The Ice Man

by Philip Carlo

  Richard grew to like Los Angeles, the accommodating weather, the relaxed lifestyle, the palm trees. Porn was very popular in Southern California, and Richard made more money there distributing porn than on the East Coast. He liked going to the “porn conventions,” thought they were fun, he says. He had a lot of business there and enjoyed spending time in Los Angeles. He enjoyed LA so much he rented an apartment in West Hollywood, just off Sunset Boulevard. He liked to sit at outdoor cafés in the warm weather and watch the world go by—the colorful circus that LA always is, the fancy cars, the fancy women, the fancy clothes. Barbara knew nothing of this apartment. She didn’t even know where Richard was when he went off on “business trips.” Barbara’s only concern—her whole life—was her children, especially Dwayne. She focused all her energy on them. When Richard wasn’t home the house was peaceful, calm…normal. Only Merrick missed Richard when he wasn’t home, though she was not encouraged to express such emotions.

  When Richard returned from Los Angeles, he was given a contract by the Gigante family that had to be filled at a Howard Johnson just off Route 46. No problem. The mark was going to a breakfast meeting at this Howard Johnson, a setup. Richard chose the .22 Ruger rifle, cut down to a mere fifteen inches and equipped with a blue-black silencer. He was in the parking lot when the mark arrived early that morning for his meeting with a Gigante lieutenant. Richard watched the two of them have breakfast, pancakes, shake hands, and part in the parking lot as if friends. As the mark reached his car, Richard raised the weapon and shot him nine times in two seconds, in rapid succession. The mark fell to the ground, dead. Richard calmly pulled away. It looked as if the mark had had a heart attack until you saw all the blood coming from these sudden little holes. Another job well done. Another murder never linked to Richard by police.

  It didn’t take long for a host of new contracts to come in from the Gigante people, which Richard gladly filled. There was no contract he would not take—except, of course, the killing of a woman or a child. That was taboo for Richard, a line he would not cross.

  There were, however, female contract killers, lethal femme fatales, who could readily get close to a mark, offering warm embraces, hot sex, a lustful blow job, but delivering sudden death. These women, Richard felt, were fair game, and he would kill one as quickly as any man. But this had not yet come to pass.

  When, in the fall of 1976, Carlo Gambino died of natural causes, everything suddenly changed, and the stage was set for a tumultuous earthquake that would rock the very foundations of Mafiadom.

  Rolling Over in His Grave

  Because Carlo Gambino so fervently believed in family ties—fidelity and loyalty—he appointed his brother in-law, Paul Castellano, as his successor as the head of the family, now the biggest, most successful crime family in history. This would prove to be a monumental error in judgment.

  Paul Castellano was not cut out for this position; he did not have the inherent instincts, the cunning, or the street smarts to master the multifaceted operation he was suddenly put in charge of. Yes, Castellano was a good businessman, but the head of a crime family—no.

  His first in a series of serious blunders was demanding that all twenty captains in the Gambino crime family come to see him once a week at a social club called the Veterans and Friends Club he began on Brooklyn’s Eighty-sixth Street, just off Fifteenth Avenue. This directive enabled the FBI to take extensive surveillance photos and video of who came and went, and thus the government suddenly knew who all the Gambino capos were, which proved to be the beginning of the end—the very unnecessary exposure of the family’s star players, the inner circle, the virtual engines that ran the family.

  The second fatal error Castellano made was not detecting the FBI’s listening devices in his fortresslike Staten Island home; because of these bugs the FBI—for the first time ever—got a fly-on-the-wall view of all the inner workings of a Mafia chieftain, who did what, when, where, and even how.

  The third fatal error Castellano made was having a carnal affair with the Columbian housekeeper his wife, Carlo’s sister, had hired, while his wife was actually in the house—an unspeakable thing that surely caused Carlo Gambino to roll over in his grave. This, for a Sicilian, was the ultimate infamy, unforgivable—a blasphemy!

  And because of the excellent listening devices in the Castellano kitchen, the FBI heard all the ridiculous syrupy conversations Castellano had with his lover while his wife was in the house. These conversations would eventually be made public, printed in a book, excerpts of which appeared in New York magazine, making Paul Castellano a despised laughingstock of every made member of all crime families in all places, even in Sicily, which sealed Castellano’s fate; interestingly, Richard Kuklinski would play a large role in that fate.

  The only capo pleased about Castellano’s promotion was Nino Gaggi. Gaggi had for thirty years been a very close personal friend and confidant to Castellano, and this put Gaggi in an excellent position—and by extension, Roy DeMeo too.

  DeMeo still wanted more than anything to be made, get his button, and now with Castellano as the boss that possibility loomed large in the very near future.

  Castellano, like Gaggi, was a particularly greedy man—whatever he got, it was never enough. DeMeo was a moneymaking machine, and Castellano was impressed with the money he was receiving—via Gaggi—from DeMeo. Gaggi kept petitioning Castellano to make DeMeo, but Castellano was reluctant: he thought DeMeo too loud, too brash—a psychopath that would eventually draw police attention—and said no.

  Then DeMeo really stirred up a hornets’ nest when he brought the infamous Westies into the Gambino fold—another large mistake.

  The Westies were a loose-knit group of Irishmen who ran Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen on the West Side. They specialized in shakedowns of local stores, bookmaking, shylocking, numbers running—and murder.

  The leaders of the gang were James Coonan and Micky Featherstone, two stone-cold killers. Featherstone was a rather frail-looking guy, about 145 pounds, with little baby hands and a baby face, but he’d shoot someone in the head as readily as batting an eye. Coonan was just the opposite, broad shouldered, big boned, square jawed, red faced, with a bulbous nose; he had whitish blond hair in a military-style crew cut.

  DeMeo liked these guys because they were utterly ruthless. At DeMeo’s suggestion they began cutting up their victims and burying dismembered bodies in the abandoned train yards on the far reaches of the West Side of Manhattan.

  One afternoon when Richard went to drop off some money at the Gemini Lounge, DeMeo asked him to go up to Harlem with Freddie DiNome and see a black guy who owned a bar there. He owed DeMeo a lot of money and wasn’t paying it back as promised.

  “Big Guy, I want you to go see him and let him know he’s walking on thin fuckin’ ice here, okay?”

  “No problem,” Richard said. “Sure.”

  “You go pick up Eddie Mack. He knows the Muli, and he’s got brass balls, okay?”

  “Sure, Roy,” Richard said, and he and Freddie DiNome, an ugly guy with curly brown hair and a giant potato for a nose, left to go to the city. DiNome was a car freak who helped Roy give stolen cars legit makeovers. He had a pet chimpanzee who one day punched DiNome and knocked him out cold. Richard had no monetary interest in this business; he was just doing DeMeo a favor.

  These days DeMeo was very “up.” He was figuring he’d surely be made soon, the thing he had coveted since he was a little fat kid victimized by neighborhood bullies. For him, in a sense, being made was the holy grail and winning the lottery rolled into one.

  Eddie Mack was part of the Westies gang, a tough Irishman and another stone-cold killer. Richard liked the Westies, thought they had balls. But he also thought they were out of control, should be kept on leashes, indeed in cages. Be that as it may, he went to the city with DiNome and picked up Mack, a stocky guy with long blond hair, and together they went up to Harlem. The bar was on Third Avenue. Eddie said he’d go in and talk to the owner, said that they knew ea
ch other from jail.

  “I’ll go in with you,” Richard offered.

  “Nah, that’s okay,” Mack said, and got out of the car and went inside.

  As always, Richard was armed. He sat there wondering why the hell he’d been asked to come along if Mack didn’t want him to go in. Within minutes, however, there was a commotion inside, things breaking, a shot fired. Richard jumped out of the car and hurried inside. Just as he entered the place, he got struck in the forehead with a bat. He fell back but didn’t go down. Chirping birds moved before his eyes. The sidewalk spun. He drew a .38 derringer and began back in, pissed off. Eddie Mack came out. He was holding his stomach.

  “The fuckin’ nigga shot me,” he said.

  “Let’s go get ’im,” Richard said.

  “Forget it. There’s a whole fuckin’ tribe a them,” Mack said, getting back in the car. “The motherfuckers.”

  “What happened?” Freddie asked.

  “He got cute, I went after him, and one of them shot me in the side. It’s dark in there and all I saw was teeth and eyes. I ain’t laying down on this. Take me home. I got some serious heat—I wanna get it and come right fuckin’ back.”

  “Let’s go,” Richard said. They returned to Hell’s Kitchen. Freddie called Roy and told him what had happened, said they wanted to load up and go back. Cursing, DeMeo gave them the green light. Eddie Mack had an old steamer trunk filled with weapons—heavy-duty armaments he’d gotten from DeMeo. Richard chose a street sweeper, a twelve-gauge shotgun with a large round clip, like an old-fashioned tommy gun. Both DiNome and Mack grabbed Mac-10s, machine-gun pistols that fired thirty nine-millimeter rounds a second. Richard helped Mack put a bandage on the bullet hole, which was on his extreme left side, in line with his belly button, and off they went, straight back to the bar, and parked in front. Richard, his forehead all swollen, burst from the car, was the first in, and let loose with the shotgun. Soon both Freddie and Mack cut loose with the Mac-10s, and they literally blew the place apart and shot whoever was standing.

  Satisfied, they left and went back to Brooklyn, making jokes about how you couldn’t see the black guys in the dark bar. At the Gemini, DeMeo got a doctor he knew to treat Mack’s wound. The bullet had apparently passed right through his side. Freddie told everyone how Richard had gone in with the shotgun and let loose.

  “The Big Guy’s got elephant balls,” DeMeo proudly said.

  Richard now had a lump on his forehead the size of a navel orange. He also had a splitting headache. DeMeo thanked him a half dozen times and gave him a big basket filled with Italian delicacies. “Your wife’ll love this,” he said, and Richard went home, angry this whole thing had happened. He could have been killed, he knew, for nothing, a thing he had no stake in. He now had something else against DeMeo.

  Barbara’s eyes got wide when she saw Richard’s head. “What happened?” she asked, concerned.

  “I fell,” he said, nothing more. She prepared an ice bag for him. He took a few aspirin and sat in his easy chair in the family room and watched a Clint Eastwood movie and stewed. His favorite actors were, not surprisingly, Eastwood and Charles Bronson.

  Word quickly spread in mob circles how the Big Guy went up to Harlem and blew apart a bunch of “uppity niggers” that needed to be put in place, to be killed, and Richard was more in demand than ever. His murderous exploits were taking on legendary proportions; yet, still, few people even knew his real name.

  Also, stories of how he was feeding live people to ravenous rats were making the rounds, both amusing and appalling those who heard them.

  The Big Guy was much in demand.

  It began as an insignificant event on Bensonhurst’s Eighty-sixth Street. Nino Gaggi was sitting in his car, double-parked in front of the Hy Tulip, a popular Jewish deli just off Twentieth Avenue, under the West End elevated train. Gaggi was waiting for his brother Roy’s wife, Marie Gaggi. Marie was a dark-haired beauty with blue eyes. When she walked down the street most every man’s head turned. When Marie left the deli that day—February 14, 1975—a few neighborhood youths made some inappropriate comments, wolf whistled. Seeing this, Nino Gaggi leaped from his car with a hammer and started swinging it at the youths, looking to break some heads. From the old school, Nino Gaggi could not tolerate such disrespect. One of the teenagers was named Vincent Governara. He did not know who Nino was—a capo in the Gambino family—nor did Nino know who Governara was—an excellent boxer, a Golden Gloves champion. Governara, a wiry, muscular youth, ducked the hammer and hit Nino with a left hook, knocking Nino right down and breaking his nose.

  This was an insult Nino would never forget, and he vowed to kill Governara.

  Word quickly spread all over Bensonhurst that Gaggi wanted Governara, wanted blood. Vinnie Governara was known as Vinnie Mook because, mentally, he was not the swiftest guy, but he was a truly superb athlete, a great handball player and baseball player, as well as a champion boxer. He looked like an Italian Jerry Lewis, had a wide mouth. Vinnie Mook was also an excellent dancer. He’d go to the Hollywood Terrace on Eighteenth Avenue on Latin night and dance up a storm. He was such a good dancer that people always moved out of his way to give him room to tear up the dance floor. Vinnie was also a vicious fighter, would hit people with extremely fast combinations. He never lost a street fight. When Vinnie heard whom exactly he had hit, he left Brooklyn and went down to Florida. Vinnie had been born and raised in Bensonhurst and he well knew the consequences of punching out a made man: death.

  Vinnie Mook would end up playing an instrumental role in Roy DeMeo finally aquiring his much coveted button.

  Some months after Governara broke Nino’s nose he returned to the neighborhood, and his car was spotted parked on Bath Avenue, just a few blocks south of Eighty-sixth Street. Nino Gaggi had his nephew Dominick, a Vietnam War vet with Special Forces training, rig up a concussion grenade to go off when Governara opened his car door. Roy DeMeo happily provided said grenade.

  However, when Governara opened the door, releasing the pin from the grenade, he didn’t close the door right away, and when the grenade went off most of the concussion escaped out of the open door. Still, the explosion broke Governara’s leg and threw him across Bath Avenue, a main thoroughfare running directly through Mafiaville.

  Needless to say, Governara again hightailed it out of Bensonhurst, went back to Florida, and wisely stayed away for a while—but not long enough; and when he returned to Bensonhurst his car was spotted on Twentieth Avenue and Eighty-fifth Street, just two blocks away, coincidentally, from the Hy Tulip where this all began.

  It was now June 12, 1976, the birthday of Dominick’s wife’s, Denise Montiglio. In the Gaggi house birthdays were always a big deal. Roy DeMeo happened to be there that day and he gave Denise—a beautiful neighborhood girl of Neopolitan extraction with long black hair and a big lovely smile—a diamond-studded watch. Denise was Nino’s niece by marriage, and Roy would do anything he could to please Nino, ingratiate himself with Nino.

  When word reached Nino that Vinnie Governara’s car had been seen on Twentieth Avenue, he, his nephew, and Roy DeMeo quickly left the house and Denise’s birthday party to go kill Vinnie Governara for a slight, a broken nose, made now some fifteen months ago. Nino’s nephew Dominick had dark hair, dark eyes, high cheekbones. He had seen a lot of action in Vietam, and since he’d returned he was quiet and sullen, and seemed to walk around with a dark storm cloud hanging over his head.

  Nino put on a ridiculous false mustache, and he, Dominick, and Roy drove over to Twentieth Avenue in Roy’s car and waited for Vinnie Governara. It was the middle of the afternoon, a Saturday. A lot of shoppers were out. None of that was going to stop Nino Gaggi from getting his revenge. This was, in fact, a stupid, very risky enterprise, killing a man in broad daylight near Eighty-sixth Street, but that wasn’t about to dissuade Nino. He was willing to sacrifice all he had to get even with Vinnie Governara, just a young man struggling to find his way in life with a good punch.

  Nino
Gaggi didn’t have to wait long. They soon spotted Governara walking to his car, an old Plymouth, without a care in the world. Nino and Roy were soon behind him. Governara spotted them and began to run. Right there, in broad daylight, Roy and Nino took aim at the fleeing Governara and let loose a fusillade of .38 bullets, shooting Governara down. Dominick did not fire the .22 he had. As they were hurrying back to Roy’s car, bystanders began to chase them. Gaggi raised his .38. Everyone hit the ground. The killers quickly got into DeMeo’s car and off they went, making a clean getaway. Governara died of his wounds a few days later at Coney Island Hospital.

  Now, with newfound intensity, DeMeo petitioned Gaggi to talk to Paul Castellano about getting made. Gaggi promised Roy he would; he would see to it that DeMeo finally got straightened out, as they said.

  This incident with Governara and Nino Gaggi concerned Richard Kuklinski only because it would ultimately cause Roy DeMeo to become made, which meant that Richard made more money with DeMeo, and DeMeo sent more murder contracts Richard’s way.

  The next hit Richard performed for DeMeo was also in Los Angeles. The mark owed money to wiseguys, wasn’t paying, seemed to be daring the wiseguys to do something. DeMeo beeped Richard, they met at the diner near the Tappan Zee Bridge, Richard was given the contract, and he was on a plane back to LA the following day.

  This mark was very cagey. He knew people were looking for him and moved with caution. For days Richard staked out his home. He lived in a pink condo complex in Sherman Oaks. The two times Richard saw him, he couldn’t make a move. There were witnesses. Richard did not like hanging around to do a piece of work. The chance of something going wrong became greater by the hour. In frustration, Richard tried something he’d seen on a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He boldly went and knocked on the mark’s door. He could see light through the peephole and he put his eye up against it. When he saw the shadowy figure of the mark approach and reach the door, Richard put the barrel of a .38 up to the peephole, waited for the right moment, and fired, shooting the mark directly in the eye, instantly killing him.