The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer

it. I mean, I knew he had a bad temper, could be violent, but I had no idea of who he really was and what he was really about. I felt…I felt like I’d been hit by a lightning bolt…was all burned and in shock.

Now, for the first time, Barbara knew whom she had married, whom she’d had three children with. Her head spun with the incomprehensible reality of it all.

My God, she kept saying to herself. My God, suddenly feeling very old and all beaten up.

While Richard had been incarcerated, Merrick had wed her boyfriend Mark (it disturbed Richard to no end that he could not walk Merrick down the aisle). She had a baby, and Merrick religiously showed up in court carrying the child, a boy she named Sean. Neal Frank said it might make the jury “more sympathetic,” if such a thing was possible, but Barbara thought that a real long shot. No jury anywhere would show sympathy, she was sure, to her husband. She could clearly see in the jurors’ eyes the absolute fear they had of Richard. After Barbara heard the tapes she knew Richard would never get out of jail.

After four weeks of carefully orchestrated, damaging testimony, then the summations of Carroll and Frank, and the judge’s charge, the jury began deliberations.

At Richard’s request, Frank did not put on any defense at all. Richard refused to take the stand. He knew, he says, that testifying would only open a can of worms. I got on that stand, he recently said, Carroll would have torn into me—given me a second asshole.

Richard was sick and tired of it all. He knew the inevitable outcome and just wanted to get it over with. It took the jury a mere four hours to find Richard guilty on all counts. They did not, however, recommend a death sentence, to Richard’s surprise. That is what he’d been expecting all along, was ready for. This came about because there had been no eyewitnesses to the murders of Deppner and Smith.

Neal Frank had, he felt, achieved his goal—he had saved Richard’s life. Now, Richard knew, he would spend the rest of his life behind bars, which for him was far worse than any death sentence. For the first time since he’d been a young boy back in Jersey City, he would have to do as he was told, abide by the strict rules and regulations set down by the state, like everyone else. For him this was anathema.

After the trial, Neal Frank, a tall, handsome man with his hair combed to the left, entered into extended negotiations with Bob Carroll and the attorney general’s office. At issue were the charges of a gun against Barbara, and some marijuana-possession charges lodged against Dwayne Kuklinski. Dwayne had been driving some friends home from a party, and a state trooper pulled him over. When the trooper realized Dwayne was Richard Kuklinski’s son, he made Dwayne and his three friends get out of the car, and the trooper found a small amount of marijuana on one of the boys and, incredibly, charged Dwayne with possession, not the boy who actually had it.

To get these charges dismissed against Barbara and his son, Richard readily agreed to plead guilty to the murder of George Malliband and Louis Masgay. He already knew that he’d spend the rest of his life in prison, and by now he wanted to get it the hell over with, wanted his family to get on with their lives.

On May 25, 1988, Richard again appeared before Judge Kuchenmeister. As agreed, he pleaded guilty to the murders of George Malliband and Louis Masgay. When asked by the judge why he had killed Malliband, Richard said, “It was—it was due to business.” Richard now had Frank read in open court a short statement in which Richard apologized to his family—no one else—for what he had put them through. The judge proceeded to give Richard two life sentences—one for the murders of Smith and Deppner, the second for the killings of Masgay and Malliband.

Unrepentant, his head high, his shoulders back, defiant, projecting an air of power and invincibility, of fuck you, Richard was led from the courtroom and taken to the place where he would spend the rest of his life, Trenton State Prison, in Trenton, New Jersey. Coincidentally, Richard’s brother, Joseph, also serving a life sentence for the murder of Pamela Dial, was still housed in the same facility. Stanley and Anna had produced two murderers, and both of them ended up in the same facility with life sentences.

Every newspaper in New Jersey and New York had a front-page story about Richard’s sentencing, with photos of him and grisly summations of his crimes.

The sad, violent story of Richard Kuklinski was over and done with…it appeared.

But the story of Richard’s life, what had been done to him, what he’d done, was only just beginning.

 57

 It’s Not TV, It’s HBO

An aspiring film producer named George Samuels learned about the extraordinary case of Richard Kuklinski from a friend in the New Jersey attorney general’s office. Thinking he might be able to get HBO interested in doing a documentary based on Richard’s crimes, Samuels approached Richard’s attorney, Neal Frank, who listened to what he said and ultimately put him in touch with Barbara.

Because Barbara had grown fond of Frank and trusted him, she agreed to meet Samuels and listen to him. Samuels, a short, balding, fast-talking individual, made all kinds of promises to her, and Barbara agreed to be interviewed on camera, tell about some of her life with the now infamous Ice Man.

The problem with Samuels was that he was duplicitous and was also acting as a shill for the attorney general’s office. The authorities believed that Richard had, in fact, committed many more crimes than what they’d nailed him for (how true!) and were hoping Samuels could get Richard to agree to talk about murders they knew nothing of. Richard had nothing to lose, they reasoned; maybe, they hoped, he’d open up and clear some unsolved killings.

By now Richard had already been in jail for four years. For the most part he had learned to accept his fate. He minded his own business, adopted a live-and-let-live policy. In truth, both inside and out, Richard was as tough as rusted railroad spikes. He knew the only way the state could truly punish him was if he allowed his incarceration to bother him, so he wouldn’t allow that to happen.

What did trouble him—deeply—was the loss of his beloved family…his Barbara. His Lady. For the most part he didn’t allow himself to think about them, but when he did, it got to him. He’d sit on his cell bunk and cry. He never did this in front of anyone. Knowing that he would die in jail, only be taken out dead, he suggested to Barbara that they get divorced. This was very hard for him, one of the most difficult things he’d ever done, but he wanted Barbara to get on with her life, he says, and with the help of the Social Services Division at Trenton State Prison, Richard divorced Barbara; it was a terribly painful milestone for him, but he stoically signed the papers and didn’t allow himself to think about it, to think of Barbara with another man. Richard had always had an amazing ability to compartmentalize his emotions, and he did that now. Still, he loved Barbara more than ever. He wrote her letters every single day. He poured out his heart to her. He told her how much he loved her; he told her how much he missed her; he told her over and over how sorry he was.

Barbara rarely wrote him back. He was, she had come to believe, “a monster.” A monster that had fooled her and duped her and used her.

Richard’s cell at Trenton State’s maximum-security facility is six by eight feet, far too small for a man his size, but he has become used to it, he says. In it there is a toilet bowl, a metal bunk bed bolted to the steel wall, on which is a thin mattress, and a sink; that’s it. He has a small television and can listen to the radio with earphones when he pleases. He doesn’t pace his cell anymore, look at himself in the mirror and curse at what he sees. He has accepted his lot in life, his destiny.

Strangely, Richard seems to have thrived in prison. He has never looked better. He grew a thick salt-and- pepper vandyke, is robust and strong, and moves about as if he owns the place, with a bounce in every step. Everyone knows who he is, prisoners and guards alike, and everyone gives him a wide berth. He secured a job in the prison law library, gives out books and checks books in. The routine in all state prisons across the country is always the same. That routine is an essential part of a successful prison—to teach the inmates that there is a preordained schedule, a mandated regimen which they have to adhere to. Breakfast is served at 6:30 A.M., lunch at 11:30, dinner at 4:30 P.M. Prisoners with jobs are allowed to leave their cells to go to work. In the beginning Richard wanted nothing to do with a job, but he quickly came to realize he couldn’t just sit in his cell, stew, and rot, and so he decided to make the best of the situation.

Prisons are notoriously dangerous places, but hardly anyone wants to tangle with the Ice Man. Richard has grown to like his nickname; he feels it quite appropriate, for he really is like ice, he knows. Since he was a teenager he could kill a human being or torture animals and never think twice about it. He still doesn’t know if he was born that way or was made that way, but he knows he is very different from other people, and he likes that. He is proud of it.