by Philip Carlo
That Christmas Eve Barbara had prepared her customary feast of all kinds of fish. Richard acted…strange; he had extreme highs and lows. Christmas reminded him of his childhood, of Stanley—the abuse, Florian’s loss—and he inevitably became depressed. On the other hand, he very much enjoyed buying gifts for the children, watching the decorating. Nothing was too good for his children. He gave Barbara whatever money she said she needed. No problem. No questions. Take it.
Barbara knew well how Richard could become quiet and gloomy during the holidays, just sit in his big easy chair and stare at the floor; stare as if he were seeing things from a long time ago; stare as if he were seeing something—someone—he wanted to hurt. Barbara did her best to keep the mood happy, but with Richard it was an uphill battle.
Christmas morning Barbara’s mother and her boyfriend, Primo, came over early, to be there when they opened their gifts. Richard put on a red Santa cap and a red Santa shirt and happily gave out the gifts. This he seemed to enjoy immensely. He’d pick up a gift, read out the name on it, and, smiling, hand the gift out. This, for Richard, was a joyous time, what he had pined for as a child and never had. This was the best life could offer: to be surrounded by a loving family, everyone happy and smiling and filled with good cheer.
After the opening of gifts, Richard took the whole family for breakfast at the Seville Diner in Westwood. Merrick’s boyfriend, Richie Peterson, was there too. Barbara had gotten him a blue cashmere sweater for Christmas, which he proudly wore now. Merrick was a full six feet tall, and she and Richie were an attractive, though imposing, couple wherever they went.
Later they sat down to Christmas dinner, a six-course feast that consisted of antipasto, shrimp cocktails, salad, ham and roast beef, rosemary potatoes, stuffed artichokes, and mushrooms, followed by pastries, fruit, coffee, and nuts, as was the Italian custom. They then played bingo.
Life for the Kuklinskis that Christmas was good, filled with a lot of nice presents, warm feelings, much love.
That Christmas evening Pat Kane dipped a somewhat stale cinnamon doughnut into a plastic container of lukewarm coffee. He was in his car, watching Danny Deppner’s apartment, hoping he’d show up.
Pat missed his wife and children dearly—it was the first Christmas away from them—but he was a man with a mission. He was sure he was onto something big here, yet still wasn’t sure what the hell it was. The chilled late-December wind blew hard. The bare arthritic branches of trees shook violently. Deppner didn’t show up the whole night. Over the next several days, Kane looked for him in all his haunts but couldn’t find even a trace of him.
On January 3, at 9:00 A.M., Pat Kane was in his office going over a burglary report when the phone rang. Kane had let all surrounding police jurisdictions know that he was looking for Smith and Deppner. A cop from nearby Franklin was calling.
“Pat,” he said, “I got Danny Deppner’s wife sitting here and she’s all bent out of shape—kind of hysterical.”
“Why?”
“Pat, I think we got a homicide here. Can you come over?”
“Homicide…sure, I’m on my way,” Kane said, and got in his car and sped over to Franklin, one town away. Not anticipating the violent storm he was walking into, Kane entered the barracklike structure.
Barbara Deppner was a small, frail woman with dirty blond hair. She might have been attractive once, but now she looked worn-out, beat up, haggard—as if she hadn’t slept for a long time, hadn’t eaten well for longer. All of life’s cruelties, it seemed, had manifested on her face. She had deep lines around her narrow lips, dark circles under puffy eyes, bad teeth; she seemed dirty. She had had eight children with a series of different men, one of whom was Danny Deppner. Pat soon learned she was the girlfriend of Percy House, who was still in jail, still refusing to talk. Barbara was, in fact, pregnant with House’s child.
Kane, as was his way, politely introduced himself and sat down, and Barbara Deppner began to pull open the curtain on one of the most horrific, sensational crime stories Pat Kane, indeed anyone in law enforcement, had ever heard. This was only the beginning; the first act in a violent Shakespearean tragedy that would span forty-seven years—since the murder of Florian Kuklinski; the murder of Charley Lane.
Barbara Deppner said, “I heard from Danny. He’s hiding from the police. After Percy was arrested they took off. They had to. They are deathly afraid of him. He’s the devil!”
“Who?” Kane asked, curiosity arching his wide brow.
“Richard Kuklinski. He’s a killer; I mean that’s what he does: he kills people!” she said.
“Is he a big man? Do they call him Big Rich?” Kane asked.
“Yeah, that’s him. First Kuklinski helped them, I mean hid them. He didn’t want the police, you know, you guys to find them. He put them in this hotel and told them to stay put. But Gary disobeyed! Gary went to see his little daughter, hitchhiked. Kuklinski found out and he killed him; he murdered Gary for seeing his kid.”
“Killed him…I don’t understand, why?”
“’Cause he disobeyed Kuklinski. I’m telling you, he’s a real killer, he’s the devil,” she said. Kane noticed that her hands were trembling as she spoke. He didn’t know if she was telling him the truth or not, but she certainly seemed to believe it was the truth. She was, it was obvious, “scared stiff,” Kane would later explain.
It was this fear that prompted Barbara to flee her home and go stay with her sister, which ultimately brought her to the attention of the police. When Barbara’s sister heard why Barbara was scared, she demanded that Barbara leave, fearing she would get killed too. They argued. A neighbor called the police. Barbara told her story to them, and she was brought in for further questioning. Barbara continued: “So Kuklinski found out. He came to the room that night. He had three hamburgers with him. Two of them had pickles; one didn’t. Gary ate this one. In minutes he began choking, got all blue, and fell on the floor.”
“Danny told you this?” Kane asked, incredulous.
“Yeah. Kuklinski poisoned the hamburger, see. That’s what I’m sayin’. He’s a killer. A professional killer…do you understand?”
“Yes,” Kane said, though he was having trouble wrapping his mind around all this. Why would someone kill because of a series of burglaries? What was that about? How could it be?
“But Gary was still alive, and Kuklinski made Danny choke Gary to death with a wire, a wire from a lamp there in the room. He told me, Danny told me.”
“What hotel?”
“The York Motel just outside the Lincoln Tunnel. Room thirty-one,” she said with certainty. “So Danny did it, did what Kuklinski said; he choked Gary to death with the wire.”
“Really?” Kane said, beginning to believe her, sensing she was telling the truth, but still wary.
“Yeah, really,” she said.
This was a hard pill to swallow. Why, Kane wondered, would this Kuklinski guy kill Gary Smith, risk a murder charge, when all that was going on here was burglary? It didn’t make sense. Though one look at Barbara, her trembling hands, her worried face, told Kane what she said was true.
“Where…where’s Gary Smith now?” he asked.
“They left him there, in room thirty-one, under the freaking bed. He was found there, by the police. Check if you don’t believe me. Go ahead,” she said. “Check.”
Kane immediately took her up on this, picked up the phone and called the North Bergen Police.
When Percy House was first arrested and Danny and Gary were indicted, Richard knew he had to take fast, decisive action. Already he regretted ever getting involved with Percy House and this motley crew, but House was Phil Solimene’s brother-in-law, Phil had vouched for him seven ways from Sunday, and little by little, over a period of several years, Richard had become more and more involved with them—and now it was all coming back to haunt him.
At first Richard tried to help Gary and Danny, to hide them from the police. He did in fact put them up in the York Hotel, paid for them to sta
y there, warned them in no uncertain terms to stay put. But Gary went to see his five-year-old daughter. Richard knew he could have been spotted by the police and picked up, so Gary had to go. As far as Richard was concerned, Gary killed himself by disobeying him. Richard went to a diner near the hotel, bought three hamburgers, sprinkled cyanide on Gary’s, went to the hotel, acting all warm and friendly, served up the burgers, and sat down to eat with Danny and Gary as if he were a good friend, when in truth he was the grim reaper. Richard had become quite the actor. He could fool the stripes off a zebra if he put his mind to it. Almost immediately, Gary succumbed to the poison, fell over, had spasms, turned blue, but didn’t die, and Richard had Danny strangle him, so Danny would, by extension, be guilty of the murder, part of it, and so keep quiet about it.
Then, after the deed was done, Richard made another mistake, as he had with George Malliband: he didn’t permanently dispose of Gary’s body. He foolishly had Danny stash it under the bed. Though he carefully wiped the place clear of prints, they left Gary there like that, dead, as blue as a rotting violet. When recently asked why he didn’t dispose of Gary’s corpse he said, There was a security guy at the hotel and people about; but Richard could have dumped Gary in a steamer trunk and gotten him out of the room, not just leave him there to be found.
The room had been rented twelve times, couples had lustful hotel sex on the bed with Gary there, rotting away, and it was ultimately the stink of his corpse that caused him to be found and the cops summoned. Also, had he not been stashed under the bed, the incident might have been written up as a heart attack.
Meanwhile, Richard had Danny stay in Richie Peterson’s apartment while Kuklinski let Richie stay in the spare room in his house. At first he didn’t want to kill Danny; but that would change soon enough.
Detective Pat Kane quickly found out that a body had, in fact, been discovered in room 31. That didn’t necessarily prove that what Barbara had said was true, he was thinking, but it sure as hell pointed in that direction. He asked the North Bergen police if they’d return to the room and see if a lamp cord had been taken from the lamp there. Within a half hour they called Kane back. The lamp cord was missing from the lamp.
Now, sure that Barbara Deppner had told the truth, knew the inside story, Kane was confronted with a diabolical homicide—and the possibility of another one. If this Richard Kuklinski killed Gary for just going to see his kid, surely he’d kill Danny Deppner, and God knew who else. Kane first made sure to find a safe place for Barbara and her eight children. He then focused his energy on locating Danny Deppner, getting to the bottom of what had happened, and finding this Richard Kuklinski. Kane couldn’t quite get out of his head how Barbara kept saying Kuklinski was the devil, how terrified she was. It was “disconcerting,” he would later say.
Kane now directed his attention to finding Richard Kuklinski. It didn’t take him long. He soon learned that Kuklinski actually lived close to him, only two towns away, and that Kuklinski was married and had three children. He found out too that Kuklinski was a film distributor. Kane phoned up the Dumont police, spoke to a detective, and learned that Kuklinski apparently had a very bad temper: on two occasions he had broken the car windows of people whose driving had somehow offended him. First he punched a hole with his bare fist in the windshield of a car filled with teenaged boys, and in the second incident a woman at a red light ticked him off, and he got out of his car and punched a hole in the passenger window. This was no easy task, Kane knew, punching holes in car windows, but this Kuklinski guy had done it twice. He was, Kane learned, six foot five, 280 pounds, and he was obviously endowed with great physical strength.
His curiosity piqued—the hunt on—Kane took a drive over to Dumont. He cruised past the Kuklinski residence. There were two cars in the driveway. He copied down their license-plate numbers and made his way over to the Dumont police barracks. There he met a detective he knew, and found out that the year before, Kuklinski had been brought in on a bad-check incident, but the case never went anywhere because Kuklinski made the check good.
“But we took his mug shot.”
“Mug shot,” beamed Kane.
“Sure,” the detective said, and he rummaged through his desk and handed the mug shot to Kane. He was looking at a balding man with severe eyes, who sported a well-trimmed goatee. The Dumont detective made a copy for Kane, who soon returned to his office, pulled out a yellow manila file, wrote the name Richard Kuklinski on it, and put it in his top right drawer. Thus began an exhausting investigation that would take four and a half years, strain Kane’s marriage, cause him to be ridiculed by his colleagues; an investigation that would, ultimately, expose one of the most prolific killers in modern times; an investigation that would put Pat Kane in the crosshairs of Richard Kuklinski’s .22 Ruger rifle.
Now, Kane knew, he had to find Danny Deppner, which proved to be a difficult thing to do. But Kane kept digging, and soon found out that Richard Kuklinski was a large distributor of porno movies, and had possible links to organized crime. He added this to the Kuklinski file in his desk.
For Richard the killing of Gary Smith was nothing more than swatting a nuisance fly. Richard knew that Gary could and probably would implicate him in the burglaries, and he wanted to be safe, not sorry. As always, Richard’s way of dealing with potential problems was murder, and thus he killed Gary. Now he had to deal with Danny Deppner. At first he tried to help Danny, hid him from police scrutiny, but it didn’t take long for Richard to learn that Danny had told his former wife (Barbara) all about Gary’s murder, and for Richard, that was reason enough to kill Danny, which he did two weeks after killing Gary Smith.
Danny had been staying in Richie Peterson’s apartment, where Richard had been bringing him meals. When Richard made up his mind to kill Deppner, he did so with cyanide. Deppner readily ate a roast beef sandwich Richard bought him, and soon he was near death. Richard then shot him in the head with a .22 equipped with a silencer. The problem was that Richard had hurt his back and wasn’t able to carry Deppner’s body so he could get rid of it. Because of that, he says, he asked Richie Peterson, his daughter’s boyfriend, to help him get rid of the corpse, and Peterson obliged. Richard told Peterson that Deppner had died of a drug overdose, and he believed him. Peterson set fence posts for a living and was particularly strong; after Richard wrapped the large, two-hundred-pound body in black leaf bags, Peterson carried it to Richard’s car. They drove to Clinton Road in West Milford and dumped the now stiff body in a desolate spot, near a reservoir, and there the body became a feast for all manner of creatures that feed on the dead.
Paul Hoffman, the larcenous pharmacist who had been selling Richard lethal poisons for several years, wanted to buy hijacked Tagamet, a popular drug used to treat the pain caused by ulcers. It was easy to sell, and he kept badgering both Richard and Phil Solimene to find him a stolen load.
“I have cash money,” he kept telling Phil, who of course reported this directly to Richard. Paul Hoffman was writing his own death warrant by telling the likes of Richard Kuklinski and Phil Solimene that he had all this cash he was so anxious to spend. Richard had never liked Hoffman. He thought of him as a greedy scumbag that would sell his own mother to turn a buck. If it wasn’t for the poisons Hoffman had been providing him, Richard might well have killed him long ago.
On April 21, 1982, Paul Hoffman showed up at Solimene’s store, saying he had twenty-five thousand dollars with him and he wanted Tagamet. The going rate was thirty-six dollars for one hundred tablets. Hoffman believed he’d be paying nine. Richard had offhandedly mentioned to Hoffman several times that he might be getting a load, but it hadn’t come to pass yet. He was in a very real sense setting out the bait. Phil now called Richard and told him that Hoffman was in the store claiming to have all this money with him.
“I’ll be right there,” Richard said, and left his house and drove over to Paterson.
Richard knew a state police detective had been asking questions about him, driving past his
house, but with both Deppner and Smith dead he figured, incorrectly, he had nothing to worry about. Percy House was still in jail, couldn’t make bail, but Phil had assured Richard a dozen times that Percy was “stand-up,” that he’d keep his mouth shut. Richard had even given Phil money for Percy’s lawyer. He was, he recently explained, trying to do the right thing. Richard was thinking that this state detective smelled the smoke but had no idea where the fire was, as he put it, and wasn’t overly concerned now that Smith and Deppner were dead. Richard drove over to Paterson without concern that day. As always he was armed, had two handguns on him and a hunting knife strapped to his massive calf. As always, he made sure he wasn’t being tailed, made sudden U turns, pulled onto the side of the road, sat there, waited, moved on. It was a nice spring day, a comfortable seventy-one degrees.
Richard met Hoffman at the store; they talked; Hoffman assured him he had the money, and Richard said the load of Tagamet had come in and that it was at his garage in North Bergen, where Louis Masgay was still stashed in the well with the ice-cold water. The garage was perfect for what Richard had in mind—sudden murder. Richard now drove over to North Bergen and Hoffman followed him.
There were some empty boxes against the back wall of the garage. Richard said they held the Tagamet. Hoffman pulled his car into the garage, thinking he was finally getting his hands on the much-sought-after drug. The moment was right. Richard pulled out a .25 auto and shot Hoffman in the neck without a moment’s hesitation. Richard pulled the trigger again, but the auto jammed and couldn’t fire—
Like a man possessed, Hoffman leaped from his car and attacked Richard with a lionlike ferocity. Hoffman was fighting for his very life. He was not a big or particularly strong man, but his adrenaline gave him nearly superhuman strength, and he fought Richard so hard he almost took control of the situation, even with a bullet in his neck, bleeding profusely. Richard finally managed to grab a tire iron and with it beat Hoffman over the head, finally subduing him, destroying him, killing him there in the garage.