The Ice Man

by Philip Carlo

  Life was good.

  Life held much promise.

  Kane had caught the cunning, very dangerous muskie.

  The State of New Jersey v. Richard Leonard Kuklinski

  On December 18 Richard appeared in New Jersey Superior Court, in front of Judge Peter Riolina, and was officially charged with nineteen felony offenses. Here for the first time Richard saw his nemesis—Deputy Attorney General Bob Carroll—and Richard did not like what he saw. It was obvious that Carroll knew the facts and details backward and forward, that he had planned and orchestrated Richard’s arrest, and that he would be trying the state’s case. Richard was now formally charged with the murders of Masgay, Malliband, Hoffman, Smith, and Deppner.

  After the brief proceeding, Richard was brought back to a cell at the courthouse jail. It would be here that he would wait while the wheels of justice slowly, inexorably turned and the case was adjudicated.

  When Barbara heard what the charges were against her husband she was apalled; she didn’t believe them. Daughter Chris wasn’t surprised at all. She felt, in fact, that her father was absolutely capable of what the police were saying. Richard’s son, Dwayne, now eighteen, also felt his father immanently capable of what the police were alleging. For the longest time, Dwayne had felt that sooner or later he would have some kind of life-and-death struggle with his father, and now Dwayne realized that such a confrontation would surely have ended with his being killed.

  More than anyone else, Dwayne felt the stigma of being Richard’s son, a Kuklinski. By now both Chris and Merrick were out of school, but Dwayne was still attending school, and he saw the strange, curious stares, the pointing, heard the whispering. Richard’s favorite, Merrick, also wasn’t surprised at what the police said her dad had done, but still she was hurt and deeply troubled that her dad was in jail. No matter what he’d done, what heinous crimes the police said he’d committed, he was innocent until proved guilty. Merrick would love him and support him and be there 10,000 percent for him to the end.

  When Richard learned that Dominick Polifrone was a plant, an ATF agent, and that he had taped most of their conversations, he knew he was dead in the water. Unless some kind of miracle happened, he’d never get out of jail, never see the light of day, would more than likely get a death sentence. He was so angry with himself, how stupid and gullible he’d been, that he couldn’t even look at himself in a mirror without getting angry and calling himself names: You idiot, you fool, what the fuck were you thinking? he said over and over again.

  He paced his cell. He silently cursed heaven and hell, the world and everyone in it.

  Richard often thought about killing Deputy Chief Bob Buccino, how he would torture him and make him suffer. Oh, how he wanted to see Buccino suffer, see the rats feed on him. He believed that Kane and Polifrone were, for the most part, just doing their jobs, but Buccino was another story. The way he had treated Barbara was, he believed, totally uncalled for, was bullylike, and he hated the man with a fiery-burning passion. Even now, so many years later, Richard gets angry, his face pales, his lips twist, when he thinks of Deputy Chief Buccino. I don’t know, he recently said, if the prick is still alive or dead, but if he died I hope it was a painful death. I hope he died of cancer of the asshole.

  Shortly after his arrest, Richard decided not even to try to mount any kind of viable defense. His was a hopeless case; once a jury heard him talking, burying himself, he’d get convicted. The only question was whether he would get the death sentence or life in jail. Either way, it didn’t matter. He had fucked up big-time and he knew it, accepted it, didn’t try to blame someone else. Yes, of course, his “friend” Phil Solimene had set him up, but he should have sensed something was up, smelled it in the wind, seen the handwriting on the wall. Richard had never been trusting or easily fooled, yet he had walked into the carefully laid trap, he says, like a wide-eyed schoolkid with no sense at all.

  Because of all the extraordinary media coverage of the case, the jury pool, he knew, was irreversibly tainted, and he had less chance than a snowball in hell. Also because of all the media attention he’d gotten, Richard was by far the most notorious prisoner in the county jail. One of his fellow prisoners began taunting him and teasing him everytime he passed his cell. “Ice Man my ass,” he said. “You ain’t shit; you ain’t so tough.” Richard just smiled, knowing sooner or later he’d get his hands on this guy. He was in a foul, homicidal mood, looking to kill someone, anyone. Murder would be like an aspirin for a headache.

  Barbara was, in a sense, relieved that Richard was finally out of the house. For the first time since she’d married Richard, she knew a new kind of peace and tranquillity, she explained. For weeks after Richard’s arrest reporters hounded her and her children, but they were coming around less and less, thank God.

  Pat Kane woke up every day with a smile on his face. He had done it. It had been a long, bumpy road but he’d done it.

  He was ten feet tall.

  It Was Due to Business

  Thirteen months after Richard’s arrest, on January 25, 1988, his trial began for the murders of Gary Smith and Danny Deppner. The state had decided to have two trials; the second trial would be for the murders of George Malliband and Louis Masgay. Bob Carroll had decided not to try Richard for the murder of Paul Hoffman, because without Mr. Hoffman’s body, the case would be difficult to prove, so for now, he dropped it.

  A young lawyer with the public defender’s office, Neal Frank, became Richard’s attorney. Richard was claiming to be indigent, and the state was forced to provide him with counsel. Perhaps out of lack of experience or naïveté, Neal Frank felt there was a fighting chance and told both Richard and Barbara that. But Richard knew better. He didn’t feel he had any chance at walking.

  Barbara, however, believed Frank, believed that Richard would beat the charges and come home. She was torn about his return. On the one hand, she was finally free of him, not subjected to his volatile mood swings, his duality, his sudden, extraordinary violence. On the other, she missed the good Richard.

  Still, she quickly got used to sleeping alone and liked it, she says.

  Neal Frank told Barbara that she and the family should show up in court, to let the jury see them. It was important for the jury to know that Richard had a loving, supportive family. They had to see that Richard wasn’t the diabolical serial killer the press had consistently portrayed him as. This, the Ice Man story, had by now appeared on hundreds of front pages across New Jersey, indeed across the country.

  The presiding judge was a stern, forbidding individual who wore granny glasses, slicked his sparse gray hair back, and was known as the “Time Machine” because he had a tendency to mete out the harshest sentences the law provided. His name was Fred Kuchenmeister, and he regularly showed open disdain for defendants. In his court defense lawyers claimed that you were guilty until you proved yourself innocent.

  By the time jury selection was completed and the trial actually began, it was February 17. Finding a fair-minded jury had been, for Neal Frank, a Herculean task with all the media attention, but Frank felt he had managed to secure a reasonable jury that would listen to the case with “an open mind.”

  Bob Carroll first presented an extremely well-put-together case, tight as a wet drum. Carroll, with co-counsel Charley Waldron, a tall, gray-haired man who knew well his way around a courtroom, put a series of witnesses on the stand, beginning with Barbara Deppner. Also up were Percy House, Richard Peterson, Pat Kane, two pathologists, Deputy Chief Bob Buccino, Jimmy DiVita, Gary Smith’s wife, and Veronica Cisek. Carroll even put on the stand Darlene Pecorato, a stewardess that had rented Richie Peterson’s apartment after he moved out. This was the place where Danny Deppner had been shot in the head by Richard, and Pecorato told about the bloodstained rug when she moved in, and Paul Smith then told how he had discovered bloodstains in the wood floor under the rug. And finally Dominick Polifrone took the stand. When Dominick walked in front of Richard, Richard said, “Hey, Dom, how you doin�
�?” actually smiling. Dominick was still, to Richard’s amazement, wearing that terrible wig.

  Now the jury heard Richard’s own words, words that clearly opened the door wide, everyone knew, to convict Richard. Neal Frank tried to make the jury believe Richard had only been bragging, but this was a hard sell and everyone knew it.

  All through the fast-moving proceedings, Barbara Kuklinski didn’t believe what the state was contending until she heard her husband readily admitting to killing people with guns, knives, and cyanide. Until she heard him say that he had frozen a man to confuse the police, she still thought that he had been framed. When she heard Richard tell Agent Polifrone what he had done and how he had done it, she was stunned to numb silence. She had always known Richard to be exceedingly tight-lipped. She hadn’t been able to get anything out of his mouth with a crowbar since she met him twenty-six years before; yet here he was admitting to a cop all that he’d done, how he’d done it, even when and where.

  Barbara wanted to run from the courtroom. She had no idea, she realized as if she’d been struck by lightning, whom she’d really been married to for so many years. She felt fooled and duped; she felt like an out-of-touch idiot. She wanted to stand up and yell at him, How could you?! How could you?! But she sat there still like stone, her mouth slightly agape, listening to her husband admit to murder as if he were talking about feeding the ducks or the color of the tie he should wear.

  Numb, she left the courtroom, sure Richard would never get out of jail, never be free, shaking her head in dismay. I was married, she recently explained, to a monster and didn’t know it. I mean, I knew he had a bad temper, could be violent, but I had no idea of who he really was and what he was really about. I felt…I felt like I’d been hit by a lightning bolt…was all burned and in shock.

  Now, for the first time, Barbara knew whom she had married, whom she’d had three children with. Her head spun with the incomprehensible reality of it all.

  My God, she kept saying to herself. My God, suddenly feeling very old and all beaten up.

  While Richard had been incarcerated, Merrick had wed her boyfriend Mark (it disturbed Richard to no end that he could not walk Merrick down the aisle). She had a baby, and Merrick religiously showed up in court carrying the child, a boy she named Sean. Neal Frank said it might make the jury “more sympathetic,” if such a thing was possible, but Barbara thought that a real long shot. No jury anywhere would show sympathy, she was sure, to her husband. She could clearly see in the jurors’ eyes the absolute fear they had of Richard. After Barbara heard the tapes she knew Richard would never get out of jail.

  After four weeks of carefully orchestrated, damaging testimony, then the summations of Carroll and Frank, and the judge’s charge, the jury began deliberations.

  At Richard’s request, Frank did not put on any defense at all. Richard refused to take the stand. He knew, he says, that testifying would only open a can of worms. I got on that stand, he recently said, Carroll would have torn into me—given me a second asshole.

  Richard was sick and tired of it all. He knew the inevitable outcome and just wanted to get it over with. It took the jury a mere four hours to find Richard guilty on all counts. They did not, however, recommend a death sentence, to Richard’s surprise. That is what he’d been expecting all along, was ready for. This came about because there had been no eyewitnesses to the murders of Deppner and Smith.

  Neal Frank had, he felt, achieved his goal—he had saved Richard’s life. Now, Richard knew, he would spend the rest of his life behind bars, which for him was far worse than any death sentence. For the first time since he’d been a young boy back in Jersey City, he would have to do as he was told, abide by the strict rules and regulations set down by the state, like everyone else. For him this was anathema.

  After the trial, Neal Frank, a tall, handsome man with his hair combed to the left, entered into extended negotiations with Bob Carroll and the attorney general’s office. At issue were the charges of a gun against Barbara, and some marijuana-possession charges lodged against Dwayne Kuklinski. Dwayne had been driving some friends home from a party, and a state trooper pulled him over. When the trooper realized Dwayne was Richard Kuklinski’s son, he made Dwayne and his three friends get out of the car, and the trooper found a small amount of marijuana on one of the boys and, incredibly, charged Dwayne with possession, not the boy who actually had it.

  To get these charges dismissed against Barbara and his son, Richard readily agreed to plead guilty to the murder of George Malliband and Louis Masgay. He already knew that he’d spend the rest of his life in prison, and by now he wanted to get it the hell over with, wanted his family to get on with their lives.

  On May 25, 1988, Richard again appeared before Judge Kuchenmeister. As agreed, he pleaded guilty to the murders of George Malliband and Louis Masgay. When asked by the judge why he had killed Malliband, Richard said, “It was—it was due to business.” Richard now had Frank read in open court a short statement in which Richard apologized to his family—no one else—for what he had put them through. The judge proceeded to give Richard two life sentences—one for the murders of Smith and Deppner, the second for the killings of Masgay and Malliband.

  Unrepentant, his head high, his shoulders back, defiant, projecting an air of power and invincibility, of fuck you, Richard was led from the courtroom and taken to the place where he would spend the rest of his life, Trenton State Prison, in Trenton, New Jersey. Coincidentally, Richard’s brother, Joseph, also serving a life sentence for the murder of Pamela Dial, was still housed in the same facility. Stanley and Anna had produced two murderers, and both of them ended up in the same facility with life sentences.

  Every newspaper in New Jersey and New York had a front-page story about Richard’s sentencing, with photos of him and grisly summations of his crimes.

  The sad, violent story of Richard Kuklinski was over and done with…it appeared.

  But the story of Richard’s life, what had been done to him, what he’d done, was only just beginning.

  It’s Not TV, It’s HBO

  An aspiring film producer named George Samuels learned about the extraordinary case of Richard Kuklinski from a friend in the New Jersey attorney general’s office. Thinking he might be able to get HBO interested in doing a documentary based on Richard’s crimes, Samuels approached Richard’s attorney, Neal Frank, who listened to what he said and ultimately put him in touch with Barbara.

  Because Barbara had grown fond of Frank and trusted him, she agreed to meet Samuels and listen to him. Samuels, a short, balding, fast-talking individual, made all kinds of promises to her, and Barbara agreed to be interviewed on camera, tell about some of her life with the now infamous Ice Man.

  The problem with Samuels was that he was duplicitous and was also acting as a shill for the attorney general’s office. The authorities believed that Richard had, in fact, committed many more crimes than what they’d nailed him for (how true!) and were hoping Samuels could get Richard to agree to talk about murders they knew nothing of. Richard had nothing to lose, they reasoned; maybe, they hoped, he’d open up and clear some unsolved killings.

  By now Richard had already been in jail for four years. For the most part he had learned to accept his fate. He minded his own business, adopted a live-and-let-live policy. In truth, both inside and out, Richard was as tough as rusted railroad spikes. He knew the only way the state could truly punish him was if he allowed his incarceration to bother him, so he wouldn’t allow that to happen.

  What did trouble him—deeply—was the loss of his beloved family…his Barbara. His Lady. For the most part he didn’t allow himself to think about them, but when he did, it got to him. He’d sit on his cell bunk and cry. He never did this in front of anyone. Knowing that he would die in jail, only be taken out dead, he suggested to Barbara that they get divorced. This was very hard for him, one of the most difficult things he’d ever done, but he wanted Barbara to get on with her life, he says, and with the help of the Social
Services Division at Trenton State Prison, Richard divorced Barbara; it was a terribly painful milestone for him, but he stoically signed the papers and didn’t allow himself to think about it, to think of Barbara with another man. Richard had always had an amazing ability to compartmentalize his emotions, and he did that now. Still, he loved Barbara more than ever. He wrote her letters every single day. He poured out his heart to her. He told her how much he loved her; he told her how much he missed her; he told her over and over how sorry he was.

  Barbara rarely wrote him back. He was, she had come to believe, “a monster.” A monster that had fooled her and duped her and used her.

  Richard’s cell at Trenton State’s maximum-security facility is six by eight feet, far too small for a man his size, but he has become used to it, he says. In it there is a toilet bowl, a metal bunk bed bolted to the steel wall, on which is a thin mattress, and a sink; that’s it. He has a small television and can listen to the radio with earphones when he pleases. He doesn’t pace his cell anymore, look at himself in the mirror and curse at what he sees. He has accepted his lot in life, his destiny.

  Strangely, Richard seems to have thrived in prison. He has never looked better. He grew a thick salt-and-pepper vandyke, is robust and strong, and moves about as if he owns the place, with a bounce in every step. Everyone knows who he is, prisoners and guards alike, and everyone gives him a wide berth. He secured a job in the prison law library, gives out books and checks books in. The routine in all state prisons across the country is always the same. That routine is an essential part of a successful prison—to teach the inmates that there is a preordained schedule, a mandated regimen which they have to adhere to. Breakfast is served at 6:30 A.M., lunch at 11:30, dinner at 4:30 P.M. Prisoners with jobs are allowed to leave their cells to go to work. In the beginning Richard wanted nothing to do with a job, but he quickly came to realize he couldn’t just sit in his cell, stew, and rot, and so he decided to make the best of the situation.