by Philip Carlo
“Done, brother,” John said.
Richard and the others stayed in jail overnight. Richard called Barbara to say he was working at the lab. Richard often stayed at the lab overnight, making overtime.
In the morning they were all taken to court for arraignment. In a foul mood, Richard made sure no one said anything. His lawyer found them in the holding pen, winked, and said, “Everything is taken care of.” They soon appeared before the judge—who had been given the three g’s by Richard’s lawyer. The judge said he didn’t see “reasonable cause” to hold over the case, levied a small fine, and dismissed it on the spot.
As Richard and the others were walking out of the courtroom, one of the detectives—not a happy camper—walked up to Richard. “Here’s your gun back,” he offered, holding out Richard’s derringer.
“That’s not my gun,” Richard said, and walked out of the courtroom.
Outside, he told his brother, “This is it. Get yourself in another jam, I am not going to help you. You understand?”
“Yeah,” said Joseph sheepishly. “I understand.”
Murder Runs in the Family
The dog had a broken leg and was in shock, shaking and trembling and barking nonstop in the yard of a building on Jersey City’s Central Avenue, number 438. It was 12:30 A.M., September 16, 1970, and the dog was disturbing people trying to sleep. The dog belonged to Pamela Dial, a twelve-year-old girl, small for her age and thin. Pamela had black hair and large, round, dark eyes. She was a straight-A student at nearby St. Anne’s Parochial School. She lived at 9 Bleeker Street with her mother and father and brothers John and Robert, just around the corner from Central Avenue, the block on which lived Joseph and Anna Kuklinski.
Pamela loved her dog, Lady, a little black-and-white mutt. They were always together; wherever Pam went, the dog was with her, wagging its tail and unusually attentive to Pamela.
Earlier, near eleven o’clock that fateful Tuesday night, Pamela had left the house looking for her dog. She had not finished her homework yet; it was still spread out on her bed. Nor did she tell her family she was going out to find Lady. Her parents were watching the eleven o’clock news when she left and didn’t even know she’d gone.
Pamela did find her dog and was walking home when she ran into Joseph Kuklinski.
Joseph and Pam knew each other from the neighborhood. Joseph was tall and handsome, thin and muscular, had glistening long blond hair, a Fu Manchu mustache. He was now twenty-five years old. The two talked. Joseph asked Pamela if she’d like to be alone with him. Not knowing exactly what he had in mind, she innocently said okay and followed Joseph Kuklinski into a four-story building, 438 Central Avenue, and up to the roof. Joseph lived at 434 Central Avenue with his mother, just two buildings away. Joseph had used the roofs along Central Avenue for sexual liaisons many times over the years, with both girlfriends and boyfriends. Pamela had no idea of what Joseph was after. He was known in the neighborhood as Cowboy Joe, and she thought he was cute. She liked the idea that he paid attention to her, that he wanted to be alone with her. Unaware of the demons inside of Joseph Kuklinski’s head, Pamela willingly went up to the roof.
Joseph had been drinking, was buzzed, smelled of alcohol. On the roof he quickly came to the point and tried to have sex with Pam. She refused. He wouldn’t take no for an answer. He forced himself on her, sodomized her, then choked her to death; all the while, little Lady was barking like mad. Joseph tried to catch the dog but couldn’t.
When Joseph was finished with Pamela, he picked up her lifeless body as if it were a rag doll and tossed her off the roof. She hit the cement backyard of 438 Central Avenue with a meaty, bone-breaking thud. Joseph then managed to catch the dog and tossed it off the roof too. The hapless animal landed near Pamela, and its legs and several ribs broke. Lady crawled to Pamela’s lifeless body and began to cry, then howl and bark nonstop. People called the police to complain about the insistent barking and howling. A squad car was dispatched. The police discovered Pamela Dial’s lifeless, broken body.
The murder of a child, even in rough-and-tumble Jersey City, was a rare event, an outrage. Early that morning every available detective and uniformed cop in Jersey City was looking for Pamela’s killer, canvassing the neighborhood, knocking on doors, stopping people driving by. Detectives soon learned that Pamela had been seen talking to Joseph Kuklinski the night before. When detective Sergeant Ben Riccardi came knocking on the Kuklinskis’ door, Joseph was still sleeping and hung over. When he was taken to the police station and threatened by angry Jersey City detectives, he admitted what he’d done.
“I threw her off the roof,” he said. With that Joseph was roughly handcuffed and placed under arrest.
Later that day, Anna Kuklinski called Richard and told him how Joseph had been arrested for the killing of a twelve-year-old girl. This bowled Richard over. He couldn’t conceive of his brother doing such a thing. It had to be some kind of mistake. As much as Richard wanted nothing to do with his mother, he hurried to Jersey City. Just the day before, Richard had gone to see Joseph. He’d waited in a bar on Central Avenue for Joseph, but Joe hadn’t shown up. Richard had known that Joseph was home, out of work, but he hadn’t knocked on the door to get his brother, because he didn’t want to see his mother; he had grown to despise Anna to that degree. The few times she had come to his home, Anna always tried to instigate trouble with Barbara, who also grew to loathe Anna, but tolerated her. Barbara had no choice; she was Richard’s mother, after all.
My mother was cancer; she slowly killed whatever she touched, Richard recently said.
At first Richard was willing to try and help Joseph, get him a lawyer. He found his younger brother at the Jersey City jail, and Joseph readily admitted to Richard that he had raped and killed the girl and thrown her and her dog off the roof.
“Why the fuck would you do such a thing?” Richard demanded, so angry he wanted to beat his brother, beat him to death. Richard had two daughters, and the thought of someone doing that to either of them left him cold and empty inside—outraged.
“Because,” Joseph said, “she wanted it.”
With that Richard stood up and walked away; he would never talk to his brother Joseph again.
That day I washed my hands of him, wanted nothing to do with him anymore. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have a brother. I didn’t have a family. To hell with them all…
Within several months Joseph Kuklinski was convicted of Pam Dial’s murder, given a life sentence, and sent to the Trenton State Prison. As far as Richard was concerned he had no brother. No mother. No sister. No family.
Let’s Do the Twist
The film lab where Richard worked now moved to a new space on Forty-sixth Street, not far from the famous Peppermint Lounge on Forty-fifth Street, the place where Joey D. and the Starlighters made the Twist so popular all over the world. Richard sometimes liked to go there in the early evening, before he started a double shift bootlegging porn, for a cocktail or two. Richard well knew he shouldn’t drink hard liquor, but it mellowed him; he was, in a sense, self-medicating, for the liquor tended to calm him; but he also became nasty when he drank, just like his father and brother. On this night he made an off-color remark to a woman at the bar; she took offense and complained to her boyfriend, who in turn said something nasty to Richard. The boyfriend was a friend of the bartender. Soon in an argument with the bartender, Richard reached over the bar and grabbed the bartender by the tie. He was going to sock him, but the bouncer interceded, coming out of nowhere, and made Richard leave, said he’d call the cops.
On the sidewalk outside, Richard was talking to the bouncer, trying to explain how the bartender had a big mouth, when suddenly the bouncer sucker punched Richard.
“Why’d you do that?” Richard asked, more shocked and embarrassed than hurt.
“’Cause you got a big fuckin’ mouth. Come back and I’ll send you to the hospital,” the bouncer promised.
“Thanks for the warning,” Richard sai
d. “I will be back. Count on it, my friend.” Richard went back to the lab, fuming. The punch had cut his lip and he was bleeding slightly. Richard wasn’t really physically hurt, but this incident ate at him. He couldn’t forget it. Another guy might have written it off as a stupid occurrence that meant nothing.
But not Richard.
His mood fouled.
He couldn’t think of anything but this bouncer and getting even. Having revenge. Killing him. But how? Forty-fifth Street was a very busy street. The club was popular, people were always there, moving in and out.
Richard took out his anger on Barbara, abused her for not making a sandwich correctly, not cutting off the crust of the bread just so, the way he liked. Though Richard never touched either of his daughters, he frequently abused Barbara in front of them, broke furniture in front of them.
That night Richard couldn’t sleep; he couldn’t stop thinking about how the bouncer had embarrassed him, disrespected him, hit him with a sneaky punch. Richard resolved to murder the bouncer; come hell or high water, he was dead.
Some three days later Richard was ready. He had it all worked out. He left the house that morning carrying a change of clothes, those of a laborer. He had a .22 with him, in a paper bag with his lunch, two turkey-on-rye sandwiches with extra mayo, his favorite.
Late that afternoon, Richard went to the bathroom, which was in the hall. He changed into the clothes he had brought, put a peak cap on his head, pulled the brim down in front of his face, and went downstairs. Richard knew the bouncer began work at about 4:00 P.M., and Richard stood in front of the building with the gun in his coat pocket, staring, waiting, looking for an opportunity to strike, like a hungry predatory cat with his eyes on a potential meal. The club had a large picture window, and he could readily see into it. It was a chilly fall day in 1971 and Richard had murder on his mind.
What this bouncer had done was, for Richard, exactly what his father had done to him—strike him for nothing when he least expected it—and as Richard stared at the club, memories of Stanley’s brutality, in stark, harsh black-and-white images, flashed before his eyes. These memories often came back to Richard like this, as if an old silent movie.
A band began to rehearse inside the club. Richard could hear the music across the street. Everyone at the bar looked toward the stage. This was the moment to move, to strike. Quickly, catlike, Richard crossed the narrow street and opened the door. The bouncer was right there. Perfect. Without a moment’s hesitation, Richard put the .22 close to his head and fired, turned, and calmly walked out, not looking back. He took a right, grabbed a cab on the corner, and had it take him to the Port Authority Bus Terminal on Forty-first Street. Here Richard changed back into his clothes, threw away the outfit he had been wearing, and walked back to work. Now there were cop cars and ambulances in front of the Peppermint Lounge, spinning red lights. A big crowd had gathered. Richard stopped and looked for several moments, just another curious guy, then went into the building where he worked, feeling good and whole—now at peace. He wasn’t even remotely suspected of the killing, was never questioned about it, never connected to it.
A change of sorts had come over Richard: these recent killings reminded him of his past, and he coveted having power over life, deciding who would live and who would die, when and where and how.
Murder, Richard knew, was one of the few things in life that he truly excelled at. It seemed, he mused, that he had a gift for it, and he began to think seriously of again hiring himself out as a contract killer, making that his profession, his job, his specialty, committing himself as a killer for hire.
But now, he reminded himself, he had a wife and two adorable little girls. He couldn’t do anything to jeopardize them. Yet, he believed if you planned a killing carefully, meticulously, didn’t hurry it, it was relatively easy to get away with because there was no tangible link between the killer and the victim. This, he knew, was the reason serial killers were so hard to catch—the randomness of the crimes made it nearly impossible for the police to connect the killer to the victims. Richard would exploit this element over and over again.
With these life-and-death musings in his head, Richard returned to Jersey City and Hoboken and let it be known that he was available for “special work.” He also went to see Tony Argrila, the porn distributor. He found Argrila at his office on Spring Street in downtown Manhattan. Argrila was in his midforties, balding, short, and heavy, had a thick Brooklyn accent. He and Paul Rothenberg were responsible for most all the porn produced in New York. They had a silent partner named Roy DeMeo.
“I need to make some serious money,” Richard began. “I want to get back in the life. I—”
“Listen to me,” Argrila stopped him. “You really want to make money, get into porn; there’s truckloads a money to make. We’ll front you whatever you want. No problem.”
Richard didn’t see much of a future making porn movies. He thought of it as dirty and didn’t want to get that involved in it. Pirating it was one thing; making it himself was another. Murder—murder was okay, nothing wrong with that. But producing porn movies was sleazy… beneath him, as it were.
“I’m tellin’ you, there’s a ton a fuckin’ money in it,” Argrila repeated.
“Really?”
“Absofuckinlutely. No fuss, no-muss, and it’s perfectly legal. We’ll give you all the product you need. I know you’re a stand-up right guy. Just pay us for what you take when you get paid, and you’re in business.”
“I’ll think about it,” Richard said, ultimately warming to the idea because it was, in fact, perfectly legal. The more he thought about it, the more appealing the idea seemed, and he decided to try it, what the hell. But he knew if he did delve into this he had to make a go of it, not fuck up, because the money involved was mob money, and he had to pay it back in a timely fashion. He didn’t like owing mob people anything, but for such an enterprise, he also knew, there was nowhere else to turn: I couldn’t go to a bank and say I got three naked girls and two guys with hard-ons and I want to make movies, he recently explained.
So Richard began taking large shipments of porn on consignment from Argrila and Rothenberg and wholesaling it out all over the East Coast. Money began pouring in. Richard was surprised at how much in demand porn was, and the dirtier and kinkier it was, the better. Because he was selling most of the product he was getting from Argrila on consignment, the bill he had with Argrila quickly grew to seventy-five thousand dollars, since Richard was spending money he should have been giving Argrila.
Richard wasn’t even sure Argrila and his partner were really mob connected. Guys were always saying they were “mobbed up,” and Richard kept taking product and was slow in paying it back. He also got it in his head to make his own movies, to have his own line, and decided to use the money he owed Argrila to start his own business. This proved to be, as Richard would soon find out, a near-fatal mistake in judgment.
Richard quit working in the film lab and immersed himself in the porn business full-time. Argrila and Rothenberg kept asking for money, and Richard kept stalling them. From working in film labs over the years, Richard did know quite a few people who made porno movies—line producers, camera people, even directors. He began talking to some of these individuals and quickly realized that he could indeed make his own porno movies from scratch. Using Argrila’s money, that’s exactly what he did—he began producing porno films, hired directors he knew, made deals with them, and let them run the show. He was only interested in the finished product—making money.
Richard’s daughter Merrick’s health was not improving. She was frequently in pain and had raging fevers, sometimes up to 106 degrees. Her sickness and distress embittered Richard even more. Her suffering, any child’s suffering, was so unfair that surely, he thought, there was no God. How could any God allow a child to suffer? Richard had great empathy for children, though absolutely none for adults. He and Barbara did all they could for Merrick, but whatever they did didn’t work; at least he was
making money now and had the funds needed for Merrick’s care.
Richard was thinking he’d deal in porn for a short while—a few years at the most—make some serious money, and get the hell out of the business. Maybe move to the West Coast, buy a house on the beach and relax. That was Richard’s dream: to have a first-class white house on a beach and enjoy the view, the glorious sunsets, watch the girls frolic in the surf.
Richard said nothing to Barbara about what he was doing or his plans for the future. He knew she wouldn’t like it. As much as Richard dominated and abused Barbara, he had much respect for her, valued her opinion, valued her judgment. She often explained things to him he read in the newspapers that he didn’t understand. An avid reader, Barbara told him about books she enjoyed. She was always reading a book, both popular novels and classics. Richard was, of course, still dyslexic and had comprehension problems when it came to the written word. The only thing he ever truly enjoyed reading were the true-crime magazines; those, for some reason, he never had any trouble understanding.
The movies Richard was producing were shot in dilapidated warehouses—no doubt now fashionable lofts—in SoHo. Richard never went to any of the shoots. He was not interested in seeing the films being made. He thought little of the people who did such things and didn’t want to be around them. For him this was a strictly moneymaking proposition. He had no prurient interests at all. He was, when it came to sexual matters, a bit of a prude. Because all the films Richard was distributing were given out on consignment and were paid for after the retailer sold them, there was a mandatory period of time that the producers had to wait to get paid. There was no getting around that.