The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer

by Anthony Bruno

  Paul Smith leaned forward on the table. “But, Dominick, look at it from Richie’s point of view. He hasn’t made any money off you. Eleven hundred on the hit kit—big deal. You’ve been talking about this big arms deal with him, about the five to ten hit kits you need for the mob guys, about ripping off the rich kid, but so far he’s seen zilch. Maybe he’s saying to himself, ‘This Dominick guy is bullshit. He talks a good game, but it’s always wait and see with him. To hell with him.’ Maybe it’s time to throw him a bone, call him up and set up something definite.”

  “That’s what you and I tried to do at Lombardi, Paul, but he didn’t show.”

  “Yeah, but he hasn’t made any real money off you yet, Dom—”

  “Did he make any money off Paul Hoffman before he killed him? How about Louis Masgay? I don’t think money is the issue here. It’s control. He’s pulling back to make me hungry. So I’ve gotta do the same thing to make him even hungrier. Otherwise, if I go to him, we have to start playing the game by his rules, doing what he says. And that puts me at a disadvantage. Don’t you see that?”

  “But, Dom—”

  “And would you want to be at a disadvantage with this motherfucker?” The ballistic “fuck” quieted the objections.

  Ron Donahue, who hadn’t said much until now, broke the silence. “Dom’s right. Fuck ’im. Let ’im stew.”

  Eyebrows went up. Ron Donahue usually didn’t say much, but with a reputation like his, he didn’t have to. He was known for getting results. His vote of confidence in Dominick meant a lot.

  “Why do you think Dominick’s right?” Bob Carroll ventured.

  Donahue poured himself a little more scotch. “He just told you, for chrissake.” Enough said.

  Bob Carroll agreed with Dominick’s reasoning, but he still wasn’t comfortable with the idea of letting Kuklinski be. As head of the task force he was the one who had to answer for what they did or didn’t do. He would have a hard time explaining to his superiors that they had officially decided to do nothing. He looked at Dominick. “Hypothetically, what if he kills again while we’re sitting here, playing it cool?”

  “You tell me. How the hell’re we supposed to know what’s going on in that crazy head of his? You wanna take him down right now on the federal charges with the hit kit, just tell me and we’ll do it. But I thought the murders took precedence. This task force was formed to nail him on the murders. If you think we have enough to get an indictment, beautiful. Let’s arrest him and wrap it up. Okay?” Dominick knew they didn’t have enough evidence to get a conviction yet.

  “Look,” Dominick continued, “Kuklinski’s been telling me things. He told me about the cyanide, how he’s used it to kill. He’s told me about arms deals he’s done. He’s told me a lot of things. He’s been treating me like an equal. We’re two bad guys of equal stature. Now if I go running to him, begging him to come kill the rich kid with me, what’s that gonna do to my position? All of a sudden, in his eyes, I won’t be an equal anymore. I’m gonna be just some mook who can’t pull off a rip-off by himself. I’m gonna need him, and then we won’t be equals anymore. Would you confide in someone you considered beneath you?”

  Bob Carroll puckered his lips and reluctantly nodded. “Okay. I see your point. For now we’ll wait. But if we wait another week, another two weeks and you still don’t hear from him, then what? We’re gonna have to do something.”

  Bobby Buccino spoke up. “If it comes to that, we’ll figure some other way to smoke him out. It doesn’t have to be Dominick. It can be someone else. Maybe we can send Kane and Volkman back to the house to talk to him.”

  Bob Carroll nodded in thought. “Okay. But start thinking about it. Just in case.”

  “Fine.”

  “There’s just one thing that bothers me—”

  A beeper went off. Everyone froze. They were looking at Dominick.

  He pulled his beeper out of his belt and shook his head. “Not mine.”

  Paul Smith pulled his out and looked at the LCD readout. “Relax. It’s my wife.”

  “Go call her,” Bobby Buccino said. “Maybe it’s an emergency.”

  Paul Smith rubbed his temples and wrinkled his face. “I just remembered. I told her I’d be home for dinner tonight. I promised her. Shit. I totally forgot.”

  It was five of ten. Paul Smith was gonna catch hell for this. The men around the table could all sympathize.

  Paul Smith propped his head on his chin and looked at Bob Carroll. “So what were you saying, Bob?”

  “I was just wondering, what if Kuklinski does have another source for cyanide? He could be out there plotting God-knows-what against God-knows-who.”

  Dominick had already considered the possibility. “You can never be sure of anything with this guy. He did seem pretty desperate to get the cyanide from me, but who knows?”

  “That’s right,” Bobby Buccino said. “After all, he did have that other guy who used to get it for him. What’s his name? The ice-cream man.”

  “Yeah,” Dominick said, staring at Kuklinski’s face on the bottle of scotch. “Mister Softee.”

  TWENTY THREE

  On hot, sticky summer evenings on the urban streets of northern New Jersey, an incongruous sound mingles with the rumble of traffic and the raucous rhythms blasting from boom boxes. By August it becomes so familiar people hardly notice it anymore. It’s an innocent singsong tune played on a celeste that is very reminiscent of the theme song from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and the recorded sound track is played over and over again, often late into the night. It comes from the Mister Softee ice-cream trucks that trawl the inner-city neighborhoods, enticing children outside with that familiar strain, inviting them to come down and buy a cool, sweet treat. Inevitably anyone who drives one of these ice-cream trucks becomes known to his patrons as Mister Softee, but in the early 1980s there was one driver from North Bergen who was known to Richard Kuklinski as Mister Softee, and he was into more than just Dixie cups and Eskimo Pies. His real name was Robert Prongay.

  Just as Agent 007, James Bond, had Q, the technical wizard who supplied him with deadly gadgets and hightech weaponry, the Iceman had Mister Softee. Although he was ten years younger than Kuklinski, Prongay was the Iceman’s instructor in the various methods of assassination. While mobster Roy DeMeo showed Kuklinski that murder could be profitable, Prongay showed him that it could also be interesting. Kuklinski considered Mister Softee both a madman and a genius.

  When Robert Prongay was a student at Auburn University in Alabama, he channeled his creative energies into pornographic filmmaking. He transformed his room at the Magnolia Dormitory into a studio and rigged a bunk bed over a water bed, installing a two-way mirror in the mattress of the upper berth so that he could film sequences from overhead. His works were shown on campus in dorms and fraternity houses, where admissions were charged. When the administration got wind of this, the campus police were sent to raid Prongay’s room at 6:00 A.M. on May 14, 1974. In their search, they found eight porno films that appeared to have been processed “in New York or New Jersey.” Prongay was eventually expelled from the university for his transgressions.

  But by the time Robert Prongay became associated with Richard Kuklinski several years later, Mister Softee was into more than just making movies. Prongay had become an expert in arcane killing techniques.

  Kuklinski first learned about the ways of cyanide from Prongay, who mysteriously seemed to have no trouble obtaining the poison. To prove the efficiency of putting cyanide into a spray mist, Prongay took him along on a job. They drove to a bank in Pennsylvania early one morning and waited for a certain bank officer to show up for work. When the man arrived, Kuklinski watched from the car as Prongay strolled over to his target, feigned a sneeze, and sprayed cyanide into the man’s face from a small nasal spray bottle. The man collapsed to the asphalt, struggled briefly, then keeled over and died. It took about fifteen seconds, start to finish. From that moment on, Kuklinski became a true believer in the wonders of c
yanide.

  But cyanide wasn’t the only poison in Mister Softee’s arsenal. He had developed a concoction that worked particularly well in crowded bars where a killer could pretend to be intoxicated and carry a glass of the toxin as if it were a cocktail. The “drunk” would pass by his intended victim, stumble, and spill the liquid onto the person’s pants. The killer would apologize profusely, but by the time he started to walk away, the man would already be having trouble breathing as the poison penetrated his skin and entered his system. In the panic caused by the dying man’s collapse, the “drunk” would escape unnoticed.

  Mister Softee experimented with other poisons as well: chloral hydrate, succinylcholine, ricinine. But these didn’t hold a candle to cyanide.

  Also an army-trained demolitions expert, Prongay was equally adept with explosives. One of his inventions was called the Seat of Death. A shotgun shell was glued to a square of plywood and surrounded with flash powder. The board was surreptitiously placed under the driver’s seat of the intended victim’s car with a small cup of ignition fluid positioned next to the shell. When the victim drove the car, he would inevitably hit a bump big enough to upset the cup of fluid, which would ignite the flash powder and fire the shotgun shell up through the car seat.

  One time Kuklinski and Prongay had been given a contract murder, and their Mafia employer stipulated that only the target was to be killed, no innocent bystanders. This was a problem because the gregarious gentleman was seldom alone. Prongay rigged a bomb to the man’s car with a remote-control detonator, but they hadn’t counted on their target’s conviviality. The man must have hated to be alone because he always had someone with him—his wife, one of his kids, friends, business associates, anyone. Kuklinski and Prongay had to follow him in their van for three days before the man was alone in the car. It was like an orgasm for Mister Softee when he was finally able to flip the switch on the remote control and feel the vibrations of the explosion.

  On another murder for hire they found that they couldn’t get close to their victim or his car because of the cadre of bodyguards he kept. Taking a tip from a movie he saw, Mister Softee strapped some C-4 plastic explosive and a detonator to a toy remote-control car. They waited a block away, watching the man’s limousine. When the man finally came out and got into the car, Mister Softee sent the toy car on its way, maneuvering it underneath the limo. When he hit the switch, the C-4 turned a hundred-thousand-dollar stretch into scrap metal.

  Though he savored the unorthodox methods, Prongay, an avid reader of Soldier of Fortune magazine, wasn’t at all averse to doing things the old-fashioned way. When he and Kuklinski were sent to collect on a bad debt from the owner of an adult bookstore outside Chicago, the man refused to pay them. Mister Softee simply told the man it was too bad he felt that way because he was going to have to go out of business now. The bookstore owner looked puzzled as the two men from New Jersey started walking out of his store. Then Prongay lobbed a hand grenade over his shoulder from the doorway. It was the last thing the man saw.

  Together Kuklinski and Prongay did “jobs” all over the country. One job took them to Canoga Park, California, the pornography capital of the country. A porno distributor owed someone in New York a lot of money, and he was making it plain that he didn’t intend to pay up. He was making his shylock look like a fool, and that couldn’t be tolerated.

  Prongay and Kuklinski shipped their guns to Los Angeles via air express, then flew out themselves. They took their time scouting out the man’s home in Canoga Park, which to their annoyance was built like a fortress. Posing as a deliveryman who required the man’s signature in order to leave a package, Prongay rang the doorbell and waited by the heavy metal door, peering through the peephole. After a long wait Prongay was told through the intercom that the man wasn’t at home, that he was on vacation. But after watching the house day and night, Prongay and Kuklinski were convinced that the man was inside hiding. Prongay wanted to bomb the whole place to kingdom come, but Kuklinski reminded him that the wiseguy who had sent them would not be pleased if he found out the man’s family had been hurt. So they waited and tried to think of another way. The afternoon wore on, and the man’s family left the compound by car. Then, as the sun was setting on the horizon, Prongay suddenly remembered the peephole in the door.

  He told Kuklinski to check his gun and follow him. At the front door, Prongay drew his weapon and motioned for Kuklinski to do the same. Then he rang the bell and peered through the peephole. Prongay had remembered that when there’s a strong backlight, you can see silhouettes through a security peephole, and sure enough, he saw a dark shape coming toward him in the peephole, spears of light coming from the floor-to-ceiling windows at the end of the hallway behind. As the silhouette was just about to peer into his end of the peephole, Prongay started firing, and Kuklinski followed suit. They heard something go thunk against the door, then heard some moaning, but it was brief. They walked calmly back to their car and headed for Hollywood to see the brass stars embedded in the sidewalk on the Walk of Fame. Kuklinski suggested they go check out Rodeo Drive as long as they were in L.A. He bought a gift for his wife there, the satin pillow she kept on their bed at home.

  It was also Mister Softee’s idea to freeze Louis Masgay’s body as an experiment to see if freezing could truly disguise the time of death. At the time Kuklinski and Prongay had rented adjacent garages in the same complex. Kuklinski’s space did not have electricity, but Prongay’s did. However, the police never found a freezer large enough to hold a man in either garage. The only freezing unit Kuklinski would have had access to was the ice-cream locker in Mister Softee’s truck, which was powered by an electric generator when the truck’s engine wasn’t running. During the two years that Louis Masgay was missing, Robert Prongay sold ice cream out of that truck.

  In many ways Kuklinski saw Mister Softee as a mentor, someone who showed him that there were better ways to kill: quiet ways, bloodless ways, foolproof ways, nearly undetectable ways. It was the perfect student-teacher relationship: One had the know-how; the other had the ambition. But in August 1984 the two men had a disagreement that led to some heated words, and the volatile Mister Softee made the mistake of his life: He threatened Kuklinski by saying that he knew where he lived.

  He must not have realized that Richard Kuklinski’s home was sacred. The mere suggestion that he would even think about approaching Kuklinski’s wife and children sealed Robert Prongay’s fate.

  On August 9, 1984, Prongay failed to appear in court, where he was facing aggravated assault charges for bombing the front door of his ex-wife’s home and threatening to run over both her and their teenage son. The judge issued a bench warrant, and two sheriff’s detectives were dispatched to find him. The next afternoon they located his garage on Newkirk Street near Seventieth Street in North Bergen, just across the courtyard from Richard Kuklinski’s garage. When the detectives opened the garage door, the first thing they saw was Robert Prongay’s lifeless body hanging out the counter window of his Mister Softee truck. He’d been shot twice in the chest with a .38-caliber revolver.

  TWENTY FOUR

  Crayon drawings of turkeys and Pilgrims hung in the windows of St. Mary’s Catholic School on Washington Avenue in Dumont. The leaves had turned, and the residential streets that led to Sunset Street were lined with knee-high piles. As Barbara Kuklinski turned the corner onto her street, she heard a heavy thud in the trunk of the red Oldsmobile Calais. She frowned and made a face. She’d just gone grocery shopping, and the heaviest item she’d bought was a gallon of milk. She prayed that it hadn’t broken open. Who’d want to hear Richard if it had?

  As she approached the house, she noticed that Matt’s car was in the driveway. Richard’s car wasn’t there. Christen and Matt didn’t hang around the house much when Richard was home.

  She pulled the car into the driveway and popped the trunk, hoping she wouldn’t find it flooded with spilled milk. When she lifted the trunk, she saw that the plastic gallon was out of the bag
and on its side, but nothing had spilled. As she turned the bag upright and started to repack it, she suddenly heard someone calling to her from the street.

  “Mrs. Kuklinski? Mrs. Kuklinski?”

  She turned and saw two men in suits coming up the driveway. She couldn’t imagine what they wanted. Then she noticed that one of them was holding up a badge.

  “Mrs. Kuklinski, I’m Detective Volkman, New Jersey State Police. This is Detective Kane. We’re looking for your husband.”

  “Well, I— Why are you looking for my husband?”

  Barbara Kuklinski watched Detective Kane’s eyes scouring the inside of the trunk. He seemed angry and suspicious.

  But so was she. She didn’t appreciate this sudden intrusion. Why were they confronting her out here in the driveway? Why didn’t they come to the door? “Is there something wrong?” she asked. She knew her voice had a sharp edge to it, and she didn’t care.

  “We’re looking for your husband, Mrs. Kuklinski,” Detective Kane said. “We have some questions we’d like to ask him.”

  “About what?”

  They ignored her question. “Is he at home, Mrs. Kuklinski?”

  “His car’s not here, so I guess he isn’t home.”

  “Do you know where he is, Mrs. Kuklinski?”

  “No.”

  “Is there any way you can get in touch with him?”

  “I don’t know where he is.”

  “Did he leave a phone number where you could leave a message?”

  “I just told you, Detective, I don’t know where he is.” Detective Kane was still staring into the trunk as if he were looking for something. “What’s this all about? What’s the problem?”

  “We’d prefer to discuss it directly with your husband, Mrs. Kuklinski,” Detective Volkman said. He was passing her off, and she didn’t like that.