by Philip Carlo
“I don’t know…. I just, I just—I don’t know,” big, tough-as-nails Wheeler said.
“Okay, not to worry, we’ll follow him, nail him in his car, okay, at a light,” Richard said.
“Yeah—yeah, okay,” Wheeler said. Richard put the car in gear and off they went, this inexperienced impromptu hit team.
They caught up with the Lincoln at a light on West Side Avenue. “Get ready,” Richard said, easing up right next to the Lincoln. Wheeler’s hands, however, were trembling so much he couldn’t even take proper aim.
“What’s wrong?” Richard asked, and the others asked the same thing.
“I don’t fuckin’ know. I can’t.”
The light turned green. The mark drove off.
“We have to do this,” Richard said. “We have no choice anymore.” They trailed the mark to a Hoboken bar, watched him belly up to the bar, have a drink and shoot the breeze with the bartender.
“I’ll do it,” Richard solemnly said, and took the gun from Wheeler. Silently, contemplatively, they sat there. Night came on quickly. It began to rain. The mark left the bar and headed for his Lincoln. He seemed a little wobbly now. The coast was clear. Without a word, Richard stepped from the car, quickly made his way to the Lincoln, deadly purpose in each step, made sure no one was looking, put the gun up close to the mark’s head, and pulled the trigger, boom, one shot to the left side of his head, just above the ear. It was done.
Calm, cool, collected, Richard walked back to the car and got in, and they drove away. Wow! was the collective feeling of the others, but no one said anything, each of them looking at Richard with a newfound respect.
Finally, after several blocks, the big, bad Wheeler said, “Man, Rich, you’re cold like ice.”
“Cool as a fuckin’ cucumber,” another said.
Richard enjoyed the adulation. He felt no pangs of conscience, no emotion, no guilt at all. Indeed, he felt nothing. He had killed the mark as easily as belching and never looked back.
Near noon the following day, the Coming Up Roses went back to Carmine’s place. Richard knocked on the door. Carmine opened it.
“What’s up?” he said. “I told you not to come back till you did the thing.”
“You see the papers?” Richard asked.
“No…why?” Carmine asked.
Richard’s answer was a slight, coy smile.
“Ah, you sons of bitches, you did it, bravo. You sons of bitches,” Carmine exclaimed, and he invited them in, graciously poured drinks for them, gave them each five hundred dollars, and thus the door to organized crime opened wide.
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
True to his word, Carmine gave Richard and his crew a lot of work. Suddenly they were making money hand over fist. They proved without question they could be trusted, were ruthless, and got the job done, no matter what it was. Carmine knew the best way to test potential associates was for them to commit a murder. Once that was done, they could, theoretically, be trusted, for they had incriminated themselves in a serious crime. In those days there were few people involved with La Cosa Nostra—“Our Thing”—who became “rats,” and the best way to guarantee someone’s loyalty was to have him commit a murder, which is exactly what Carmine had done with the Coming Up Roses. Indeed, the first step into the induction of any Mafia family was carrying out a killing, or making one’s “bones.” That created the lifetime bond that proved so successful for so many years, first in Italy, then around the world: the Italian Mafia was, still is, the most successful criminal enterprise of all time, and Richard Kuklinski would become one of its premiere killers—a homicide superstar.
Carmine Genovese had amazing sources of information all over New Jersey. He knew what trucks to hijack, when and where and what they were carrying, even had the truck numbers, which he gave to Richard’s crew. Carmine received half of the proceeds of all the ill-gotten gains they made, and the gang split the other half five ways among themselves. They hijacked trucks that were filled with appliances, jewelry, clothing, albums, razor blades, furniture, tools and machinery, even fancy foods such as steak and loads of caviar—anything that could be turned into hard cash quickly.
No matter how much Richard’s crew made, they spent it all, gambled and lived large. Richard was not too fond of the horse tracks, but he loved Las Vegas, and he went there by himself and with Linda—the older woman he was still living with—and gambled up a storm. He also very much enjoyed watching the garish, extravagant Las Vegas shows. His favorite entertainer was Liberace, of all people. He loved the game of baccarat, won a lot, but lost far more. He recently explained: I had no idea what money was, and I spent it like water. I should’ve been investing it, buying property, but I threw it all away.
Richard also enjoyed seeing all the gorgeous showgirls. Often he was propositioned by Las Vegas prostitutes. He was hard to miss, with his huge size and decked out in a yellow suit, but he never went with any of the very lovely prostitutes who came on to him. He thought of prostitutes as whores and wasn’t turned on to them. A girl that screwed eight guys that day does nothing for me, he explained.
The largest score Richard and his crew made—because of Genovese—was taking off an armored truck company in North Bergen, New Jersey. Genovese had given them the combination to the alarm and locking system, and after pressing a few buttons they were inside the small redbrick warehouse, where armored trucks were neatly lined up. There was a huge safe filled with boxes of cash and gold bullion. Carmine told them it couldn’t look like an inside job, so the first thing they did was break a hole in the wall. They then proceeded to blow open the safe and completely fill up one of the armored trucks with bullion, cash, and coins.
Unfortunately, they put too much weight in the truck, and when they were pulling out of the garage and hit the outside curb, all four rear tires blew out with loud explosions, startling them. They tried to drive to a prearranged warehouse they had rented not far way, but the armored truck couldn’t make it, and the gang was forced to go back and take two more armored trucks. Working triple time they emptied the contents of the first one into the other two trucks right there on the side of the road just near the turnpike and finally took off. If a cop car had come along they would certainly have been busted, but they were lucky and made it to their safe haven just as it was getting light.
Altogether they stole two million dollars’ worth of currency and gold. Carmine took half, and Richard and his group split one million: two hundred thousand each. A great score for these young toughs still wet behind the ears. The Coming Up Roses gang now really lived it up, squandered their shares, and before any of them knew it the money was gone, mostly lost at the racetrack and poker tables and spent on women.
Richard made several first-class flights to Vegas and managed to lose all his ill-gotten gains.
I was a dumb kid. I didn’t know any better, he says; but boy did I have a ball—smiling as he thought about it even now.
With all their success the gang became more and more bold and began to think they were invincible.
Two of the Coming Up Roses, John Wheeler and Jack Dubrowski, got it into their heads that it would be okay to stick up a card game sponsored by a made man in the De Cavalcante family. They did this without asking or consulting with Richard, which proved to be a fatal mistake in judgment. One of the group they robbed recognized John, even though they both sported plaid bandannas over their faces. Word quickly reached a De Cavalcante soldier. Knowing Richard led the Coming Up Roses and that they worked with Genovese, this soldier—his name was Albert Parenti—found Richard and solemnly sat him down in a quiet corner of a bar called Phil’s. Parenti was a barrel-chested Italian American of Sicilian extraction, balding, weasel faced, so bowlegged he walked like he just got off a horse. He said, “I know two of your guys stuck up my game on Washington Street. I also know you had nothing to do with it or I wouldn’t be talking nice. I’m coming to you here like this as a courtesy, see. We all know you are a stand-up guy; we hear only good things about you.
That’s why I’m talking to you nice like this, see. Those guys of yours gotta go. There ain’t no other way.”
Angry but controlling himself, Richard knew better than to try and deny his guys’ involvement or to become belligerent in any way. What he did was plead for mercy.
“First let me say I appreciate you talking to me like this,” he said. “I had no idea ’bout any of this. I’m real sorry. I’ll make sure every fuckin’ penny is paid back, all—”
“It’s not the money I’m talking about here, it’s the principle.”
“I know that, I’m just saying—”
“Look, let me cut to the chase: these guys gotta go. And you gotta do it, see. They’re your responsibility, see.”
This hit Richard like a bare-knuckled punch in the face. In his own quiet way he loved John and Jack; they were his first and only friends. How could he kill them? But Richard knew enough about the rhyme and rhythm of street justice to know that if he didn’t do what Parenti was asking—actually demanding!—he himself could very well be marked for removal.
He tried again: “Let me talk to them, let me make sure they leave town and never, I mean never, come back.”
“They gotta go. That’s it. You do it or we do it, capisce?”
“Capisce,” Richard said, seeing clearly the handwriting on the wall; and it was written in John and Jack’s blood, and if he was not careful, his blood.
“Good. I’m glad that’s settled,” Parenti said with solemn finality. He stood up and left, the two goons he traveled with close behind. A heavy life-and-death weight suddenly on his shoulders, Richard sat there as still as a tombstone, knowing he and his small crew could never fight with the De Cavalcantes. They were many, and notoriously violent, and defying or fighting with them would only mean sure death for all of them. Richard knew too that John and Jack had fucked up big-time, gone against the basic tenets of the street, and his strict rule of never taking off any mob guys. They had, he knew, sealed their own fates. Richard got up slowly, left the bar, first found Jack, shot him in the head before he knew it, and left him where he dropped. He then found John leaving his girlfriend’s apartment and shot him down, killing him, leaving him on the street so the De Cavalcantes would know the deed was truly done. They both died without pain—before they knew what hit them.
Still, Richard felt terrible. He had just killed two of the people he’d been closest to, whom he loved more than brothers. They had done much together. Now they were dead, dead by his hand.
It was them or me, he kept telling himself, but that didn’t help much, he later confided.
The De Cavalcantes immediately heard, of course, about what Richard had done, and it didn’t take long for them to realize that Richard Kuklinski could be a great asset to them—a made-to-order killer who knew what to do and how to do it, and kept his mouth shut…something all mob families in all places are always scouting for. True, Richard could never be made, but he could surely work as an independent contractor if he proved he could keep his mouth shut, that he understood that silence was golden. Before they’d approach him with anything more, they’d wait and see if he could be trusted.
The Jersey City police found no witnesses…no links to Richard; no one knew anything about the murders of John and Jack, and they soon became forgotten; just two hoods that got their just desserts.
Long Walks, Short Piers
It was the spring of 1954. Richard was just nineteen years old but comported himself as if he were much older. He had a stoic seriousness about him beyond his years. Perhaps it was because of his parents’ brutality; perhaps it was because he’d always been an outsider, put-upon, victimized; perhaps it was because he’d never had any kind of childhood. Perhaps, because he had killed his two best friends. Whatever it was, Richard was no longer a boy. He was a man about to make his mark on the world.
Like many Poles, Richard had a penchant for walking, the outdoors and fresh air. He’d regularly walk miles at a time. He didn’t believe in exercise, lifting weights, working out in a gym, jogging, but he loved to walk and think as he went. Though he didn’t exercise, Richard was endowed with unusual strength. He did menial work between his financial highs and lows, loading and unloading trucks—always keeping an eye out for something he could rob and turn into hard cash. His strength, however, seemed something he was born with, in his genes. The Poles from northern Poland, where his father had come from, were a hardy, powerful lot—and all the best physical traits of his bloodline seemed to manifest themselves in Richard. When recently asked if he exercised as a young man, went to a gym, lifted weights, he said: The only exercise I ever got was carrying dead bodies.
Curious to see more of New York, Richard took the ferry to Manhattan, marveling as the boat crossed the river at the multicolored, rich skyline—how different it was from Jersey City and Hoboken. He had been to the city several times already with the Coming Up Roses crew, but never by himself. Now the Coming Up Roses were a thing of the past, part of his youth. There were rumors on the street that Richard had killed John and Jack, and the other members steered clear of him. As it happened, they soon began using heroin, and Richard in turn stayed away from them. He did not like drugs, or the people who used them. He viewed drug users as weak and unreliable—people you couldn’t trust. Richard had become a kind of solemn, slow-moving, very dangerous lone wolf—an attribute that would serve him well for many years to come. He enjoyed being alone. He avoided friends.
When Richard stepped off the ferry near Fortieth Street, he took a right and began to walk downtown along the riverfront, under the West Side Highway. This was a dark, dank, desolate place. Most of the great piers that had once lined West Street, bustling with commerce, ships, and affluent people, were now rusting and dying, mere skeletons of their former selves. Here there were few streetlamps, and the streets were rough cobblestone, slick when wet. Richard now always carried a knife or a gun. He didn’t feel fully dressed unless he was armed, a trait that would stay with him all his professional life. He didn’t, he says, have any designs on hurting anyone on this first lone foray into Manhattan, but a nasty bum with an attitude approached him, asking for money. Richard ignored him. The bum followed, demanding money, and still Richard walked on. The bum, a large, dirty, bearded bear of a man, grabbed Richard by the shoulder and swung him around.
“Hey, you deaf, motherfucker?” he said. Smiling, Richard quickly turned and, before the bum realized it, pulled out his knife and slammed it into the bum’s chest in two swift movements.
“Get the fuck away from me!” Richard growled as the bum went to his knees and hit the ground hard. It was all over in a split second. Richard watched the light in his eyes go out, wiped his blade on him, and walked on, knowing he had killed the man, glad he had killed him.
I enjoy seeing the lights go out. I enjoy killing up close and personal. I always wanted the last image they had to be my face, he explained.
Richard had come to enjoy having control over who lived and who died. It made him feel omnipotent. He viewed the man he just killed as a vermin, and he kept his eyes open for more vermin. He walked all the way to the Battery Tunnel and solemnly stared at Jersey City just across the water, remembering how he used to read crime magazines over there when he was a kid, remembering his brother Florian, remembering his father’s brutality, remembering the friends he had killed. He could just about see the place where he had shot John Wheeler to death. Hell of a thing, he thought.
His handsome face a mask of unfeeling granite, Richard turned and made his way back uptown, passing the bum he had killed as he went, enjoying the sight of him there like that, dead at his hand, still lying where he had left him, though now a ghostly pale in the forlorn yellowish light of a streetlamp.
Richard knew this murder would not be tied to him, that the New York police would definitely not communicate with the Jersey police.
He came back to Manhattan numerous times over the ensuing weeks and months and killed people, always men, never a female,
he says, always someone who rubbed him the wrong way, for some imagined or real slight. He shot and stabbed and bludgeoned men to death. He left some where they dropped. He dumped some in the nearby Hudson River.
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-blown serial killer from Jersey City was coming over to Manhattan’s West Side for the purpose of killing people, to practice and perfect murder.
Richard made the West Side of Manhattan a kind of lab for murder, a school, he says. He learned the finer points and intricacies of where to put a knife for the maximum effect: in the back of the head and up into the brain; an inverted slice across the throat, at the same time cutting the carotid arteries and windpipe. Directly into the heart was also very effective.
But in the back of the head and into the brain, he realized, was the quickest way and much less bloody. That, blood, became a constant concern, for Richard did not want to get blood on himself or his clothes. With respect to a gun: a bullet to the head, just above the ear, under the jaw, proved to be the most efficient. He hung a man one time, looped a piece of hemp across the man’s neck, hoisted the man off the ground, holding him with the rope over his shoulder. I became the tree, he explained. He also used an ice pick, which proved to be a good killing tool—easy to conceal—when stuck in the right place: directly into the ear, or directly into the eyeball, it was quite lethal.
Even back then the darkened cobble streets of Manhattan’s far West Side were a gathering place for gay men. There were numerous dark bars that discreetly accommodated a homosexual clientele. One such place was Scottish Annie’s, a safe haven for men who liked to wear skirts and dress as women. The dark bars on these dark, out-of-the-way streets were the perfect place for men to lead what often amounted to a second, hidden life.
