Richard Kuklinski

Pleasure killer and Mafia hitman

  • Born: April 11, 1935
  • Birthplace: Jersey City, New Jersey
  • Died: March 5, 2006
  • Place of death: Trenton, New Jersey

Major offense: Murder for hire

Active: 1949, 1965-1985

Locale: New York and New Jersey

Sentence: Two consecutive life sentences

Early Life

Richard Kuklinski (kew-KLIHN-skee) was born on April 11, 1935, in New Jersey. He was raised in a low-income housing project in Jersey City by his strict Catholic parents until the age of sixteen. His father, who was a brakeman for the railroad, and his mother, who worked at a local meatpacking plant, were far from ideal parents; they abandoned Kuklinski and his brother in 1951. Later, after Kuklinski was convicted of murder, he admitted that it was the frequent beatings from his alcoholic father that caused him to become psychologically numb and detached from his victims throughout his murderous career.

At age fourteen, Kuklinski killed his first victim, a local neighborhood bully. At sixteen, Kuklinski began to understand his potential as a fighter when he severely beat six teenage boys with a bar from a neighbor’s clothesline. In a 1991 prison interview, Kuklinski openly admitted that he enjoyed the rush and the sense of power that came from beating and killing those who stood in his way or contested him. He also admitted that during his younger years, he had an obsession with torturing and brutally killing neighborhood pets. In one account, he mentioned how he would tie the tails of two cats together and throw them over a clothesline to watch them claw each other to death.

With only an eighth-grade education, Kuklinski took to the streets and became a pool-hall hustler, an enforcer for local bookies, and eventually a film technician, in which capacity he pirated pornographic films for various Mafia members. It was not until the mid-1960’s, after he married his wife, Barbara, and began to have children (he would have three), that Kuklinski began his new profession as a contract killer for the mob.

Criminal Career

To his family and friends he was a quiet businessman who worked long and sometimes strange hours to support his family. However, to his employers, various Mafia families from both New Jersey and New York, Kuklinski was an enforcer and professional hit man with a tremendous reputation for making his victims suffer. At the pinnacle of his career, Kuklinski was earning nearly fifty thousand dollars a hit and became known as one of the best contract killers in the business.

Kuklinski was known for using numerous heinous methods to kill his victims. His favorite was using liquid cyanide, either lacing his victim’s drink or literally throwing the chemical on the victim’s skin, to watch him go into cardiac arrest. Kuklinski was also notorious for the various instruments he used to murder his victims, from chainsaws to axes to ice picks. Kuklinski received his nickname the Iceman for his method of freezing his victims’ bodies over long periods of time, both to conceal and to prevent discovery of any physical evidence. Kuklinski estimated that in total, he killed more than one hundred people during his criminal career.

Kuklinski was arrested in December, 1986, and was subsequently convicted of four murders in 1988. He received two life sentences, to be served consecutively. He died in March, 2006, in the prison wing of St. Francis Hospital in Trenton. At the time of his death he was scheduled to testify regarding a hit he purportedly made for Mafia boss Sammy Gravano. Authorities, however, considered Kuklinski to have died of natural causes.

Impact

Richard Kuklinski is one of the most infamous killers of the twentieth century. He admitted to committing more than one hundred murders. Although this number may never be substantiated, his brutal and heinous tactics gained for him irrefutable notoriety among scholars and clinicians alike. In particular, his contract killings for various Mafia families—in which Kuklinski would torture, kill, and dismember his victims—brought him notable acclaim among his peers. Kuklinski’s story was told in two HBO documentary films, one released in 1992, the other in 2001.

Bibliography

Bruno, Anthony. The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer. New York: Dell, 1993. This biography of Kuklinski offers the first look into what some have deemed the most notorious serial murderer in the history of the United States.

Kuklinski, Barbara, and John Driver. Married to the Iceman: A True Account of Life with a Mafia Hitman and the Inside Story of His Crimes. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1994. Kuklinski’s wife offers a detailed look at the man behind the killer, highlighting his role as a father and husband.

Kuklinski, Richard. The Iceman Interviews. Film documentary. HBO Productions, 2004. A unique compilation of interviews conducted with Kuklinski, first in 1992 and then in 2001. He gives a firsthand account of his life as a ruthless role as a hit man for the mob.