by Philip Carlo
Everything Richard said was checked and rechecked by Anzalotti and his partner, and all proved true, and soon the two detectives cleared twelve unsolved murders thanks to Richard, including the killing of Robert Pronge, a.k.a. Mister Softee.
“For the most part,” Anzalotti recently said, “everything he said was true; where he shot people, the caliber he used.”
In December of 2004 Richard appeared in Bergen County Superior Court and pleaded guilty to the murder of Detective Peter Calabro and the murder of Robert Pronge, and received still another life sentence. That day Peter Calabro’s daughter was also in the courtroom. She had been four when her father had been killed. She wanted to talk to Richard, wanted to know why he killed her father, but Anzalotti wouldn’t let her. Richard, in fact, wanted to talk with her, wanted to tell her it was nothing personal, that if he hadn’t done it someone else would have.
“Stupid is as stupid does,” were Forrest Gump’s immortal words, and what Sammy Gravano—the crime-fighting hero of the federal government, a man who won glowing praise from scores of federal prosecutors—did with his freedom was stupid.
Very stupid!
Gravano ended up living in Arizona, where he started a moving business and began selling the popular drug ecstasy to schoolkids. He not only got involved in this sordid business, but he involved his family—his wife and son Gerald. They were all arrested; Gravano went to trial, was found guilty, and was sentenced to twenty years. Gravano had been the poster boy for the federal government’s witness-protection program, and wound up using his ill-gotten freedom to sell drugs to kids.
“Stupid is as stupid does” indeed.
When the New Jersey attorney general’s office felt it had an airtight case against Gravano for his complicity in the shotgun murder of Detective Calabro and had gotten an indictment against him for the murder, Detectives Robert Anzalotti and Mark Bennul flew to Arizona and placed Gravano under arrest for this killing.
Many in the New Jersey attorney general’s office, and certainly Detectives Anzalotti and Bennul believe that the federal government knew about Gravano’s part in the Calabro killing but hid it, and they plan to prove it in open court. Richard will, of course, be the state’s star witness against Gravano. The trial is scheduled, as of this writing, for the summer of 2006, and will take place in the Bergen County Superior Court—the same court where Richard was tried, convicted, and sentenced.
In early April of 2005, Gravano’s lawyer, Anthony Ricco, went to see Richard at the Trenton State Prison. Richard claims that Ricco offered him two hundred thousand dollars not to testify against Gravano.
Conversely, Anthony Ricco claims it was Richard who offered to throw the case for two hundred thousand dollars. As of this writing, who, if anyone, solicited a bribe has not been established. Anthony Ricco, however, had to withdraw from representing Gravano because he is now scheduled to appear as a witness on Gravano’s behalf at Gravano’s trial for the killing of Detective Peter Calabro.
60
No Sunset, No Sunrise
Today, Richard is still housed in the maximum-security unit at the Trenton State Prison. To control his mercurial temper he is given daily doses of Ativan and Paxil, once in the morning, once at night. These drugs, for the most part, make him placid and easygoing.
At all meals, Richard shares a table with three mob guys, all skippers (captains), all of them are serving life sentences. They regularly share war stories about the days when they were free, the women they knew, the great food they ate, the wonderful places they saw, their appeals, sports, the mistakes they made to wind up in prison.
For Richard there are no sunrises, no sunsets. From his tiny cell at the Trenton State Prison he cannot see outside, cannot see the sky, the sunrise or the sunset. He never goes outside. Life for him is a monotonous regimen that rarely, if ever, varies. When recently asked if he had any regrets he said, “I wish I had taken another path in life, been a good husband and father; but that…that wasn’t in the cards.”
Barbara Kuklinski lives with daughter Chris and Chris’s son, John, in southern New Jersey. Barbara never remarried. She has severe arthritis of the spine and is in constant pain; her condition prevents her from working.
When Barbara talks about her life with Richard, her hands still tremble and she gets angry. She regrets, she says, ever having met Richard. She recently explained: “When Richard was in a good mood, he was the best husband any woman could have had. When he was in a bad mood, he was cruel beyond description. I’ve gotten used to being alone. I have my children, my grandchildren—and they are the only ones in this world who mean anything to me. I’m…I’m very thankful for them.”
Chris Kuklinski still holds what her father did against him. She only wishes he’d been arrested sooner. “I always knew,” she said, “he could be mean, you know, I mean I saw it, I grew up with it, but I never imagined he was…he was a cold-blooded monster, a hit man for the Mafia.” Shaking her head sadly, she continued: “He is where he belongs. I think even he realizes that.”
Richard’s son, Dwayne, doesn’t think much about his father. He is happy. He has a good job as an electrician and is marrying his longtime sweetheart, settling down, and having a family of his own.
Merrick Kuklinski deeply misses her father, still loves him dearly. She is quick to defend him, readily points out how life was stacked against him from the very beginning. “I’m not making excuses for him,” she recently said. “But the truth is my father didn’t have a chance. When you look at what he went through, the childhood he had, it’s not such a big surprise he turned out the way he did. I love him—I love him with all my heart and soul. He was, for me, a wonderful father. I will never ever forget how he was always there for me, how he helped sick children who had nothing in the hospitals where I often was as a child. He couldn’t see a child suffer without wanting to help, running to help—doing something. I saw him bring children he didn’t know food and toys and clothes without ever being asked. No other dad ever did that! He was no Ice Man. He was a caring, giving man with a heart as big and warm as the sun. For me, my father was the nicest, most giving man I ever knew. I will go to my grave believing that! I love him very much.”
61
A Flying Fuck
When Richard was asked recently what he would like to say for the close of this, his story, he said: “I’d rather be known as a nice man, not the Ice Man.”
Upon reflection Richard added: “I was made. I didn’t create myself. I never chose to be this way, to be in this place. Yeah, I for sure wish my life took another turn, that I had an education and a good job, but none of that was in the cards for me. I am what I am, and the truth is I don’t give a flying fuck what anyone thinks about me,” said Richard “the Ice Man” Kuklinski, formerly of Jersey City, New Jersey, the second born to Anna and Stanley Kuklinski.
EPILOGUE
The Melting of the Ice Man
March 13, 2006
Richard Kuklinski died at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, on Sunday morning, March 5, 2006 at 1:03 A.M. At this point the exact cause of his death has not been definitively determined, although the timing of his passing is particularly suspect, for the day after he died the charges against Sammy “the Bull” Gravano—that he ordered the murder of NYPD Detective Peter Calabro—were dropped by the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office. Those in the know believe that this was not a coincidence. The famed medical examiner, Dr. Michael Baden, on behalf of the Kuklinski family, has requested toxicology tests to see if, in fact, Richard was poisoned or if he died of natural causes.
Richard’s health began to deteriorate in late October 2005. Supposedly, two doctors at Trenton State Prison each ordered different blood pressure medicines, which were administered to Richard simultaneously, causing Richard’s potassium and electrolyte count to become “dangerously low.” He began passing out and experiencing vertigo. He was removed from his cell and placed in the infirmary. His health continued to decline, and his blood
pressure dropped. He was taken to St. Vincent’s hospital for a period of thirty hours, then “signed himself out,” an official at the prison said, and he was returned to Trenton Prison’s infirmary. Richard called me and told me that he believed he was being poisoned, and that I should call the media. I assumed that he was delusional, and told him I’d do what I could. What I did do was discuss this with Barbara Kuklinski and we decided Richard was imagining things. His health, however, continued to decline and he stopped eating. His speech, I noted when he called, was slurred. He was brought back to St. Vincent’s again, and doctors observed that his lungs were congested and that his kidneys were failing. He was tentatively diagnosed as having Wegener’s disease, a rare, potentially lethal malady that, if treated with drugs, is not fatal.
Richard’s health continued to get worse. He suddenly developed a form of dementia, experienced loss of memory, and had a skin rash on his hands and legs; he also refused to eat. Doctor Wong from the hospital called Barbara and told her he was doing all he could, and he first gave a diagnosis of Wegener’s disease. He said that they were also going to do a CAT scan of Richard’s brain to see if he had a stroke…perhaps the cause for his dementia. At this point Richard couldn’t even remember Barbara’s phone number. This was very odd considering that Richard had a very good memory when it came to numbers, as Barbara put it. Doctor Wong also said they were performing a biopsy on Richard’s kidney.
The CAT scan indicated no stroke. The biopsy indicated no cancer. Yet, Richard’s health continued to decline. His blood pressure fluctuated abnormally: first it was high, then low.
The holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, all passed, and Richard didn’t call his family, as he always had done. The family became very concerned. I now tried to visit Richard at the hospital, but was told by a prison official that was not possible, that only immediate family could visit. Barbara and Chris did go to see him and were shocked by his gaunt appearance due to his loss of weight.
“It looked,” Barbara recently explained, “like he lost a hundred pounds. He spoke in little more than a whisper. He told us ‘they’re trying to kill me,’ that we should call the police; ‘call the media,’ he said. At this point I thought—perhaps incorrectly, I’m thinking now—that he was just delusional. The police were there, I mean guarding him, three guys in plainclothes and two uniform cops. He was in a nice room at the end of the hall. We sat there for forty-five minutes. He was drifting in and out. He then said, ‘If I don’t leave the hospital it’s because I was murdered.’”
“‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why are you saying that, Richard?’ He did not answer me. Chris had not seen him in quite a few years, and she was shocked at how thin he’d become; for that matter I was, too. I now asked him why he had signed himself out of the hospital. He said he did not sign himself out, which, of course, I thought was…strange.”
Barbara explained that she absolutely did not love Richard, that any warm feelings she once had for him were long gone, but still he was the father of her children and she wanted to make sure anything that could be done for him was done.
Richard’s health continued to fail. Doctor Wong told Barbara he didn’t think Richard would survive. Barbara and her daughter Merrick visited him again on February 9. He looked still worse. He could now barely speak. Though he did, again, tell Barbara and now Merrick that he was being killed…murdered, he said.
Merrick was very traumatized by her father’s appearance due to his illness. She still very much loved her dad, indeed loved him more than ever, and she prayed for him and tried to tell him he’d be OK, that he should will himself to get better. Again, however, he just managed to say that he was being “murdered.”
“By who, Dad—who?” Merrick asked.
“Them,” he whispered. “If I don’t get out of here alive, it’s because I was murdered,” he said yet again.
Distraught, Merrick held her father’s hand, a once powerful killing tool, now weak and frail, pocked with black and blue marks from the IV needles. That day there were four IVs feeding him different fluids and medications. Barbara was informed that he was also bleeding internally, that blood was in his urine, and issuing from his rectum. Doctor Wong said it was probably an ulcer, which Barbara found kind of odd for Richard had no history at all of ulcers.
Merrick left her father that day crying, upset, and traumatized, remembering how he so diligently cared for her when she was a child, when she was in the hospital. She was heartbroken to see her father, a mere shell of the powerful, omnipotent man he had once been.
Doctor Wong called Barbara on the evening of February 28th and said Richard did not have long, and, in fact, he passed away Sunday morning March 5. Barbara was relieved. “We finally have closure,” she said.
Richard was laid out at the Gaiga Funeral Home in Little Falls, New Jersey. The service was attended by only the immediate family, me, Gaby Monet, and friends of Merrick, Chris, and Dwayne. There was no priest.
Barbara said, “If we had a priest eulogize him, Richard would have sat up in his coffin and said ‘get him the f—out of here!’”
In all the time I spent with Richard, it was hard not to grow fond of him. I know people will be offended by my saying this, ask how I could feel warmly about such a cold-blooded killer. I did not know Richard on the outside world. By the time I’d met him he’d been incarcerated for many years. I found Richard to be warm and considerate and very polite, in a word—a gentleman. He always asked after me and my family and was solicitous and thoughtful when I couldn’t visit because I had the flu. Truth is, he was a hell of a nice guy, and certainly one of the funniest people I’d ever known. He had a keen, dead-pan sense of humor (pun intended), that was very rare indeed. One time, I remember, I told him, “Richard you are the funniest guy I’ve ever known; you should have been a stand-up comedian.”
He said, “Yeah, I’ll come out on stage with my tacky prison garb, say good evening ladies and gents. I got a hundred jokes that’ll kill you, and if they don’t kill you, I will,” laughing as he said this.
My meeting and getting to know Richard Kuklinski so intimately was a unique, sobering experience—an education—and made me much more aware of the nuts and bolts, the wheels and pulleys that make a psychopath work. Regardless of my warm feelings for Richard, however, I have no doubt that he was a particularly cunning, highly motivated psychopath. In all my interaction with him, I never lost sight of the fact that he was a very dangerous man, a human predator the likes of which have not been seen in modern times. Personally, I came to view Richard’s life as a classic case of a severely abused child, filled with seething rage, becoming an abuser, and turning into a remorseless killer. As of this writing the tests to determine if Richard had been poisoned have not been completed.
Rest in peace Richard Leonard Kuklinski.
POSTSCRIPT
Detective Pat Kane was promoted to lieutenant before retiring from the New Jersey State Police. Today he is working as a fire ranger and loves being outdoors.
ATF Agent Dominick Polifrone is presently retired. He had been training younger agents in successful undercover work.
Bob Carroll retired from the state attorney general’s office and today is a practicing attorney; his specialty is criminal law.
Stanley Kuklinski died of a heart attack in 1979. Until the end of his life Richard regretted not having killed him.
Richard’s sister, Roberta, moved to the West Coast, and he didn’t hear from her in the thirty years leading up to his death.
Barbara Kuklinski has severe arthritis, chain-smokes, loves to read, loves her grandchildren. “My whole life,” she says, “is my children and grandchildren.”
Charges against Sammy Gravano for the murder of NYPD detective Peter Calabro were dropped the day after Richard Kuklinski died.
Roy DeMeo’s boss, Nino Gaggi, died in a federal prison of a heart attack.
The police never discovered any of the videos Richard made of feeding people to rats.
&n
bsp; HBO’s Gaby Monet had been planning to do yet another special on Richard Kuklinski, this one entitled The Ice Man Cold Case File, which would have explored more unsolved murders of Richard’s.
Detective Robert Anzalotti was promoted to sergeant because he was able to get Richard to talk about murders he committed that the police knew nothing about.
Richard’s three children, Merrick, Chris, and Dwayne, are doing very well; all of them live in New Jersey.
Author Philip Carlo is living in southern Italy, working on a new book.
You may contact author Philip Carlo at:
[email protected]
www.philipcarlo.com
INDEX
abortion
Academy of Holy Angels (Demarest)
Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Bureau of (ATF)
Allstate Insurance Company
Anastasia, Albert
animals, torture of
Another Way (Guttenberg, New Jersey)
Anzalotti, Robert
Archer’s (Cliffside Park)
Argrila, Anthony
DeMeo and
Armond (Barbara’s uncle)
Armond Meatpacking Company (Jersey City)
Arnold, Louis
assassination techniques See also poisons; rats
Ativan
Atkins, Jon
Baden, Michael
Bella Luna (Hoboken)
Bennul, Mark
Bensonhurst, Brooklyn
Bergen County Superior Court
Bergin Hunt and Fish Club (Queens)
bestiality
Bilotti, Tommy
Bob (Roy DeMeo’s fishing trip murder victim)
boilermakers