returned with an irate, red-faced priest who slapped Richard so hard his face stung and a huge strawberry-colored welt quickly formed. Rubbery dots swirled before his eyes. The priest grabbed Richard by the ear and dragged him to his office, where he proceeded to beat the boy with a book—a Bible, Richard realized. Later that night, Richard received a second beating from his mother.
From that day on Richard had little interest in religion, and came to believe that the nuns and priests were a bunch of sadistic creeps who used religion and the always ominous specter of God to scare and manipulate people into doing what they wanted, when they wanted, how they wanted. Religion was one big con job, he thought, and he soon turned away from the Catholic Church, its teachings, mandates, and disciplines. He did, however, find solace sitting in the church when it was empty. He’d stare at the pained face of Christ up on the cross and ask him questions—where Florian was, why people were so cruel, why his mother and father beat him. He never received an answer. If there really was a God, he came to believe, he would never allow the violence that parents, nuns, and priests so readily dished out to children.
Not surprisingly, Richard soon turned his rage on animals.
Stray dogs and cats became the focal point of his anger. Richard devised terrible tortures, sadistic beyond what a child should be capable of: he’d capture two cats, tie their tails together, then hang them over a clothesline and gleefully watch them tear one another apart. He threw stray cats down the incinerator, then lit it and enjoyed the cats’ screams, how they tried to claw their way up the chute to no avail. He’d hunt down dogs, set them on fire with gasoline, and watch them run around in flames. He used clubs and pipes and hammers to beat the dogs to death.
He killed so many stray animals—all practice for the indiscriminate killing of human beings—that he cleared the neighborhoods of them. Something was very wrong with the young Richard Kuklinski, but no one addressed his problems, the demons already inside him, and they grew to monumental proportions.
3
Sticky Fingers
Richard first started stealing to eat. As religious as Anna Kuklinski was, she was not a good mother. She didn’t seem to realize that her children had to eat, and eat on a regular basis. When Stanley finally abandoned the family, Anna became the lone, hard-pressed provider, working at the meatpacking company and cleaning St. Mary’s floors at night. However, with four to feed, and rent and utilities to pay, there was never enough of anything, and Richard took to stealing food. He’d get up early and lift cakes and cookies from the Drake’s delivery truck, which made daily deliveries to shops and homes all around Jersey City. Although shy and awkward, Richard was particularly ballsy when it came to stealing.
Catlike, he’d stalk the Drake’s delivery truck, and when the deliveryman made a drop-off, Richard would sneak into the truck, quickly grab cakes and milk, and take off. He did this several times a week, and like this his sister, Roberta, and brother, Joseph, had something more to eat than the cheap porridge Anna provided— somewhat reluctantly, it seemed.
Anna too was a firm believer in corporal punishment. She’d had a mean streak beaten into her at the Sacred Heart Orphanage, and Richard sometimes thought his mother was even meaner than his father—no small thing. Anna tried to stop Richard from stealing, hit him with most everything she found in the house: shoes and broom handles, hairbrushes, wooden spoons, pots and pans. She often hit him on the head—this even after Florian was killed that way—and knocked Richard out cold. She’d come up behind him and strike him when he didn’t expect it. One time after Anna hit him with a broom handle, Richard ripped it out of her hands. Like his father, Richard had a very bad temper. Anna picked up a skillet, and he hurried from the house.
Why, Richard often wondered, did his mother hate him so? Why, he wondered, was she so cruel? What had he done to make her so hateful?
Another good source of food was the train cars that lined the huge railroad yards all over Jersey City. The boxcars were filled with all kinds of food from across the country, and Richard took to breaking into them and stealing pineapples, oranges, and huge chunks of frozen meat from icy freezer cars. Anna learned to accept the bounties Richard brought home. She could never afford such food items, and she soon stopped punishing Richard for his pilfering. He was, after all, the man of the house now, and he was inadvertently filling the role of his father. He had effectively taken the place of Stanley, and Anna, Roberta, and Joseph looked to the young Richard as the breadwinner. Richard liked this role. It made him feel important, grown up, older than his years. His stealing got so bad that if it wasn’t nailed down, Richard would bring it home.
4
First Blood
Somehow Anna managed to get a federally subsidized apartment in a new four-story redbrick housing project complex at New Jersey Avenue and Fifteenth Street. This was a real step up for the family. The project was heated, well insulated, had all the modern conveniences. Everything was spanking new and clean. Richard loved this new home, the new hardwood floors, how the sun streamed in through the windows, how everything was clean and shiny and nice to look at.
The projects were filled with low-income blue-collar people, and there were many potential friends and playmates for Richard. He had grown into a tall, skinny, very shy boy with glistening blond hair, almond-shaped light brown eyes, and excessively protruding ears. The boys of the projects quickly took to teasing Richard; they made fun of his appearance, his clothes, his thinness, his shaggy blond hair, his ears.
“Hey, you dumb Polack,” was a frequent insult.
“The project boys,” a gang of five or six of them that were always in a group, not only teased Richard but took to physically abusing him, pushing him, slapping him, throwing his baseball cap to and fro, demanding that he give them money. Richard had little money, which caused him more and more abuse, slaps, and kicks in the ass as he walked. Whatever fires of discontent were already burning inside of Richard, the abuse he suffered from the project boys was further fueling it.
The leader of this group of punks was a big dark-haired kid named Charley Lane. He was a few years older than Richard, a foot taller, and much stockier. He seemed to get the most joy out of making Richard’s life miserable.
Richard had no friends. He was a loner. There was no one he could confide in, talk to, throw a ball with. He wanted friends, someone to be his ally, his buddy, to stick up for him, but all the boys in the projects wanted was to taunt and tease him, bring him down and call him names: “Hey, dumb Polack; hey, locked brain!”
Richard’s brother, Joseph, was too young to be his friend, and his sister, Roberta, had her own interests and little in common with her older brother.
As it happened, Richard found solace in true-crime magazines. He discovered them in a neighborhood candy store and with his sticky, nimble fingers managed to steal new, exciting, eye-opening issues every few weeks. Richard had grown into a bold, particularly adept thief; he was, he would later confide,
For the most part, Richard did not enjoy reading, but he devoured these true-crime magazines. He’d read slowly, using his long, thin fingers to keep his place, often having to go over the same passage several times to comprehend the words, their hidden, secret meanings. Because he was so drawn to the subject of crime, he made it his business to understand the words, to turn over the words in his young mind, to imagine the larcenies, robberies, and murders they vividly described in short, simple sentences. When the weather was nice, Richard liked to go down by the Hudson River and read there by the silent, swift-moving water. Here it was quiet and no one harassed or bothered him. Just opposite Jersey City, he could see lower Manhattan, a teeming, lively place filled with tall, stately buildings and rich people who ate steak and fancy food every day, all they wanted, as much as they wanted, Richard was sure.
What interested Richard the most was how crimes, especially murders, were solved. For hours on end, Richard buried his face in these true-crime magazines, and they gave him an insight into criminal behavior he could find nowhere else, insights he would put to good use. The words in these simply written pulp magazines with colorful covers, brimming with violence, filled Richard’s head like sinister clouds of poison gas with fantasies of violence, of murder, of striking back at those who abused him, taunted him, called him names. He began thinking
