by Philip Carlo
Richard left his house carrying a wrinkled brown paper bag of money for DeMeo, his cut of the porn business. They were full-fledged partners now.
Richard also knew that DeMeo had been made, that he was no longer a picciotto, but was now a sgarrista. Richard knew, too, that DeMeo had grand plans. Richard believed DeMeo would quickly ascend within the Gambino family, would surely have his own sanctioned crew within a few years. But Richard firmly believed that DeMeo was too temperamental, was an out-of-control maniac, had too much of a volatile temper to last very long and reach his full potential. Richard also believed it was just a matter of time before DeMeo’s crew of crazies, as he thought of them, would set fire to the bridge DeMeo was building for himself.
Richard still planned to kill DeMeo when the time was right. DeMeo’s being made would not stop that. Indeed, nothing would. It was just a matter of time before the proper elements would all be in play. Richard had come to know that it was okay to cap a made man, provided no one knew about it. To murder a made man without the hit being sanctioned and letting anyone know about it was a ticket to the grave…certain death.
Richard hugged and kissed DeMeo at the club, effusively congratulated him, playing the part of a loyal friend, good partner: an Oscar-winning performance. Richard gave Roy his share of the money. Richard was scrupulously honest with DeMeo. He made sure he got every dollar due.
Roy surprised Richard by inviting him to go fishing on his boat, a new toy DeMeo was proud of. It was a nice day, Richard liked to fish, so he agreed to go along. They got into DeMeo’s Caddie and headed over to the nearby Sheepshead Bay Marina. The serial killers Chris Goldberg, Joey Testa, and Anthony Senter were already at the marina waiting for Roy. They had a fourth guy with them, Bob, whom Richard didn’t know. Introductions were made. They got on the boat, a fast thirty-foot gleaming white cruiser outfitted with a few fishing poles, and off they went. DeMeo had brought along a big box of Italian hero sandwiches, chunks of provolone and mozzarella, and thick links of pepperoni. DeMeo obviously loved the boat and was proud of it—like a kid with a new bike, the best bike on the block, which everyone envies. The sky was clear and very blue. It was unusually warm and the ocean was calm and friendly. When they were a little way out, DeMeo full-throttled the boat and off they went, straight out to open waters. Richard sat and enjoyed the ride, the fresh air. Though Roy’s guys still hadn’t warmed to Richard—nor he to them—they had learned to accept him; but they were wary of him.
Since he was a kid in Jersey City, Richard loved the ocean and he enjoyed being on a boat, the clean, fresh smell of the Atlantic coming to him. Joey and Anthony were talking to this Bob guy, making jokes with him, telling him how these two gorgeous girls had given Roy a double suck.
When they were way out, Roy slowed the boat, shut the engines, and announced that this was a good place to fish, but first they had to put chum in the water.
“What are we fishing for?” Bob asked.
“Sharks,” Roy told him.
Bob was a short, square guy with the face of a bulldog. He had a slight accent Richard couldn’t place. Maybe Canadian. After lowering a chum basket in a net into the water and putting a couple of baits on big hooks, Roy broke out the sandwiches, and they had lunch, drinking beer and white wine and telling dirty jokes. There were no other boats to be seen. Richard was curious to see sharks up close and personal, though he really didn’t believe there were sharks in these waters. He had an open mind though and was excited by the prospect. Roy, however, was sure there were sharks here, said he caught a lot of them in this very spot.
Richard sensed something in the air—danger; but he didn’t know why. All seemed okay. He was, as always, armed, had a gun and a knife on him. DeMeo was in a great mood. As they were finishing lunch, Chris spotted a shark, its cobalt blue dorsal fin cutting the water. They all stood to see it as it moved closer.
“See, I told ya!” DeMeo announced. Soon there were other sharks; they suddenly seemed all over the place. DeMeo moved to where Bob was standing. DeMeo said, his demeanor suddenly changing, “I know you’re a fuckin’ rat. Calabro told me what you’ve been up to,” and with that DeMeo pulled out a pistol and shot Bob in the face. The hapless man screamed and fell down. The others grabbed him and tossed him in the water.
Wide eyed and screaming, he tried to keep afloat, but was having difficulty. Chris wanted to shoot him, but Roy wouldn’t let him.
“Let the sharks do him,” Roy said. Bob was bleeding profusely; his heart, no doubt, was pumping away furiously, and blood came from the hole in his face in a pulsating torrent of red; and it didn’t take long for the sharks to gather near him, swim around him, as Bob screamed and flailed about wildly. This Richard watched in awe, amused, enjoying it. It didn’t take long for the sharks, no doubt stirred on by the blood, to begin taking nips, then bites out of the screaming, pleading, begging Bob, and he soon went under and didn’t come back up. DeMeo and the others thought it was entertaining, great fun, better than any Broadway show; they high-fived one another, laughing and smiling. Richard too thought it entertaining, liked its originality.
“Fuckin’ rat got what he deserved. I only wished it lasted longer, you know,” DeMeo said.
They all agreed. They caught a few sharks, shot them in the head when they were close to the boat, then headed back to the marina. As they went the sky abruptly changed, became gray and dark. It began to rain. With the rain came winds, thunder, lightning. The water became choppy. Whitecaps hurried across the suddenly rough sea. Richard began to feel seasick and wanted to get back on solid land. They arrived at the dock all right. Richard thanked Roy for a “very entertaining afternoon.”
“You’re full of surprises,” Richard said.
“Got a million a them,” Roy said.
As Richard made his way along Flatbush Avenue—it was dark by now—a car filled with black guys wearing red bandannas on their heads pulled up alongside him and for no reason began harassing him, calling him “cracker” and “honky.” They reached a red light.
“Hey, motherfucker!” one of them said, only a few feet from Richard now. “Get the fuck outta this neighborhood.”
“My seven friends don’t like that talk,” Richard said.
“What seven friends?” the driver demanded, looking at Richard as if he were nuts.
“These seven friends,” Richard said, showing them his gun, which contained seven bullets. The guy went through the red light, tires screaming, burning rubber. Richard drove onto the Belt and headed west, back to Dumont, his wife and children, turning over the day in his mind. He liked the idea of feeding people to sharks, thought it was a novel way to get rid of a body.
He began thinking of new ways to kill, expanding his repertoire. He wondered about poisons. He knew assassins had successfully been using poisons for many years. Deciding it was something he needed to look into, he began across the wide expanse of the Verrazano Bridge, admiring the view as he went, how a multitude of colored lights glistened on the water like giant piano keys. He remembered how he used to admire how the lights of Manhattan glistened on the Hudson River when he was a boy back in Jersey City.
Richard’s one friend, Phil Solimene, could get his hands on anything if he put his mind to it. Richard was still going to Solimene’s store on Friday nights to play high-stakes games of poker, and he usually stopped in a few times a week to shoot the breeze, see what was in the wind, have some coffee. Richard was gambling again, more and more.
If New Jersey had a Fagan it was Philip Solimene. It seemed every thief and larceny-hearted hustler knew Phil. Richard asked Phil offhandedly if he knew where he could get some poison.
“What kind?” Phil asked.
“To kill rats—big rats, ha ha—cyanide, strychnine, arsenic.”
“I’ll ask around,” Phil said. That’s what Solimene always said when people asked him for different items. Solimene never said no, and he most often came through.
Solimene knew firsthand just how deadly Ric
hard was. He had set up people for Richard to rob and kill. He would offer different merchandise for sale—perfumes, drugs, blank tapes, porno, guns—and when the people showed up with the cash, Solimene would call Richard, who’d come over, bullshit the buyer, get him alone, kill him, and split the cash with Solimene. Solimene had actually seen Richard kill people.
Solimene liked Richard, thought he was stand-up, always kept his word, was tight-lipped and steely eyed and had balls. If, of all the people in the world, Solimene had to be in a foxhole with someone, he would want it to be Richard—hands down.
Four days later, Solimene called Richard and asked him to come by that night. Richard made his way to the store, and Solimene told him that he had a friend, a Union City pharmacist and “player,” who’d sell him all the poison he wanted. Thus Paul Hoffman entered, for a relatively short while, Richard Kuklinski’s life.
Hoffman was average in size, overweight, a particularly greedy individual. He was always looking for an angle, a way to get over, more than what he was fairly and equitably entitled to. He had a good profession, a successful business, but it wasn’t enough; he always wanted more. He had been buying hijacked loads of drugs from Solimene for years. He’d buy anything—aspirins, barbiturates, diet pills, antibiotics, ulcer medication, perfume, razor blades—for a fraction of the real worth and then sell it at retail prices, making a big profit. When Richard first met Hoffman at Phil’s store, he didn’t like him. Of course, Richard liked very few people.
Not only would Hoffman sell Richard all the poison he wanted, but he told him how to administer the proper dose for the desired—for the maximum—effect. He actually sat down with Richard and gave him detailed instructions, insights, and pharmaceutical advice on the proper application and use of the most dangerous toxins known to man, warning him that if he used too much the police could determine the cause of death, too little and it wouldn’t work at all. He even gave Richard a tiny measuring spoon for doling out proper dosages. Richard first bought cyanide; it came in a thick glass vial adorned with a skull and bones. Richard got the strangest sensation when he held the deadly little vial. It gave him, not surprisingly, a feeling of power and omnipotence.
This, indeed, was a very dangerous combination—Richard Kuklinski and cyanide.
The hit was of a lieutenant in the Bonanno family, a paranoid, crafty individual—a hard man to kill because he knew people were looking to do him in, and because he always went around with two grim bodyguards. His name was Tony Scavelli. He was known as “Dapper” because he always dressed to the nines. He was quite the ladies’ man, had a beautiful girlfriend who liked to go to the best restaurants, out clubbing afterward…to the upscale Regine’s on Park Avenue and Xenon on West Forty-fifth Street. For ten days Richard stalked Dapper but could never get close enough to make a decisive move.
Richard decided to do it in one of the clubs—with poison. Paul Hoffman showed him how to mix the cyanide with a special liquid and put it in a hypodermic needle.
“A lethal hot shot,” he called it.
Using the thinnest, least detectable needle he could find, Richard mixed the liquid and cyanide carefully until all the poison blended and became one with the liquid.
Regine’s was, he decided, too small, not crowded enough for him to get close to the mark unobserved. But Xenon was another story—it was perfect: crowded, noisy, strobe lights blinking on and off. To blend in Richard put on a garish outfit that he believed made him look gay.
It was a Saturday night. The mark, his girlfriend, and his bodyguards ate in a popular French restaurant called Un, Deux, Trois, then headed over to Xenon. Wearing a red peaked hat, pink pants, a yellow vest, beads around his neck, and platform shoes, Richard managed to get in the club, which unto itself was a feat. The place was packed with dancers—an upscale, chic crowd—music blared, the bass thumped, disco lights swirled madly. The lights confused Richard. He didn’t like them. People, Richard could see, were openly snorting cocaine. Richard managed to find the mark. He was dancing on the edge of the dance floor off to the right.
Moving with the music, shaking his huge body as he went, Richard swished-danced past the mark, and as he went he stuck him with the needle while moving toward the exit. Within a minute the mark went down, and he was soon quite dead. Everyone believed he’d had a heart attack. At the autopsy in the medical examiner’s office, the poison was not even detected.
According to Richard, one of the guys on the Jimmy Hoffa hit, Sal Briguglio, got into some trouble with the law, and word spread that he was trying to use what he knew about the Hoffa murder to get himself out of trouble. This is what caused Hoffa’s remains to be dug up, compacted in the trunk of a car, and exported to Japan. Richard was given the contract to kill Briguglio. He and another Jersey assassin, Paulie Salerno, tracked Sal to Little Italy. As he was walking near Mott Street, Richard struck him from behind with a jawbreaker, knocked him down, and shot him numerous times with a .38 equipped with a suppressor, then quickly walked away. The cops were called. Detectives questioned neighborhood people. No one saw anything. Another mob-related murder in Little Italy…nothing new.
Poison and Richard Kuklinski went together like peanut butter and jelly: for one of the few times in his life, Richard bought books and carefully studied them, medical texts about poisons. For several weeks he was reading and taking notes, teaching himself the subtleties and finer points of killing people with poison. He learned about cyano, prussic acid, hydrocyanic acid, hydrogen cyanide, aniline, and cyanic acid, and their proper applications. Whenever he saw Paul Hoffman, he asked him questions, and Hoffman gladly answered Richard’s questions, and provided Richard with the actual poisons. Hoffman, of course, was charging Richard exorbitant amounts, but Richard didn’t care; it was just the price of doing business.
Like a child with a new toy, Richard was anxious to try out these new killing tools. He loved, he says, the subtlety of poison: that there was no violence, guns, blood, broken bones; that it was odorless and colorless, yet as lethal as—perhaps more lethal than—a bullet to the head.
With vials of poisons in his pocket, Richard went out into the world to fill murder contracts. In many instances, Richard could get close to a mark, invite him for a meal, a drink—and use my new friends, as he called the poisons.
His name was Billy Mana. He was a made guy in the Genovese family. His boss wanted him dead. Richard contacted Mana, invited him for a drink, saying he had a load of fur coats he wanted to sell “real cheap. I’m in a hurry to move the load,” Richard said.
Like all mob guys, Mana was money hungry, and he met Richard for a drink in a Union City bar. Richard had a pinkie-sized vial of cyanide with him. When Mana went to the john, Richard quickly and discreetly—like a magic trick—dumped the poison in Mana’s drink. Mana soon came back and knocked off his drink. Richard graciously ordered another round. Before it was served, however, Mana choked, held his throat, his eyes swelling, and soon fell over.
“Heart attack, call a doctor!” Richard called out and soon disappeared, as if he never was there.
Pleased, Richard made his way home, back to his family, like Dracula returning to his lair. Over the coming months, whenever possible, Richard used poison to kill, in food, in drinks, on pizza. He became quite the expert in the application of deadly substances.
This, of course, only bolstered his reputation as an assassin, and even more murder contracts came his way. He was traveling all over the country now to murder people the mob wanted dead. He’d go anywhere to do a piece of work. He was very busy; too busy. He knew this could not go on forever; but he greatly enjoyed the work, the challenge, a successful outcome. It made him feel godlike, a truly lethal force. Richard became the brightest star in a rogues’ gallery filled with stone-cold killers. As Richard’s reputation spread, people “in the life” didn’t like to be around him, looked at him warily out of the corner of their eyes. Even Roy DeMeo was wary of Richard. DeMeo was one of the few people in the world that knew how tr
uly dangerous and diabolical Richard was. When DeMeo had a beef with John Gotti and his brother Gene, he asked Richard to come to a meeting with them and watch his back.
The Gotti brothers and their crew also had a reputation for being dangerous, ruthless—quick to kill and ask questions later. But even they wanted nothing to do with DeMeo and the Gemini gang. True, DeMeo and John Gotti were in the same family, but there was friction between them. Yet, because they were in the same family, in theory anyway, disputes and disagreements had to be settled with talk, amiably, not murder. When DeMeo and John Gotti—these two ruthless men with oversized egos—had a disagreement over how merchandise stolen from Kennedy Airport was divvied up, who would get what, there had to be a “sit-down,” the mob term for resolving disputes with reason and conversation, not violence.
John Gotti, like DeMeo, had a reputation as a no-nonsense, two-fisted, dangerous man with a volatile temper. He had recently been released from jail, having done time for his involvement in a murder: Gotti had killed Jimmy McBratney, the man rumored to be responsible for the abduction and murder of Carlo Gambino’s nephew. Gotti hired the famous Roy Cohn, who made a sweetheart deal for Gotti—four years for attempted murder, a cakewalk.
Gotti had done the time and was out now and making waves in the Gambino family. He, like many in the Gambino clan, hated Paul Castellano, for a host of reasons: Paul’s greed; his insistence that all the captains come pay homage to him once a week at the Veterans and Friends Club; the fact that he was appointed because of family connections; the fact that he failed to prevent the FBI from bugging his home; the fact that his affair with the housekeeper had become public scandal, much talked about in Mafiadom.
DeMeo didn’t like or trust John Gotti, and when the sit-down occurred DeMeo brought along Richard as his bodyguard. As they drove to the meeting, held in the home of another Gambino captain, Roy said, “Big Guy, we can’t trust this fuckin’ Gotti. Keep your eye on him, and don’t let me out of your sight, got it?”
