The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer

alleging. For the longest time, Dwayne had felt that sooner or later he would have some kind of life-and-death struggle with his father, and now Dwayne realized that such a confrontation would surely have ended with his being killed.

More than anyone else, Dwayne felt the stigma of being Richard’s son, a Kuklinski. By now both Chris and Merrick were out of school, but Dwayne was still attending school, and he saw the strange, curious stares, the pointing, heard the whispering. Richard’s favorite, Merrick, also wasn’t surprised at what the police said her dad had done, but still she was hurt and deeply troubled that her dad was in jail. No matter what he’d done, what heinous crimes the police said he’d committed, he was innocent until proved guilty. Merrick would love him and support him and be there 10,000 percent for him to the end.

When Richard learned that Dominick Polifrone was a plant, an ATF agent, and that he had taped most of their conversations, he knew he was dead in the water. Unless some kind of miracle happened, he’d never get out of jail, never see the light of day, would more than likely get a death sentence. He was so angry with himself, how stupid and gullible he’d been, that he couldn’t even look at himself in a mirror without getting angry and calling himself names: You idiot, you fool, what the fuck were you thinking? he said over and over again.

He paced his cell. He silently cursed heaven and hell, the world and everyone in it.

Richard often thought about killing Deputy Chief Bob Buccino, how he would torture him and make him suffer. Oh, how he wanted to see Buccino suffer, see the rats feed on him. He believed that Kane and Polifrone were, for the most part, just doing their jobs, but Buccino was another story. The way he had treated Barbara was, he believed, totally uncalled for, was bullylike, and he hated the man with a fiery-burning passion. Even now, so many years later, Richard gets angry, his face pales, his lips twist, when he thinks of Deputy Chief Buccino. I don’t know, he recently said, if the prick is still alive or dead, but if he died I hope it was a painful death. I hope he died of cancer of the asshole.

Shortly after his arrest, Richard decided not even to try to mount any kind of viable defense. His was a hopeless case; once a jury heard him talking, burying himself, he’d get convicted. The only question was whether he would get the death sentence or life in jail. Either way, it didn’t matter. He had fucked up big-time and he knew it, accepted it, didn’t try to blame someone else. Yes, of course, his “friend” Phil Solimene had set him up, but he should have sensed something was up, smelled it in the wind, seen the handwriting on the wall. Richard had never been trusting or easily fooled, yet he had walked into the carefully laid trap, he says, like a wide-eyed schoolkid with no sense at all.

Because of all the extraordinary media coverage of the case, the jury pool, he knew, was irreversibly tainted, and he had less chance than a snowball in hell. Also because of all the media attention he’d gotten, Richard was by far the most notorious prisoner in the county jail. One of his fellow prisoners began taunting him and teasing him everytime he passed his cell. “Ice Man my ass,” he said. “You ain’t shit; you ain’t so tough.” Richard just smiled, knowing sooner or later he’d get his hands on this guy. He was in a foul, homicidal mood, looking to kill someone, anyone. Murder would be like an aspirin for a headache.

Barbara was, in a sense, relieved that Richard was finally out of the house. For the first time since she’d married Richard, she knew a new kind of peace and tranquillity, she explained. For weeks after Richard’s arrest reporters hounded her and her children, but they were coming around less and less, thank God.

Pat Kane woke up every day with a smile on his face. He had done it. It had been a long, bumpy road but he’d done it.

He was ten feet tall.

 56

 It Was Due to Business

Thirteen months after Richard’s arrest, on January 25, 1988, his trial began for the murders of Gary Smith and Danny Deppner. The state had decided to have two trials; the second trial would be for the murders of George Malliband and Louis Masgay. Bob Carroll had decided not to try Richard for the murder of Paul Hoffman, because without Mr. Hoffman’s body, the case would be difficult to prove, so for now, he dropped it.

A young lawyer with the public defender’s office, Neal Frank, became Richard’s attorney. Richard was claiming to be indigent, and the state was forced to provide him with counsel. Perhaps out of lack of experience or naivete, Neal Frank felt there was a fighting chance and told both Richard and Barbara that. But Richard knew better. He didn’t feel he had any chance at walking.

Barbara, however, believed Frank, believed that Richard would beat the charges and come home. She was torn about his return. On the one hand, she was finally free of him, not subjected to his volatile mood swings, his duality, his sudden, extraordinary violence. On the other, she missed the good Richard.

Still, she quickly got used to sleeping alone and liked it, she says.

Neal Frank told Barbara that she and the family should show up in court, to let the jury see them. It was important for the jury to know that Richard had a loving, supportive family. They had to see that Richard wasn’t the diabolical serial killer the press had consistently portrayed him as. This, the Ice Man story, had by now appeared on hundreds of front pages across New Jersey, indeed across the country.

The presiding judge was a stern, forbidding individual who wore granny glasses, slicked his sparse gray hair back, and was known as the “Time Machine” because he had a tendency to mete out the harshest sentences the law provided. His name was Fred Kuchenmeister, and he regularly showed open disdain for defendants. In his court defense lawyers claimed that you were guilty until you proved yourself innocent.

By the time jury selection was completed and the trial actually began, it was February 17. Finding a fair- minded jury had been, for Neal Frank, a Herculean task with all the media attention, but Frank felt he had managed to secure a reasonable jury that would listen to the case with “an open mind.”

Bob Carroll first presented an extremely well-put-together case, tight as a wet drum. Carroll, with co-counsel Charley Waldron, a tall, gray-haired man who knew well his way around a courtroom, put a series of witnesses on the stand, beginning with Barbara Deppner. Also up were Percy House, Richard Peterson, Pat Kane, two pathologists, Deputy Chief Bob Buccino, Jimmy DiVita, Gary Smith’s wife, and Veronica Cisek. Carroll even put on the stand Darlene Pecorato, a stewardess that had rented Richie Peterson’s apartment after he moved out. This was the place where Danny Deppner had been shot in the head by Richard, and Pecorato told about the bloodstained rug when she moved in, and Paul Smith then told how he had discovered bloodstains in the wood floor under the rug. And finally Dominick Polifrone took the stand. When Dominick walked in front of Richard, Richard said, “Hey, Dom, how you doin’?” actually smiling. Dominick was still, to Richard’s amazement, wearing that terrible wig.

Now the jury heard Richard’s own words, words that clearly opened the door wide, everyone knew, to convict Richard. Neal Frank tried to make the jury believe Richard had only been bragging, but this was a hard sell and everyone knew it.

All through the fast-moving proceedings, Barbara Kuklinski didn’t believe what the state was contending until she heard her husband readily admitting to killing people with guns, knives, and cyanide. Until she heard him say that he had frozen a man to confuse the police, she still thought that he had been framed. When she heard Richard tell Agent Polifrone what he had done and how he had done it, she was stunned to numb silence. She had always known Richard to be exceedingly tight-lipped. She hadn’t been able to get anything out of his mouth with a crowbar since she met him twenty-six years before; yet here he was admitting to a cop all that he’d done, how he’d done it, even when and where.

Barbara wanted to run from the courtroom. She had no idea, she realized as if she’d been struck by lightning, whom she’d really been married to for so many years. She felt fooled and duped; she felt like an out-of-touch idiot. She wanted to stand up and yell at him, How could you?! How could you?! But she sat there still like stone, her mouth slightly agape, listening to her husband admit to murder as if he were talking about feeding the ducks or the color of the tie he should wear.

Numb, she left the courtroom, sure Richard would never get out of jail, never be free, shaking her head in dismay. I was married, she recently explained, to a monster and didn’t know