by Philip Carlo
Roy, as usual, got right to the point: “This fuckin’ Jew Rothenberg’s a problem,” he said. “Did you hear what he said about knowing so much we couldn’t hurt him?” he asked, incredulous.
“I heard,” Richard said.
“Our friend here is concerned. It’s because of him that we’re able to earn; it’s because of him no one bothers us.” Richard nodded respectfully; he understood.
Gaggi spoke now for the first time. “I made the mistake of letting this kike see me. He knows who I am. It’s a problem. The cocksucker can put me away.”
Nino Gaggi dreaded the thought of going to jail. He viewed himself as a businessman who just happened to rob and kill, and jail never played into the equation. Most mob guys know—never forget—that jail is an inherent part of the territory, but not Nino Gaggi. He was above that. Jail wasn’t for him.
“I can take care of this problem,” Richard offered. He now knew why he’d been called to Brooklyn, and he knew this was a good chance to get in good with Gaggi and the Gambino people. “I’ll be happy to go see him,” Richard added.
“Good,” Roy said, and told Richard where Paul Rothenberg lived, the type of car he drove, even the license plate number. Nothing else had to be said. Now it was just a matter of time.
When Richard went out on a “piece of work” he usually took his van with tinted windows. He brought a supply of club soda and a plastic container he could use to relieve himself.
Being an efficient contract killer was all about planning and patience—being able to sit and watch and wait for the right moment to strike; this was the part of a piece of work that Richard enjoyed the most, what he excelled at, the stalking and planning.
Sunday July 29 was a hot, humid day. Richard discreetly parked his van a block away from Rothenberg’s house and sat there waiting. Roy had told Richard that Rothenberg was married, and that he often took his wife shopping. Rothenberg also had a black girlfriend. Richard had met her several times. Richard had with him today a .38 with a silencer. Patient and calm, he sat there in the July heat waiting for Rothenberg, listening to country music.
When Rothenberg finally walked out of the house, he took a rag from the trunk and began cleaning the windows of his car. Roy had asked Richard to call him when he spotted Rothenberg, which Richard now did from a phone booth on the corner there. He beeped in the number. Roy called him right back.
“What’s cookin’?” Roy asked.
“I’m looking at him right now. He’s in front of his house cleaning the windows of his car,” Richard said. “Looks like he’s going somewhere.”
“Call me and let me know where he goes. If possible I want to see this go down.”
“Roy, that complicates—”
“Rich, just call,” Roy insisted, always the bully, always the boss.
Richard hung up. He didn’t like the idea of letting Roy know when and where the hit would go down, but he’d do as Roy asked.
Soon Rothenberg’s wife left the house. They both got in the car and off they went, Richard following. Richard did not know the area well, but he managed to trail Rothenberg to a mall. Because it was the weekend there were many shoppers. Rothenberg parked, his wife got out of the car and went into a store. Rothenberg began reading the sports section of the Daily News. Richard called Roy and told him where he was, that he was planning to pop him right there. Because of the silencer he’d be able to do the job if the right moment presented itself.
“I’m on my way,” Roy said. “Wait for me!” he added.
“Are you nuts?” Richard began, but Roy hung up. Angry about this, Richard went back to his van. Shaking his head in disgust, he sat there, watching Rothenberg read the paper. He knew that once his wife came out of the store, the moment would pass. He would not kill him in front of his wife. Rothenberg was parked off to the left of the large lot, near an alley between two cinder-block buildings where goods were unloaded from trucks.
Sure enough, Richard spotted DeMeo’s white Lincoln come speeding into the lot, tires screeching. Richard rolled his eyes. There were three guys in the car: Freddie, Dracula, and Chris. Freddie spotted Richard’s van and pointed to it, Richard could see. They started toward Richard. Roy got out of the car and walked over to the van.
“Where is he?” Roy asked.
“There, but I don’t understand—what’s this all about? Why’d you bring your army?”
Before Roy could answer, Richard watched Rothenberg get out of his car and start toward the alley, moving quickly, looking over his shoulder, fear about his face.
“He spotted you,” Richard said, pissed off. He stuck the .38 into his pants, got out of the van, and went after Rothenberg, who now began to run into the alley. When Richard reached the alley, he pulled out the .38, aimed carefully, fired two times, and dropped Rothenberg. He hid the gun, turned, and made his way back to the van.
Roy approached him. “Fuckin’ great shot, Rich,” he said, smiling.
“Yeah,” Richard said, getting into his van, keeping his anger to himself.
“You mad, Rich?”
“Roy, come on, I just popped someone, I want to get the fuck outta here,” Richard said, and pulled away.
Richard got lost but soon found his way to the Belt Parkway and headed for home, thinking that Roy DeMeo was nuts, that he had watched too many gangster movies. And Richard didn’t like the fact that three other guys had seen the hit; this was still another thing Richard had against Roy DeMeo. The list was growing.
As Richard drove back to his family, a man in a red Mustang cut him off. Richard pulled up alongside the red Mustang and began to curse the guy, made a fist at him. The driver of the Mustang gave Richard the finger. Incensed, Richard followed him off the parkway and caught up with him at a light. Just the two of them were there. The guy jumped out of his car. Richard shot him dead, made a turn, and left him there by his car, another unsolved murder done by Richard. With no witnesses and no apparent motive, the police could do nothing. He soon dropped the .38 in a creek, but he kept the silencer. He had used the gun to kill two people within the span of forty minutes.
Richard returned home, had a turkey-on-rye sandwich, sat down in the living room, and watched TV with Barbara. The children were sleeping.
Angry, serious-faced detectives immediately went and picked up Roy DeMeo and questioned him about Paul Rothenberg’s murder. He had nothing to say other than his name and address. Anthony Argrila—lucky for him—had been boating when his partner was murdered by Richard. He swore he knew nothing about Roy DeMeo, nothing about anything, said that his partner had “a lot of dealings with people I know nothing about.”
“Truth is,” he told skeptical detectives, “he dealt with people I never even met. Truth is, I think, no I’m sure, he was stealing from me, you know,” he said.
However, the police trailed Tony Argrila and actually saw him meet with DeMeo several times, proving that he lied through his teeth; but there wasn’t much they could do about it at this point.
More than anything in the world, Roy DeMeo wanted to be made, and he was hoping this murder would do the trick. A big smile about his pudgy, dark-eyed face, Roy went to Nino Gaggi at his Bensonhurst home on Cropsy Avenue and proudly told his boss, hopefully his sponsor—the man that could have him inducted into the Gambino family—that Rothenberg was dead, and that he’d actually seen him go down. Gaggi wanted all the details, which Roy gladly regaled him with.
“Good, good job!” Nino told Roy, proud of him. How quickly he had disposed of this potentially serious problem. He hugged and kissed Roy, as is the custom. Little did Nino Gaggi know that Roy DeMeo would soon bring the world crashing down on his balding head.
Richard did not ask for or receive any payment for this hit. It was a favor. But Roy later told him, “The slate’s clean between us,” forgiving fifty thousand dollars Richard owed Roy for porn. All nice and neat and tidy, it seemed.
31
Lady and
Pouilly-Fuissé
&nb
sp; Barbara Kuklinski both dreaded and looked forward to weekends. Though she never knew when Richard would be home—he often left the house without any notice, at the drop of a dime, at all times of the day and night—she tried to make plans that included him. Barbara enjoyed getting dressed up and going to nice restaurants, enjoyed good food, good company, good conversation. Unlike her mother, Genevieve, Barbara was outgoing and gregarious and liked the company of friends and other couples on Friday-and Saturday-night outings. In this she was just like her father.
When they went out, Richard always ordered the best of everything. Money was no object. As far as he was concerned money was for spending, and he spent as if he had a tree in the backyard that grew crisp new hundred-dollar bills every time you watered it. Chateaubriand, lobster, three-hundred-dollar bottles of wine, were the norm. Richard also enjoyed putting on hand-tailored suits, silk ties, expensive Italian shoes. Barbara picked out most of his clothes. He trusted her taste; he trusted her social graces and direction. If another couple joined them, as often happened, Richard picked up the tab. He wouldn’t let anyone else pay. Barbara tried to explain that he didn’t have to pay every bill, that it was okay to split tabs or let others pay. But he didn’t see it that way, and her words fell on deaf ears.
Barbara didn’t know where all the money was coming from. She figured he had finally found his way in business and didn’t question him. If she had questioned him, his answer would have been a blank stare, a stone face, as though he hadn’t heard her. Barbara learned to accept, like everything else, her husband’s tight lips…and generous ways. When Barbara and Richard went out for a night on the town, he was usually quiet, didn’t talk much. He just sat there, taking everything in. Barbara, however, talked enough for both of them, and that was fine with him. She’d even answer questions for him. Richard now only drank a little wine. He knew hard alcohol made him mean and he had the good sense to steer clear of it. He was mean enough without it.
Richard was not only generous, he could be amazingly considerate, an incorrigible romantic. He had, for instance, nicknamed Barbara “Lady” and regularly called her that, and he’d arrange for Kenny Rogers’s song “Lady” to be playing when they entered favorite restaurants—Palosadium, Archer’s, Over Rose’s Dead Body, Le Chateau, and Danny’s Steakhouse—and he made sure Barbara’s favorite wines, Montrachet and Pouilly-Fuissé, were in fancy ice buckets next to their table. He even arranged for freshly cut long-stemmed red roses to be placed on their table before they arrived.
Nothing was too good for Lady.
This Richard—the good Richard—Barbara loved in her own quiet way. The other Richard, however, she had grown to hate, and often the bad feelings she harbored for him far outweighed the good ones. Like a pendulum, her feelings swung back and forth—love, hate; love, hate.
When they dressed up and went out, Richard was usually polite, a gentleman. But he was obsessively jealous. If a waiter or any man paid too much attention to Barbara or stared at her, Richard’s face iced over, and he didn’t have the slightest compunction about becoming rude, aggressive…even violent. More than ever he viewed Barbara as his personal property, a treasured bauble, and it was a dangerous enterprise, paying her too much attention.
One Saturday evening they went to a movie in Dumont. As they were leaving, Richard abruptly walked away from Barbara, went over to some guy Barbara didn’t even notice, and demanded to know why he was staring at Barbara. The man told Richard he was crazy; that he wasn’t staring, to “shove it.” Richard punched the guy and knocked him out cold.
“Why, Richard?” Barbara asked when they got outside.
“I saw him staring disrespectfully.”
“At me?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t even see him.”
“This was between me and him,” he said.
Barbara loathed to be in the car with Richard, for often he got into arguments with people about how they drove, which inevitably caused him to lose his temper, get out of the car, berate people, break windshields with his huge ham-hock fists. Barbara knew that when Richard was like this she could do nothing to reason with him. No one could. Not even a cop with a drawn gun. It was best she just keep quiet because his rage could suddenly be turned on her. Richard was a walking time bomb. When he was mad and you looked at him you could almost hear the ticking. He could go off at any moment. That was reality. That was what she had to live with. Even when he was in the car with his daughters, he’d get into these nutty, nonsensical, violent disputes with men and women about how they drove. He was even arrested for breaking the windshield of a woman’s car when his daughters were with him. However, the woman refused to press charges. She was—correctly—deathly afraid of Richard. To see him in one of his rages was a frightening experience. No one who saw it was apt to forget.
Dwayne was still too young to comprehend fully what a madman his father could become, but both Merrick and Chris well knew how volatile and violent he was, and both of them were terrified of their father, scared to the core of their little beings. Merrick took to trembling when Richard lost it. But he never laid a finger on either girl. Even now, so many years later, both Merrick and Chris pale and tremble at just the sound of Richard’s voice.
Yet, when Merrick had to be hospitalized, as she often was, Richard could not be more solicitous and caring. Oh how Merrick loved that daddy, and oh how Merrick feared the other daddy. It was during the quiet times at the hospital, when Richard and Merrick were alone in the early-morning hours and late at night, that Richard began telling his firstborn about his childhood. How he, his mother, and his brother Florian were brutalized by Stanley; how poor they were; how there was never enough of anything; how he stole to eat. He never spoke like this to Chris or even to Barbara, only to Merrick. She’d look at him with her huge, honey-colored fawn eyes and silently listen to him, having an understanding beyond her years. It wasn’t as though he were trying to rationalize or make any kind of excuse for his temper tantrums and his violence against Barbara. He just wanted her to know the truth; how it had been. But after hearing these things, Merrick only loved her father all the more.
There were times at home when Richard would have one of his outbursts and break things and then lock himself in his office. Merrick would go to him, ask him to calm down, to “please relax, Daddy.” During these episodes Richard would explain in a matter-of-fact way, “You know if…if I kill Mommy, if something happens and she dies, I’ll have to kill you all…. I can’t leave any witnesses.”
“Yes, Daddy. I know, Daddy,” she said.
As strange and horrible a thing as this was to tell a child, Richard was trying to let Merrick know in advance—out of consideration—what might happen. He wanted her to understand that his doing such a thing was out of…love. Only out of love.
He loved Barbara too much.
He loved his children too much.
That was the problem. The only way he could deal with their loss, if he inadvertently killed Barbara, was to kill them. Essentially, that was how Richard had dealt with all his problems since he was a child. Kill it and the problem goes away. Richard had a unique ability to compartmentalize emotional pain and turmoil. He was like two different people who didn’t know each other, two strangers in the same body.
“But you, Merrick…. You’ll be the hardest to kill. You understand?” he’d tell his daughter, she recently explained.
“Yes, Daddy,” she said, and she did understand and readily accepted this. She was, she knew, his favorite, and she coveted that.
That August Richard and Barbara—with her cousin Carl and his wife, Nancy—rented a nice beach house in Cape Cod for two weeks. Barbara was still very close to Carl. Richard had grown to accept and even like Carl, though because he was a man, Richard would not let Barbara kiss him hello or even hug him. She could only shake his hand. Carl and Nancy had two children, and all the kids loved playing on the beach, making sand castles and frolicking in the surf. Richard enjoyed playin
g with the kids. He helped them with their castles and sea walls, dug deep holes for them, let them cover him in sand, though his skin was fair and he always ended up sunburned. Barbara would warn him about the sun as if he were a child, remind him how sensitive he was to it, but Richard so enjoyed playing with the children that he’d inevitably end up burned red like a steamed lobster.
They had barbecues and cookouts on the beach, everyone happy and smiling and having a good old time. To look at Richard there on the beach with the children, you’d think he was the best dad in the world. A wonderful, devoted family man who surely wouldn’t hurt a fly.
That summer the family also went down to Florida to visit Barbara’s father. Little Dwayne couldn’t fly because he’d get ear problems from the altitude of the plane, so the family drove. They got up early—all the kids excited about the trip, Disney World, seeing their grandpa—piled into the car, and headed south on the New Jersey Turnpike. During this Florida trip, Richard did not lose his temper at the way someone drove. They stopped at a restaurant and had lunch on their way down and continued on. Barbara and the children sang and played license-plate poker, seeing who could find the most matched numbers on any given plate, and they looked for animal-shaped clouds. They stayed in a good hotel, where the kids played in the pool, and continued on in the morning. Richard even sang along with the family as they went.
As fun and good as the trip was, both Chris and Merrick were wary and on guard; they never knew when their father would go off, when Barbara might say something to upset him. Barbara had a sharp tongue and would use it to cut Richard if she had a mind to. It was, in a sense, her way of getting back at him for bullying her.