THE ICEMAN Ep. 1 | “Making A Murderer”

Listener discretion is advised.

The victim was no match for the 6 foot 5, 290 pound Richard Kuklinski.

Kuklinski had easily overpowered the man, tied him up, and deposited him in the trunk

in a parking lot in New Jersey.

As Richard calmly drove his car through the windy, tree-lined backroads of New Jersey,

he never sped.

If a cop dared to pull him over, he would probably be a dead cop.

But for Richard, taking his time was never an issue.

Kuklinski never panicked.

Transporting a writhing, bound body in the trunk of his car

was the equivalent of dropping off a bag of clothes to Goodwill.

Kuklinski was ruthless and emotionless.

The people he worked for paid Richard extra if the victim suffered before dying.

The only trouble was, since the person was about to be dead, there was no way to prove it

until Richard started setting up film cameras to record the suffering.

Only then would he have the documentation of the slow, painful, methodical, and often creative torture that he inflicted.

Ever the visionary, Kuklinski was always trying to build a better mousetrap.

After dumping a body in a forest, he came across a dead animal in a cave

with a bevy of rats feasting on the carcass.

That inspired him.

If the rats would eat a deer, they would probably eat a human.

It's not like rats were picky eaters.

Richard, who had the strength of five men,

parked his vehicle deep in the woods of Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

He then easily carried the flailing man over to the caves.

Had the victim known what was about to transpire,

he died in the trunk on the trip there.

Richard wrapped wet strips of rawhide around the man's arms and legs.

Tomorrow, when the sun came out, the warm rays would dry out the strips

and squeeze the victim's limbs as if they were blood pressure monitors gone bad.

Richard set up his video camera to tape the festivities and then drove off,

relaxing to country music while the victim still squirmed and pleaded through the duct tape on his mouth.

The next morning, Kuklinski went back to the caves to check on his work.

The man had been reduced to a pile of bones overnight.

Satisfied, Richard turned off his camera,

smiled at the few remaining rats still scrounging for scraps,

and drove off with yet another contract fulfilled

and another person reduced to almost nothing.

From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America.

I'm your host, Chris Wimmer,

and this season we're telling the story of one of the most prolific, notorious,

and terrifying mafia hitmen of all time,

the Iceman.

This is Episode 1, Making a Murderer.

Richard's father, Stanley Kuklinski,

immigrated from Warsaw, Poland to Jersey City, New Jersey as a child.

Richard's mother, Anna, was a New Jersey native.

They met and married in the 1920s,

and their relationship was bad from the beginning.

Stanley was a brake man for the Lackawanna Railroad,

and he was a hard drinker.

Drinking made him angry and violent,

and although he was only 5 feet 7 inches tall, he was powerful.

He was abusive, and Anna hoped he would mellow out

with the arrival of their first child, Florian, in the spring of 1929.

The opposite occurred.

It wasn't long before Stanley started hitting Florian, too.

If Florian cried, he got hit.

If he continued to cry, he got hit again,

and Anna was helpless to stop it.

On April 11, 1935, Anna had another boy, Richard.

Although he would grow into a hulking brute of nearly 300 pounds,

he weighed only 5 pounds at birth.

He had a head of shiny blonde hair,

and Anna was hopeful that, as the family expanded,

the violence would subside.

Again, she was wrong.

The additional mouth to feed put even more pressure on Stanley,

and now there were three people in the house to hit.

Stanley Kuklinski frequently struck his two small boys in the head

with a belted fist,

often knocking both Florian and Richard out cold.

Richard became so terrified of the sight of his dad

that he would wet his pants,

which caused an additional beating for ruining his clothes.

He lived his life in abject terror.

Violence surrounded him.

Richard was dyslexic and had trouble reading,

With his fingers to keep his eyes in the proper place in his textbook at school,

a nun struck his hand with a metal ruler.

One day at home, Stanley hit Florian with such force

that his son never got back up.

Stanley insisted that Anna tell the neighbors and the authorities

that the boy had died by falling down a flight of stairs and hitting his head.

Florian was 11 years old.

Richard was just 5.

Anna told Richard that Florian died after being hit by a car.

Richard still didn't understand where his brother was,

and with Florian gone, Richard's life became even more brutal.

He no longer had an older brother to lean on

and felt alone and isolated.

It didn't help that he lived in a tough Irish neighborhood.

Some bigger kids often picked on him.

Once after Stanley saw his son running away from a group of boys,

he beat up Richard and demanded Richard go back outside

and fight the kids who had humiliated him.

Richard wasn't even a teenager yet,

but he was more frightened of his dad than of a couple street kids.

He reluctantly went back outside and confronted two of the instigators.

But this time, for the first time, Richard Kuklinski won a fight.

Blood was drawn, and for the first time it wasn't his.

Richard's inner demons were officially unleashed.

At the age of 13, a local gang of boys viciously beat up Richard.

As he lay helpless on the ground,

they continued to kick and punch and spit on him.

He had suffered so many injuries and the one-sided brawl,

he had to stay home from school for a week.

While lying in bed, Richard decided he could no longer live in fear.

According to Richard, as soon as his wounds healed,

he set out in the frigid January Jersey City air

and waited for the gang's leader, Charlie Lane, to come home.

When Charlie approached him and called him a dumb Polack,

that was all Richard needed to hear.

He pulled out a two-foot-long wooden pole that he'd hidden in his coat,

and he beat Charlie Lane to death.

In Richard's telling of the story,

he yanked out Charlie's teeth with a pair of pliers

and cut off Charlie's fingertips with a hatchet

and then disposed of the body.

Charlie Lane's body was never found,

so you'll have to take Richard's word for it.

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Just as the birth of a second child didn't mellow out Stanley Kuklinski,

another mouth to feed just made him even meaner.

The abuse continued, and when Richard attempted to come to his mother's defense,

Stanley hit Richard so hard he knocked Richard out.

And then Stanley began openly having affairs.

Soon, Stanley started seeing someone else and wasn't around the house as much.

That was good for the family's safety, but bad for their finances.

Anna now had two jobs to make ends meet.

She worked at the Armand Meatpacking Company and cleaned floors at St. Mary's Church.

As Richard grew into his early teenage years and had been forced into a fight by his father

that awakened him to his ability to dole out punishment instead of take it,

and then maybe killed his first person, he also grew in size well beyond his father.

After he discovered that his father had come home and hit his mother,

Richard found his father, put a .38 caliber gun to his head,

and said he'd kill him and dump him in the river if he ever set foot in their home again.

Stanley Kuklinski never hurt his wife or sons again,

but the damage to Richard was already done.

Richard would become a bigger, meaner version of his father.

Despite standing 6'5 and weighing nearly 300 pounds,

Richard Kuklinski was light on his feet.

He never spent a day in a gym or lifting weights in a garage.

He once said that,

The only exercise I ever got was carrying dead bodies.

At his size, he had no trouble attracting women.

Before he was even out of his teenage years,

a petite 25-year-old brunette named Linda fell in love with him,

and he moved in with her in Jersey City.

It didn't take long for Linda to become pregnant.

Richard didn't love her and he didn't want kids,

but they eventually had two sons before she was finally able to convince him to get married.

Before long, they were estranged,

and Linda started seeing a guy named Sammy James,

who used to shoot pool with Richard.

Richard caught them together in a motel room and pummeled Sammy

and threatened Linda with a knife.

Sammy James left Jersey City the next day and never returned.

Richard and Linda got divorced,

but she wasn't the only one who had found someone new.

Within months of their marriage,

Richard met the woman who would become his second wife.

It was the spring of 1961.

Richard was 26 years old and working at a trucking company,

and so was a tall 18-year-old of Italian descent named Barbara.

They met at a soda machine and said hello, and there was a spark.

A few weeks later, they ran into each other on the loading dock and made more small talk.

Mr. Goldfarb, the manager of the company,

approached Barbara in private and warned her to stay away from Richard.

He said,

Don't have anything to do with that guy.

He's a lug.

He's married with kids.

Richard continued to converse with her, and that got him fired.

But Barbara was still interested, and they dated,

with Richard repeatedly saying he would get divorced from Linda.

Richard and Linda got divorced,

and then the same cycle started with Barbara.

She got pregnant, and Richard didn't want her to have the child.

But Barbara was a strict Catholic and didn't believe in abortion.

When Richard went to work, Barbara went to the bank,

withdrew her life savings, and took off without saying a word to Richard.

She flew to Miami to stay with her father,

and if she was genuinely trying to run from Richard, she didn't run far enough.

Richard found her in a matter of days,

and soon afterward, with Barbara's pregnancy showing,

they got married in Miami.

There was no honeymoon,

and Barbara quickly learned she had married two Richards,

the good Richard, who could be sweet and kind

and would lavish her with gifts in the future,

and the bad Richard, who showed himself shortly after their wedding.

While still staying at Barbara's father's place,

a few days after they were married,

Richard saw Barbara light up a cigarette, and he went berserk.

He yanked it from her mouth and stomped on it.

Barbara, who was no pushover, said she'd smoke if she felt like it.

Richard then stomped on her right foot and fractured her toe.

That evening, Richard wouldn't let Barbara into the bedroom.

Instead, he made her sit on a metal stool on the patio the entire night.

He told her that if she moved from the stool,

he'd kill her father in front of her.

Barbara sat out there, motionless and in shock, until the sun came up.

That morning, she'd lost the baby

because of the stress and torment of the previous night.

Despite all that, they stayed together and slowly started to build a family.

Richard went to extreme lengths to control himself at home.

He punched himself and banged his head against a wall

until he sometimes knocked himself out.

But at least it was better than terrorizing Barbara.

And all that time, he was also finding a better way

to relieve the nonstop anger and aggression that roared inside him.

By his own count, he had killed well over 60 people by that point in his life,

in his mid-20s, and he was about to turn killing into a profession.

A few years earlier, in the mid-1950s, when Richard was 19 years old,

he went into Manhattan by himself for the first time.

He took the ferry into Midtown near 40th Street

and began to walk under the West Side Highway.

Kuklinski hated exercise, but he loved to walk.

It was the best time to think.

Richard walked down the desolate streets, armed with a gun or, at minimum, a knife.

One day while he was walking, a homeless man approached him and asked for money.

Richard ignored him and continued walking.

But the man, who was a large man, was persistent and followed Richard.

Frustrated at being ignored, the man grabbed Richard by the shoulder and asked if he was deaf.

Quick as a cat, Richard spun around and slammed a knife into the man's chest.

The man collapsed to the ground and died,

and Richard wiped the blood from the blade on the man's pants

and continued his stroll as if nothing had happened.

Richard would later say,

Richard had no fear about being tied to the homeless man's murder.

First, the odds of Manhattan police communicating with the Jersey City police,

where Richard lived, were slim.

Second, the Manhattan police believed homeless men were killing each other

as the body count rose among their population.

But at least some of the murders were the work of Richard Kuklinski.

He returned to Manhattan's west side again and again over the coming months

to do what was quickly becoming natural.

He left some of the victims where they were shot or stabbed.

Others he dumped in the Hudson River.

Richard became a connoisseur of murder.

He studied human anatomy to learn the best locations to stab a person,

and he practiced on the least fortunate in society,

the people whose deaths wouldn't be noticed or investigated.

And he didn't limit his methods to knives and guns.

He used a rope to hang a man.

He used an ice pick to stab a man in the eye.

Richard became addicted to killing.

After he committed a murder, he felt relaxed and at peace.

And the NYPD never suspected that a hulking man with Polish roots from Jersey City

was responsible for all the dead men they kept discovering.

There were no witnesses, no clues, and no suspects.

Ken Rowe, an ex-NYPD captain of detectives, summed it up recently when he said,

Because most all these killings were of bums,

there was no incentive to properly work the case.

You see, because he was killing in all different ways,

the cops didn't think one guy was doing it.

In a sense, in a very real sense,

giving him a license to kill.

Around the early 1960s,

as Richard's first marriage was ending and his second marriage was beginning,

he formed a gang with two Polish guys, an Irish guy, and an Italian guy.

They called their gang the Coming Up Roses Gang.

Each of the five got a tattoo with the name on their left hands.

They swore loyalty to one another and began breaking into warehouses,

robbing liquor stores, and burglarizing rich people's homes in New Jersey.

Richard and his gang frequently got into bar brawls.

They sent their opponents to the hospital

and were soon famous in the area for their savagery.

That's when members of the Di Cavalcante crime family discovered them.

Carmine Genovese, no relation to the infamous Vito Genovese,

was short, stout, and had a giant round head,

which earned him the nickname Meatball.

Carmine recruited Richard and his gang for a hit.

Richard was ecstatic.

He finally had his entry into organized crime.

Four of the five members of his gang weren't Italian,

which meant they could never become made men,

which was actually a good thing for aspiring contract killers.

That meant they could work for all the mob families as independent contractors.

And now they had their first assignment.

Richard's gang had to kill a man who drove a Lincoln.

They followed the car to a bar,

but there were too many other people on the road to take action,

so they waited in the parking lot until the man left the establishment.

One of the other gang members was supposed to be the trigger man,

but when he saw the mark leaving the bar and heading to his Lincoln,

he got cold feet.

Richard grabbed the gun from his friend and said,

I'll do it.

Calmly and quietly, Richard approached the Lincoln,

making certain there were no witnesses.

He pressed the gun to the mark's head,

just above the left ear, and pulled the trigger.

One shot and the job was done,

and Richard felt only happiness.

Carmine Genovese was overjoyed at how quickly and methodically the hit had been done.

He poured drinks for the gang and paid them $500 each.

And now that the Coming Up Roses gang had committed murder,

they could be trusted.

Richard had stepped in and coolly executed the contract,

and he was on his way to becoming a homicidal superstar.

Carmine Genovese needed another man killed, with two caveats.

The body had to disappear.

If Richard could prove the man suffered before dying,

he would receive double the payment.

Richard didn't care what the man had done to deserve to suffer.

He never asked. That was none of his business.

Carmine gave him a photograph of the mark and the address where he worked,

a used car lot in Newark, New Jersey.

Richard surveilled the lot for two full days,

memorizing when people were there, when they left,

and the place where they parked.

Finally, he had a plan.

He parked his car a few blocks away on a deserted street.

11 a.m. was a dead time for shoppers at the used car lot.

Richard stuffed a .38 caliber Derringer in one pocket

and a piece of lead pipe in the other, and he walked onto the car lot.

He calmly approached the mark and said he needed a cheap car ASAP.

The mark found a car for Richard, and they drove it off the lot for a test drive.

After driving a few blocks, Richard pulled the vehicle over and popped the hood.

The salesman hovered behind him.

Richard pointed to something in the engine block.

When the salesman looked, Richard smashed him over the head with the pipe

and knocked him out cold.

Richard put the man in the trunk, duct-taped his mouth shut,

and hog-tied his feet and hands behind his back.

He drove to a forest in South Jersey and dragged the panic-stricken man from the trunk.

Richard tied the man to a tree and then had to decide

how he was going to prove that the man had suffered before he died.

Richard could cut off a toe or a finger or something like that,

but he decided to go a little further.

He did the necessary work and then drove to Carmine's house.

When Carmine asked for proof, Richard placed a large plastic bag on Carmine's kitchen table.

Carmine looked inside and saw the salesman's head.

In March of 1964, Richard and Barbara's first child was born.

They thought the girl was a healthy baby,

but she had kidney issues and was frequently in the hospital.

As the doctor bills piled up, Richard needed money.

He got a tip about a truckload of TV sets that was leaving a warehouse.

Before he and his gang stole the truck, they needed a safe place to store it

since it was better to sell all the stolen goods at once rather than one or two at a time.

An acquaintance knew a guy who had a barn on his farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania,

a short drive away.

The farmer agreed to let them hide the truck in his barn for $500, no questions asked.

Richard and his friends hijacked the truck on an empty road.

They put a gun to the driver's head, forced him out of the truck, and tied him to a light pole.

Then they dropped the truck at the farmer's barn and paid him his storage fee.

Now all they needed was a buyer for the televisions.

It took them eight days to find the right person.

But when Richard returned to the farm to retrieve the merchandise, he discovered one minor problem.

The truck was gone.

The farmer acted shocked and said he had no idea what happened.

Richard knew he was lying.

The idea that the truck magically disappeared from the farmer's barn

and the farmer had no clue what happened was absurd.

But the farmer insisted he was telling the truth and swore on his mother's life.

Richard was losing patience.

He tied the farmer to a tree near the barn.

The man wailed uncontrollably, but Richard wasn't fazed.

He walked back to his car and grabbed an emergency road flare.

He removed the farmer's shoes and socks and lit the flare,

placing it close enough to the man's foot to blister it.

That was Richard Kuklinski's way of being nice.

But the farmer continued to claim he knew nothing of the truck's whereabouts.

Richard thought he might have made a mistake.

Maybe the farmer didn't know anything.

That moment left quickly as Richard continued using the flare on the man's foot until it was blackened.

The farmer still didn't give it up.

Richard grabbed a second flare,

and this time he directed it at more sensitive, private parts of the farmer's anatomy.

It wasn't long before the farmer cried out,

Sammy has it.

Sammy was the farmer's friend who lived down the road.

Richard was incredulous and asked why he didn't just say that in the first place.

The farmer responded, because I thought I could fool you.

And that was the first and last time he made that mistake.

When Richard's friends went down the road,

Sammy, a short, burly man, came out of his farmhouse and denied having the truck.

Sammy took less convincing.

Richard's friends pistol-whipped Sammy,

and within seconds, he confessed to hiding the truck behind some trees out back.

At that point, Richard was thoroughly pissed at having to go through so much trouble

because of these two stubborn farmers.

He shot the farmer whom he'd burned,

and his gang members killed Sammy.

Then they headed back to New Jersey and sold the entire truckload of televisions.

With his share of the cash,

Richard and his wife Barbara bought a house in West New York.

With two successful murders under his belt for a made man in a crime family,

and the successful hijacking of the truckload of TVs,

Richard had proved he was ruthless, efficient, and a problem solver.

Those were the exact traits that were wanted by Roy DeMeo.

Roy would become Richard's introduction to the big time,

a contract killer for all the mafia families on the East Coast.

Next time on Infamous America,

the demand for Richard's services skyrockets.

He travels the country fulfilling contracts.

Some require subtlety.

Some require blunt force.

Some allow him to be horribly creative.

And they all move him into a position to meet one of the biggest players in the business,

John Gotti.

That's next week on Infamous America.

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This series was researched and written by Brian Frazier.

Original music by Rob Valliere.

I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer.

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Thanks for listening.