The Ice Man

by Philip Carlo

  When, that evening, they had to go for the final eulogy by the parish priest, Father Casso, Barbara and Richard were late because he went somewhere and picked her up after the service began. She was upset. He couldn’t understand why.

  “She’s dead, isn’t she?” he asked.

  “That’s not the point. The point is to show the proper respect.”

  He had no good answer, no point of reference, no real concept of this kind of respect.

  Merrick Kuklinski was born in March 1964, a seemingly healthy baby girl. Barbara was overjoyed. She’d lost three children, and with Richard’s irrational explosions, who knew what could happen? Unlike the birth of the children he had with Linda, Richard viewed this child as a prized blessing, and he was very attentive to Barbara. He couldn’t have been more considerate about everything. Did she want something to drink, to eat? What could he get her? Barbara was beginning to think she had, in fact, married two distinctly different men, the good Richard and the bad Richard. When, she explained, he was the good Richard, he couldn’t have been nicer, more giving and considerate. When he was the bad Richard, he was the meanest bastard on the face of the earth….

  When it was time for Merrick to come home, Richard proudly carried his little girl to the car, being ever so careful, a big smile about his high-cheekboned face. He’d wanted a little girl, and he had her. Strangely enough, he felt a male child would eventually have competed for Barbara’s affection, so he wanted only female children. At this point, he saw very little of the two boys he had with Linda. It was as though a different man had fathered them, not Richard. He felt no tie to those children as he did to Merrick.

  When Merrick was brought home Barbara’s whole family came over to see her. Everyone was thrilled for Barbara, knowing that she’d lost three children in a row. Barbara’s Nana Carmella went to church to light candles, to thank God, sure he had intervened and blessed her granddaughter with a beautiful, healthy baby girl. Drinks were poured. Expansive toasts were made. Richard proudly gave out cigars, the beaming father. Life was good.

  Soon, however, they realized that Merrick wasn’t as healthy as she seemed. She had a urinary block, which quickly caused kidney problems, high fevers, convulsions. She was in constant pain, and she had to make frequent trips to the doctor’s office to undergo numerous procedures and surgeries.

  Meanwhile, Barbara became pregnant again. Her fifth pregnancy was a comparatively easy one, though during the last several months of it she was again bedridden. This was a difficult time for her. She was not easy to get along with, was sometimes demanding and short. She had to make frequent trips to the doctor. Bills piled up. Richard felt as if he were swimming upstream and could make no headway no matter how hard he tried. He hustled, took chances, but still had difficulty making ends meet. He felt trapped. Barbara gave birth to a second girl they named Christin.

  As Merrick grew into an attractive child with large round eyes, she frequently had to stay in the hospital. Richard could not have been more attentive. He stayed by his first daughter’s side, stroked her hair, hurried to get her anything she needed. He even slept, as did Barbara, in her hospital room with her, on the floor with just a pillow and a thin blanket. Barbara was pleasantly surprised at what a caring, devoted father Richard was. For the first time she realized what a truly good man Richard could be, and she was glad he was her partner in this crisis.

  Doctor and hospital bills mounted. The couple was soon deep in debt. Though Barbara’s mother and grandmother did what they could, Richard was forced to work more and more hours at the lab. Sometimes he’d do his shift, then stay the whole night printing pirated copies of popular films and cartoons. But no matter how hard he worked, how many overtime hours he put in, how many pirated films he printed and sold, there was never enough money. Barbara became pregnant yet again. The family moved to a larger apartment in Cliffside Park. Bills kept mounting. Richard recently put it like this: I felt like I was in a sinking hole, and the more I worked, the harder I tried, I was sinking deeper and deeper. This straight life wasn’t working for me!

  Richard called John Hamil in Jersey City. “You guys got anything good coming up?” he asked.

  “Fact is we do, Rich.”

  This job involved a truckload of Casio watches, which were popular and easy to turn into cash. There was a guy in Teaneck who’d buy the whole load. Richard, John, and Sean went to see him. He had a warehouse just off Route 4. He was a big burly individual who talked out of the side of his mouth as though he had lockjaw. He confirmed that he’d take the whole load; a price was agreed upon. “Everyone wants one of those fuckin’ watches. I’ll take five truckloads if you guys can get your hands on ’em,” he assured them.

  With that settled, Richard and his partners went about hijacking the load of Casio watches. They’d gotten a tip about the load, when and where it would be; they followed the truck and made the driver pull over and stop by showing phony police badges. Richard got in the cab and off they went, leaving the driver tied up on the side of the road. As always, Richard was wearing gloves. No matter what he did, if it was illegal, he wore gloves. They managed to get to the warehouse in Teaneck. The man who had agreed to purchase the load was all smiles. But he insisted his crew of three guys unload the truck to make sure there was a full load—one hundred thousand watches.

  “Hey, my friend, they’re all there,” Richard said. “We didn’t even open the rig.”

  “I’ve gotta check,” was his answer.

  “Okay,” Richard said, “no problem, my friend,” wanting to get this over with, to get the money and go home to his family. He was, of course, armed. He had two pistols stuck into his pants under his jacket.

  The three other guys used two high-lows to unload crates off the rig. Richard, Sean, and John watched them, not pleased. When they had the load on the ground they proceeded to open the crates and actually count the boxes of watches; there were exactly one hundred thousand of them. This took all of two hours.

  Richard was becoming impatient. “See, I told you, my friend,” he said, knowing the more time he spent there, the greater the risk. Richard was becoming tense, and when that happened people often suddenly died.

  “Come on in the office,” the buyer said. Richard had a bad feeling—something unsavory was in the air.

  “Wanna drink?” the buyer offered, speaking out of the side of his mouth.

  “No thanks, just the money,” Richard said.

  “You know, I wanted to talk to you about that,” said the buyer, who looked more like a weasel by the minute.

  “About what?” Richard asked, knowing the answer.

  “The money.”

  “What’s there to say, my friend? We agreed upon a price. You have the watches. Time for us to have the money. Simple.”

  “Not so simple; I’m thinking I’d like to…renegotiate.”

  “Come again?” Richard said, his high, wide brow creasing, his eyes growing cold, icelike, distant.

  “Fifty large instead of seventy-five. I’m more comfortable with that,” said the weasel.

  “My ass,” said Richard. “We agreed upon seventy-five. And now after you had your guys unload the watches you want to renegotiate? Funny, guy…. You know you’re a funny guy, my friend.” Richard looked at Sean and John, his eyes telling them to get ready because there was going to be trouble. Gunplay.

  “You know Tommy Locanada from Hoboken. He’s my goombah. Let’s call him and he’ll tell you fifty is a good price.”

  This really disturbed Richard. “You can call Jesus fuckin’ Christ himself if you want. We ain’t taking fifty. We agreed upon seventy-five. That’s what it is.”

  “No it ain’t,” the buyer said, and with that Richard ran out of patience, whipped out the pistol, and shot the buyer in the head. He was dead before he even hit the ground, before he even knew his life was over. Richard hurried inside and quickly killed the three other guys—bullets to the head.

  “We can’t have witnesses,” he said, an
d they put the watches back in the truck and split, making sure they left no clues. When the bodies were discovered the next day, the police summoned, the murders were put down as “mob related” and were never solved; never attached to Richard Kuklinski.

  They managed to sell the load to Phil Solimene, a player Richard had known well for many years now. Solimene was a feral-looking man with thick dark hair slicked back. He was charming and affable. Solimene had his fingers in many pies, all of them illegal. He had a discount variety store in Paterson with no sign out front. He sold everything, and everything he sold was stolen: small appliances, perfumes, coffee and dried fruits, all kinds of canned goods—all hijacked, stolen stuff. Above the store he had a few girls who worked as prostitutes, and he sold porno movies too, even ones involving hard-core bestiality, any kind you wanted—women screwing and fellating dogs and Shetland ponies. There was a big market for that stuff, and Solimene was happy to fill it. He’d sell anything, including his own mother. He also ran a burglary gang, acting as a front for all kinds of thieves who stole from people’s homes all over New Jersey. He was, in a sense, the Fagan of New Jersey. On weekend nights Solimene hosted poker games in the back of the store. Richard liked him because he was a born outlaw, a slick operator, would do anything to turn a buck; they spoke the same language. Though Solimene was not a born killer, as Richard apparently was, he had no qualms about setting someone up to be robbed and killed. Solimene was one of the few friends Richard ever had—which proved to be a fatal mistake.

  Now the idea of returning full-time to a life of crime loomed larger every day, like a glistening pot of gold at the end of a long rainbow. Richard wanted more out of life. A bigger, juicier slice of the proverbial American dream. He even thought about “hurting people” for money again—contract killing. It was something he did well, enjoyed, and found challenging; but now he had a family, something to lose.

  Still, he went to work every day at the film lab, stole more and more from it. He now noticed, he said, that the three men who owned the place were all stealing from one another, absconding with stock (huge cans of films) and masters they could make copies from and sell on the side.

  Once Richard sniffed what was in the wind, they suddenly had a fourth partner—him. He became bolder and bolder and began to sell expensive rolls of film, as well as the movies and cartoons he was pirating.

  The lab, as a matter of course, also printed and developed XXX-rated movies. They were perfectly legal, and the lab processed most of the porno movies produced on the East Coast.

  Richard began pirating these productions, would sometimes stay all night running four and five machines at a time. He partnered with another guy in the lab, a developer, and together they printed and developed all kinds of pornography.

  For the first time in his life, Richard was seeing hard-core porn on a regular basis. He says little of it turned him on; he viewed the women in these films as whores and sluts and was not turned on by them at all. He did, however, get a rise out of the “girl-on-girl” productions. They also processed porn movies involving bestiality, one of which starred the not yet famous Linda Lovelace, giving a very happy German shepherd a lustful blow job. Richard sold some of these films to Phil Solimene, and they seemed to fly off the shelves. He never mentioned any of this to Barbara. She knew he was bootlegging cartoons and thought nothing of that, didn’t see it as any big deal.

  Wanting to earn still more money, Richard spoke to a “connected guy” he met at the labs, Anthony Argrila, an associate of the Gambino crime family. Argrila said he and his partner, Paul Rothenberg, would buy all the films Richard could pirate, and like that, overnight, Richard was inadvertently selling bootleg porn to the Gambino crime family, who had a lock on porn shops all over the entire country.

  John Hamil called Richard to tell him that a load of television sets was leaving a trucking company in nearby Pennsylvania. “We got the number of the truck and everything,” John explained.

  “Count me in.”

  “Rich, we have to move quickly.”

  “I’m ready to go,” said Richard, and the following night Richard, Sean, and John headed to Pennsylvania. Rather than drive a hot rig to New Jersey with no buyer lined up, they decided to find a safe stash for the rig while they found a buyer. It was always better to sell the whole lot at once—wholesale, not retail, was the way to go. John knew a guy who had a farm and barn in Bucks County, and this man agreed to let them stash the hot rig in his barn for five hundred cash, no questions asked.

  The truck was hijacked without difficulty. The driver had a gun put to him as he stopped for a light on a lonely stretch of road. He was tied to a light pole and left there for the authorities to find. Richard and his partners wore masks. The driver couldn’t give a description even if he wanted to, which he didn’t. Nothing of his had been stolen. Why put his head in a noose? Richard drove the load to the farm. They left it in the barn and went to find a buyer. This was always the best way to off a hot load—not in a hurry, shop it around. In fact, it took them eight days to find a guy who’d buy the entire load at a fair price, COD. They returned to the farm for the load. The barn was empty, the truck gone. The man who owned the farm—a tall, skinny dude who needed a shave and a bath, had long hair, was missing front teeth—said he had “no idea” where the truck was, looking the three hijackers square in the eyes, scratching his head as he did so.

  “What?” Richard said.

  “I have no idea what happened,” he said.

  “My friend, there is no way anyone could have driven off with that load without you knowing. Do I look stupid here?”

  “I have no fuckin’ idea what happened to it,” the owner repeated. “I swear!”

  “We paid you good to stash the truck here. We want it. Where is it?”

  “I don’t know—I swear on my mother’s life, I don’t know,” he said, adamant.

  Richard took a long, deep breath. “Don’t make me hurt you—I will hurt you bad,” he said. “Where’s our truck?”

  “Honest, guys, I don’t know! It was just suddenly gone.”

  “My friend…this is a your last chance—where’s our truck?”

  “I’m tellin’ you, I don’t know!”

  Richard had John and Sean tie the guy to a tree near the barn. This was a very desolate place, no other houses around for miles. That was one of the reasons they had chosen it. Now the skinny guy was pleading and telling them how he knew nothing. Richard slapped him a few times.

  “I swear, I don’t know!” he wailed, a little blood streaming from his lip.

  A diabolical idea came to Richard; he calmly walked back to the car. He had two red flares, the kind used for road emergencies, in the trunk. He grabbed one and returned to the guy. “I’m telling you I’m going to hurt you bad. Where’s our load?” he asked, showing the man the flare.

  “Buddy, I don’t know!” The skinny man’s bleeding lower lip was quivering now.

  Richard had Sean and John take off the guy’s shoes and socks. It was a nice spring day. Birds chirped. The sky was clear and friendly. The sun shone. Butterflies danced in the air. Richard lit the flare. A sudden tongue of white-hot flame leaped from it. Richard brought it to the man’s left foot, just close enough to blister the flesh, not burn it. He was trying to give the guy a chance to talk, to spill the beans.

  “Please, I’m telling you I don’t know—I swear!”

  With that, Richard shoved the burning flare against his foot. The guy screamed and screamed, but denied any knowledge of the truck. The smell of burned flesh filled the air. Richard knew how intensely painful this was, and he was beginning to think that maybe the guy really didn’t know. To be sure, Richard kept it up. When the guy’s left foot looked like a charred piece of meat, Richard stopped. The bones of his toes were plainly visible; most of the flesh was gone; it didn’t quite look like a foot anymore.

  “Where’s our truck?” demanded Richard.

  “On my mother’s life I don’t know, on my mot
her’s life!” he screamed, crying, his face a mask of tormented sincerity.

  “Tell us and we’ll take you to a hospital, you can get your foot taken care of, and we’ll be on our merry way. There’s no way anyone could have gotten that rig off this farm without you knowing. It sounds like a fucking jet taking off.”

  “I wasn’t here twenty-four hours a day, I swear I don’t know!”

  Richard smiled his deviant wolf grin, went to work on the other foot, soon burned that to a bloody, seared mess, all the while the guy screaming bloody fucking murder.

  By now the first flare was all used up. Richard, John, and Sean walked off to confer.

  “I think if he knew he’d’ve told,” said Sean.

  “So do I,” John agreed.

  “Yeah, I’m beginning to think so too,” Richard said, watching the guy crying like a baby. “Maybe he really don’t know,” Richard said.

  But something, a sixth sense, told him the guy did know. Richard walked back to the car, retrieved the second flare, and went back to the distraught farm owner.

  “Why,” Richard asked, “are you causing yourself to suffer like this? Tell us. We’ll drop you off at the hospital and it’ll all be over and done—”

  “But I don’t knowww!” he pleaded.

  Richard lit the second flare. “Okay, here goes, now I’m through playing fuckin’ games here. No more games. You tell us where our fucking load is or I’m burning your balls off.” He brought the white-hot flare to the guy’s crotch.