The Ice Man

by Philip Carlo

  The cocaine from Brazil arrived and was delivered to a warehouse Gaggi and DeMeo had found in south Brooklyn, down by the waterfront, near the old armory.

  Richard, seriously armed, was there to receive it. It was a lot more than he thought. The cocaine was on wooden skids, two of them, all neatly wrapped in plastic. Richard set up a cot for himself, put broken glass all over the floor, even installed two electronically activated beams at the entrance so no one could sneak in. He had to stay with the coke until it was picked up. Those were his orders. That night a few of DeMeo’s guys did show up and took the load away. Richard’s job was done. He soon received a big bag of money from DeMeo, minus what Malliband had owed, of course. But DeMeo didn’t charge any vig at all.

  For months this went on flawlessly. The loads came in; Richard received and guarded them until they were picked up; a short while later he was given a bag filled with hundred-dollar bills. Richard was pleased. It was all working out well. Everyone was making money. There were no problems.

  That soon changed.

  DeMeo beeped Richard; they met near the Tappan Zee Bridge.

  “We’ve got problems,” DeMeo said, “with the Brazilians.”

  “What happened?” Richard asked, concerned.

  DeMeo explained that he and Gaggi had found a better coke contact, Colombians out of Medellín, that sold coke for far less than the Mediro brothers, and DeMeo had not paid the Brazilians for the last load; furthermore, he wasn’t going to pay them, he said.

  “How much is involved?” Richard asked, thinking this was a stupid thing for DeMeo and Gaggi to be doing. Why, he wondered, were these Italians always so greedy?

  “Little more than half a million. And they…well, they threatened us.”

  “Of course. Roy, these are serious guys. I wouldn’t fuck with them. Give them—”

  “We ain’t,” he interrupted.

  “And what do you want me to do?”

  “Go there with a few of the guys and kill the cocksuckers,” DeMeo said.

  “In Brazil?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Roy, Rio is a big place; I don’t know my way around.”

  “I’ll send you with three of the guys.”

  Richard thought about this. It was a risky proposition, he knew…but he liked the challenge, even the danger, of it. “If I go I want to do this by myself,” he said.

  “Any way you think is best. There’s sixty large in it for you.”

  “Okay,” Richard said, intrigued by the challenge, how the odds were stacked against him; his death wish was again coming into play.

  “When can you go? The sooner the better,” DeMeo said.

  “I’ll leave tomorrow,” Richard said. “That soon enough?”

  “Good man,” DeMeo said, and hugged and kissed Richard. They both got back into their cars and went in opposite directions, Richard’s mind playing over, as if he were studying a giant life-and-death chess match, what he would do, how he would do it.

  By now you know, he recently explained, what I liked most was the hunt, the challenge of what the thing was. The killing for me was secondary. I got no rise as such out of it at all…for the most part. But the figuring it out, the challenge—the stalking and doing it right, successfully—that excited me a lot. The greater the odds against me, the more juice I got out of it.

  Gambling, it was all about gambling, I guess, you know, and I was betting my life, all I had; that was the bet. Me, alone, against them…I don’t mean these guys necessarily, the Brazilian brothers, anyone I was going up against. This involved me, only me—it didn’t put my family in danger at all. That I’d never do. Gamble with them. Their lives. Their well-being.

  Richard didn’t seem to realize that he was, in fact, putting his family in jeopardy. Serious jeopardy. South Americans, as a matter of course, regularly strike at enemies’ families. For them it was the norm. For Richard it was anathema. For South Americans, the first, logical place to strike was to kill a man’s family, and it was, they knew, much more painful and lasting than even doing in the intended target.

  Moreover, Richard didn’t seem to connect what he was doing to the full spectrum of calamities that could and would befall his family if he was found out. Such a thing was so painful for him, he didn’t think about it. Perhaps he couldn’t think about it. He pushed it away somewhere in a dark corner of his mind and left it there.

  Getting weapons to Rio, Richard knew, would be the first order of business. That night he took apart two Italian automatics with silencers, put them in a wooden box, lined it with pieces of styrofoam. In the morning he mailed it and a box of nine-millimeter bullets to himself at the Copacabana Palace. (He was using a bogus name.)

  As usual, he didn’t say one word to Barbara about where he was going or what he was doing. He kissed her so long, drove himself to Kennedy Airport, left his car in the parking lot, and boldly caught a Pan Am flight—of course first-class—directly to Rio de Janeiro.

  The plane ran into a fierce thunderstorm and Richard was tossed about in his seat. He was a superstitious man, and he hoped the storm wasn’t some kind of bad omen. As much as Richard could like someone, he liked the Mediro brothers; he very much liked Eduardo’s little girl Yada. That weighed on him for a while, but he soon forgot about her. Richard was very good at compartmentalizing his feelings, and he focused his thoughts, his energy, on murdering the brothers and getting away with it unscathed. That was all that mattered. That was the job at hand.

  He took a cab from the airport directly to the lovely Copacabana Palace, checked in under his false name, and went up to the luxurious room. It had a sweeping view of the beach, and Richard stood at the window admiring the tawny-colored beach and the beautiful nearly naked females all over the place.

  The guns were supposed to arrive that day, but they never came. They were, no doubt, stolen by a customs agent, and now Richard was in Rio with no weapons, feeling as if he were in band with no instrument to play.

  This was, of course, a dilemma. Richard knew no one here, didn’t speak a word of Portuguese, didn’t even know how to get to their home. He walked onto Copacabana Beach, down to the water’s edge, turned, and faced the bustling, steaming city. Using the giant Christ as a point of reference, Richard had an idea where the house was, but he had no car.

  Perplexed, concerned, he walked all the way to the Ipanema district and back. He sat at a shaded outdoor café, ordered an iced tea, and watched the Brazilian people go about their fast-paced hot-blooded lives. Here it was like summer and the temperature was in the low nineties. The sun, so close to the equator, was much stronger than back in the States. Richard could see its searing heat rising from the black-and-white mosaic tiled sidewalk in sensuous undulating waves. He just sat there watching people, the gorgeous women, thinking this thing out.

  It didn’t take long for Richard to spot street urchins dealing drugs along the sidewalk on the beach side of the wide avenue, on the other side of the street. They were tough little tykes, and as the sun began to set behind Sugarloaf Mountain, Richard approached a tall, skinny cappuccino-colored kid. The kid saw him coming from across the street, thinking Richard was a gringo who wanted to suck his dick. Many such men approached him for he was a handsome boy, maybe fifteen. He smiled at Richard, willing to let anyone who paid him suck his dick to his heart’s content.

  Using mime, his street savvy, Richard quickly managed to let the boy know he wanted to buy a gun, a pistol, a .38. The street kid, an outlaw, immediately understood exactly what Richard wanted and, using his fingers, let him know how much such a gun would be. More or less a hundred bucks. Richard said okay. They agreed to meet in this same spot at twelve the following afternoon. The boy asked for the money now; Richard said no—he’d get paid when he brought the “pistola.”

  Not sure if the kid would deliver, Richard went back to the café and watched the busy thoroughfare some more. When darkness engulfed the city he returned to his room and called Barbara. They talked about the kids. He
said nothing about where he was. She didn’t ask. He went back downstairs, had dinner, went for another long walk, and retired early.

  At noon the following day, Richard crossed the street, and the boy was there, holding a brown paper bag. Richard looked inside. Sure enough it was a .38 Smith & Wesson. Richard paid him. They shook hands and parted. Back in his room, Richard took the gun apart. It was old and somewhat beat-up, but all the components worked. He cleaned and oiled it.

  Now carrying the gun, Richard went back out and walked away from the beach, into Rio Central. He located a hardware store, bought a hammer, pliers, and screwdriver, walked on. He found a quiet street and quickly managed to steal a van, using the tools he’d just bought. Now with wheels, he headed straight for the hills overlooking Rio, and using the giant Christ as a point of direction he actually managed to locate the Mediros’ home within several hours. He smiled, parked down the street, and waited, not sure what to do or how to do it. He wasn’t there an hour when the electronic gate suddenly opened and out came the yellow Mercedes. Both brothers and two other men were in it. Richard followed them back down to the beach area along Avenida Atlantica. They parked and went into a secluded restaurant on a quiet Ipanema street. Richard had six bullets. He knew every shot had to count, that surely they were armed and he had to move quickly. He managed to park near the Mercedes. He let the air out of the front left tire, went back to the van, and waited, tense like a coiled spring, a giant cat about to strike, but calm inside; ice cold inside…an Ice Man. Richard was in his element. This is what Richard did. Stalk to kill. After two hours, they came out. They had obviously been drinking, were now laughing, relaxed. As they approached the Mercedes, Eduardo first noticed the flat. After appropriate curses, one of the other guys opened the trunk of the Mercedes and pulled its spare tire out. The others waited. They lit cigarettes. Richard stepped out of the van and calmly walked right toward them, staying in shadows as he went. John Carlo first spotted him—but he couldn’t quite conceive that it was truly Richard. Richard pulled out the pistol and in a matter of several seconds fired four times, dropped all of them. However, he had to fire a second shot to finish off Eduardo.

  The job done, Richard got into the van and pulled away. Shocked diners and waiters poured from the restaurant. Richard drove to the other side of the city, to Lemi, and left the van there after carefully wiping all his prints off it. He threw the gun into the ocean and returned to the hotel. The following day Richard left Rio on the first flight out.

  Richard was very proud of this piece of work. It was the kind of accomplishment he wanted to tell people about, brag about, but of course he couldn’t.

  He got into his car and drove back to New Jersey, checking his rearview and taking U turns as he went. Near his home, he beeped DeMeo from a phone booth. Roy called him within minutes. Richard let him know the brothers weren’t a concern anymore.

  “Big Guy, you’re the fuckin’ best—the fuckin’ best, you hear!” DeMeo said.

  Richard thanked him, hung up, and went home, pleased and proud of himself, but thinking DeMeo and Gaggi were greedy bastards.

  Several days later, Richard met DeMeo at the diner near the Tappan Zee Bridge, and DeMeo gave him, as promised, a paper bag with sixty thousand dollars in it, in one-hundred-dollar bills. They hugged and kissed each other on the cheek and went their separate ways.

  Sammy “the Bull” Gravano

  Sammy Gravano was born and raised in the heart of Mafia country, Bensonhurst Brooklyn.

  As a youth Gravano was a tough kid, a member of the notorious street gang called the Rambers. It was headed by Gerald Pappa, a vicious, extremely tough street fighter with jet-black hair and light blue eyes, one of the roughest guys in all of Brooklyn—no easy task. Gerald Pappa was known as Pappa Bear because of his unusual strength. He, like Gravano, would eventually be inducted into one of the five New York crime families, the Gigante clan, while Sammy would be made by the Gambinos. Sammy Gravano and Pappa were very close as teenagers. Gravano would eventually name his only son Gerald, in honor of Pappa.

  Gravano had a bad habit of killing his friends and business partners; he murdered his own brother-in-law, Eddie Garofalo. He was known as a greedy, black-hearted backstabber. If Gravano called you up and invited you for dinner, a friendly drink, an espresso, it was a good idea to leave town in a hurry.

  John Gotti would later take a shine to Gravano and promote him to underboss of the Gambino family—a fatal mistake—after the two of them successfully conspired to kill Paul Castellano on December 15, 1985, in front of Sparks Steak House. Now it was early March 1980. Richard Kuklinski knew Gravano; they had met at restaurants and Roy’s place over the years.

  According to Richard, when Gravano had a “special piece of work to do”—the killing of a cop—he contacted DeMeo, and DeMeo referred him to Richard and strongly vouched for him. DeMeo wanted nothing to do with killing a cop, even a crooked cop. No matter how you looked at that, it spelled trouble, and DeMeo knew it. It was Peter Calabro.

  DeMeo let Richard know Gravano would be calling, and a meeting was set up at a diner on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge. They met in the parking lot, shook hands. Gravano came with a driver. As Richard and Gravano walked and talked, Gravano’s car slowly followed. Gravano wasted no time. “I’ve been hearing good things about you for a long time, Rich. I have a special piece of work I’d like you to do. It’s gotta be done pretty quickly.”

  “I’m available,” Richard said.

  “The guy lives in Jersey. I’ve got his address and photo for you, even the weapon—a shotgun. You okay with that?” Gravano said, not mentioning that the mark was a cop.

  “Sure. They’re messy but they work.”

  “Okay, there’s twenty-five large in it for you.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “Where’s your car?”

  “Just down the ramp here.”

  “I’ll give you everything right now, all right?”

  “Sure.”

  Richard led them to his parked car. Gravano had his driver open the trunk of his car. In it was a green canvas bag, like a small army duffel bag. Gravano opened it. Inside was the shotgun, a walkie-talkie, and a photo of the mark, a nice-looking dark haired man with an oval-shaped face. Gravano still said nothing about him being a detective out of the Brooklyn hot-car division. He had been working with the Gambino family for years now, providing a laundry list of services, some of which had caused people to be murdered. It was Calabro’s wife, Carmella, that DeMeo had murdered. Calabro had gotten himself in trouble, and both Gravano and DeMeo were concerned he would turn on them. He had to go. Richard took the canvas bag and put it in the trunk of his car.

  “I’ll pay you when it’s done, okay?” Gravano asked.

  “Sure. I know you, you know me, no problem,” Richard said, and it was done.

  Peter Calabro lived with his young daughter, Melissa, and another detective, John Dougherty—also a widower—in a simple ranch-style house in Saddle River, New Jersey, a secluded wooded area. Richard checked out the house but decided not to do the murder there. He saw Calabro’s young daughter with some other young girls and opted to do the hit down the road from the house, a narrow, little-used road with few homes.

  The plan was for Calabro to be followed from work, and Richard would be informed via the walkie-talkie when Calabro was approaching the house. Calabro knew he was marked—there had been threats against his life—and as he made his way from Brooklyn back home that evening he took a secondary route, traveled on back roads, not Route 17. But still he was followed, and Richard knew when and from which direction he was coming. It was March 14, 1980, a cold night, snowing heavily.

  Richard parked his van on the snow-covered road, put on his emergency lights, grabbed the shotgun, crouched in front of the van, and waited for just the right moment. Richard was able to see the approaching car, its headlights reflecting off the snow as it came. He had parked his van so that Calabro was forced to go slow
ly; Richard raised the shotgun and, at just the right moment, when Calabro was abreast of Richard, cut loose with both barrels of the blue-black twelve-gauge, shooting Calabro in the side of the head with the double-ought buckshot rounds. Calabro was killed instantly. His brown Honda meandered for a ways, then careened down a thirty-foot embankment and crashed into a stand of trees.

  Calmly, Richard got back into his van and left, still not knowing he had just killed a cop.

  As Richard made his way back to Dumont he dumped the shotgun into a stream near his home and went into the house. It was a Friday night. His daughters Chris and Merrick were in the living room with some friends. Barbara was sleeping. Richard made himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and retired.

  At 2:15 A.M. Saturday morning a snowplow crew clearing the road found Calabro’s car. In the morning Richard first learned that the man he had killed was a decorated NYPD detective. It didn’t make any difference to Richard that he had killed a cop, but it would have been nice, the right thing to do, if Gravano had told him. Be that as it may, Gravano called Richard a few days later and made arrangements to give Richard the twenty-five thousand.

  It was over and done…for now.

  In years to come, though, this murder would take on a life of its own and come back to haunt not only Sammy Gravano, but the United States Justice Department as well.

  The accident occurred on March 18 of that same year. John Gotti’s youngest son, Frank, borrowed a friend’s motorized minibike, shot out onto the street where the Gottis lived, and was struck and killed by a car driven by one John Favara.

  Surely, Favara should immediately have left town, but what he did do was to continue driving the car about the neighborhood, infuriating Mrs. Gotti and her husband, John. He also should certainly have gone to the Gotti home and told the family how genuinely sorry he was. He did neither. His days were numbered. It was by now well known that Richard did “special work,” and Gravano asked him that July if he’d be interested in applying his special talent to the man who had killed John Gotti’s son. Richard knew all about what had happened.