The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer

by Anthony Bruno

  As more cars arrived on the scene and plainclothes officers spilled into the street, Paul Smith drew his gun and led the pack running down the street toward the black van to assist with the arrest. His boss, Deputy Chief Bobby Buccino, was a few feet behind him.

  Suddenly Smith heard the unexpected screech of spinning tires. Up ahead the red Oldsmobile Calais was mounting the curb, doing an end run around the black van. The Calais ran over a lawn, then bounced back into the street, metal scraping the pavement and tires smoking. The engine roared.

  Standing in the middle of the street, the red car coming right at him, Paul Smith could see Kuklinski’s large frame behind the wheel. The options flew through Smith’s mind: He could either jump out of the way and hope he wouldn’t get run over, or he could shoot. But as he gripped his weapon, he could see that there was someone else in the car with Kuklinski. Maybe one of the kids, he thought. If he touched off the shooting, the gunfire would be so heavy the person in the passenger seat would die for sure. Then there was the matter of stray bullets ricocheting off the vehicle. This was a residential neighborhood; someone could get hit. But the red car was bearing down on him now, and it wasn’t going to hit just him. Kuklinski was going to mow down every man in his way, men Smith had known and worked with for years. Paul Smith’s finger tightened on the trigger. The red car kept coming. He started to squeeze the trigger, resolved to shoot, but then suddenly the red car bucked and started to slow down. It was moving forward but very slowly as if Kuklinski had taken it out of gear and just let it roll under its own momentum.

  The three state troopers from the black van—Detectives Pat Kane, Ernie Volkman, and Dennis Vecchiarelli—were running toward the car from behind, shouting as they came, but Paul Smith, who was now the closest man to the car, kept his eye on Kuklinski at the wheel. As he rushed up to the car, leading with his weapon, he couldn’t see the big man’s eyes behind the dark glasses. Smith whipped the door open, and Kuklinski leaned forward. He appeared to be reaching under the seat for something. Before he could get his hand back up, Paul Smith jammed his gun into Kuklinski’s ear and pinned the Iceman’s head to his other shoulder.

  “Freeze! Police officer! Put your hands on the dash or I’ll blow your friggin’ head off,” Smith yelled into Kuklinski’s face as loud as he could.

  Kuklinski didn’t move a muscle; then slowly he brought his hands up and put them on the steering wheel. There were at least four muzzles pointed at Kuklinski’s head now.

  Investigator Smith grabbed the Iceman by the shirtfront, keeping the gun in his ear, and started to pull him out of the car. Kuklinski said nothing and put up no resistance at all. Smith tipped him over on his side, and Pat Kane grabbed a fistful of Kuklinski’s jacket, hauling him all the way out of the car and onto the ground. The Iceman just let it happen.

  On the other side of the car Deputy Chief Buccino, who had just come as close to pulling the trigger and shooting someone as he ever had in his entire career, had his arm across Barbara Kuklinski’s chest, pinning her against the seat back to get her out of his line of fire in case he had to shoot. When her husband was out of the car, he pulled her out, too, and held her to the ground, still concerned that there would be gunfire.

  Barbara Kuklinski did not understand that these men were policemen, and she had no idea why this man with a gun was holding her down. In her panic and confusion she screamed out to her husband.

  “Rich! Rich! Help me!”

  Detective Kane had just managed to get the handcuffs on Kuklinski’s huge wrists—and it had been a struggle just to get them to click on the last notch—when all of a sudden the ground seemed to shake. Hearing Barbara’s cries, Kuklinski erupted, bursting to his feet and bulling his way through the crush. He let out an ungodly roar as he lunged for the roof of the car, trying to get to his wife.

  “Leave her alone!”

  Members of the arrest team jumped on his back and tried to secure him, but he turned on them and shrugged them off. More men converged on him, and he shrugged them off, too. Finally enough men came so that they were able to wrestle Kuklinski back to the ground. It took five men to hold him down. Pat Kane was ready with a pair of the largest leg irons he could find. Unfortunately they didn’t fit around Kuklinski’s ankles. Unwilling to risk letting Kuklinski get back to his feet without leg restraints, they carried him horizontally to the black van.

  Barbara Kuklinski, crying and still confused, was also handcuffed and then handed over to a female officer, who took her away to another car.

  Paul Smith, in the meantime, searched the red Oldsmobile and found a .25-caliber Beretta automatic pistol under the driver’s seat. This was what Kuklinski had been reaching for under the seat.

  In the trunk of the car they found the three egg sandwiches, each one wrapped in butcher’s paper and placed in the white paper bag. In a plastic bucket filled with rolled coins and loose change, they found the brown paper bag containing the brown glass vial of quinine. The vial was not full.

  Later that morning Kuklinski’s house was searched, but the two-tone blue van he had told Dominick about was not found in either the driveway or the garage. Officers searched the areas around Kuklinski’s home and the Vince Lombardi Service Area for days, looking for an abandoned blue van. They never found one.

  While Richard Kuklinski was being read his rights, Dominick Polifrone was in Hackensack, pacing the floor, wondering what the hell was going on at Kuklinski’s house. He had fought the urge to go see the arrest for himself and had gone back to the Bergen County courthouse complex to wait. When the word finally came in that Richard Kuklinski was under arrest and was being brought in, Dominick rushed from the offices of the Bergen County Homicide Unit, where he’d been waiting, to the Sheriff’s Department next door.

  The Bergen County courthouse complex is a stately building with marble columns and a huge domed rotunda, but the Sheriff’s Department is housed in a small addition to the courthouse that is tucked away on the parking lot side. Its designer must have had a dark sense of humor because the structure has a decided medieval facade complete with crenellated battlements along the roofline. In the Sheriff’s Department Dominick found an empty office off the main staircase that leads up to the holding cells. If he couldn’t see Kuklinski’s face, maybe he’d at least be able to hear the big son of a bitch when they brought him in. He left the door partway open.

  Dominick watched from a window as the caravan of vehicles returning from the arrest pulled up to the entrance to the Sheriff’s Department. From that window he couldn’t see them bringing the Iceman out of the van, but he had no trouble hearing Kuklinski after they had him inside.

  Kuklinski’s arrogant voice carried up the stairwell. “You know what your trouble is? You guys been watching too many movies.”

  Dominick furrowed his brow. He thought he could hear a woman crying in the midst of a jumble of male voices.

  “Hey! I told you guys to leave my wife alone,” Kuklinski bellowed. “She didn’t do nothing. This has nothing to do with her. Now get those fucking cuffs off her.”

  The sound of shuffling feet carried up the stairwell.

  Dominick wondered if Kuklinski was really giving them a hard time or just mouthing off. He couldn’t tell for sure. He was dying to go down and see Kuklinski’s face, but he figured he’d better stay out of sight just in case Kuklinski got out on a technicality and he had to approach him again as “Michael Dominick Provenzano.”

  Dominick strained to hear what was going on down there, but it was hard to tell. He had already heard that they couldn’t get Kuklinski in leg irons, and he had imagined the big man struggling to get free, kicking and thrashing his head and swinging his shoulders. But it was pretty quiet down there now. Dominick listened to the scrape of shoes on the steps as the pack passed by on its way upstairs to the holding cells. Kuklinski wasn’t talking.

  But when the cell door upstairs finally slammed shut, that’s when Kuklinski started. He yelled and roared, taunting and threatening
the police who’d brought him in, demanding to know what they were doing to his wife.

  “Hey! What’re you gonna do with my wife? You let her go. She didn’t do nothing. Let her the fuck go or I’ll kill somebody.”

  His bellowing was so loud Dominick was certain they could hear it in all the courtrooms next door. They could probably hear it across the street.

  Dominick sat down at a desk and just shook his head. It was finally over. The Iceman was behind bars. After all this time it was hard to believe.

  “Dominick. What the hell did you do?” Lieutenant Alan Grieco, Dominick’s best friend, was standing in the doorway. His tie was askew, and his eyes were wide.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your friend Kuklinski is up there shaking the bars like he’s King Kong. I can’t believe you went undercover with that animal. You must be crazy.”

  Dominick could only shrug. “Hey, Alan, you do what you gotta do in this business. You know that.”

  Grieco was about to say something when the Iceman’s roar rang through the building.

  “I’ll kill you bastards! I’ll kill all of you!”

  The two men just looked at each other and shook their heads.

  THIRTY THREE

  After his arrest Richard Kuklinski appeared before New Jersey Superior Court Judge Peter Ciolino and was charged with nineteen offenses, including five murder counts for the killings of George Malliband, Louis Masgay, Paul Hoffman, Gary Smith, and Danny Deppner. The Attorney General’s Office decided not to charge him for conspiracy to murder the “rich Jewish kid,” so the question of what Kuklinski’s real intentions were on the morning of his arrest would have to wait. The state was more interested in building a solid case against him for the five murders at hand. Kuklinski’s bail was set at two million dollars, and he was transferred to the Bergen County Jail.

  When Kuklinski’s home on Sunset Street in Dumont was searched, two more firearms were discovered in addition to the .25-caliber Beretta that was found under the driver’s seat of the red Oldsmobile Calais. A 9mm Walther automatic pistol, model P-38, was recovered from the master bedroom, and a neglected Mossberg twelve-gauge bolt-action shotgun was wedged behind some garden tools on a garage wall.

  The Newark office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms ran a trace on these weapons, but both handguns were too old to yield any information. The rusty Mossberg shotgun, however, was traced to a firearms wholesaler in Mahwah, New Jersey, who had sold the gun to the Two Guys department store in Hackensack on August 2, 1979. On the day before Christmas 1979, the gun was purchased by a Robert Patterson of Bergenfield, New Jersey. When the police questioned Mr. Patterson about the shotgun, he told them that he’d bought it for his brother, Rich, who was now living in Jupiter, Florida.

  Rich Patterson was very nervous when he returned to New Jersey to answer questions about the shotgun, but his nerves didn’t keep him from talking. In fact, the young man had quite a bit to get off his chest when he sat down with state investigators who wanted to know how his gun had gotten into Richard Kuklinski’s garage.

  The answer was simple: Rich Patterson had lived with the Kuklinskis from 1983 to early 1986. He had been engaged to Merrick, the Kuklinskis’ older daughter. Richard Kuklinski had liked him, and he had wanted them to get married.

  But before moving in with the Kuklinskis, Patterson explained, he had briefly had an apartment of his own, a small studio just a few miles from Dumont at 51-1 Fairview Avenue in Bergenfield. Patterson swallowed hard and paused before he continued with his story. He seemed suddenly shaken. When he finally collected himself, he told the state investigators about the weekend in February 1983 when he and Merrick Kuklinski and a group of friends went away to a hunting lodge in upstate New York. He wasn’t sure which weekend it was, but he did remember that one of the other boys in the group had fallen onto a wood-burning stove and burned himself so badly he had to be taken to the hospital in Ellenville, New York. (Hospital records later confirmed that the young man Patterson mentioned had been brought to the emergency room with severe back burns on Saturday, February 5, 1983.) Other than that trip to the emergency room, the weekend had been pretty uneventful. He and Merrick returned home late Sunday night, and Patterson spent the night at the Kuklinskis’.

  The next morning Richard Kuklinski asked “young Rich,” as the family called him, to give him a hand with something. They got into Kuklinski’s white Cadillac, and Kuklinski let young Rich drive. It had just snowed, and the roads were slippery. Kuklinski told Patterson to head toward the Blazing Bucks Ranch in West Milford. Patterson knew the way. The family had taken him there many times to go horseback riding.

  On the way Richard Kuklinski told the young man that something had happened at his apartment that weekend. Kuklinski, who had a set of keys to the place, had let a friend stay there. The friend had been living at a motel on Route 46 because he was in some kind of trouble. Kuklinski had been helping him, bringing him food so he wouldn’t have to go out and risk being seen. But when Kuklinski had gone to Rich Patterson’s apartment to check on his friend sometime during the weekend, he found the man dead. He’d been shot. The body, Kuklinski said, was in the trunk. He said he wanted to dispose of it in the woods so that young Rich wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of having to explain to the police how someone had gotten killed in his apartment.

  Gripping the steering wheel with bloodless fingers, Patterson followed Kuklinski’s directions to an old logging road near the ranch. He pointed to a place at the side of the road and told Patterson to pull over. Other than the reservoir there was nothing but woods on this road. Kuklinski told him to shut off the engine and pop the trunk. Young Rich obeyed, but he couldn’t bring himself to get out of the car. Driving there with the body in the trunk had already given him the creeps. Touching the thing was unimaginable.

  Sitting behind the wheel of the Cadillac, staring into the rearview mirror, Patterson heard a few thumps in the trunk. The trunk lid slammed shut, and Patterson saw Richard Kuklinski, his future father-in-law, dragging something wrapped in dark green plastic garbage bags through the snow. Knowing what it was, Patterson could imagine the shape of the dead man inside. Richard Kuklinski disappeared into the trees with his bundle.

  A few minutes later Kuklinski returned and got into the car. He told Patterson to head home. On the way back Kuklinski said it would be best if they just forgot that this had ever happened.

  Young Rich was afraid to go back to his apartment, and he was certainly never going to sleep there again. Two days later he did return, though, to collect his things. Richard Kuklinski went with him. While Patterson gathered his belongings, Kuklinski got down on his hands and knees and scrubbed the red-brown stain on the gold-colored carpeting where he said the dead man had bled after he was shot. As Kuklinski worked on the bloodstain, Patterson noticed a few pieces of Tupperware on the kitchen counter that weren’t his. They looked as if they had been laid out to dry after being washed. He was pretty sure he’d seen these containers before at the Kuklinskis’ house.

  The investigators asked Patterson if Richard Kuklinski ever mentioned the dead man again after that.

  Only once, Patterson said, and he didn’t exactly mention it. That spring the family was up at the Blazing Bucks Ranch, and once again he had gone with them. Kuklinski, who never rode himself, had been reading the local West Milford newspaper. He pointed to an article and told Patterson to read it. The article was about a body that had recently been found in the vicinity by a man out riding his bicycle.

  Young Rich and Merrick eventually broke off their engagement, and Patterson moved out of the house. The dead man was never mentioned again.

  With the information provided by Rich Patterson, Investigators Paul Smith and Ron Donahue went to the studio apartment at 51-1 Fairview Avenue in Bergenfield with a photographer and a state police chemist to look for the stain in the carpet. The current resident, a flight attendant who lived there only part of the time, told them that sh
e remembered there being some discoloration in the rug when she moved in, but she couldn’t recall exactly where it was, and she definitely didn’t remember its being red or brown. She said she had had the entire carpet professionally cleaned before she moved in several years ago.

  With the resident’s permission, Smith and Donahue moved the furniture and proceeded to pull up the carpeting, hoping to find some trace of blood on the canvas backing and foam rubber padding. They started with the edge closest to the window, which was where Patterson had remembered seeing the stain. Dust flew into their eyes and the odors of former tenants filled the air as they yanked at the old carpeting. They pulled up four feet worth and folded it back.

  There was no sign of any staining on the canvas backing.

  They ripped up the foam padding and folded that back.

  Nothing.

  Paul Smith was disappointed. Rich Patterson had been definite about the bloodstain being near the window. If there had been a stain, there should have been some trace of it on the underside. Even professional cleaning doesn’t clean that well.

  “C’mon, Paulie, let’s put it back and get outta here,” Ron Donahue said. “I told you this was gonna be a waste of time.”

  Paul Smith tapped his foot on the bare wood floor. “Why don’t we pull up a little more? What the hell, we’ve come this far.” He avoided the gaze of the woman who lived there. He’d promised her that they wouldn’t make a mess.

  Donahue frowned at the young investigator. “This is a waste of time, I’m telling you. If there was a bloodstain here, Kuklinski would’ve gotten rid of the whole goddamn carpet. He’s no dummy.”

  “Ronnie, we’re here, for chrissake,” Smith said under his breath so the woman wouldn’t hear them argue. “What’s it gonna hurt to do a little more?”

  Donahue smirked and shook his head. “If it’ll make you happy, Paulie. But don’t listen to me. I’ve only been doing this friggin’ job since you were in short pants.”