by Philip Carlo
For Gravano, this was a sweetheart deal to say the least. He should have had to spend the rest of his days in jail, or at the very least a minimum murder sentence—seven to ten years—but the federal government decided to give him his freedom, and all his ill-gotten gains, if he cooperated with them—an infamy. Surely, if any government anywhere ever made a pact with the devil this was certainly it, in living color, in broad daylight.
Gravano, dressed in a sharp dark blue suit, dutifully took the stand at Gotti’s trial and told the jury and the world in a strong, believable voice the crimes he had freely committed with Gotti—foremost of which was the carefully orchestrated killing of Paul Castellano and Tommy Bilotti in front of Sparks Steak House.
True, at this point Richard Kuklinski was already in prison, but somehow Gravano neglected to tell the government that Richard Kuklinski was part of the hit team, that Richard had killed Tommy Bilotti at the specific request of Gravano.
Gravano said nothing because Gravano would be accused of direct complicity in the murder of a cop, Peter Calabro. Gravano knew that if he fingered Kuklinski for the Bilotti hit, Richard would tell the authorities how he had murdered Calabro for twenty-five thousand dollars with a shotgun that Gravano had given him.
Gravano knew that if it became public knowledge that he had ordered the murder of a cop—even a dirty cop—there was no way in hell the government could cut him a deal.
It was rumored, however, that Gravano did in fact tell the feds about the Calabro hit, and they opted to keep it quiet, to sweep it under the rug, knowing they could never cut a deal with a cop killer. If they did such a thing there would be hell to pay, a hue and cry that would shake the very foundations of the Justice Department, from both the public and law-enforcement professionals.
“The truth,” Detective Anzalotti recently told an inquiring journalist, “will all soon come out in the wash.”
On September 27, 1998, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano appeared in Brooklyn before federal judge Leo Glasser for sentencing. By now Gravano had testified in scores of trials, causing the convictions of forty wiseguys, most prominent of whom was, of course, John Gotti.
Judge Glasser, approvingly quoting law enforcement officers, praised Gravano to high heaven, said, “You have done the bravest thing I’ve ever seen,” and went on to pass a sentence that essentially amounted to time served—a mere five years all told. This for his admitted part in the killing of nineteen human beings. Many people in law enforcement and the public felt this was a genuine travesty of justice. The families of Gravano’s victims held an angry news conference and bitterly complained about what the government had done. The daughter of Eddie Garofalo said, “This guy took my father away from me, from us. He is a vicious brutal killer and yet the government is letting him walk. It’s outrageous. It’s heartbreaking. It’s a sin. How could they do such a despicable thing? Sammy Gravano is a monster! An animal. He should be kept in a cage like the dangerous beast he is. I can’t sleep at night thinking that Gravano will be free after killing my father and all those others. It’s an outrage!”
Several months later, Sammy Gravano did, in fact, walk out of a federal prison after having served five years. He was never charged for ordering the hit of Peter Calabro. He quickly disappeared into the wide expanses of the federal witness-protection program, where noted author Peter Maas found him and wrote a bestselling book about Gravano called Underboss. It should have been called, many said, The Luckiest Guy in the World.
Gaby Monet and forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, with an HBO film crew in tow, showed up at the Trenton State Prison to do the third documentary featuring Richard Kuklinski. By now Richard had put on weight from his sedentary lifestyle. He did no exercises, didn’t go out in the yard; but he was still as strong as a bull and very dangerous. He’d been in jail now for over ten years. He had become used to prison, had accepted it as his permanent home, the place where he’d die. He wouldn’t let anyone in his family come visit him anymore. He didn’t want his daughters and Barbara frisked by the female guards, so he put a stop to their visiting the prison.
A somewhat kinder, gentler Richard sat down with Dr. Park Dietz, and for the first time ever Richard spoke to a forensic psychiatrist who had interviewed serial killers before. A tall, reserved man with piercing blue eyes, Dietz had worked with law-enforcement outfits across the country, including the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, and had talked with Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and other infamous serial murderers; he frequently appeared on news shows to discuss the little-understood phenomenon of serial murder.
A change had clearly come over Richard. He now joked often, was outgoing, friendly, introspective, and even self-effacing. He was not morose and stone-faced as he had been in the first two HBO specials. Much of this “new Richard” had to do with Gaby Monet’s kind, gentle ways. Richard had grown fond of her. He trusted her and considered her a friend—perhaps the only real friend he’d ever had, he says. Gaby too had grown quite fond of Richard. She recently said of him: “Richard is one of a kind: he is smart, charming, funny, and a mesmerizing storyteller. He has a very likable side, and thank goodness that’s the only side of him I’ve ever known.”
When Richard was sent to prison, he weighed 290 pounds. He was now about 315, but still moved with catlike efficiency and agility. His face was notably fuller, his cheeks and jowls somewhat loose on his face. He also had lines and creases where before there’d been none. Prison had taken a clear toll on Richard.
For thirteen hours, over a six-day period, Dietz asked Richard pointed, probing questions about his violence, which Richard answered with chilling honesty. He was now even more engaging because he was so open and readily shared his true feelings about the murders he committed, about his childhood, the animals he tortured, his cold lack of empathy for the people he killed, tortured, shot, stabbed, and poisoned. He talked about murder like a chef discussing the various ingredients of different perfected dishes. He readily spoke about his father, the violence he suffered at his hands, the violence he suffered at his mother’s hands. He wasn’t, it was obvious to Dietz, looking for an excuse or someone to blame for the path he walked in life—he was just telling the truth about what he’d been through as a boy, what he saw, what he felt, the hatred that lived inside his head.
When Richard told Dietz about the three men he killed in South Carolina while coming back from Florida, Dietz said, “Was that, you think, a capital offense, this guy cutting you off?”
Richard did not like that question or the way Dietz asked it. He was, Richard felt, judging him, speaking down to him, and right there on camera one can readily see the anger Richard felt color his face like a ripe strawberry.
“Now,” Richard said, “you’ve made me angry,” and he stared at Dietz with cold, detached, deadly eyes. If looks could kill, Dietz would have keeled over dead. After some tense seconds slowly passed, they discussed what had upset Richard about Dietz’s question, and Richard acknowledged that it was because Dietz had “spoke down to me”—judged him.
“Perhaps,” Dietz suggested, “like your father had?”
“Just like my father,” Richard readily agreed, and went on to say how he still regretted not killing Stanley.
Many say this third documentary was the most compelling of all because in it Richard was the most open and relaxed, and the world soon got another sixty minutes of Richard telling how he killed people and got rid of bodies, how he dismembered people with knives and saws and threw them down mine shafts, further horrifying and shocking people all over the globe. At the end of the piece, Dietz told Richard he had a lot of pent-up anger because of what his father had done to him—no shit, Sherlock.
Richard sat and listened politely, now the perfect gentleman, a far cry from who he had been when he was sent to prison.
“Interesting,” Richard contemplatively said.
In the course of telling Detectives Robert Anzalotti and Mark Bennul about the hit on Detective Peter Calabro, Richard had grow
n comfortable and at ease with the two detectives, especially Anzalotti, and he began telling them about more New Jersey murders he had committed that had never been attached to him. He remembered details, times, and places with uncanny accuracy, the detectives realized.
Everything Richard said was checked and rechecked by Anzalotti and his partner, and all proved true, and soon the two detectives cleared twelve unsolved murders thanks to Richard, including the killing of Robert Pronge, a.k.a. Mister Softee.
“For the most part,” Anzalotti recently said, “everything he said was true; where he shot people, the caliber he used.”
In December of 2004 Richard appeared in Bergen County Superior Court and pleaded guilty to the murder of Detective Peter Calabro and the murder of Robert Pronge, and received still another life sentence. That day Peter Calabro’s daughter was also in the courtroom. She had been four when her father had been killed. She wanted to talk to Richard, wanted to know why he killed her father, but Anzalotti wouldn’t let her. Richard, in fact, wanted to talk with her, wanted to tell her it was nothing personal, that if he hadn’t done it someone else would have.
“Stupid is as stupid does,” were Forrest Gump’s immortal words, and what Sammy Gravano—the crime-fighting hero of the federal government, a man who won glowing praise from scores of federal prosecutors—did with his freedom was stupid.
Very stupid!
Gravano ended up living in Arizona, where he started a moving business and began selling the popular drug ecstasy to schoolkids. He not only got involved in this sordid business, but he involved his family—his wife and son Gerald. They were all arrested; Gravano went to trial, was found guilty, and was sentenced to twenty years. Gravano had been the poster boy for the federal government’s witness-protection program, and wound up using his ill-gotten freedom to sell drugs to kids.
“Stupid is as stupid does” indeed.
When the New Jersey attorney general’s office felt it had an airtight case against Gravano for his complicity in the shotgun murder of Detective Calabro and had gotten an indictment against him for the murder, Detectives Robert Anzalotti and Mark Bennul flew to Arizona and placed Gravano under arrest for this killing.
Many in the New Jersey attorney general’s office, and certainly Detectives Anzalotti and Bennul believe that the federal government knew about Gravano’s part in the Calabro killing but hid it, and they plan to prove it in open court. Richard will, of course, be the state’s star witness against Gravano. The trial is scheduled, as of this writing, for the summer of 2006, and will take place in the Bergen County Superior Court—the same court where Richard was tried, convicted, and sentenced.
In early April of 2005, Gravano’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco, went to see Richard at the Trenton State Prison. Richard claims that Ricco offered him two hundred thousand dollars not to testify against Gravano.
Conversely, Anthony Ricco claims it was Richard who offered to throw the case for two hundred thousand dollars. As of this writing, who, if anyone, solicited a bribe has not been established. Anthony Ricco, however, had to withdraw from representing Gravano because he is now scheduled to appear as a witness on Gravano’s behalf at Gravano’s trial for the killing of Detective Peter Calabro.
No Sunset, No Sunrise
Today, Richard is still housed in the maximum-security unit at the Trenton State Prison. To control his mercurial temper he is given daily doses of Ativan and Paxil, once in the morning, once at night. These drugs, for the most part, make him placid and easygoing.
At all meals, Richard shares a table with three mob guys, all skippers (captains), all of them are serving life sentences. They regularly share war stories about the days when they were free, the women they knew, the great food they ate, the wonderful places they saw, their appeals, sports, the mistakes they made to wind up in prison.
For Richard there are no sunrises, no sunsets. From his tiny cell at the Trenton State Prison he cannot see outside, cannot see the sky, the sunrise or the sunset. He never goes outside. Life for him is a monotonous regimen that rarely, if ever, varies. When recently asked if he had any regrets he said, “I wish I had taken another path in life, been a good husband and father; but that…that wasn’t in the cards.”
Barbara Kuklinski lives with daughter Chris and Chris’s son, John, in southern New Jersey. Barbara never remarried. She has severe arthritis of the spine and is in constant pain; her condition prevents her from working.
When Barbara talks about her life with Richard, her hands still tremble and she gets angry. She regrets, she says, ever having met Richard. She recently explained: “When Richard was in a good mood, he was the best husband any woman could have had. When he was in a bad mood, he was cruel beyond description. I’ve gotten used to being alone. I have my children, my grandchildren—and they are the only ones in this world who mean anything to me. I’m…I’m very thankful for them.”
Chris Kuklinski still holds what her father did against him. She only wishes he’d been arrested sooner. “I always knew,” she said, “he could be mean, you know, I mean I saw it, I grew up with it, but I never imagined he was…he was a cold-blooded monster, a hit man for the Mafia.” Shaking her head sadly, she continued: “He is where he belongs. I think even he realizes that.”
Richard’s son, Dwayne, doesn’t think much about his father. He is happy. He has a good job as an electrician and is marrying his longtime sweetheart, settling down, and having a family of his own.
Merrick Kuklinski deeply misses her father, still loves him dearly. She is quick to defend him, readily points out how life was stacked against him from the very beginning. “I’m not making excuses for him,” she recently said. “But the truth is my father didn’t have a chance. When you look at what he went through, the childhood he had, it’s not such a big surprise he turned out the way he did. I love him—I love him with all my heart and soul. He was, for me, a wonderful father. I will never ever forget how he was always there for me, how he helped sick children who had nothing in the hospitals where I often was as a child. He couldn’t see a child suffer without wanting to help, running to help—doing something. I saw him bring children he didn’t know food and toys and clothes without ever being asked. No other dad ever did that! He was no Ice Man. He was a caring, giving man with a heart as big and warm as the sun. For me, my father was the nicest, most giving man I ever knew. I will go to my grave believing that! I love him very much.”
A Flying Fuck
When Richard was asked recently what he would like to say for the close of this, his story, he said: “I’d rather be known as a nice man, not the Ice Man.”
Upon reflection Richard added: “I was made. I didn’t create myself. I never chose to be this way, to be in this place. Yeah, I for sure wish my life took another turn, that I had an education and a good job, but none of that was in the cards for me. I am what I am, and the truth is I don’t give a flying fuck what anyone thinks about me,” said Richard “the Ice Man” Kuklinski, formerly of Jersey City, New Jersey, the second born to Anna and Stanley Kuklinski.
EPILOGUE
The Melting of the Ice Man
March 13, 2006
Richard Kuklinski died at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, on Sunday morning, March 5, 2006 at 1:03 A.M. At this point the exact cause of his death has not been definitively determined, although the timing of his passing is particularly suspect, for the day after he died the charges against Sammy “the Bull” Gravano—that he ordered the murder of NYPD Detective Peter Calabro—were dropped by the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. Those in the know believe that this was not a coincidence. The famed medical examiner, Dr. Michael Baden, on behalf of the Kuklinski family, has requested toxicology tests to see if, in fact, Richard was poisoned or if he died of natural causes.
Richard’s health began to deteriorate in late October 2005. Supposedly, two doctors at Trenton State Prison each ordered different blood pressure medicines, which were administered to Richard simultaneously, causing R
ichard’s potassium and electrolyte count to become “dangerously low.” He began passing out and experiencing vertigo. He was removed from his cell and placed in the infirmary. His health continued to decline, and his blood pressure dropped. He was taken to St. Vincent’s hospital for a period of thirty hours, then “signed himself out,” an official at the prison said, and he was returned to Trenton Prison’s infirmary. Richard called me and told me that he believed he was being poisoned, and that I should call the media. I assumed that he was delusional, and told him I’d do what I could. What I did do was discuss this with Barbara Kuklinski and we decided Richard was imagining things. His health, however, continued to decline and he stopped eating. His speech, I noted when he called, was slurred. He was brought back to St. Vincent’s again, and doctors observed that his lungs were congested and that his kidneys were failing. He was tentatively diagnosed as having Wegener’s disease, a rare, potentially lethal malady that, if treated with drugs, is not fatal.
Richard’s health continued to get worse. He suddenly developed a form of dementia, experienced loss of memory, and had a skin rash on his hands and legs; he also refused to eat. Doctor Wong from the hospital called Barbara and told her he was doing all he could, and he first gave a diagnosis of Wegener’s disease. He said that they were also going to do a CAT scan of Richard’s brain to see if he had a stroke…perhaps the cause for his dementia. At this point Richard couldn’t even remember Barbara’s phone number. This was very odd considering that Richard had a very good memory when it came to numbers, as Barbara put it. Doctor Wong also said they were performing a biopsy on Richard’s kidney.
