by Philip Carlo
Again, by pure happenstance, the body was found within several days and the police were summoned. Interestingly, the frigid well water had completely preserved the corpse. Masgay had now been dead for two years but he looked as if he had just died—been murdered—only the day before. The clothes he was wearing were matched with missing-persons reports, and thus the authorities realized it was Louis Masgay, reported missing so long ago.
On the day Masgay disappeared, the police knew, he’d gone to see Richard Kuklinski with ninety thousand dollars cash money on him. When word of this discovery reached Detective Kane, he hurried and told Lieutenant Leck. The lieutenant said: “Pat…Pat, you’ve made a believer out of me,” and he shook Kane’s hand. This murder finally vindicated Kane, and he felt ten feet tall.
Now with Leck’s permission and encouragement, Kane dug deeper and quickly learned that Louis Masgay was last seen on his way to have dinner with Kuklinski the day he vanished. Kane also learned that Masgay had been buying porn and blank tapes from Kuklinski. Kane now turned his attention back to the murder of George Malliband, spoke to his brother Gene, and heard how Malliband was a heavy gambler, deep in debt to loan sharks and “Mafia characters.”
Kane went for a long jog, thinking this out, trying to fit the jagged pieces of this bloody puzzle together. He had many good ideas while running, managed to see things in a new light—from different angles, as he says. While jogging he had the idea to contact the NYPD organized-crime unit and see if he could learn something more about Richard Kuklinski from them. He needed help, he knew. He was only a lowly detective in the small state police barracks at Newton, New Jersey, which had an absolute minimum of resources—a serious disadvantage, and Pat Kane had the good sense to know it. Kane’s query to the NYPD proved to be fruitful. He not only asked about Kuklinski, but he provided the OC Unit with Kuklinski’s mug shot; it was shown to a Mafia informant—Freddie DiNome—and Kane soon learned that the photo was of “the Polack,” a proficient hit man who had worked with Roy DeMeo, who himself had recently been killed. “He is supposed to be,” an NYPD detective told Kane, “a specialist at getting rid of bodies.”
This confirmed what Kane had all along suspected, but to hear it from the NYPD OC Unit was very sobering. It sent shivers up his spine.
How many people has he killed? Kane wondered, and his mind played over the long list of Mafia hits that occurred all over New Jersey. With this new information, Kane became even more concerned for both his and his family’s safety. If Kuklinski was a contract killer, what was to prevent him from coming after Kane, or his wife, or for that matter his children? Kane made sure to find out the license-plate numbers of not only all of Richard’s cars, but his family’s cars as well. With the information he took Terry aside and explained how he was on the trail of a dangerous killer, a contract murderer, who lived nearby, a ten-minute drive away, and he “might,” he said, come around looking to hurt him. This both troubled and confused Terry.
“Why,” she asked, “would he come after you, Patrick, and not one of the other guys?”
“Because I’ve been pursuing him for a while, and I think…well, I think it’s possible he found out about me.”
“You, I mean just you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Terry, it’s long and involved. Just suffice it to say that I’m…I’m concerned, and I want you to be…”
“To be what, Patrick?”
“On guard—alert,” he said. “Keep your eyes open.”
“What about the children, Patrick? Would he…you know, hurt them?” she asked.
“Terry, I just want you to keep your eyes open, that’s all. No. No, he won’t hurt the children,” Kane said, but in truth he didn’t know what Richard would do, what Richard was capable of.
Merrick Kuklinski’s boyfriend, Richie Peterson, was becoming abusive. He first took to pushing Merrick around, then striking her and breaking things. As much as Merrick loved Peterson, she was not, she vowed, going to enter into an abusive relationship the way her mother had. So she unapologetically, irrevocably ended all romantic relations and ties with Peterson. He was heartbroken, crestfallen, pursued Merrick, begged her to reconsider, promised he’d change, but she didn’t want to hear it.
If Merrick had told her father that Richie Peterson abused her, Richard would have killed him and fed him to the rats. But Merrick kept silent about the abuse, and Richard still treated Peterson well. It was out of character for Richard to trust Peterson—or anyone—so much. Peterson was young, not an outlaw, and he had been involved with Merrick for a long time now. Richard thought of Peterson as a surrogate son. This familiarity, however, would come back to haunt Richard.
Chris Kuklinski was still asserting her individuality by having a lot of male friends. She would sometimes be fooling around in vans parked right outside the house with Richard home; she would sometimes cavort with boys in her basement bedroom with Richard home—just upstairs, watching TV.
Chris, of course, knew all about her father’s bad temper, but she knew nothing about the second life he led; she had no idea what a truly thin, dangerous line she was crossing by doing these things. If Richard had caught her in these acts he would have gone berserk and sent any male she was with to the hospital, or worse—a grave. This was a tragedy waiting to happen.
Several times, Pat Kane tried following Richard, but that proved to be very difficult. Richard’s doubling back, making sudden turns, pulling over on the side of the road and just sitting there waiting, made tailing him nearly impossible. Kane also thought about going into Phil Solimene’s store in Paterson to see what he could find out, but Solimene knew Pat Kane through an odd quirk of circumstances, and knew Kane was a cop, so he’d be made the second he entered the store.
Kane came to view Solimene as a possible weak link, a way to get something on Richard, but the question was how? In truth Solimene was a genuine black-hearted outlaw and knew very well just how dangerous Richard was, and he’d be hard-pressed to do anything to undermine Richard or help the cops in any way.
Though, with time, that would change.
Kane now turned his stubborn nature to Kuklinski’s phone records, and soon learned he had four different phone lines and ran up huge bills…several thousand dollars every month.
Upon closer scrutiny of Richard’s phone calls, Kane realized that Richard had been making phone calls to Louis Masgay’s number, which abruptly stopped the day Masgay disappeared.
“Interesting,” Lieutenant Leck observed when Kane brought this to his attention. “Especially considering that Kuklinski denied even knowing Masgay.” As provocative as this was, it didn’t in any way prove that Kuklinski had killed Louis Masgay, though it certainly pointed in that direction. Kane went back to checking the hundreds of numbers called from the Kuklinski home. This was grueling, tedious work, comparing all these seemingly unrelated numbers, but suddenly, one of the numbers seemed to jump off the page and slam Pat Kane right in the face. “Bingo!” he shouted, and hurried into Lieutenant Leck’s office. “We got ’im,” he announced.
“What’s up?” Leck asked.
Richard went about business as usual. He accepted murder contracts across the country. He bought and sold hijacked merchandise, drugs and guns, distributed pornography from one end of America to the other. He rented an office in Emerson now and started a new corporation he called Sunset Inc. He used the company to buy and sell lots of damaged goods and to sell counterfeit knockoff items, jeans and sweaters, handbags, even perfumes. Richard had bogus labels sewn into the clothing and sold it as the real McCoy. Wholesalers from flea markets across the country gobbled them up. Richard never brought home any of the pornography he dealt in. Barbara would never stand for such a thing. Once in a while, however, he kept loads of X-rated movies in the garage, wrapped in plastic, overnight. Richard’s son, Dwayne, happened upon one such load and became all wide-eyed at the sight of the blatant porn all over the boxes—an exciting thing for any health
y teenage boy to see.
Dwayne had never been close to his father. Though Barbara and his sisters tried mightily to shield Dwayne from the truth, he knew Richard beat his mother, broke up furniture, tore things apart. Dwayne figured it would be just a matter of time before his father turned his wrath on him. Dwayne would gladly defend his mother with his life, and he often thought about just that—trying to stop his father from abusing his mother and suddenly becoming the target himself. Dwayne still always made sure to have weapons ready, so when and if the time came to defend his mother from Richard, defend himself, he’d be prepared, ready for action.
But Dwayne had no idea just how dangerous, truly deadly, Richard was, and regardless of what preparations he made he’d never be able to do any kind of combat with his father and survive.
Richard did his best to please his son; he tried to be a good dad. He was buying Dwayne gifts all the time, mostly some sort of weapon: a sword, all kinds of knives, BB guns, a crossbow. Not just any crossbow, but a superdeluxe one designed to bring down a bear, with razor-sharp arrows, made to kill, readily pierce flesh and muscle and break bones. Dwayne didn’t take to any of these weapons, rarely used the crossbow—but he did think about using it against his father, indeed killing him with it to protect his mother. Dwayne was very close to Barbara, but he was by no means a mama’s boy. Dwayne loved sports and rough-and-tumble action, lifted weights, and had a long, lean, muscular body. Dwayne’s passion was wrestling, and he was very good at it, winning most of his matches. His whole family, including Richard, went to his wrestling matches and cheered him on wildly. Richard’s attending Dwayne’s matches was one of the few things Richard participated in that his son liked. Richard did not take him to baseball, soccer, or football games, didn’t go fishing with him, never did any of the things a father and son might do together. But Dwayne did enjoy when his father came to his wrestling heats and cheered him on.
Richard seemed to thrive on family life. He very much enjoyed being home, with his family, cooking at barbecues, watching movies together, shopping for groceries, even going to church with the family on Sunday mornings. A healthy, loving family was what Richard had always wanted, coveted, and now he finally had it. Yet, his enjoyment, his obvious love of home life, could turn to explosive rage at the drop of a dime. He still struck Barbara, broke her nose, gave her black eyes. Though these incidents were certainly less frequent than in years past, they still happened. Both Merrick and Chris had grown into large, physically strong young women and would run to get between Richard and their mother when he had one of his outbursts.
Richard was bipolar and should have been taking medication to stabilize his behavior, his sudden highs and lows, but going to see a psychiatrist was out of the question. He’d be admitting that something was wrong with him, and he’d never do that.
Conversely, family life was, he was beginning to think, making him soft, taking away his razor edge, and because of that he was becoming…vulnerable. But there was nothing he could do about it. The only thing in this world Richard Kuklinski ever cared about was his family, and he’d die, he often vowed, before he lost them.
He often fantasized now about making a lot of money and retiring from crime, going straight, buying a house near the ocean and enjoying the view every day, going for long walks with Barbara. Richard knew he’d been lucky for a very long time now, and somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that someday his luck would change, had to change, the laws of average dictated that.
Still, Richard did little to lessen his exposure, to step back and look at his life with a critical, rational eye. He plunged forward, intent upon one thing, making money, providing for his family, and retiring one day. But he needed a lot of money for that, and the risks he was taking became secondary. They were a natural part of the landscape and he accepted that. He vowed to be more careful, to plan and plot methodically and move only when the time was right.
Another potential problem for Richard was his explosive, homicidal temper. He was still getting into arguments with people about how they drove, which could quickly escalate into sudden violence, even murder. Someone who cut Richard off in traffic was taking his life in his hands.
One evening Richard was returning to New Jersey and had just crossed the George Washington Bridge when he passed a tall, lanky hitchhiker. The man tried to wave him down, but Richard kept moving, and the hitchhiker gave him the finger. For some reason this disrespect always outraged Richard; he couldn’t let such a thing pass. He doubled back, taking a gun from the holster on his calf, rolled down the window, drove right up to the hitchhiker, and shot him in the chest, killing him. The hitchhiker was found by a biker; the police were summoned. There were no witnesses, no motives, no weapons, no clues. Another unsolved killing for the homicide books.
Another time Richard wanted to try out a new weapon—a small black metal crossbow made in Italy. It seemed like a good assassin’s weapon because it was so silent, so small, the size of a catcher’s mitt, but would it really work? he wondered. To test it Richard went out in his car looking for someone he could shoot with the crossbow. He wasn’t angry, hadn’t been drinking; it was just a test to see if the small crossbow would kill a human being, he explained. He spotted a man, his guinea pig, walking innocently on a secluded street, slowed, pulled up, and asked for directions in his friendly way. The man approached Richard’s car to answer and in the next instant Richard shot him in the forehead with the six-inch steel-shafted arrow. The man went right down, the arrow in his brain, not knowing what hit him or why…and was soon dead.
The Elusive Muskie
A man in Vineland, New Jersey, owed mob guys a lot of money—over one hundred thousand dollars. He was a degenerate gambler and a sexual degenerate, and got himself in deep with loan sharks of Italian persuasion. He paid his debt with a check that bounced—twice. Richard was asked to go see this man. His name was John Spasudo, and he would wind up playing an important role in Richard’s life.
Like Richard, Spasudo was a large man, though with long dark hair. He had perfected the gift of gab to a high art form, could talk the spots off a running cheetah if he had a mind to. Richard, however, had heard it all before many times over and did not fall for Spasudo’s line of bull. Richard calmly explained the facts of life to Spasudo, and Richard did end up getting all the money due after a few days.
In the course of these days, Spasudo told Richard about this “great opportunity” he had to make money buying and selling Nigerian currency and South African Krugerrands, a coin made of pure gold. And he told Richard about this idea he was developing with Louis Arnold, a wealthy Pennsylvania businessman, to open a series of rest stops specifically designed for trucks all along the interstate—a hotel, restaurant, and garage where mechanical problems could be quickly addressed. It sounded like a reasonably good idea and piqued Richard’s interest.
Richard, as always, was looking for new ways to make money, and he listened to Spasudo with an open mind, heard more about how much could be made with gold coins and currency trading, and soon was on his way to Zurich, Switzerland with a whole new spectrum of opportunities before him, and a new list of victims to be sent to the grave.
Pat Kane hurried excitedly into Lieutenant Leck’s office. He was sure he had found the rope they could use to hang Richard Kuklinski.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “I have here clear, irrefutable proof that links Kuklinski to the York Hotel. He called the place on December 21, when Deppner and Smith were staying there. Let’s see him try and deny this.”
“Good, very good work,” Leck said; while this was only circumstantial proof and did not mean that Kuklinski had killed anyone, it did tie Kuklinski directly to the place where Gary Smith had been found.
Though in Pat Kane’s mind it was further proof of what he’d been saying for years. This was not enough proof, however, to go out and handcuff Kuklinksi. More than anything he had ever wanted in his life, Kane wanted to arrest Richard Kuklinski and put him in a cell—cage
him like the deranged animal Kane believed he was. This investigation had all been very frustrating and disheartening for Kane. He knew Kuklinski was a mob contract killer, a distributor of pornography, had killed five people that he was aware of—Masgay, Hoffman, Malliband, Smith, and Deppner—and he couldn’t do anything about it, at least not yet. Kane was becoming quiet and morose. Terry could barely get him to talk, to acknowledge her or the children. He had always been a loving, extremely devoted, and attentive husband, a doting father, but now he was like another man entirely: there, in the house, in the bed next to his wife, but not really present, a part of the family. He was somewhere else most all the time, Terry Kane would explain. Kane wasn’t sleeping well either. He’d lie in bed, toss and turn. Dark circles formed under his eyes. Sometimes at night, he’d hear a sound outside, get out of bed, and go outside with a cocked gun in his hand. If Kuklinski came around looking to hurt him or his family, he’d kill him. End of story.
If Kane was going to get Kuklinski, stop his bloody one-man crime spree, he needed tangible, irrefutable evidence, he knew—the proverbial smoking gun, eyewitnesses, fingerprints, real evidence that would stand up in a court of law. Pat Kane went for grueling runs, pounded his heavy bag, thinking only about this case, how to get Kuklinski off the streets. He fantasized often about getting into a shootout with Kuklinski and killing him. Kane was an excellent shot and wished he could face Kuklinski man to man. Kane believed that if anyone needed killing, it was surely Richard Kuklinski. But Kane knew such a thing was not possible. He had played it straight, within the rules and regulations of society, his whole life and he wasn’t about to change now, become a killer, because of Kuklinski. Still, he wished Kuklinski would give him cause to shoot him down like the rabid dog Kane was sure he was.
