The Ice Man

by Philip Carlo

  From Argrila the porn producer Richard heard that there was office space available in a commercial building on Spring, just off Lafayette, perfect for what he had in mind, and it was in the city. Richard was often in the city now on business, and this little office would serve him well. He rented it and proceeded to buy some office furniture, a bed, a big desk, a safe, a fridge. He had phones installed and suddenly Richard Kuklinski had an office—a place from where he could conduct business, his criminal dealings, murder contracts. He stashed a host of weapons in the safe, hand grenades, handcuffs, and some of his expanding library of poisons.

  Now, when he knew he had a job to do early in the morning, a contract that had to be filled in the city, he’d sleep at the office, his war room, as he thought of it. There was even a bathroom with a shower stall. He didn’t tell Barbara about it. He told Barbara very little.

  Another piece of work came Richard’s way, the killing of a Genovese soldier. He was using drugs, making mistakes, compromising the family; he had to go. Richard knew the mark, Henry Marino, was a coke hound, and decided to use that as the way to kill Henry. Richard bought a few grams of pure coke and carefully laid it out on his desk in his new office, on a piece of mirror. Richard did not use coke; he didn’t do any drugs. But he knew about drugs, their applications and effects. After chopping up the coke with a razor, he put on white plastic gloves and carefully mixed enough cyanide with the coke to kill a man. That done, he put the coke into a vial, and he was soon on a plane to Las Vegas. Richard had always loved Vegas, since he was a kid, and now he was going there to do a piece of work and get paid well for it. He had it, far as he was concerned, made in the shade.

  Richard knew the mark was staying at a swank hotel on the Strip. He checked into the hotel, went down to the bar near 9:00 P.M., and had a beer. Richard rarely, if ever, drank when on a job, but he knew Henry Marino liked to hold court at the bar, pick up babes, that he’d show up sooner or later, and Richard wanted to look as if he belonged, act as though their meeting were purely coincidental.

  It didn’t take long. Henry Marino soon came strolling in, a tall thin man with thinning hair. He saw Richard; they shook hands, said hello. Richard bought him a drink before he had a chance to say no. They began to shoot the breeze. After a time Richard offhandedly mentioned that he had just ripped off a Colombian coke dealer and had a few keys of high-grade coke he wanted to unload.

  “You know anyone?” Richard asked, somewhat conspiratorially; this caused Henry’s ears to immediately perk up.

  “Good stuff?” he asked, equally conspiratorially.

  “Pure, straight from Medellín,” Richard said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened to the Colombians?”

  “Went fishing.”

  “Sure. I might be interested—if it’s really good and the price is right.”

  “I got some with me; wanna taste?” Richard innocently asked, springing the trap.

  “Sure,” Henry said.

  Richard discreetly handed him the vial. Henry smiled, winked, and walked off to the bathroom, newfound purpose in his hurried step. Richard paid for his drinks and left.

  Henry Marino was found dead in the bathroom, a vial of coke on the floor nearby, and his passing was written up as a heart attack, not a homicide.

  Later that same evening Richard went out gambling. He was again beginning to gamble large amounts of money. Money was rolling in; he had it; why not? he reasoned. He so enjoyed the thrill of gambling, the challenge of it. The higher the stakes, the more he got out of it. He won sometimes, but mostly lost. He didn’t know when to quit. That was his problem in a nutshell. He lost, in fact, all the money he had earned killing Henry Marino. He felt doubly bad about losing because he had a family now, a wife that wanted and demanded nice things: that the children go to top private schools, that everything was the best, their clothes, their cars, the restaurants they went to, the wines they drank. Angry at himself for losing forty thousand dollars in a few hours, Richard went back to New Jersey in a foul mood.

  Richard came to truly enjoy killing with poison. Now whenever possible he used poison. Most often these hits were written up as suicides or natural deaths, mainly because Richard was scrupulously careful about using the right dosage: just enough to kill, not enough to be readily detected. But in one interesting instance the cause of death could not be put down as natural.

  Richard was still involved with hijacks and B and E jobs (breaking and entering). He’d pretty much do anything to turn a buck. His life was all about crime, and there was nothing he would not do except kill women or children. This particular job, all told, involved six people. A B and E crew of four (with Richard, five) and the insurance guy who spotted the job, the “inside man.”

  A wealthy businessman in Montclair, New Jersey, had an expensive collection of coins and rare stamps. He kept them in a tall narrow safe in his home, built into a fancy cedar closet. The insurance guy knew about the coins and stamps because the company he worked for had insured the collection. He also had the combination of the safe.

  Richard knew this B and E crew from his wild and woolly days back in Jersey City. There was a possibility that the owner would show up unexpectedly, and it would be Richard’s job to take him out quickly and quietly. The gang met in Jersey City, got into the house without trouble, opened the safe without incident, found the coins and stamps, and made a clean getaway. So far it was a perfect job, had gone like clockwork.

  Back at the home of one of the gang, Ralphie the Snake, they looked over their loot, the rare coins, the precious stamps. Beforehand, all had agreed to a six-way split. But they got to arguing among themselves about who would and should get what. This was exactly why Richard hated working with people, this kind of ridiculous bickering, backstabbing…greed.

  Losing patience, Richard said, “Hey look guys, this all went perfectly, a piece of cake, let’s not fudge it up by arguing amongst ourselves. The deal was a six-way split; that’s it, okay? I mean, come on.”

  Still, they argued on: about who had the largest part, about how the split should be made. Richard became more and more annoyed.

  One of the guys said he was hungry; another said Harry’s was still open. Harry’s was a small take-out restaurant in Jersey City, little more than a greasy spoon, but they made great sandwiches with a renowned “special sauce.” Richard magnanimously said he’d go get the sandwiches, diligently wrote down what the others wanted, and off he went. These days Richard had taken to carrying around, especially when he went on a job, a vial of cyanide. He had it with him now. He recently explained:

  So I’m driving over to get the sandwiches, when the idea first came to me. I mean, I was going to completely play it straight here with these guys, but now…now I’m thinking to myself they’re all a bunch of greedy stiffs and I decided it was going to be a one-way split—one way my way. I’d show them what greed really was.

  Richard dutifully ordered the sandwiches, some sodas, and coffee.

  Outside, in the quiet solitude of his car, he put his sandwich on the side and put on plastic gloves (Richard always kept an economy box of plastic gloves in his car), opened each of the other four sandwiches, and ever so carefully sprinkled cyanide on them in such a way that anyone who ate one would get the full dose, each dose about what you’d find in a salt packet at any McDonald’s. He put the sandwiches back in the bag, his right on top, took off the gloves, and returned to the house and the still-squabbling gang. Richard took his sandwich, announced he was starved, went in a corner, and ate with gusto—he really was hungry; and as he ate he watched the others consume their delicious Harry’s sandwiches with the special sauce as they still bickered. Within minutes the poison had an effect; suddenly they were all frozen in place, eyes wide open, spittle coming from suddenly lax mouths, which actually hung open, as though their jaws had become unhinged. Richard carefully watched them, eating his sandwich, got up and looked at them closely, learning firsth
and, like a scientist in a lab observing monkeys, the actual effect of the poison. One of them tried to stand, but that was impossible. Motor movement was gone. Richard carefully put all that was left of the sandwiches, the soda, and the coffee back in the bag. He then wiped away all his fingerprints, moving slowly, methodically. Satisfied, he took the loot and the garbage and left, closing the door softly as he went.

  The following day he went to meet the insurance appraiser who had turned them on to the job. They met in a crowded bar in Teaneck. When he wasn’t looking, Richard put a boost, as he calls it, in the insurance guy’s drink. Within minutes he fell to the floor—still another heart attack in a Jersey bar; how sad. Still another murder not attached to Richard Kuklinski.

  Richard wound up selling what they stole to a fence he knew in Hoboken. Altogether he earned four hundred thousand dollars. He put it in one of the two safe-deposit boxes he rented in different Jersey banks.

  Most of that money, however, was soon gone—Richard gambled it away. As far as he was concerned it was easy come, easy go.

  Barbara would have been livid if she’d found out he was squandering amounts of money like that. He never told her about it, or even about the safe-deposit boxes he had. They were, like much of Richard’s life outside the home, his secret. His business.

  That Sunday Richard was watching Wild Kingdom, one of his favorite shows. Richard liked animals far more than people. When he saw a large male lion subdued by a tranquilizer gun, he got an idea: Why not use such a gun on humans, he thought. It would be, he reasoned, an ideal way to snatch people marked for death. Monday morning, Richard went to see his buddy Phil Solimene and asked him if he could get him a tranquilizer gun, with the darts and tranquilizer.

  “Sure, I’ll ask around,” Solimene said, and within two days Richard had the gun, thirty-five darts, and enough tranquilizer to put a football team to sleep.

  Mister Softee

  Richard was given a contract to kill another mob guy by the notorious De Cavalcante Jersey family. The job specifically called for torture. The mark had to suffer severely; that was a prerequisite.

  This was a particularly difficult job because the man knew he’d been marked for death and was wary and paranoid, as skittish as a house cat around a crazed junkyard dog. The mark often doubled back for no reason when driving, would suddenly pull over and let the cars behind him pass. Richard followed him for eleven days and could never get the opportunity he needed. Then he figured out that the mark met a woman at a Marriott Hotel in Queens, either a nurse or a beautician because she wore a white uniform. They would spend afternoons and evenings in one of the deluxe rooms. Richard began hanging around the hotel, looking for a clear chance to snatch the mark, waiting for the right moment.

  While in the elevator, coming down from the floor where the mark was having his romantic tryst, Richard first ran into him—a small dark-haired man with shifty eyes, a thin nasty mouth, and bushy eyebrows who was definitely up to no good, Richard was sure. They smiled at each other. Richard knew the guy was a player. The elevator opened. They went their separate ways. A few hours later, Richard went to use the hotel bathroom (he had taken a room in the hotel), and as he was standing at the urinal taking a leak, the shifty-eyed guy walked in and took the urinal next to him. Richard thought this guy was stalking him, and got ready to draw his gun, do battle, kill him right there.

  “How ya doing?” Richard asked, looking down at him, a tight smile about his face.

  “Yeah, okay.”

  “We keep running into each other.”

  “I know.”

  “You following me?” Richard asked, facing him head-on.

  “No…you me?” the guy asked.

  “No. I’m doing a piece of work, that’s all. You’ve nothing to do with it.”

  “So am I.”

  “You sure your business isn’t with me?”

  “Positive. Yours with me?”

  “Absolutely not.” They stared at each other.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  They both finished their business and washed their hands. Richard reached out and shook the guy’s hand.

  “Okay,” he said, “good luck to you.”

  “And to you,” the other said, and they parted.

  Richard had an uncanny way of discerning immediately other contract killers. He knew intimately the moves, the looks, the eyes, the body language, and he could spot another killer a mile away, hands down, with one eye closed, and he was sure the little guy was stalking someone to kill him. Richard even contacted the people who’d given him this job to ask if they’d given it to more than one person. He was assured they hadn’t.

  Hmm…

  Several days later, Richard was sitting in his van (these days he most often used the van for stalking marks). He had with him the animal-tranquilizer gun and four darts filled with animal tranquilizer. If the mark was true to form he’d soon be showing up at the hotel. Richard was planning to snatch him right from the parking lot, if circumstances permitted such a move. It was a warm day. Richard was thirsty. He had already drunk the sodas he’d brought from the house and eaten a turkey on rye Barbara had prepared for him. Richard heard the familiar jingle of a Mister Softee truck. He saw in his rearview the white truck slowly coming down the block. Richard stepped from the van and waved the truck down, sweat beading on his high, wide brow. He walked up to the window and was stunned to see the guy from the bathroom inside the Mister Softee truck.

  “You again,” Richard said, amused though suspicious and on guard.

  “You again,” the guy said.

  “What’re you doing?” Richard asked.

  “This is what I do. I’m Mister Softee…. I use the truck to do, you know, surveillance, to follow people,” he said.

  “Really…fucking clever!” Richard said, impressed, admiring the originality of it. Who would ever suspect a Mister Softee? Brilliant.

  “You still working?” this Mister Softee asked.

  “I am.”

  “You want something?”

  “Yeah, how about a Coke?”

  “Sure thing,” he said, and gave Richard a cold can of Coke. Richard tried to pay.

  “It’s on me.”

  “I like this,” Richard said. “Great idea. Talk about blending.”

  “My name’s Robert, Robert Pronge,” he said, offering his hand.

  “How you doing? I’m Richard.” They again shook hands.

  “Funny how we keep running into each other,” Richard said.

  “I keep my truck in a garage nearby. So you’re doing a piece of work?”

  “Yeah. Guy’s very hard to pin down.”

  “Does he drive?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Use the car.”

  “Can’t be that way—there’s a special request involved here.”

  “Got you. Look, if you can come over to the garage I’ll show you some interesting stuff.”

  “I’ll come now. I’ll follow you,” Richard said, and he got into his van and, curious but on guard, followed Pronge to a garage in a quiet Queens neighborhood.

  Pronge parked his truck in the garage and opened a battered gray locker in the rear corner of the garage. It was filled with weapons—rifles, pistols, hand grenades, boxes of ammunition. Richard was impressed. He’d never heard of an ice-cream man who killed people. What better disguise could someone take on? He showed Richard a hand grenade he had wired up so it could be detonated by remote control. Robert Pronge, as it happened, was also a contract killer.

  “What I do,” Pronge said, “is put the grenade under the driver’s seat of the car and set it off when the moment’s just right. It’s got a radius of about two blocks.”

  “Very clever,” Richard said, noticing a bottle of poison. “I see you use poison.”

  “Absolutely. I use it whenever possible. I made a spray, but you gotta be real careful about the wind.”

  “How do you mean a spray?”

  “I mixed
cyanide with DMSO [dimethyl sulfoxide, a solvent easily absorbed through the skin] and put it in this,” he explained, and showed Richard a sturdy white spray bottle.

  “It works?”

  “Absofuckinlutely. Watch this,” he said, obviously proud of his creation.

  There was a stray cat lolling about some garbage cans there. Pronge walked up to it, acting as if he had something to eat for the cat. When he was close enough, he checked the wind, held his breath, sprayed the cat right in the face, and quickly backed off. The cat immediately went down and started to die.

  “Fuckin’ amazing,” Richard said. “I never knew something like that existed. Will it work on a human?”

  “Absofuckinlutely,” Pronge said, and the two of them shared war stories about how they killed people. This was a one-in-a-million coincidence—that Richard Kuklinski and Robert Pronge would run into each other. It seemed like some kind of ungodly-unholy contrivance Satan had to have a hand in….

  Robert Pronge was a former Special Forces soldier. He had one passion in life and it was killing people. He was thirty-six years old, a guy with an extremely diabolical mind, a seemingly normal man who drove an ice-cream truck but in truth was an unhinged psychopath. Richard would later say of him, The two most dangerous men I ever met in my life were Roy DeMeo and Bob Pronge. Pronge was completely nuts. At least Roy had some semblance of being normal, but Pronge was way way out there…dangerous beyond belief. Far more dangerous than Roy.

  Robert Pronge was an obsessed assassin. He hated the world, everyone in it, and most all his waking hours were devoted to devising new, unorthodox ways to murder people. In his garage he had stacks of Special Forces and survivalist magazines, boxes of books about how to kill people…how to use explosives, poisons, booby traps, pistols, rifles equipped for nighttime use.