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.

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.