Richard Kuklinski always had a deal going, and usually several at
once. He stole cars and expedited trade in pornography, guns,
and drugs.
Anthony Bruno points out in his book, The Iceman, written
with Kuklinski's cooperation, that he first killed someone in 1949
when he was fourteen years old. Protecting his territory
against a bully, he fatally beat the other boy, although it
surprised him to hear the next day that the kid was actually dead.
It also filled him with a sense of power. He now perceived
himself as "someone." He grew up into a controlling
man who tolerated no one's defiance or disrespect.
On a televised documentary on HBO, Kuklinski described his first
premeditated kill as an adult: In Jersey City one evening, he'd used
a car bomb triggered by gasoline to kill a man. As he walked
away from the exploding car, he felt nothing. That was his
way. He detached himself from his victims, an attitude that he
claims came from having to detach himself from the abuse his drunken
father inflicted on him as a boy. In fact, he had a brother
Joey who'd gone to prison at the age of 25 after raping and killing
a twelve-year-old girl and throwing her body from the roof of a
building. He threw her dog to the ground with her, and for
that he got life in Trenton State prison.
Kuklinski planned on avoiding that fate but he didn't really care
who he hurt. He just had to make sure it couldn't be traced to
him.
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Roy DeMeo (POLICE) |
Eventually he got involved in business deals with the
Brooklyn-based Roy DeMeo, a one-time butcher's apprentice and the
most feared hit man for the Gambino crime family. While
Kuklinski wasn't great about collecting money due, DeMeo saw that
"the Pollack" had what it took to kill people.
Kuklinski admitted that he'd do anything for money, so DeMeo took
him to a place where they spotted a man out walking his dog.
Without a thought, and on command, Kuklinski walked by the man and
then turned and shot him. That brought him deeper into DeMeo's
inner circle and he witnessed DeMeo's volatile moods.
In fact, DeMeo had a strange assembly-line approach to his
killings. According to a former associate, the target person
would walk into the club. He'd be shot by one person, wrapped
in a towel by another, and stabbed in the heart by yet a third
person. Then he'd be cleaned up, drained of blood, laid out on
a pool liner, and hacked into pieces that were packaged like meat
and tossed into a dump. Kuklinski knew he had to be careful,
and once for no apparent reason he was nearly annihilated by the
paranoid DeMeo.
Yet when DeMeo's renowned temper and mania for killing became
disorganized and conspicuous, he fell out of favor with the Gambino
family. A hit was put on him and eventually he was found shot
to death in the trunk of his car in January of 1983. While by
some reports, Nino Gaggi did the hit, Kuklinski smiles at the idea
that it might have been done by him. "He outlived his
usefulness," was Kuklinski's comment. At any rate, the
man responsible for well over one hundred killings was now gone, but
not before he'd taught Kuklinski a thing or two.
Apparently he killed a number of other people during the 1970s,
but the first one that police linked to him was George W. Malliband,
Jr., from Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, who was in the pornography trade
with Kuklinski. Early in 1980, he left home with Kuklinski to
meet with Roy DeMeo. Malliband owed DeMeo money, and since
Kuklinski had vouched for him, it was now on Kuklinski's head.
DeMeo was furious and it would be in character for him to shoot them
both dead on the spot.
What Malliband did not realize is that Kuklinski's own anger had
been simmering since Malliband had come to his home the summer
before. Kuklinski never allowed his business to penetrate his
family life, and he'd been furious when Malliband had just walked
into his yard during a family gathering, asking for him. Now
that he was in a bind, Malliband reminded Kuklinski that he knew
where his family lived. It was a veiled threat and that was
the last idea Malliband ever had. Kuklinski pulled over and
shot him five times with a .38, right there in the van.
Then he was faced with a body disposal problem. He decided
to put the guy into a 55-gallon steel drum, but Malliband was
six-foot-three and weighed 300 pounds—almost matching Kuklinski's
own enormous frame. Kuklinski knew it wouldn't be easy, and it
wasn't. He stuffed the corpse into the drum, headfirst, and
found that he couldn't quite make the legs fit in. The answer
was to break one. Cutting the tendons behind the knee, he
snapped the leg forward. Then he placed the top on the barrel,
secured it, and rolled it off a cliff in the Palisades. It hit
some sixty feet below.
Kuklinski paid off DeMeo and washed his hands of George Malliband.
On February 5, the owner of a Jersey City building at the foot of
the cliff noticed the dented drum. The lid had popped and
something was sticking out, so he went closer. When he saw two
bloody human legs, he ran to get the police. They traced the
corpse's identity, and soon heard from Malliband's brother that he
had been seriously afraid of Kuklinski. They now had a
suspect.
It was a year and a half before a similar murder was performed,
and much longer before the victim was identified, mostly due to an
idea Kuklinski got from a man named Robert Prongay, a.k.a., Mister
Softee.
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