullet hole in the back of his head. Masgay had disappeared over two years earlier, on July 1, 1981, the day he was due to meet Kuklinski at a New Jersey diner to purchase a large quantity of blank videocassette recorder tapes, for which Masgay had hidden $95,000 in his van.[3] His body was stored in a freezer and was found 15 months later.[3] Kuklinski would later say he shot Masgay in the back of the head after accepting a plea deal with prosecutors.[21]

However, Kuklinski did not allow the body to thaw completely before he dumped it and he also wrapped it in plastic garbage bags, which kept it insulated and partially frozen. The Rockland County medical examiner found ice crystals inside the body on a warm September day. Had the body thawed completely before discovery, the medical examiner stated that he probably would have never noticed Kuklinski's trickery.[30] Detectives also realised that Masgay was wearing the same clothes his wife and son had said he was wearing the day he disappeared.[30] The discovery that Kuklinski had frozen Masgay's body is what led authorities to nickname him "Iceman".[1] Newspapers reporting on the subsequent trial frequently used Kuklinski's moniker of "Iceman" in headlines about the trial.[1]

In interviews and documentaries, Kuklinski says he killed Robert Prongay, whom he says had been a mentor to him.[45] Prongay was murdered in 1984 and he had been shot multiple times in the head and found in his Mister Softee ice cream truck. Robbery had not been considered a motive at the time. He was set to go on trial for blowing up the front door of his ex-wife's house.[46] Kuklinski says that Prongay taught him how to use cyanide and other methods to kill, and that Prongay told him to freeze the body of Masgay. However, Kuklinski says he had killed Prongay after he had threatened his family. Investigators considered Kuklinski a prime suspect since 1986, but the director of the New Jersey Division of Criminal Justice said that no charges were sought because Kuklinski was convicted of other crimes.[4] In 1993, in response to his claims, Hudson County Prosecutor said that new charges against Kuklinski were possible since the Prongay murder was still an open investigation and that they would assess whether there was enough to prosecute.[45] Ultimately no charges were pressed against him for the Prongay murder.

Kuklinski claimed to have killed Gabino Crime family member Roy DeMeo in an interview for the 1993 book "The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer" by Anthony Bruno.[45] He described DeMeo as a mentor of his, whom he had met after he fell behind on a loan he had taken out to distribute pornography. He received a beating and later became business partners. Kuklinski says DeMeo taught him how murder for hire could be a way to make money.[4] However, author Jerry Capeci who has written extensively about DeMeo and the mafia, doubts that Kuklinski killed DeMeo.[5] Most sources indicate that DeMeo was killed by members of his own crew, with no suggestion that Kuklinski was involved.[47][48][49] Kuklinski is not mentioned in Capeci and Gene Mustain's book about the DeMeo crew, Murder Machine or Albert DeMeo's account of his father's life in the mob, For the Sins of My Father.[50][49]

In his 2001 HBO interview, Kuklinski confessed to killing Peter Calabro, an NYPD detective who had been ambushed and shot dead by an unknown gunman on March 14, 1980. Calabro was rumored to have mob connections and had been investigated for selling confidential information to the Gambino family.[41] His wife Carmella had drowned in mysterious circumstances three years earlier and members of her family believed that Calabro himself was responsible for her death. At the time, his murder was thought by law enforcement to have been a revenge killing either carried out or arranged by his deceased wife's relatives.[51] Her brothers were regarded as "key suspects" but the crime remained unsolved.[52]

The Bergen County prosecutor believed Kuklinski's confession to be a fabrication, but his successor decided to proceed with the case.[53] In February 2003 Kuklinski was formally charged with Calabro's murder and received another sentence of 30 years. This was considered moot, as he was already serving multiple life sentences and ineligible for parole until he was over the age of 100.[5] Describing the murder, Kuklinski said that he parked his van on the side of a narrow road, forcing other drivers to slow down to pass. He lay in a snowbank behind his van until Calabro came by at 2 a.m., then stepped out and shot him in the head with a sawed-off shotgun, decapitating Calabro. He stated that he was unaware that Calabro was a police officer at the time, but said he probably would have murdered him anyway had he known.[41]

Kuklinski claimed he had been paid to kill Calabro by Gambino crime family soldier (later underboss) Sammy "The Bull" Gravano and that Gravano had provided him with the murder weapon. Gravano, who was then serving a 20-year sentence in Arizona for drug trafficking, was also indicted for the murder and Kuklinski was set to testify against him.[54][53] Gravano denied any involvement in Calabro's death and rejected a plea deal, under which he would have received no additional jail time if he confessed to the crime and implicated all his accomplices.[55][56] The charges against Gravano were dropped after Kuklinski's death in 2006.[57]

Kuklinski also alleged that he was a Mafia contract killer who worked for all of the Five Families of New York City, as well as the DeCavalcante family of New Jersey.[58] He claimed to have carried out dozens of murders on behalf of Gambino soldier Roy DeMeo. He said that he was one of the hitmen who assassinated Bonanno family boss Carmine Galante in July 1979,[44] and Gambino family boss Paul Castellano in December 1985.[59] For the latter hit, Kuklinski said he was personally recruited by John Gotti ally Sammy Gravano, who instructed him to kill Castellano's driver and bodyguard, Thomas Bilotti.[60] He told Philip Carlo he was hired by John Gotti to kidnap, torture and murder John Favara, the man who accidentally killed Gotti's 12-year-old son Frank after hitting him with his car.[44]

When he became a Government witness in 1990, Sammy Gravano admitted to planning the murder of Castellano and Bilotti, but said the shooters were all members of John Gotti's crew and were chosen by Gotti; he did not mention Kuklinski.[61][62] Anthony Bruno felt that Kuklinski's participation in the killing of Castellano was “highly unlikely”.[63] Bruno noted that in 1986 Anthony Indelicato was convicted of Galante's murder and Kuklinski was not mentioned during the trial.[64] Philip Carlo later wrote that Kuklinski's claim to have participated in Galante's murder was untrue.[65]

In his 2001 HBO interview, Secrets of a Mafia Hitman, Kuklinski said he knew who killed former Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa. He did not name the culprit, but said it was not himself.[12] However, he later claimed that he actually killed Hoffa. In his account, Kuklinski was part of a four-man hit team who picked up Hoffa in Detroit. While they were in the car, Kuklinski killed Hoffa by stabbing him with a large hunting knife. He said he then drove Hoffa's body from Detroit to a New Jersey junkyard, where it was placed in a drum and set on fire, then buried in the junkyard. Later, fearing an accomplice might become an informant, the drum was dug up, placed in the trunk of a car, and compacted to a cube. It was sold, along with hundreds of other compacted cars, as scrap metal. It was shipped off to Japan to be used in making new cars.[8][44]

Deputy Chief Bob Buccino, who worked on the Kuklinski case, said "They took a body from Detroit, where they have one of the biggest lakes in the world, and drove it all the way back to New Jersey? Come on." Buccino added: "We didn't believe a lot of things he said."[66] Former FBI agent Robert Garrity called Kuklinski's admission to killing Hoffa “a hoax” and said Kuklinski was never a suspect in Hoffa's disappearance, adding "I've never heard of him."[8] Bruno said he investigated Kuklinski's alleged involvement in Hoffa's disappearance, but concluded that “[his] story didn't check out”. He opined that Kuklinski made the confession in order to “add extra value to his brand”[63] and so he omitted the story from his biography of Kuklinski.[67]