by Philip Carlo
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 firsthand, 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.
37
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.”
<
br /> “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.
Pronge, like Richard, filled contracts for the Mafia, and these two hit it off like long-lost relatives. Richard took an immediate liking to Pronge, who liked Richard. After sharing notes with each other for a while, Richard said he had to get back to work, and he left after they made plans to meet again soon.
The following evening, Richard managed to park his van close to the mark’s Lincoln. Richard had the tranquilizer gun close at hand. He had practiced with it and was sure he could score a bull’s-eye at close range. A little after midnight, the mark left the hotel and approached his car. Just as he reached it, Richard shot him with the dart, hit him in the left buttock. Startled, the mark turned, began to reach for a weapon, but never made it. He went right down. Richard picked him up, put him in the van, handcuffed his hands and feet together, put duct tape over his mouth, and headed for the caves in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
This job required torture, and Richard was going to feed him to the rats. He was very pleased at how well the dart gun had worked and planned to use it again. By the time he arrived in Bucks County it was almost 4:00 A.M. Richard parked the van, pulled the mark out, uncuffed his ankles, and walked him to the cave. The guy was hysterical now, crying like a baby, but his mouth was taped and all he could do was grunt and moan. Richard didn’t want to hear anything he had to say. He had heard it all before and didn’t want to hear it again.
Richard says he didn’t get any particular kick out of doing this. It was just a job, nothing more, he says. In the cave, using a powerful flashlight, Richard made the mark lie down, again cuffed his ankles together. He used his knife and cut the man’s arms so he’d bleed. The blood, Richard knew, would quickly draw the rats to him. Richard set up the camera and light and left.
When Richard returned two days later the mark was completely gone. There was only a stain on the ground where he had been. This time the rats took even his bones.
Richard retrieved the camera and that night he watched the video in his war room on Spring Street, and sure enough it was, again, all on film: how the rats first approached, took tentative bites, soon completely covered the mark. Richard proceeded to take the video to Hoboken and showed it to the De Cavalcante captain who had ordered the job. He loved it. Clapped his hands, patted Richard on the back.
“You’re the fuckin’ best!” he proclaimed, and gladly gave Richard forty thousand dollars.
Another job well done, another customer satisfied, Richard headed back home, looking in his rearview as he went, pulling off the highway suddenly to make sure he wasn’t being trailed. Besides country music, Richard was fond of oldies, and he sat there listening to “Blue Moon.” The oldies, he now says, relaxed him.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, Richard knew this couldn’t go on forever, that sooner or later, if he didn’t stop, there would be trouble. He didn’t worry for himself but for his family, his children. If what he was doing came out it would be a terrible thing for them to have to live through. He shook his head at the thought of the embarrassment and humiliation they’d suffer if he was ever exposed. The thought of it shook him to the core of his being. He would, he resolved, make enough money to retire, then walk away from the life and go straight.
He still had the fantasy-daydream of having a house on the beach in Southern California. He had mentioned it to Barbara numerous times, but she didn’t want to leave Jersey. She liked Jersey. It was where she’d been born and raised, where most her family lived, where her children went to school and had friends.
“I’m not moving to California. Forget it,” she said, with grave finality. But still Richard had this hope…this dream.
What I wanted to do was walk away from it all, go to LA, only deal in porn out there—it’s big out there—but Barbara wouldn’t go and so that was that. Barbara made all the decisions when it came to those things…about the family and all.
Richard and Barbara’s son, Dwayne, was a truly gifted child. He was always first in his class, and this in the prestigious Sacred Heart/Elizabeth Marrow School. Dwayne had grown into an intense dark-haired boy with curious eyes, intelligent beyond his years. His eyes seemed like the eyes of a middle-aged man who had been around the block a few times, not a chi
ld’s eyes.
Barbara, Chris, and Merrick still did their best to shield Dwayne from Richard’s tirades and outbursts. Most weekends he was sent to stay with Barbara’s mom. Richard did try to exhibit more control when Dwayne was around. He seemed to know instinctively that if Dwayne saw him be violent toward Barbara, as the girls did, it would only be a matter of time before Dwayne attacked him, and he’d have to hurt his son.
Dwayne was painfully shy around strangers, but he was open and gregarious once he got to know someone. Dwayne was endlessly curious, still always reading, a polite, very well-behaved boy any parent would be proud of. Barbara and the girls thought they had protected Dwayne from Richard well, and little if any damage had been done him, his development, how he viewed the world, his take on life, his psyche.
But in truth, Dwayne knew what was going on. This was a very sharp little guy. He saw the marks on his mother, the black eyes and bruises, the broken furniture, and he well knew his father was responsible.
At first this exceedingly bright, curious child accepted what he saw, thinking such things were normal. But it didn’t take Dwayne long to piece together the reality of his father’s actions, and it made him terribly angry. Dwayne loved his mother and sisters deeply, and the thought of his father hurting his mom, terrorizing his sisters, left him cold and angry deep inside. Dwayne started planning how he’d defend himself against his father, what he’d do if Richard came to hurt him, even kill him. He began leaving knives and swords Richard had given him in strategic places in his room. When Richard gave Dwayne a BB gun, Dwayne plotted how he could use it to blind his father. Surely if he blinded his father the way Ulysses had blinded the Cyclops, Dwayne could handle Richard, do him in if it came to that. When Richard gave Dwayne a bow-and-arrow set, Dwayne made it part of his arsenal. He practiced with the bow to be able to hit his father, if necessary.
Barbara was effusively, gushingly proud of Dwayne and let Richard know every chance she had how smart their son was, implying that Richard couldn’t hold a candle to his son. This, of course, caused Richard to resent Dwayne, and sometimes, when angry, he’d stare at his son with a dreadful gleam in his eyes. In fact, one time just after dinner Richard grabbed Barbara, manhandled her in front of Dwayne, and the boy immediately got up and put himself between Richard and Barbara.