The Ice Man

by Philip Carlo

  When Kane left the bar, he got into his car, not realizing he was being watched—stalked—and drove straight home. By force of habit he checked his rearview—most cops do—but Richard was exceedingly adept at trailing people unnoticed and soon learned where Pat Kane lived with his wife and two children.

  The thing Pat Kane had dreaded from the very beginning had just happened.

  Now, Richard thought, it was just a matter of figuring out how best to do this—dispose of Pat Kane once and for all and for it not to come back to him. To amuse himself, Richard took a bead on Kane with the rifle as he stepped from his car. Bang, you’re dead, he whispered, though he didn’t pull the trigger.

  I’ve Got Some Rats I Have to Get Rid Of

  The more Richard thought about killing Kane, the more he realized the law-enforcement firestorm he’d bring down on his own head. The link between anything happening to Kane and him would be immediate, he knew. To do this job properly, he decided, he had to make Kane’s murder look like an accident; that was the key, and he was sure he could do that, but he needed poison. He needed the cyanide spray to pull it off, though he didn’t have any. He began asking people he knew in the underworld in Jersey City, Hoboken, and New York if anyone could get his hands on some cyanide. No luck. Richard’s plan was to spray Kane in the face as he was leaving the bar after a few drinks; he’d keel over dead right there. Everyone would believe it was a heart attack. Perfect. Applied with the right dosage, cyanide was very difficult to detect.

  He’d first give Kane a flat, and as he was changing the tire, he’d get him. It’d be a piece of cake. He smiled at the thought, knowing it would work. However, he was having a hard time finding high-grade, lab cyanide. He had only one shot at this, he knew, and it had to work. There would be no second chance. Kane was armed and dangerous.

  Richard was supposed to go to Zurich that Friday, but he put off the trip until the following week. He’d plot and plan Pat Kane’s murder.

  Now, for the second time in less than a week, strange men came knocking on Richard’s door, and this second incident upset Richard to the point of absolute distraction. It was, for him, a Waterloo of sorts—in a sense the beginning of the end. It all had to do with John Spasudo.

  So far, with Richard, John Spasudo had made a small fortune, but he was a degenerate gambler, and not only pissed the money away but indebted himself to drug dealers, to cocaine wholesalers. He was apparently taking drugs on consignment, selling them, and losing the money gambling, and he had got himself in hot water with some Colombians. Spasudo had never been to Richard’s home. However, by using a trace on Richard’s license plates, he was able to find out Richard’s address.

  When the Colombians put a squeeze on Spasudo, he got it in his head to tell them Richard had their money, which wasn’t at all true, and Spasudo actually took two of them to Richard’s home. Spasudo believed Richard wasn’t in town, that he’d gone to Zurich, but he was actually in the house when they knocked on the door. Richard saw them through the curtain—Spasudo sitting in the car—and was angry beyond words that street people, thugs, had come to his home.

  This was not supposed to happen.

  Richard had always been scrupulously careful about keeping the street, his nefarious dealings, far away from his home, his family. Now the street was actually knocking on his door, ringing his bell. He recently explained: I realized that day that I’d made mistakes. I’d allowed what I was doing to touch my family. It was what I’d always dreaded and yet it happened. For me…for me it was like getting hit by a speeding train. I would fix it. I had to fix it. My plan was to kill them all. To kill everyone close to me—I mean everyone!

  As the Colombians stood there, Dwayne innocently pulled into the drive. The two of them approached Dwayne and asked where his dad was. They were friendly, but there was an undercurrent of danger, of threat.

  “He’s out of town,” Dwayne said.

  That seemed to placate them for now. They told Dwayne to tell his dad they’d been there and would be back. One of them touched Dwayne’s arm as he spoke. Richard saw this from the window and nearly exploded with rage. His lips twisted into a snarl. He wanted to run outside and kill them with his bare hands, but that would have to wait. He controlled himself, gritting his teeth, as the soft clicking sound came from his lips. They got back into their car and left. As they pulled away, Richard stared at Spasudo there in the backseat. Rage made his head spin. He actually had to sit down.

  Early that evening, Richard went and found Spasudo. He was shocked to see Richard.

  Richard bellowed, “How fucking dare you bring those spics to my house!”

  “Rich, I thought you were out of town. I was just trying to stall them. I’m sorry; I’m sorry, Rich!”

  If, Richard recently explained, he hadn’t been doing things with Spasudo, he’d have killed him right then and there, gotten rid of his body—fed him to the rats. But that luxury, for now, wasn’t his; though Spasudo’s days were now numbered. Richard pulled out a pistol and stuck it right in Spasudo’s mouth, pulled the hammer back.

  “You ever bring someone near my home again, I’ll kill you, John. You understand?”

  “I do, I swear, I understand!” he mumbled.

  Richard then went to kill the two Colombians. By doing this, he was getting Spasudo out of debt, but that certainly was not his intention. He just wanted to kill the men who had dared to come to his door.

  Next would be Pat Kane.

  Now, out of irrational desperation, Richard did what Pat Kane and Dominick Polifrone had been hoping and praying for all along: he used a pay phone and called Phil Solimene. Polifrone was, by pure happenstance, sitting in the store playing cards.

  “Hey, Big Guy,” Solimene greeted Richard.

  “That friend you have, this Dom, he around?” Richard asked.

  “Yeah, he’s sitting right here.”

  “Put him on.”

  “Hey, Dom,” Solimene called out. “It’s for you: Big Rich.” He smiled and winked as he handed the phone to Dominick.

  “How ya doin?” Dominick said, very pleased that finally, after all these months, he was actually making contact with the elusive Richard Kuklinski. The devil himself was calling.

  “I’m good. I hear you have some good contacts.”

  “Fuckin’ A.”

  “Let’s talk. I need something special. I don’t want to come there. Can you meet me at the Dunkin’ Donuts down the street?”

  “Sure, Rich, no problem,” the agent said.

  “Five minutes?”

  “Okay,” Polifrone said, and hung up.

  Solimene was smiling. “I told you he’d call.”

  “That you did,” Dom said. “He wants to meet me at the Dunkin’ Donuts.”

  “I’ll be here,” Phil said, and Dominick left.

  Dominick walked outside. There was no time to contact Kane or even his own ATF people. He was truly on his own, and he had to move fast. He slid into his black Lincoln sedan and drove over to the Dunkin’ Donuts. He knew he should have been wearing a wire, but there was no time for that. It was 10:45 A.M. The sky was filled with somber grays. Dominick was nervous, excited, concerned, all at the same time. He had been planning this for so long, had begun to think it would never happen. But it was. He’d just spoken to the devil himself. Dom was armed. He had a Walther PPK in his pocket. He was an excellent shot. He didn’t think Kuklinski would try to pull something in broad daylight, at a Dunkin’ Donuts, but he had no real idea what was up, what Kuklinski wanted—what was in the wind. As he pulled into the parking lot, he spotted Richard. He was in Dwayne’s silver Camaro. Polifrone parked and walked over, swaggering as he went, now seriously in his wiseguy mode.

  “Hey, how ya doin?” he greeted Richard.

  “Okay, good,” Richard said, getting out of the car and shaking Polifrone’s outstretched hand. The agent was taken aback by Richard’s size.

  “Let’s grab some coffee,” Richard said, and they headed inside the Dunki
n’ Donuts. It was just about empty. Richard moved to a quiet corner on the left, thinking this Dominick guy might have great contacts in the underworld and all, but he was wearing the worst wig he’d ever seen. It looked like a raccoon went and died on his head, he’d later say.

  The bad wig aside, Richard had taken his “friend” Phil Solimene at his word: that Dominick was “good people,” that they went back a lot of years. They both ordered coffees. Dominick was concerned about poison, that somehow Richard knew he was a plant and that he’d somehow manage to slip poison into his coffee. He purposely didn’t order anything to eat and made sure to keep his coffee close, actually in his hand.

  “I’m glad we’re finally fuckin’ meeting, Rich. I hear all kinds of good fuckin’ things about you.”

  “And me you. So you know Phil a long time?”

  “Yeah, we go back. You too I hear.”

  “I know Phil…what, now, over twenty years.”

  “He’s a great guy. Stand-up.”

  “Yeah…So let me tell you what I need, okay?”

  “Sure, please.”

  “I want to get some cyanide.”

  “Cyanide, you mean like the fuckin’ poison?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, Rich, go to, you know, go to a fuckin’ gardening store.”

  “No, I mean high-grade stuff—laboratory quality. I got some rats I need to get rid of,” he said, amused.

  “Yeah, well sure, I’m certain I could get ya that,” Dominick said, all serious. He wanted to, had to, draw Richard further out: cyanide, after all, was not illegal, nor was asking for it illegal. He had to get Richard involved in something that was overtly illegal. Dominick knew the game, knew what to say. The question was, would Richard take the bait?

  “Rich,” he said, “I hear you got good contacts for serious weapons, I’m talking heavy steel here. My guy had to take off recently. I’ve got a good customer, a broad who’s hooked up with the IRA, and they got serious bucks and are looking for heavy steel. Can you help me there? You know, one hand washes the other?”

  “Sure. Let me make a few calls,” Richard said.

  There was something about Polifrone that Richard wasn’t comfortable with, that put him off. Yet they exchanged beeper and telephone numbers and planned to do business. The meeting soon ended. They walked outside together. The sky was lower and darker.

  “I’m thinking of stopping and saying hello to Phil,” Richard said.

  “Sure, good idea. I’ll follow you over,” Dominick said, and made his way back to his Lincoln and followed Richard to the store. They walked inside together. What a pair. As different as night and day.

  “Hey, Rich!” Phil called out, acting overjoyed to see him. “Glad you two finally hooked up.”

  Richard hugged Solimene and kissed him on the cheek, said hello to some of the other guys. During all the months Polifrone had been hanging around the store, he’d been clocking the action—he knew who was involved in counterfeit money, hijacking, robberies; but he couldn’t make any kind of move, yet. However, at the right time, he’d make sure all these criminals, the regular thugs that hung out at the store, were picked up.

  “So you and Dom here go back,” Richard said offhandedly.

  “Absofuckinlutely,” Phil said. “You can treat him like me, Rich. He’s a thousand percent!”

  “Okay,” Richard said. “Good enough for me,” readily accepting what Solimene was saying. This was out of character for Richard. He was usually a particularly untrusting, suspicious individual. But he believed Phil and had no real reservations about Polifrone, other than his terrible hairpiece. He felt whoever had sold it to him should be arrested.

  Phil, Richard, and Polifrone did a three-way handshake.

  “Salud,” Phil said, wishing them luck on whatever enterprise they did together.

  Richard had apparently taken the bait. He said he had to get going and soon disappeared.

  “I told you, I told you I’d deliver him,” Solimene told Dominick.

  “And you did. Good work,” Dominick said. He was anxious to let his superiors know he had finally hooked Kuklinski. He had been getting flak about a lack of results, but now he had something concrete to show for all the months he’d been working this case, the endless card games, cursing, cigar smoking, bullshit. When he left the store, he drove a few blocks, making sure he wasn’t tailed, used a pay phone, and told his people what had happened, what was said. “Our man has taken the bait,” he told headquarters.

  Polifrone next called Kane. When Kane heard what had happened, he let out a loud whoop. He hurried into Lieutenant Leck’s office and told him the good news. They shook hands, high-fived each other.

  “So we got him on the hook,” Kane said. “Now all we have to do is get him in the boat.”

  As it happened, this was easier said than done.

  Now what Kane and Polifrone needed to pull this off successfully was a larger, more sophisticated operation. They had not only to get Kuklinski to incriminate himself, but to record it and make it all admissible and viable in a court of law. They needed help—more resources, wiretaps, electronic surveillance, manpower, helicopters, money—and they would get most of it in the form of New Jersey Deputy Attorney General Bob Carroll.

  It was time to take off the gloves.

  Two days after their first meeting, Richard beeped Polifrone. The agent called him back. Richard wanted to know if he had secured the cyanide. He was anxious to get rid of Kane, and to do it properly he needed the cyanide.

  “I’m working on it, Rich. How about you—you find what I need?”

  “Got feelers out,” Richard said.

  “Okay, I’ll get back to you on that ASAP, all right?”

  “Yeah, good, okay,” Richard said.

  Richard wanted to go back to Zurich, but he was hesitant to leave with this up in the air; now the first order of business was getting rid of Kane. He believed once that was done he’d be in the clear. But he knew it had to be done right, to make it look like a heart attack. He imagined spraying Kane in his surprised face, saw it happen in his mind.

  Pssst, you’re dead, fuck you.

  Since the two Colombians had come around the house, Richard was, Barbara noticed, quiet and withdrawn…introspective. He barely talked. She recently explained, I never saw him like this. He was just moping around the house, sitting in his chair and staring into space. He didn’t want to talk; he didn’t even want to go feed the ducks. I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea what.

  Operation Ice Man

  Bob Carroll was a diligent, hardworking prosecutor. He had a full baby face, was stocky and square, appeared somewhat like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. That cherubic baby face, however, belied a tenacious prosecutor that won most trials he took before a jury. Bob Carroll was a supervisor of the New Jersey Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau task force, a relatively new unit put together to cross jurisdictions and build up and prosecute cases across the state of New Jersey, focusing on organized crime. Carroll worked out of a secretive unmarked two-story redbrick building in Fairfield. The entrance to the building was in the back, away from prying eyes. There were strategically placed surveillance cameras everywhere. If New Jersey had a Pentagon, a place from which to fight wars, this was surely it. When Carroll heard about the Kuklinski case, he contacted Kane and asked to see “the file.”

  By now Kane’s one folder had grown to many carefully put-together files, all contained in a large brown cardboard box. For two days Bob Carroll pored over Kane’s files, more and more amazed—stunned, actually—at what the young detective had single-handedly put together. “It was,” he would later say, “one of the most significant, incredible files I’d ever seen.”

  Thus the New Jersey attorney general’s office lined up behind the investigation that Detective Pat Kane had started.

  On the evening of September 6, 1986—four days after Dominick Polifrone had his first meeting with Kuklinski—Pat Kane sat down in a windowless war room in
the New Jersey attorney general’s Fairfield building. He was surrounded by law-enforcement heavies, including Bob Carroll, Deputy State Police Chief Bob Buccino, Captain John Leck, and New Jersey Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau investigators Paul Smith and Ron Donahue, all interested, all there because of Kane’s diligence. No one doubted any longer what he’d been saying. If John Leck was also there, he was now behind Pat Kane 100 percent. Here Operation Ice Man—because they believed Richard had frozen Masgay—was formed, and the rope to hang Richard Kuklinski became longer still.

  Over Chinese takeout, Pat Kane and Bob Carroll carefully laid out all the information Kane had gathered over the many months he’d been working the case: how it all began as a series of unsolved burglaries; the murders of Masgay, Smith, and Deppner, and the disappearance of Hoffman; Kuklinski’s connection to Roy DeMeo and organized crime. All that Kane had found out, put together, was tremendously helpful. But the attorney general’s office needed tangible evidence that would hold up under the withering scrutiny of a crack defense attorney.

  Dominick Polifrone was the answer. They would use him to get Kuklinski to incriminate himself. If Kuklinski had asked Polifrone for cyanide at their very first meeting at the Dunkin’ Donuts, it stood to reason that Polifrone was “in,” that Kuklinski would hang himself.

  Cyanide was the key—that would be the beam from which to hang the rope.

  With permission from his superiors, Polifrone soon attended a second meeting of the Operation Ice Man task force, and Bob Carroll ran down for Polifrone what he wanted. Again present were Pat Kane and the heavies—Investigators Paul Smith and Ron Donahue, Deputy Chief Bob Buccino, and Captain John Leck. Ron Donahue was a seasoned, hardened investigator, notorious for his toughness on the streets. He was actually booed by mob guys when he showed up in court, walked into mob hangouts. He very much looked like the boxer Jack Dempsey and was tough like him. Paul Smith was in his early thirties, had a Beatle haircut, hooded dark eyes. He was an adept undercover guy. Only Captain Leck wore a uniform. Bob Buccino had a thick head of silver hair, was a patient, intelligent man, a good administrator, adept at getting people to work well together. They all sat down. Now there was an eight-by-ten glossy of Kuklinski taped to the wall, a bull’s-eye drawn on it.