Book Review – Philip Carlo’s “The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer”
To the regular world he was Richard Kuklinski.
The man was married and lived with his wife and three children in New Jersey. Although not very social, Kuklinski frequently cooked BBQ parties for his friends and neighbors. He treated his wife to the best restaurants in town, and his children were spoiled with gifts and vacations to Florida. In all aspects, Richard Kuklinski appeared to be a normal, caring person to the outside world.
Hidden underneath that “average” personality was one of a monster.
To the police, Richard Kuklinski was nicknamed the “Ice Man” because of the way he was known to preserve dead bodies before tossing them into the woods, throwing off the police investigators. But those few dead bodies are nothing on the scale of murder and mayhem committed by Kuklinski during a lifetime of crime.
Philip Carlo’s chilling book, The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer takes a detailed look into the life of Richard Kuklinski. Carlo himself was allowed to interview Kuklinski as he sat in prison after being convicted of several murders. He was allowed to interview a man with an incredibly dangerous reputation, and have him tell his story about the events throughout his life and his dealings with the Mafia. Much of Kuklinski’s story has been confirmed by his living relatives, the police investigations, and those people who had contact with the killer and lived to tell their tales.
Richard Kuklinski’s tale begins with being born to a Polish father and Irish mother in one of the worst neighborhoods in New Jersey. His father frequently abused his mothers, and those beatings were commonly targeted towards Richard and his two older brothers Joseph and Florian. His father’s beatings were so terrible that he accidentally killed young Florian, and his mother conspired to help cover the boy’s death.
It wasn’t just the rage of his father that took its toll on young Richard. Neighborhood bullies frequently beat Richard, and when his father learned about it Richard was given another beating for losing the fight or running away from the bullies. There were times when Richard was so injured from his father’s beatings that he had to miss days of school.
Richard’s father eventually moved on with another woman, leaving Richard with his brother Joe, sister Roberta, and their mother Anna. This forced Richard’s mother to work two jobs to maintain their home, and she in turn also focused her anger on her two sons. Richard’s mother frequently beat him with anything she could use, from pots and pans in the kitchen to broom handles.
Richard was sent to a Catholic school where he was also physically abused by the nuns who taught the classes. The only escape for the child was when he found a quiet spot by a river and read detective books. Those very books would have a strong impact on the boy and help him live a mostly successful life of crime.
According to Richard, his first murder occurred when he was a young teenager. One day he received a particularly bad beating from the neighborhood bullies, and Richard decided to get even. One night he ambushed the leader of the bullies and kept attacking him over and over, not realizing that he actually killed the boy. Richard put the boy’s body in the trunk of a stolen car, and then he drove away and disposed of the car and the body, making sure to remove his fingerprints and other incriminating evidence. That neighborhood bully simply became an unsolved missing person case, the first of many at the hands of Richard Kuklinski.
That killing was what gave Richard his calling in life. By reading the detective stories as a child, he knew about police procedures and how criminals were linked to crimes. He used that knowledge to his advantage when plotting robberies and murders later in life. In the meantime, Richard was still living at home and suffering physical abuse from both his mother and the nuns at the Catholic school. Richard, in turn, focused his energy on using weapons and the art of killing living creatures. Stray cats and dogs disappeared from his town as Richard perfected his methods for murder.
School wasn’t a place for Richard Kuklinski, and the teenager found himself hanging out at a neighborhood bar and learning the game of pool. He became quite a skilled player and hustled money in games of pool. When players refused to pay him, or worse, they insulted him, Richard let his aggression get the best of him. Kuklinski would often stalk his victims and strike back, beating and killing several people. For each of his murders, Richard would attack with different weapons and deposit the bodies in different places, making the police believe that the culprits were different people and none of the cases were connected.
Richard found a few people who shared the same passion and aggression, and they formed a gang known as the Coming Up Roses. This gang had a fierce reputation that soon attracted the attention of a mobster named Carmine Genovese. Genovese spoke with Richard and offered him a contract killing, which he accepted. He took his Coming Up Roses gang and found the target, but the trigger man didn’t have the nerve to actually commit the murder. Richard took the firearm and shot and killed the target, solidifying his future as a contract killer.
Richard Kuklinski was a man who would gladly kill another man, even without it being a contract hit by the mob. His only restrictions were that he would not kill women or children. Everybody else was fair game. He reasoned that the targets put themselves into such a negative position, so they know that they have it coming to them. It’s just a matter of somebody fulfilling the obligation of killing the individual.
Contract hits weren’t the only people that Richard murdered. Initially, many bums in New York City were the victims of Richard’s madness. He viewed NYC as his own personal hunting ground, and there he practiced his killing methods and weapons on the homeless population. He frequently changed his weapons and the locations of the murders, and the police department never suspected that a single person was responsible for the deaths. They believed that it was a series of homeless-on-homeless crimes, crimes that could nor would be solved. As a result, Richard perfected his killing techniques.
Those are just the beginning parts of the tale of Richard Kuklinski. The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer goes on telling about many of Richard’s contract killings and his rise and fame with a few of the infamous Mafia families. Since Richard was not of Italian birth, he could never be a made man with the Mafia. This gave him the flexibility of working with several Mafia families, carrying out robberies, extortions, and contract killings for them.
His work took him throughout the country and ultimately to places like Brazil and even Europe. No place was too far for Richard to fulfil a contract killing. Besides, his sponsors would pay for the excursion and Richard travelled in first class, staying at the best hotels, and dining in top restaurants. Many of those excursions were miniature vacations for the serial killer.
A contract killing takes Richard Kuklinski along with a few other hitmen to the suburbs of Detroit, Michigan. There a target is taken outside of a restaurant, and while in the car Richard kills him with a knife. The target’s body is taken back to New Jersey, stuffed into a 55-gallon oil drum, burned and then buried. The site of burial is later compromised, so the oil drum with the target’s body is unburied and placed into a car that is crushed and sold as scrap metal to a car company in Japan. It’s suspected that the target killed by Richard in Detroit was none other than Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa.
One of Richard’s specialities was making his victims suffer before or as they were killed. Sometimes this was required as part of the contract. Sometimes that happened because of Richard’s personal feelings or attitude towards the target. One of Richard’s preferred ways of making a target suffer was by taking them to an isolated cave somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania, binding the person, and then leaving him for the rats. He’d leave behind a camera and record the action as the rats would swarm over the still living person and slowly eat away and kill him. It’s noted that these particular rats developed a taste for humans, and in later killings they would consume all the evidence including bones and clothing.
As far as dealing with rapists, one gruesome tale is told when Richard travels to Florida to make a target suffer on behalf of the victim’s father. It’s told that Richard took pleasure in sadistically torturing the target before dragging him into the ocean and letting the sharks finish the killing.
It turns out that Richard was more like his thug of a father than he would have liked. He frequently beat his wife and destroyed furniture in their home. However, their children were never touched. They knew about their father’s anger and aggression, but he never abused them like his mother and father did to him. Richard spent time with his eldest daughter when she was in and out of the hospital, and he even treated the other kids in the hospital with special gifts and treats. But as loving as Richard was to his children and, at times, to his wife, there was still his dark side that his family never knew.
Richard’s dark side wasn’t just limited to the Mafia and all of his robberies and murders. Nor was it with his underworld business of distributing bootleg movies and pornography. Richard had drinking and gambling problems that frequently wrecked havoc on his life. In his youth, the alcohol abuse would turn Richard into a mean person who quickly used lethal violence to solve his problems, even if it started from a simple dispute or somebody even looking at Richard the wrong way. The gambling removed Richard’s excess money, making him continually accept contract killings so he could keep supporting his family and one day retiring from the business.
In the end, it was a lengthy police investigation and a sneaky undercover agent that led to Richard Kuklinski’s arrest and criminal conviction. A judge sentenced him to several life sentences, and Richard ultimately died in prison back in 2006. He was in the same prison that held his brother, Joe Kuklinski. Joe was convicted in the raping and killing of a young girl. He killed her by throwing her off the roof of an apartment building.
The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer is one of those books where sheer fascination and outright horror make you keep reading page after page. It’s hard to believe that not only somebody like Richard Kuklinski actually exist, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, but that he allegedly killed so many people. It’s believed that Richard killed somewhere between 100 and 250 men throughout his life.
It’s one thing for somebody to fulfil a killing contract from the Mafia. As it was stated, when you reach that point you’re obviously guilty of a serious crime against the Mafia. They don’t just issue contracts for the fun of it. No problems there when it comes to taking out Mafia targets or people who basically deserve to die. One of the more horrific personality traits of Richard Kuklinski is that he also killed innocent people, from homeless men wandering the streets of New York City to people who may have mildly offended Richard when he was in one of his killing moods. One part of the book describes how Richard Kuklinski kills a completely innocent man out walking his dog as a way of proving himself to mobster Roy DeMeo. A man out for a walk, completely unknown to Kuklinski and DeMeo, died just so that Kuklinski could prove himself as a stone cold killer to a mobster.
For me, that’s what makes somebody like Richard Kuklinski such a vile and evil human being. The man had zero regard for human life. Sure, he wouldn’t kill women or children, but he would easily kill any man whether it was to fulfil a contract or not. The man simply killed people with deadly efficiency. That’s just crazy.
The book takes us readers back to many of those killings and the different methods, and weapons, Richard has used to kill people and dispose of their bodies. Sometimes the killings were made to look like accidents. Sometimes they required the victim to simply disappear (like into the bottom of a “bottomless” pit in Pennsylvania). Some cases required the victim to suffer. And sometimes a person had to be killed but their body had to remain hidden for some time, such as when hiding from the police or committing insurance fraud. Those murders that involved Richard keeping the body in a cooled location were what helped inspire his nickname as the Ice Man. Richard was also cool as ice when committing such heinous crimes, and it’s believed that to be that evil your heart must also be a block of ice, something without sympathy or caring towards other people.
In the end, it was his life of crime that provided the police with enough evidence to arrest and convict him in a court of law. Had Richard been more careful with both his finances and his methods, he could have easily retired as a multi-millionaire and living a life of luxury on the beach, just as he always dreamed.
The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer is an absolute must-read for anybody interested in psychopaths, killers, and the Mafia. Be warned: some of the killings described in the book are rather brutal. Also take note that once you start reading about the horrors of Richard Kuklinski, you’ll keep reading page after page until the very end.
