The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer

question was, would Richard take the bait?

“Rich,” he said, “I hear you got good contacts for serious weapons, I’m talking heavy steel here. My guy had to take off recently. I’ve got a good customer, a broad who’s hooked up with the IRA, and they got serious bucks and are looking for heavy steel. Can you help me there? You know, one hand washes the other?”

“Sure. Let me make a few calls,” Richard said.

There was something about Polifrone that Richard wasn’t comfortable with, that put him off. Yet they exchanged beeper and telephone numbers and planned to do business. The meeting soon ended. They walked outside together. The sky was lower and darker.

“I’m thinking of stopping and saying hello to Phil,” Richard said.

“Sure, good idea. I’ll follow you over,” Dominick said, and made his way back to his Lincoln and followed Richard to the store. They walked inside together. What a pair. As different as night and day.

“Hey, Rich!” Phil called out, acting overjoyed to see him. “Glad you two finally hooked up.”

Richard hugged Solimene and kissed him on the cheek, said hello to some of the other guys. During all the months Polifrone had been hanging around the store, he’d been clocking the action—he knew who was involved in counterfeit money, hijacking, robberies; but he couldn’t make any kind of move, yet. However, at the right time, he’d make sure all these criminals, the regular thugs that hung out at the store, were picked up.

“So you and Dom here go back,” Richard said offhandedly.

“Absofuckinlutely,” Phil said. “You can treat him like me, Rich. He’s a thousand percent!”

“Okay,” Richard said. “Good enough for me,” readily accepting what Solimene was saying. This was out of character for Richard. He was usually a particularly untrusting, suspicious individual. But he believed Phil and had no real reservations about Polifrone, other than his terrible hairpiece. He felt whoever had sold it to him should be arrested.

Phil, Richard, and Polifrone did a three-way handshake.

“Salud,” Phil said, wishing them luck on whatever enterprise they did together.

Richard had apparently taken the bait. He said he had to get going and soon disappeared.

“I told you, I told you I’d deliver him,” Solimene told Dominick.

“And you did. Good work,” Dominick said. He was anxious to let his superiors know he had finally hooked Kuklinski. He had been getting flak about a lack of results, but now he had something concrete to show for all the months he’d been working this case, the endless card games, cursing, cigar smoking, bullshit. When he left the store, he drove a few blocks, making sure he wasn’t tailed, used a pay phone, and told his people what had happened, what was said. “Our man has taken the bait,” he told headquarters.

Polifrone next called Kane. When Kane heard what had happened, he let out a loud whoop. He hurried into Lieutenant Leck’s office and told him the good news. They shook hands, high-fived each other.

“So we got him on the hook,” Kane said. “Now all we have to do is get him in the boat.”

As it happened, this was easier said than done.

Now what Kane and Polifrone needed to pull this off successfully was a larger, more sophisticated operation. They had not only to get Kuklinski to incriminate himself, but to record it and make it all admissible and viable in a court of law. They needed help—more resources, wiretaps, electronic surveillance, manpower, helicopters, money —and they would get most of it in the form of New Jersey Deputy Attorney General Bob Carroll.

It was time to take off the gloves.

Two days after their first meeting, Richard beeped Polifrone. The agent called him back. Richard wanted to know if he had secured the cyanide. He was anxious to get rid of Kane, and to do it properly he needed the cyanide.

“I’m working on it, Rich. How about you—you find what I need?”

“Got feelers out,” Richard said.

“Okay, I’ll get back to you on that ASAP, all right?”

“Yeah, good, okay,” Richard said.

Richard wanted to go back to Zurich, but he was hesitant to leave with this up in the air; now the first order of business was getting rid of Kane. He believed once that was done he’d be in the clear. But he knew it had to be done right, to make it look like a heart attack. He imagined spraying Kane in his surprised face, saw it happen in his mind.

Pssst, you’re dead, fuck you.

Since the two Colombians had come around the house, Richard was, Barbara noticed, quiet and withdrawn… introspective. He barely talked. She recently explained, I never saw him like this. He was just moping around the house, sitting in his chair and staring into space. He didn’t want to talk; he didn’t even want to go feed the ducks. I knew something was wrong, but I had no idea what.

 50

 Operation Ice Man

Bob Carroll was a diligent, hardworking prosecutor. He had a full baby face, was stocky and square, appeared somewhat like the Pillsbury Dough Boy. That cherubic baby face, however, belied a tenacious prosecutor that won most trials he took before a jury. Bob Carroll was a supervisor of the New Jersey Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau task force, a relatively new unit put together to cross jurisdictions and build up and prosecute cases across the state of New Jersey, focusing on organized crime. Carroll worked out of a secretive unmarked two-story redbrick building in Fairfield. The entrance to the building was in the back, away from prying eyes. There were strategically placed surveillance cameras everywhere. If New Jersey had a Pentagon, a place from which to fight wars, this was surely it. When Carroll heard about the Kuklinski case, he contacted Kane and asked to see “the file.”

By now Kane’s one folder had grown to many carefully put-together files, all contained in a large brown cardboard box. For two days Bob Carroll pored over Kane’s files, more and more amazed—stunned, actually—at what the young detective had single-handedly put together. “It was,” he would later say, “one of the most significant, incredible files I’d ever seen.”

Thus the New Jersey attorney general’s office lined up behind the investigation that Detective Pat Kane had started.

On the evening of September 6, 1986—four days after Dominick Polifrone had his first meeting with Kuklinski—Pat Kane sat down in a windowless war room in the New Jersey attorney general’s Fairfield building. He was surrounded by law-enforcement heavies, including Bob Carroll, Deputy State Police Chief Bob Buccino, Captain John Leck, and New Jersey Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau investigators Paul Smith and Ron Donahue, all interested, all there because of Kane’s diligence. No one doubted any longer what he’d been saying. If John Leck was also there, he was now behind Pat Kane 100 percent. Here Operation Ice Man—because they believed Richard had frozen Masgay—was formed, and the rope to hang Richard Kuklinski became longer still.

Over Chinese takeout, Pat Kane and Bob Carroll carefully laid out all the information Kane had gathered over the many months he’d been working the case: how it all began as a series of unsolved burglaries; the murders of Masgay, Smith, and Deppner, and the disappearance of Hoffman; Kuklinski’s connection to Roy DeMeo and organized crime. All that Kane had found out, put together, was tremendously helpful. But the attorney general’s office needed tangible evidence that would hold up under the withering scrutiny of a crack defense attorney.

Dominick Polifrone was the answer. They would use him to get Kuklinski to incriminate himself. If Kuklinski had asked Polifrone for cyanide at their very first meeting at the Dunkin’ Donuts, it stood to reason that Polifrone was “in,” that Kuklinski would hang himself.

Cyanide was the key—that would be the beam from which to hang the rope.

With permission from his superiors, Polifrone soon attended a second meeting of the Operation Ice Man task force, and Bob Carroll ran down for Polifrone what he wanted. Again present were Pat Kane and the heavies— Investigators Paul Smith and Ron Donahue, Deputy Chief Bob Buccino, and Captain John Leck. Ron Donahue was a seasoned, hardened investigator, notorious for his toughness on the streets. He was actually booed by mob guys when he showed up in court, walked into mob hangouts. He very much looked like the boxer Jack Dempsey and was tough like him. Paul Smith was in his early thirties, had a Beatle haircut, hooded dark eyes. He was an adept undercover guy. Only Captain Leck wore a uniform. Bob Buccino had a thick head of silver hair, was a patient, intelligent man, a good administrator, adept at getting people to work well together. They all sat down. Now there