Richard ‘The Iceman’ Kuklinski was convicted of five murders but admitted to over 100
A HULKING serial killer dubbed ‘The Iceman’ confessed to shooting, stabbing, strangling and poisoning more than 100 victims. This is his shocking story.
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FOR a killer without a conscience, Richard Kuklinski surely knows by now if there is a heaven and a hell.
A prolific hitman — who earned the nickname “The Iceman” because he froze a victim to thwart the efforts of forensic examiners — Kuklinski died almost nine years ago, leaving a self-confessed long record of killings in his wake.
If theologists are right about an afterlife, Kuklinski would be dancing with the devil right now.
It’s ironic a man called The Iceman would be so well suited to fiery damnation.
The son of a violent alcoholic father, Kuklinski used cold-hearted methods and was indifferent to killing, two more good reasons for his synonymous moniker.
While he was convicted of only a handful of murders and pleaded to one, the hulking American claimed during interviews that he killed more than a hundred men.
No women or children was his rule.
His methods varied, he said.
He admitted he shot, stabbed, strangled, bashed, burned and dismembered people.
He claimed he used rats, and liked to poison victims.
Cyanide was his liquid of choice, because it was a fast-acting agent and difficult for pathologists to detect at autopsy.
Popular theory and Kuklinski’s own confessions suggest the happily married father worked on contract for mob groups in and around New York before branching out on his own to continue his morbid work, with his victims including friends and associates.
According to psychiatrists, he also killed people who angered him.
Kuklinski claimed he killed over a 30-year period up until the mid 1980s.
He told author Philip Carlo, who wrote the biography The Ice Man — Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer: “What I liked most was the hunt ... The killing for me was secondary. I got no rise as such out of it ... for the most part.”
Kuklinski’s many confessions include a claim he was the one who killed Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa, who mysteriously disappeared in July 1975.
Hoffa was presumed murdered, and his body was never found.
A police taskforce worked on Kuklinski.
A brave undercover cop named Dominick Polifrone wormed his way into Kuklinski’s world and, after gathering evidence and setting up a sting, brought about the big reaper’s arrest.
A team of federal agents and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officers arrested Kuklinski in December 1986, after Mr Polifrone tricked the killer into buying what he thought was pure cyanide.
Kuklinski was convicted of several murders and handed consecutive life sentences.
Years later he pleaded guilty to the slaying of New York City detective Peter Calabro, and had a concurrent 30 years added to his sentences.
While in jail, Kuklinski boasted of committing many more murders.
Could have been a hundred or it could have been more, he claimed.
But criminal identities have questioned the veracity of some of his recollections.
Before his mysterious death in a prison hospital ward at age 70 in March 2006, the big bearded Kuklinski — presenting like a bear on prozac — conducted several interviews.
Documentaries were made, books were written and a feature film based on his confessed exploits was produced.
While being interviewed inside Trenton State Prison, in New Jersey, for a documentary for the US TV cable channel HBO, Kuklinski said he’d killed “more than a hundred”.
“It doesn’t bother me,” he said when asked about killing.
“It doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t have a feeling one way or the other.”
When asked about the tools of his trade, he told HBO: “When I was out on the streets to do something I carried three guns and a knife.
“I had a Derringer in each pocket and a gun on my ankle — a bigger gun just in case, and a knife and it all depends how it came about.”
Kuklinski was also notorious for using a spray bottle filled with cyanide; a weapon of which Dominick Polifrone was acutely aware while pretending be a gangster when in Kuklinski’s company.
“No matter where I went with him, I wore this leather jacket with a pocket sewn inside containing a small-calibre weapon,” Mr Polifrone told the New York Post in May 2013.
“I knew that I was somewhere on his hit list. If he’d pulled out that nasal spray, I’d have to protect myself.”
During the HBO special, assistant attorney general Robert J. Carroll said Kuklinski was not a serial killer.
“He’s not a drug-crazed wild man running around with a machine gun,” Mr Carroll told HBO.
“He’s not a person that is driven by perverse sexual desires. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t gamble.
“Richard Kuklinski instead is nothing more than a predator on human beings. His motivation is greed and his method of murder is very varied and very extreme.”
According to Mr Polifrone: “He never socialised, gambled or messed around with other women. He lived for his wife and kids.”
During one of his HBO interviews, Kuklinski said he sometimes left victims to be found — on park seats, for example — and other times disposed of bodies.
“You could bury it,” he told HBO of a body.
“You could put it in a big drum. You could put it in the trunk of a car and have it crushed.”
He also said: “Nothing haunts me. No murders haunt me ... I don’t think about it ... I would have liked to have had a better outlook on life — but I can’t change yesterday.”
Suspicions were raised when Kuklinksi died in a secure hospital wing as he was due to appear as a witness at the trial of a Gambino family underboss.
“I hope he died a slow death because of what he did to families and individuals,” Mr Polifrone told the New York Post.
“He had no mercy. And if it was foul play, that’s okay with me.”
US character actor Michael Shannon, who played Kuklinski in the 2012 film The Iceman, said he was attracted to the role after watching one of the HBO specials.
“I didn’t know who he (Kuklinski) was. I had never heard of him,” Shannon told Yahoo! Movies writer Jonathan Crow.
“(The movie’s director) Ariel Vromen approached me and he gave me the interview and told me to watch it, and I did. Kuklinski’s a very captivating person.
“A lot of people, when they see the interview the first time, they see a very frightening individual. But I was immediately drawn to this sense of melancholy that I felt about him.
“I felt like he’s a very tragic figure ... He was trying to process it sitting in prison by himself.
“There’s something very sad about it, not that I condone or approve of what he did.
“If it was just a movie about some guy killing a bunch of people, I wouldn’t have done it.”
As former undercover cop Dominick Polifrone told the New York Post: “I’ve met hundreds of bad guys, but Kuklinski was a totally different type of individual.
“He was cold-hearted — ice-cold like the devil. He had no remorse about anything.”
paul.anderson@news.com.au