But nobody showed up. The bar was closing. Finally, De Peti said they should rent a room in a nearby hotel, that he’d definitely have the money “in the morning.”
“In the morning?” Richard repeated.
“I swear.”
Reluctantly, Richard called Genovese, who said it was okay to wait. They checked into a nearby hotel. Richard washed up and, tired, lay down on one of the two beds there, as did De Peti. But Richard was wary and sleep did not come easily. He didn’t know how long he’d been lying there, but he sensed, in this half-asleep state, movement nearby. He opened his eyes. As they adjusted to the dark he could just discern De Peti skulking through the room, moving toward him, past him, and to the window. De Peti slid it open and began to creep, snakelike, out onto the fire escape. In two swift movements Richard was up, grabbed him, and yanked him back into the room, where he pummeled him. Richard moved shockingly fast for such a big man, which caught many people off guard. Richard turned on the light.
“You slimy motherfucker, you been playing me all along.” Richard kicked him so hard he moved across the floor. Oh how Richard wanted to kill him, shoot him in the head, and throw him out the window, but those luxuries were not his, he knew. This guy owed Carmine a lot of money, and Richard couldn’t just go killing him. Instead, Richard called Carmine in Hoboken.
“The fuckin’ asshole tried to fly,” he said. “I caught him sneaking out on the fire escape.”
“Son of a bitch; put him on’a da phone!”
Blood running from his mouth, De Peti told Carmine that he was only looking to get some fresh air, not escape…certainly not trying to get away. “I swear, I swear on my mother,” he cried, histrionically holding his heart for maximum effect.
“Where’s the money?” Carmine demanded.
“Tomorrow, tomorrow, I swear!” De Peti pleaded.
Richard got back on the phone. Carmine said, “Give ’im until tomorrow. He don’t come up with the money, throw him out a window with no fuckin’ fire escape, okay?”
“Okay,” Richard said. “Gladly.”
The next day, it was the same story, running around to different bars and lounges, looking for different people who had the money. It was like, Richard was thinking, De Peti was playing a shell game, a three-card monte shuffle. Again, De Peti went to use a phone. There was a door near the phone, and Richard could see De Peti eyeing it. He hung up, came back, said they had to go to a pizza place. They waited there an hour, then went to two more bars.
Richard was tired of De Peti’s bull. “He’ll be here, he’ll be here,” he kept telling Richard, and no one showed up.
Pissed, Richard took De Peti back to the hotel and, without another word, hung him by his feet out of the window. Begging, De Peti now said he’d get him “all the money,” that it was in a place he owned over on the South Side—
“You lying to me, I’ll kill you on the spot!” Richard promised.
“I ain’t lying! I ain’t lying!” he pleaded, cars and trucks and buses moving on the wide avenue ten stories below.
Richard pulled him inside. “Let’s go.”
It was a kind of go-go place. Half-naked girls who had seen better days danced around, wiggling their breasts and shaking ample asses in Day-Glo red lights. De Peti took Richard straight to a rear office, opened a safe hidden in a closet wall, grabbed a pile of currency, and gave him the thirty-five g’s.
“My God, if you had the money all the time, why didn’t you just give it to me?” Richard asked, really annoyed now, anger rising in him.
“Because I didn’t want to pay,” De Peti sheepishly admitted.
That made Richard see red; his balls, as he says, were all twisted already, and this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“Really,” he said, smiling slightly, making the soft clicking sound out of the side of his mouth.
“Let me get one of the girls in here to clean your pipes out,” De Peti offered.
“Naw, that’s okay,” Richard said.
After counting the money, Richard suddenly pressed the little .38 derringer hard to De Peti’s chest and pulled the trigger.
With a horrific hole in his chest, De Peti hit the ground hard, and was soon as dead as a doorknob.
Calmly, Richard left the club, hailed a cab a block away, went to the airport, and caught a flight back to Newark. As soon as he hit the ground, he went to see Carmine Genovese.
“And what happened?” Carmine asked as he opened the door.
“I got two things to tell you.”
“Yeah?”
“First, I got the money—all of it. Second, I killed him. All he did was play me,” Richard said, not sure if Carmine would get mad. After all, he had killed a customer of Carmine’s after getting all that was due.
“Good, bravo,” Carmine said. “We can’t be letting these fuckin’ assholes play us for fools. That gets around on the street, we’re out of business. You did the right thing,” Carmine said, patting Richard on his enormous back. “You’re a good man, Richie. Mama mia I wish you were Italian. I’d sponsor you in a fuckin’ minute, in a fuckin’ minute,” he said, and paid Richard well.
Carmine, a very rich man, tended to be—like most Mafia men—cheap and greedy. For them, nothing was ever enough.
Content, Richard soon left.
Back in Chicago, one of De Peti’s strippers discovered his body. The police were summoned. They questioned everyone in the club, got a vague description of a big man seen leaving the office.
Another unsolved homicide.
12
Mob Guys and Crooked Cops
His name was Jim O’Brian. He was a large, burly, red-faced Irishman, a former police captain out of Hoboken. He was as crooked as a figure-eight pretzel, worked intimately with the De Cavalcante crime family. He’d do anything to turn a buck—pimp women, deal drugs, sell hot merchandise. He, like most everyone in New Jersey crime circles, knew about Richard Kuklinski, knew how reliable he was, that he was the best bagman in Jersey; how ruthless he could be when and if the job called for violence. O’Brian approached Richard in a Hoboken bar and asked him if he’d pick up a suitcase for him in Los Angeles.
“You interested?” O’Brian asked.
“Sure, if the price is worth my time,” said Richard. He did not usually like cops, crooked or otherwise. He felt they could not be trusted, that they were bullies with badges and guns, but he knew O’Brian worked with the family he was associated with.
O’Brian said, “It’ll take you no longer than a day and I’ll pay you five large and all expenses.”
“Sure, I’ll go,” Richard said, and the next morning he was in the first-class section of an American Airlines flight to LA. Richard very much enjoyed traveling in first class. It made him feel successful, that he’d made a notable step up in the world.
Amused, he looked at the other men in the section, knowing they were all civilians, thinking how surprised they’d be if they knew what he really did—that he regularly killed people and enjoyed doing it. Smiling stewards served him a lovely lunch and free drinks, and he soon fell asleep.
Richard took a cab from LAX straight to a fancy hotel on the famous Sunset Boulevard. He checked in under a false name, went upstairs to his room, and was admiring the sweeping view of LA when there was a soft knock on the door. He opened it. Two of the shiftiest-looking men he’d ever seen, one resembling a rat, the other a ferret, stood there. “You Rich?” Rat Face asked.
“I am. Come on in.”
They walked into the room, Ferret Face carrying a suitcase.
“That for me?” Richard asked, friendly enough, but not liking either of these men.
