“How many people have you killed,” an interviewer asks the prisoner known as the
Iceman, a one time alter boy, a family guy and a prolific hitman.
“An approximate guess…”
He pauses, then says, “more than a hundred.”
His face shows no remorse, no sign of emotion other than perhaps a veiled bitterness aimed
at life itself.
“How do you feel about killing,” asks the interviewer.
“I don’t…it doesn’t bother me at all.
I don’t have a feeling one way or the other.”
He’d be asked the same question in another interview, and that time he would reply, “Nothing
haunts me, no murders haunt me.”
This is the story of Richard Kuklinski, a man associated with frozen water not only
for the total lack of feeling, or fear, that he was known for, but also for the way in
which he disposed of the many people whose last sight on planet Earth was the Iceman’s
6 foot 5, 300 pound body bearing down on them.
How did an altar boy turn into America’s hitman with the biggest body count?
How does one become so impassive to murder, other people’s pain?
Richard Leonard Kuklinski was born on April 11, 1935.
Many years before he became known to some mobsters as “the devil himself”, Kuklinski
shared a New Jersey apartment with his Polish-American father and a mother who was born to Irish
immigrants.
It’s a story we all know, the tough neighborhood, the hard-knock life, with his mother eking
out her days in a meat-packing factory and his father working on the railroad.
From interviews with Kuklinski, an inference we can make by looking at his dysfunctional
family, these parents were a long way from the type that would have picked up good parenting
guides.
It’s said the father was a hostile drunk, and someone who took sadistic pleasure in
beating Kuklinski and his siblings.
The mother, who he called an overly strict God-fearing woman, was no better.
In fact he once called her “cancer”, saying she destroyed everything she came in touch
with.
“He’d just come in and give you a whupping ‘cos he felt like it,” Kuklinski said
in an interview when talking about his dad.
These weren’t ordinary beatings, even in a time when a smack on the backside was seen
as fair play for parents.
No, this maniac of a man was said to have broken household objects while beating his
kids.
The attacks were so vicious that this resulted in one of Kuklinski’s bothers being beaten
to death.
The parents told the cops he had fallen down the stairs.
Shortly after that, the tormented father left the family and never returned.
There is no doubt such a childhood had a profound effect on what happened later, with the Iceman’s
brother, Joseph, also living a dissolute life that ended with sadism and tragedy.
It’s a familiar tale in the circles of forensic psychology; the abused children, when no hand
is held out to them, turn to hurting and killing themselves.
We might also ask if a violent gene is passed on, perhaps those frontal lobes don’t work
as other people’s work, perhaps there is no self-control; nurture, nature, or a bit
of both, but we’ll let you decide later.
If you’ve watched the movie The Iceman, brilliantly played by Michael Shannon in the
starring role, you might know a few things about our guy.
Like most renditions of reality, it stretches the truth, but also skirts close at times.
Growing up with his mentally impoverished mother Kuklinski was bullied.
He was one of those kids that virtually smelled of victimhood.
But he was a big person, and it wouldn’t be long until the Iceman-to-be realized that
with enough willpower you can break people, and when broken, they don’t bother you again.
“If you hurt somebody, they’ll leave you alone,” he told an interviewer once, relating
to the time in his teenage years when he made those bullies disappear once and for all.
“I’d heard it was better to give than to receive,” he said, a wicked play on a
cliché relating to altruism, not revenge.
One time six boys had been beating on him.
He took the beating, but then went home and found an iron bar.
He returned to the group and viciously attacked them.
They left him alone.
He was right about that.
In fact, most people would stay out of his way from then on.
If you got in his way, you were going to get hurt.
He told the interviewer that even a tiny infraction, someone maybe looked at him the wrong way,
and he would beat them mercilessly.
Here is the making of a hitman, a nascent killer that would do things most people could
never imagine.
He was also a pool shark, and it was said that if you bothered him it would end in tears,
blood, or the grave.
He murdered at least one person he had called a bully.
Speaking of that first murder when he was in his early teens, Kuklinski said in an interview,
“I didn’t mean to do it.
I felt sadness, but after a while I felt something different.
Some sort of rush.”
If enemies or perceived enemies weren’t around to hurt, it’s said as a teen he’d
take his anger out on neighborhood cats.
But there was another side to him, because Kuklinski was fond of women and was said to
have been romantic at times.
How romantic, how caring, is something of a divided issue.
The movie portrays him as a loving, doting husband and father, but he already had two
kids with a much older women when he met his wife-to-be Barbara Pedrici.
While the film depicts a wonderful early romance, replete with bouquets of flowers and awkward
dates, Pedrica would later tell the British press that when she once told him she wasn’t
ready for a full-on relationship and might want to date others, he jabbed her with the
sharp end of a hunting knife.
“I felt the blood running down my back,” she told the press.
Kuklinski then told her in no uncertain terms that she was his, forever, and if she left
him she and her entire family were dead.
It’s said he then throttled her until she lost consciousness.
This is somewhat different from the sweethearts in love we see in the movie.
Nonetheless, she would never leave him, out of fear, or love, well that’s open to interpretation.
They had three kids, two girls and a boy.
The family understood that here was a double personality, they even called him the Good
Ritchie and the Bad Ritchie.
The good version was a hardworking, committed father who would do anything for his family.
The bad version disappeared for weeks on end, he broke noses and handed out black eyes.
He even killed one of his daughter’s dogs as a punishment because she came home late.
This was a man with an almost inhuman rage, but also a man who could be a wonderful father
and husband.
Soon he was returning home with large amounts of money, which may have helped ameliorate
those fears they all had of him flying into dangerous frenzies of anger.
Nonetheless, they had barbeques, visited theme parks, made home videos (a lot of home videos),
ate Turkey at Thanksgiving.
They were an average working-middle class American family, mom’s apple pie and church
on Sunday.
But then more money was coming in, and that’s because Kuklinski had started working for
the American mob.
Apparently, some mob bosses had got word that there was a giant Polish-American man in town
who showed little or no fear.
If you did wrong by him, you lost your teeth or went missing.
He was quite the asset for those kinds of people.
As the kids were growing up, Kuklinski was “taking care” of people for the Genovese
crime family.
He also worked as a human disposal man for Newark's DeCavalcante crime family and the
Gambinos of New York City.
How did he dispose of people?
Well, you name it, he had many methods.
He later said in interviews he liked to be creative.
One time he bought a crossbow, and because he really wanted to use it he shot a random
guy in the head with it.
“I just wanted to see if it would work,” he later said in an interview to the consternation
of the reporter.
He liked to hone his trade it’s said, with one author once saying, “Murder, for Richard,
became sport.
The New York police came to believe that the bums were attacking and killing one another,
never suspecting that a full-fledged serial killer from Jersey City was coming over to
Manhattan's West Side for the purpose of killing people, to practice and perfect the craft
of murder.”
We can’t talk about every hit he did as that would be tantamount to writing an encyclopedia,
but we can discuss some of his more nefarious actions, well, they were all dark.
He told the media later he enjoyed disposing of people in different ways.
Icepick, knives, his hands, hammer, but he liked nothing more than using a nasal spray
containing cyanide, not hay fever remedies.
It didn’t unblock people’s noses, it undid their existence.
This made less mess, you offed them anywhere you wanted and the cops just thought they
had a heart attack victim.
When he wasn’t leaving bodies in parks or down alleys, he was taking them to a place
where he could chop them up and refrigerate the parts.
Sometimes he’d just freeze the whole body and then some time later dump it.
This was particularly smart, because then the authorities could not determine the time
of death.
Hence the name, The Iceman, although others will tell you he got this name because of
his frigid demeanor.
There is more ice to this story, too.
How did Bad Ritchie know about cyanide?
He got this from a man known as Mr. Softee, real name Robert Pronge.
Ponge was ex-military and very familiar with bombs and poisons and guns.
He actually drove around in a Mr. Softee ice-cream van, hence the nickname.
Kuklinski would later recall his friendship with the hitman, saying, “He’d go around
the neighborhoods and sell ice-cream to the kids, and maybe kill one of their fathers.”
But after teaching Kuklinski many methods of murder, Mr. Softee ended up being found
in his van shot several times in the head.
Another notch for the iceman.
He did this, police suspect, because he was tying up loose ends.
The cops at this time were on to him.
It’s also said, perhaps not true, that Mr. Softee had offered his services to take out
Kuklincki’s family if Kuklinski took out his family.
Lots of loose ends could be tied up if there were no families left.
We are told that things had started to turn awry.
For a long time the Iceman had been in the services of mob boss Roy DeMeo.
DeMeo had not only once handed a beating to Kuklinski (with his cronies of course), and
humiliated him on several occasions, but there were rumors DeMeo was beginning to lose it
and might end up ratting other mob bosses out.
Kuklinski didn’t need much encouragement to take his boss out.
DeMao was another victim, or at least this is what the police thought; he never actually
admitted to that.
The movie depicts a couple of instances that are apparently true.
One was when DeMao first met Kuklinski and was impressed at how well he could take a
beating – like a man!
We are told Kuklinski was later taken out for a ride in a car, and at some point the
mobster said kill that man over there walking his dog.
Kuklinski got out and did it, no problem, not a big deal.
He was hired.
But the “Polak” never had a great relationship with DeMao, and we might think he was very
happy to get rid of him if of course he did.
Surely he couldn’t hide all this killing from his wife?
Well, she later said in an interview, “I never questioned him.”
He would go out at all hours, money would flood in, but she knew better to be too inquisitive.
As for his friends, they all went missing, too, in the end, except just one according
to the Iceman.
“Anyone you killed you liked?,” asked an interviewer.
“All my friends are dead,” was his sardonic reply, hinting that he had killed them.
It’s a long story, but his friends started to know his business, and that was dangerous.
He actually did say there was only one friend he didn’t take out, but the rest were fair
game.
As these tales of gangs and murders often end, people got paranoid and started removing
their fears one by one.
The mob were doing it, and Kuklinski was doing it.
But the cops weren’t far behind, and when one undercover agent got the Iceman to talk
about fast and convenient ways to kill someone over the phone, and to sign up for another
contract, they swooped in.
He was arrested in December of 1986 of many charges including multiple murders and robbery.
He was eventually sentenced to two life sentences, getting 30 years for killing a cop.
It later turned out he had killed another mob boss, too.
He ended up in prison on the same wing as his brother, Joey.
As we said earlier, Joey Kuklinski had gone the wrong way, too.
He was serving time for assaulting and then strangling to death a 12-year old girl.
He then threw her off a roof along with her pet dog.
Did he regret any of the murders?
Well, he usually said no, then in one interview he said perhaps one regret was killing a man
who had prayed to God in front of him to save his life.
In his own words Kuklinski said, “So I told him he could have a half an hour to pray to
God and if God could come down and change the circumstances, he'd have that time.
But God never showed up and He never changed the circumstances and that was that.
It wasn't too nice.
That's one thing, I shouldn't have done that one.
I shouldn't have done it that way.”
His daughter, Merrick Kuklinsk, later did some interviews with the press, saying the
film was not close to reality in terms of their home life.
She said she had loved her father, and was shocked to find out he had killed more than
100 people (some say close to 200).
The large woman, standing almost 6-feet tall, said she has her dad’s ashes.
She showed the interviewer a card she had sent to her father while he was in prison,
“Remember dad, you always left a light on for me.
That warm light still shines in my heart,” the card reads.
“He denied us nothing,” she said about her father.
“He wanted his life to be like it was on television.
He just didn’t know how to get there.”
She said her mother was no angel herself, but her dad could fly into rages and they
knew to stay away when that happened.
She said he even told the kids once that if he ended up killing their mother in a rage
he would have to kill them, too.
She said they knew he wasn’t kidding.
But he also confided in Merrick when she was just a kid.
He told her about what happened with his abusive parents, and even told her he had killed people.
“He told me about the time he used a wooden clothing rod to beat to death another teenager
who had been bullying him,” she said.
She concluded, saying she had loved him, but later knew he was a sick, demented man who
had been abused and had not come to terms with that.
“Maybe if he’d gotten treatment some or all of this could have been prevented.
That thought haunts me every day,” she said.
During those many prison interviews Kuklinski seems entirely impassive, smiling and laughing
at some murders, but then there is one time when he eventually looks upset, and that’s
when, once again, he is asked if he regrets anything.
“I do want my family to forgive me,” he says, and you almost see a tear, some internal,
emotional distress.
“I aint gonna make this,” he adds, meaning maybe he can’t carry on with the interview,
but he does.
“You see the Iceman crying.
Not very macho.
But I’ve hurt people that mean everything to me, the only people that meant anything
to me.”
Richard Kuklinski died aged 70 in a prison hospital.
He thought he had been poisoned, although he had been diagnosed with Kawasaki disease,
an inflammation of blood vessels.
He had told doctors they should revive him when he was out, but that didn’t happen.
His wife Barbara had already signed a “do not resuscitate” order.
That is some story, a chilling tale, with a message in there along the lines of violence
often begets violence.
We are now going to ask you what you think..
Also, be sure to check out our other show This Is A Real Life Hitman.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.