Organized Crime and Punishment

Title: Mob's Grim Reaper: Roy DeMeo's Violent Odyssey Original Publication Date: 8/30/2023 Transcript URL: https://share.descript.com/view/bkHR55zM1qY Description: In this episode of Organized Crime and Punishment, Mustache Chris and Steve delve into the chilling tale of Roy DeMeo, a ruthless figure who left an indelible mark on the world of organized crime. Join us as we trace DeMeo's meteoric rise through the ranks of the Gambino crime family, his notorious "DeMeo Crew," and their involvement in a string of gruesome murders and criminal enterprises. From his reputation as a cold-blooded enforcer to his ties with powerful crime syndicates, we explore the factors that fueled DeMeo's dominance and the empire he built. However, as the walls closed in and law enforcement tightened their grip, his empire began to crumble, leading to his eventual demise in a hail of bullets. Tune in to unravel the complex web of power, violence, and justice in the underworld, and don't miss our expert analysis on the legacy that Roy DeMeo leaves behind. #OrganizedCrime #TrueCrime #RoyDeMeo #CriminalEmpire #GambinoFamily #DeMeoCrew #RiseAndFall #ColdBlooded #PodcastEpisode #TrueCrimeStory You can learn more about Organized Crime and Punishment and subscribe at all these great places: https://atozhistorypage.start.page email: crime@atozhistorypage.com www.organizedcrimeandpunishment.com Parthenon Podcast Network Home: parthenonpodcast.com On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/@atozhistory https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage https://facebook.com/atozhistorypage https://twitter.com/atozhistorypage https://www.instagram.com/atozhistorypage/ Music Provided by: Music from "5/8 Socket" by Rico's Gruv Used by permission. © 2021 All Rights Reserved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210vQJ4-Ns0 https://open.spotify.com/album/32EOkwDG1YdZwfm8pFOzUu Begin Transcript: [00:00:00] Welcome to Organized Crime and Punishment, the best spot in town to hang out and talk about history and crime with your hosts, Steve and Mustache Chris. Let's talk a little bit about Paul Castellano because Paul Castellano, he came up in our last episode about the Iceman. To me, he seemed like the... Really the most unlikeliest of mafia guys, because he had a huge legitimate business in meatpacking that, uh, the, his business was in selling meat and chicken, and he made tons and tons of [00:01:00] money. If I'm not mistaken, both of his sons were involved in the business and they were completely legit. And I. Don't understand why someone like Paul Castellano would want to be involved in this really dirty, nasty. Underworld element of the, the mafia when he could have just been involved completely in the white collar part of the mafia, which in the 60s and the 70s and the 80s. Sure. If you were. In labor unions, or if you were in something like meatpacking, yeah, you were connected to the mafia, but you didn't have to be in the nitty gritty of being around people like Roy DeMeo and the Westies, and the really gritty, nasty part of the mafia and the organized crime. No, I just, I think. It's because he just kind of grew up with it and kind of got pulled into it. And [00:02:00] because he was such a good earner, I mean, it, it would make kind of sense that you would want that guy to be the head of the family because nobody knew how to like make as much money as Paul and do it somewhat. I mean, do it legitimately for the most part and not attract like police attention, but. I don't like Paul wasn't really cut out for the job to like, I don't think he really understood like stuff that was coming down the pipe in terms of like week, uh, Rico and like wiretapping. Cause he would have all the dude, you would have all the guys like show up at the, I believe it was like the veterans club that they called every two weeks, every week to sit down and talk about, you know, what was Gambino family. And it's the cops are just kind of sitting there laughing at them and say, well, I mean, really, they're all going to show up at the same time. We're just. I'm going to stand out here and take pictures and, you know, and his own house was wiretapped at one point. He just doesn't seem, it seemed like probably like a good idea in theory. This guy's a great [00:03:00] earner and he seems to keep his nose pretty clean. Like who better to run the family, but. In practice, it didn't really work out all that well. And I mean, he was so like white collar too, that he, he really kind of pissed off the guys that were, you know, like the street guys. And if you're going to be the head of a mafia family, you have to be able to strike a balance between the two where. The street guys are happy because you do need them. At the end of the day, the mafia is kind of built on muscle. If you don't have that, um, the threat of violence, if, um, the rest of it doesn't really work all that well. I mean, especially in like, you know, labor unions and like the construction business and even. I mean, even Paul's chicken and poultry business was built on kind of loan sharking where, you know, he was successful at it and then he would lend out loans to like other, you know, butcher shops and what have you. And then they obviously wouldn't be able to pay. And then he would just take like, 25 or 50% of their business. And that's kind of how it grew up. That doesn't work. If you don't [00:04:00] really have the guys like Roy DeMail showing up at, you know, Joe Schmoe's butcher house saying, you know, this is how it's going to go down. If it doesn't go down in the next couple of days like this, um, you know, we're going to take care of business. If they're not afraid that these guys are going to take care of business, the whole thing doesn't really work. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think that, uh, definitely in somebody like Paul, he was perfect as the boss in that he had this really. Good knowledge of the, um, of the white collar part. But at that point in the Gambino family, you had the Gambino family was really the Mafiaa in New York City. There was still the five families. And if we go a little bit further, the de Caval canes in New Jersey right next door. But it was really, the Gambinos were the game. They were the biggest family and they were divided between the Manhattan. Faction under Neil Della [00:05:00] Croce and Nino Gaggi in the, uh, the Brooklyn Faction. It was a family that was really split between these two regional factions, plus the white collar faction and the more blue collar faction. So they, it was a. It was a very tough, or it was a huge umbrella, you might say, and it was maybe too big for its own good. Yeah, and it's, there's a lot of different theories about, like, if Neil Delacroix had been made boss instead of, uh, Paul Castellano. Oh, like, how history would have been different, like, does John Gotti come around? And, you know, like, there's... It's interesting, but, yeah, like, Paul... Paul just wasn't the guy for the job, in my opinion. He didn't, you can't look down on the street guys because without them, the rest of it just doesn't work. And the, the, the intimidation of is like essential to the mafia. That doesn't, you [00:06:00] can't, you got to treat those guys fairly because they're just as important as the guys, you know, doing, you know, running the concrete business, which is pretty much. The mob ran the entire concrete business. It's crazy to think that in New York, if you poured any concrete, you're the that was the mob's concrete. You're paying the mob one way or another. Now, the other thing. So we have this really that somebody it's Paul Castellano is like one of those people with the plates trying to like, spin them on sticks and keep this whole thing of the Gambino crime family going. Then you have, if we zoom in on Paul DeM or on Roy DeMeo, looking at his personal life, he was somebody who, for the most part, Kept lived two separate lives that he didn't live in Brooklyn. He lived in the suburbs. He lived a completely normal suburban lifestyle at the same time of being a brutal street criminal in New [00:07:00] York City. You know, he would do like firework shows for house parties. Uh, He practice and for, you know, every in house with the mom, the peddling, the pornography and all that stuff. And he tried to like his family life was completely stopped, not want any of the stuff kind of truly involved in all the craziness. I don't, how do you think some, it seemed that it, Roy was able to hold those two lives together for a long time, but then it really did start breaking down for him. Yeah, well the, I, the thing that kind of starts it is Chris Rosenberg. Should, is that, should we start talking about that? Yeah, let's, because that's kinda where it kind of all starts falling apart. Yeah. Let's get into that. Yeah, so Chris Rosenberg, who we had mentioned earlier, was kind of like, uh, a son almost to Roy DeMille, you kind of viewed him as like a son or a little brother, comes up with this, uh, harebrained idea that he [00:08:00] was going to do, uh, a massive coke dealer with some, uh, Colombians that were living in Florida. Colombians, uh, sorry, Cubans that were in Florida at the time and Chris, yeah, Chris comes up with this great idea. It's like, well, I'm going to do the deal and I'm going to show up and but I'm going to take the coke and I'm also going to take the money. And so how is Chris going to do this? Oh, he's just going to kill them. And As opposed to, like, introducing himself as, like, Chris Rosenberg, which is who he is, he was, he would, he introduced himself as Chris DeMeo. And, where it gets, I believe he was, like, the, the guys who were, he ended up killing were, like, cousins to some, oh, I think it was El Negro. With some Cuban, um, uh, some big time, like Cuban drug Lord and they put, uh, basically say that the, uh, the, uh, only, uh, form that the only way that this is going to go away is if Chris Rosenberg is killed and it's [00:09:00] made publicly. So, you know, God, he goes to Roy de Mayo. It's like, I understand that, you know, how much Chris means to you, but he like really messed up. And if we don't do anything about this quickly, we could have a full on, you know, war between the Gambino family and a Cuban, uh, drug cartel. And to be quite honest to the Gambinos are really powerful, but I don't really know if they could have, uh, taken on a, a drug cartel, which, uh, I mean, anybody who's like looked into narcos, there's the mafia and then like the narcos are a whole nother level above the mafia in terms of just, you know, power and influence Roy. For obvious reasons is, you know, apprehensive. He really doesn't want to do this and this kind of shows a different kind of side of Roy where a lot of the stuff you read about Roy, you get the impression that he's just this like cold blooded, ruthless killer. And he definitely was that. But this to me shows, I think it was like two weeks or a couple of [00:10:00] weeks. He was holding off trying to killing Chris because he really didn't want to do this. And uh, Roy, in the meantime, you know, he's like getting paranoid and there is a kid hanging out in front of his house. Um, can't remember his name right now, but he would, he looked cute. Uh, Roy DeMille thought it was a Cuban hit man. So, you know, he chases him down for a couple of blocks and catches up to him and basically shoots dead, you know, right in the middle of the street, middle of the day. Turns out that the kid was just selling vacuums and, you know, gets a word of this and freaks out and says like, okay, that's enough. Like you, you, uh, take care of Chris right now, or you're, you're done yourself. We're, we'll take care of you. And so they get, um, Chris to go back to the Gemini lounge, which they had done many, many times. I'm surprised that Chris knowing the circumstances would agree to go to the Gemini lounge, but he does. And Roy [00:11:00] shoots. Um, and from the information that we have, he shoots them once and, uh, in the head, but Chris didn't die. I guess he didn't get a clean enough shots and he's up on one knee. Roy can't finish the job. And I believe in the job for Roy, but this and Roy's son talks about this and period and Chris's, I mean, in a Roy's life and how it, it really messed him up, like when he shot that Cuban kid, he was. I believe was didn't leave his room for a couple of days. It really affected them. And then on top of, you know, with Chris, it really affected him too. And it, it shows that he wasn't like a psychopath. He actually did feel like he actually didn't care about people and deeply and. Unlike say, like somebody like a Ted Bundy who was a sociopath and didn't really have any empathy for anybody. Clearly Roy did. He was just able to [00:12:00] compartmentalize the, um, what he was doing with the, the murdering. Cause for the most part, the guys that he was killing were going to either. Gonna rat on him and his crew and, you know, like ruin his family's life. And for the most part, the guys who were going to be ratting weren't like exactly good guys either. They probably would have done the same thing to Roy if the roles were reversed. I mean, I can see in a way how you would justify. Uh, justified to yourself that, like, these murders are okay because they, you know, because of the situation I just laid out, but Chris, that's my best friend, and this kid, he had nothing to do with it. I was just being paranoid, and I killed an innocent person for no reason. Steve here again. We Parthenon Podcast Network, featuring great shows like Josh Cohen's Eyewitness History and many other great shows. Go [00:13:00] to Parthenon Podcast to learn more. And now, here's a quick word from our sponsors. That's the big thing with Roy, and I think, you have to try and understand Roy, I think, even though it's hard to, and it's hard for, me to wrap my mind around, Roy is like a, um, somebody in the military who, They, they kill the enemy. I think that first for Roy, he took a lot of glee in it and a black humor, but I think it was black humor in a lot of ways to cover up for how insane it was, how much killing they were doing and the way they were killing it, killing people. But like you said, that Roy really was upset that he had to kill his. Best friend for a good chunk of his life and is the person we mentored in Chris, uh, Chris Rosenberg and [00:14:00] that, uh, you know, inadvertently killing that kid who was selling the vacuums that really wasn't Roy. Roy was a killer, but he, he wasn't a serial killer. I think that that's really the difference. Yeah. It's like the military is, is, is a really good comparison. That's kind of how I view is Roy saw himself as a soldier in the Gambino family. And he excelled at doing. This type of dirty work and he viewed it as no different than say, like a soldier going into battle and having to kill the enemy. Let's talk, let's shift gears a bit to, um, the biggest score really that Roy had in his whole career. And it was this whole thing about stealing cars in New York. Cleaning them up, you might say, and then shipping them over to [00:15:00] Kuwait. It was really the score that made him a lot of money. And if it had really come to full fruition, what it probably had made him one of the biggest gangsters in, of all times. Yeah, the. It's called, well, it's referred like Empire Boulevard and they had this, this whole elaborate system in terms of stealing these cars where they had it down to such a science where his, uh, Kuwaiti buyers would say, we want, I'll just use it. We want a caddy, you know, 72 caddy red with these types of rims. And Roy has a whole, you know, had a whole army of kids. police cars. And they had a system where he basically had like an on demand car stealing service where, you know, people would like write down to the color of the paint, the type mileage, the whole nine yards. And yeah, they would bring them back to the empire [00:16:00] Boulevard and they would change the VIN number and, you know, stuff so that the car wasn't, uh, wasn't traceable and. I'm trying to remember the amount of cars that were stolen like in a year, but it is astronomical and there was just nothing done about it. I mean, at the time, like the police force in general was understaffed, but, you know, roundabout way, you know, the The, the, you know, the chubby kid from school was like a butcher apprentice and like was always known for these like blue collar type crimes as become an international criminal, because that's basically what it is. This is committing international crime, trading stolen cars from, you know, New York and shipping them out to Kuwait. It's mind boggling that it got this big. The, the thing that, because I was kind of going into this with the. Modern mindset on how hard it is to really steal a car for and resell it in the U. with VIN [00:17:00] plates and each car has a unique identifier called a vehicle identification number of VIN, and if I'm not mistaken, that this is kind of your business. The VIN number is all over everything, if I'm not mistaken, like it's really hard to take a car and just resell it because then you can't get it registered. You can't do anything with it because of this VIN number. Yeah, that's why a lot of the times like the cars they would end up stealing for the, I mean, they would steal like. Cars hold sometimes they tell them to love just, uh, you know, shady or like used car lots. I wouldn't have you and they would buy it for cheap But for the most part you would steal the car and it goes to what we call In the the business kind of I'm in i'm not In the chop shop business, but we call them chop shops and they would, they would steal a car and they chop the car ups. They take all the parts out of all the valuable parts off the car and then [00:18:00] sell the parts and then those become untraceable for the most part. And then they would just get rid of the car, no car, no crime. And this, this thing took it to a whole nother level though, cause they were selling like an entire cars and I assume parts too, but like entire cars to these, uh, Kuwaiti businessmen. And I guess at the time that they did have VIN numbers on the cars, they just, Roy was able to like. Come up with new VIN numbers and he would double check with his contacts in the police department to, you know, make sure that the, this didn't accidentally just like duplicate a VIN number or what have you. And then that would like trigger off, like, uh, if this car had ever been got pulled over or what have you, um, cause he had a whole sophisticated business too, in terms of like. You know, police on the payroll, basically, because none of this would work unless the police were turning a blind eye to a lot of it. And he, and he was really kind of threading the needle [00:19:00] because the, the local, the MIPD cared about the stolen cars, but the federal authorities like customs. They didn't particularly care because the paperwork was clean enough for them that they didn't really, nothing, it didn't raise any huge alarms to them of these cars and a lot of them had really, you know, they were getting sloppy with the VIN plates and they were getting sloppy with a lot of elements with it, but it didn't really matter because the Kuwaitis didn't care. They were just getting flooded with it. Extremely cheap cars, and Roy was making a fortune off of it, I think they were saying that just when they were getting ramped up, they were stealing four to five cars a night, every night of the week, for weeks and weeks and weeks, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of cars, they had to expand their Enterprise from only from being able to process four cars at a [00:20:00] time to 20 cars at a time. And that was at a time when it was a lot easier to steal cars than it was today. So they, it was just like, boom, boom, boom, boom. You know, cars were just vaporizing off the street. Yeah, well, it goes to show you to that, like the cops were, he had to have enough of the police force paying paid off the police force with nothing to really be done about for as long as it's this was going on, you'd imagine, like, just say for 20 cars a day or getting stolen in New York, 20 cars, the point where they, like, I pointed it out, they had, like, an on demand service where you could just kind of go to Roy and be like, I want a red caddy. Oh, yeah, no problem. I'll get it for you tomorrow. And he just sends out like some kids to go steal the car from, you know, because they would use kids because of the most part they nothing would really happen to them. They just get sent home like they wouldn't throw them and the kids don't, you know, steal a car again. For the most part, that's what they would do. And for the most part, you could teach a kid how to steal [00:21:00] those cars. A kid could steal one of those cars in minutes. Yeah, yeah, easily. And then there's like, you don't have to worry about a lot of the other stuff of like an adult was caught stealing the car. They'll be like, who are you stealing the car for? You know, most people are stupid. They'll start blabbing. What really was the cause of Roy's fall? Because Roy eventually does it, everything crumbles, uh, underneath him, his whole foundations. What happens to Roy? Crazy as it sounds, you'd think once Roy was made a, like a main guy, he would just kind of slow down a bit. It's like, okay, uh, you know, I'm, I'm good, but no, I apparently the exact opposite happened. He ramped up the killing and he took more contracts and like to the point he was like doing them at like discounts and It's crazy, I figured you would slow down and you know, you've made it, you're not gonna, like his, Roy wasn't gonna get any higher than that, you know, [00:22:00] he was a made guy, he wasn't gonna be a capo, he was never gonna be a head of the family, that was never gonna happen. He figured I reached the pinnacle of everything I worked for, but no, that's not what happened at all. But like the, I, the one particular situation that happened that kind of like accelerated his downfall was there was James Eppolito and James Eppolito jr. Right. I'm saying that I'm remembering this correctly. And yes, there is, they're actually related to that famous mafia cop. Yeah. Yeah. They're, it's a really fat, those guys. Fascinating story. They go to Paul Castellano saying that Roy, uh, and Nino are dealing drugs. And officially the ruling in the Gambino family, it was different from family to family, but in the Gambino family, Paul Castellano said, had like a zero tolerance policy for dealing drugs. This is what he would say, right? And it was like, Death penalty for anybody caught dealing drugs. [00:23:00] Now people say like, Oh, you know, it wasn't that like moral and virtuous for the mafia family to be like, Oh, we're above, we're not going to be dealing drugs. It wasn't like anything to do with morals. It was guys. We get caught dealing drugs and the charges for dealing drugs were. Really high. So the guy dealing just a bit of heroin or a bit of coke would be looking at 20 years in prison. Most people don't have enough willpower to not talk when they're looking at 20 years in prison. They're probably going to talk and it causes, you know, so people talk and then. But then if you're having to worry about people talking because they got busted for drugs, you're going to have to take care of them. You take care of them yourself, and it just leaves all kind of problems. It's just in the long run. There's a ton of money to be made in drugs, but Paul and certain mafia guys. It's not worth all the extra trouble. Like we're, we're making tons of money doing our loan sharking and stealing cars and, you know, our labor unions and construction rackets. [00:24:00] And, you know, we don't, we don't need that type of money, but Paul was, Paul was a hypocrite, he knew that Roy and Nino were dealing drugs and he, he took the money, right? Um, Paul goes to Nino and says, well, the. You know, these Epilito guys have, uh, came to me saying that you were doing this. He goes and basically gave Roy and Nino the, you know, go ahead, just take care of it as you want. And so, Roy and Nino, they do, they, they find out where these guys are, I believe it was in a, like a parking garage or what have you. And they, um, they go and kill 'em. But there happened to be an eyewitness nearby. That's all 'em do. And they waved, I guess she waved the cop that was nearby and the cop came down and Nino and Roy get into a gunfight with a cop, Nino gets hit, he ends up in the neck, he gets arrested, Roy ends up, ends up, uh, getting away. But, [00:25:00] this This is where one of the more infamous, uh, Roy DeMeo stories, and was that hair, like, can you explain this, this hair brain scheme that they had? Because they end up taking the bullet out of, like, Nino's neck and try to put a different bullet in his neck. Oh, I'm, it was, it was so... Dumb, but if it worked, it would have been genius. I think they, yeah, I didn't completely understand what they were trying to do because I don't think they really understood what they were trying to do, but they wanted, they wanted it to make it look like Nino was, they wanted to make it look. Like, Nino had been shot earlier, I think, to give him a defense that it was a self defense or something. It was just, it was a really, really, if it, because I think you have to look at it that juries and lawyers and that whole, the, the whole criminal thing, you're just trying to prove some. [00:26:00] Tiny doubt in one juror's mind that maybe it didn't happen the way the prosecution said it and, but it was just, I think that it was to me, that was so emblematic of Nino it's Nino, let's come up with this airbrained idea and throw it up in the air and let's see if it, if it takes off or not. Yeah, what ends up happening is Nino ends up going to jail for, I believe it was five to 15 years, probably would have got more, but there was like jury tampering involved. And I mean, the whole situation is just not good, you know, you know, Roy killed that innocent kid. And then now on top of this, they're getting into shootouts with cops and being really sloppy about that was the thing with the Eppolito. Murders is just, it doesn't seem like Roy, he, I don't know. It's almost [00:27:00] like hubris. He's going to a parking lot, you know, out in the open. It just doesn't like Roy from a couple years ago, probably would have came up with a more intelligent way of going about this and not getting caught. But I think it was just kind of hubris and maybe it was just getting tired of the whole. Lifestyle, I think, because it, it, it is really sloppy and it doesn't seem, I don't know, like, like I pointed out, like, a couple of years ago, Roy wouldn't be doing this, but, you know, the whole situation isn't good. Your capo's in jail, it puts a huge red light on your, uh, huge, like, uh, light on all the illegal stuff that you're up to and. It just puts a lot of heat on the Gambino family, because, I mean, getting into shootouts with your, you know, inter mafia guys is one thing, but getting into shootouts with cops? Yeah, it's just so much heat. It's, it's can, it's so unnecessary. And I think that was a major unforced error [00:28:00] for them. That whole situation. Yeah, because they could've just, I mean, okay, whatever, you wanted revenge at the, uh, at these, uh, polito guys, you could've just waited. There was no reason you had to take immediate revenge. They could've just waited for a better, really, you probably could've waited, like, a couple years, and these guys probably would've had their guard down at some point. They just weren't thinking straight. They were thinking impulsively. Steve here again with a quick word from our sponsors. I wonder with the, with the mafia at this point, like, maybe the smarter people like Paul saw that with dealing drugs, they were dealing with people like with the Colombians and the, the Cubans and these, these other groups who were really, really bad hombres, you might call them, they were not criminal Headline Anybody to trifle with and [00:29:00] sure, maybe the mafia could have taken them on, but it was so unnecessary to take these on. And it would be just constant warfare when really drugs was just a sideshow for them, for the mafia, the five families. Yeah, I mean, I would. Yeah, I would. Yeah, I would agree with that. Like, I mean, some of the cooler heads and some of the, you know, I guess maybe higher IQ people in the month, you kind of looked at the drugs and thought, like, this is just inviting. It's not to mention, like, you end up having guys who end up getting addicted to the drugs and and, you know, like, if you're dealing drugs in the neighborhood and people are all walking around like zombies in the neighborhood, like, the cops start looking into it. It's just and, like, the charges that come with, you know, getting busted dealing drugs. It's just. I mean, yes, there's a lot of money that can be made into it. But I mean, if you look at a lot of the big time drug dealers in [00:30:00] American history, they kind of were, um, I don't know, like they would shine really bright for a bit and then it would all come crashing down really quickly where the mafia was kind of like the opposite, where it was just slow, slow, gradual buildup. There was just so much more money to be made, too, with things like Paul's legitimate businesses. Sure, legitimate businesses that have connections to organized crime get investigated, and sometimes there's fines, but there's so much more avenue to obfuscate and move money around on the books and things like that. With drugs, it's so much easier for prosecutors to start sniping people, and it Brings down everyone. I just, I, I have to agree with, with Paul. Yeah. You're not going to, well, Paul, I mean, Paul loved the money though. So Paul, he could have started whacking people to stop it, but he really didn't because he loved taking in all that money. I guess [00:31:00] that's the thing, like you were saying that you can make so, so, so much money off of the drugs, but then it brings down. All the heat. It brings down heat from the people they're buying the drugs from. It brings down heat from every layer of government. I, I think that they, they really did miss something by just staying out of the drugs altogether. Yeah, I agree with that, but I mean, the temptation is just, it's so, there's so much money to be made, it just seems, the temptation seems to be too much, especially with like, the cast of shady characters that is the, uh, Italian Mafia, but, I mean, That's the thing with drugs too is it doesn't like you could like take a low end street dealer and all of a sudden he's, you know, talking about, you know, he's the next Joe Valachi talking about, you know, this is how this whole thing works and, you know, it's just like a street guy, right? That could potentially [00:32:00] facing 20 years in jail. Like it's if Paul was consistent in the sense of, Like, he actually did just kill people that were in the Gambino family that were caught dealing drugs. Then, yeah, but he tried to like have best of both worlds, or he would just pick and choose who he would do that to. Eventually, Roy's whole world falls apart around him. How, what's the end of Roy look like? Well, the heat's Starts coming down for the car Stealing business, but the whole how the whole epilido thing went down paul castellano just comes to the conclusion It's like yeah, roy's bringing in a lot of money But all the other trouble that he's bringing is just not worth it. He puts out a contract to uh on roy And this is what I found pretty interesting is apparently nobody would really take the contract because they were all just terrified of Roy Tamayo and his crew like, uh, apparently John Cotty wouldn't take the job for this reason because, you know, Roy had a whole like [00:33:00] psychotic killer crew with him and Roy himself was, you know, had a reputation of, you know, well founded for being pretty insane himself and yeah, nobody would take the job and eventually it came down to his own crew was the one that decided they would Take the job and do it. Uh, and that's exactly what happened. Anthony center and Joseph test. Uh, are the prime suspects are the ones who took down Roy to mail. But people think that, you know, God, who was out of prison at this time, uh, was there as well. They shot Roy a bunch of times and stuff them in his trunk of his car. And where he was found, I think it was like a couple of days later, frozen to the spare wheel. Do you think in the end that Roy, because Roy, his career is really very parallel with John Gotti and this is the time period of the rise of John Gotti. Do you think that Roy was a serious competitor to John [00:34:00] Gotti to have to take over the Gambino crime family? No, I don't, I don't think so. Just because of the way, I mean, it's possible. I mean, Albert Anastasia had became like a, you know, a head of the family himself, right? And he was pretty and he was like Roy DeMille in the sense of like, he enjoyed killing and. was pretty insane himself. Um, but I just don't think, I don't know, I just don't, I just can't see Roy becoming a head of the family. But I mean, he was a great earner, and he didn't mind getting his hands dirty. So I mean, it's possible, but everything that I've read, I don't think many people thought that was a realistic positive possibility. And now in our next episode, we're going to tie together Richard Kuklinski and Roy DeMeo. The one thing that sticks with me with Roy DeMeo, and I think that how Richard Kuklinski got drawn into his orbit, is that Roy DeMeo really did [00:35:00] surround himself with a varied crew, a diverse crew, you might say, and I think that, not to give away too much of next week, but My thought is that Richard Kuklinski was an admirer of Roy DeMeo from afar. Yeah, I would agree with that, and I think Richard, it kind of, yeah, I kind of almost like, I don't worship Roy DeMeo in a lot of ways. I noticed it when I was, uh, reading Into the Iceman. I had already known a little bit about Roy DeMeo, but like, really getting into, like, Roy DeMeo's story. It really kind of, and we'll get into this more next week, but it really kind of looks like Richard really wanted to be Roy DeMeo or, um, admired Roy DeMeo so much that he mixed, uh, he mixed, uh, his story and Roy DeMeo's story. Together. Does that make sense? Yeah. And I think in a lot of ways it goes even deeper than that. So I think [00:36:00] that I'm I know I'm going to really enjoy discussing this story. And I hope people join us next week when we talk about the Iceman at movie and how that draws in Richard Kuklinski with the story of Roy DeMeo because I think you're going to people out there are going to see a lot of parallels. Between their story, their two stories. And I think it's going to be interesting to compare and contrast them and see maybe where some of those similarities come from. Yeah, for sure. I guess my like last word on like Roy DeMille would be John Gotti and tough guys in the Italian mob, you know, some of the toughest guys in the world or in New York at the time looked at, had a contract. Put out on Paul, the boss put a contract out on Roy and they looked at Roy and said, no, I'm not really interested in taking that contract. So that just kind of shows you the, uh, the, uh, the reputation that Roy [00:37:00] had in the, you know, in that tough guy world where he was like the toughest of the top and the craziest of the craziest. Then yeah, I'm going to, I've had a blast. You know, learning about Roy and learning about Richard Kuklinski. And, you know, I guess it's going to come to a conclusion next week. We're going to leave it at that for today. I just want to mention though, the best thing you can do to help us in this podcast is if you enjoy what you're hearing, tell a friend, tell a couple of friends about the Organized Crime and Punishment Podcast so that your friends can become friends of ours. You've been listening to Organized Crime and Punishment, a history and crime podcast. To learn more about what you heard today, find links to social media, and how to support the show, go to our website, A to Z History Page dot com. [00:38:00] Become a friend of ours by sending us an email to crime at A to Z History Page dot com. All of this and more can be found in the show notes. We'll see yous next time on Organized Crime and Punishment. Forget about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coming Soon on Organized Crime and Punishment! You can learn more about Organized Crime and Punishment and subscribe at all these great places: https://atozhistorypage.start.page www.organizedcrimeandpunishment.com Click to Subscribe: https://omny.fm/shows/organized-crime-and-punishment/playlists/podcast.rss email: crime@atozhistorypage.com Parthenon Podcast Network Home: parthenonpodcast.com On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/@atozhistory https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage https://facebook.com/atozhistorypage https://twitter.com/atozhistorypage https://www.instagram.com/atozhistorypage/ Music Provided by: Music from "5/8 Socket" by Rico's Gruv Used by permission. © 2021 All Rights Reserved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210vQJ4-Ns0 https://open.spotify.com/album/32EOkwDG1YdZwfm8pFOzUuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Title: The Making of a Mob Monster: Roy DeMeo's Dark Origins Original Publication Date: 8/23/2023 Transcript URL: https://share.descript.com/view/Dl1OmvVefjj Description: In this episode, Mustache Chris and Steve delve into the intriguing early life and career of the notorious Roy DeMeo, whose journey into organized crime paved the way for an empire built on fear and brutality. From his humble beginnings on the streets of Brooklyn to his calculated entrance into the Gambino crime family, we uncover the pivotal moments that shaped DeMeo's transformation into a ruthless enforcer and prolific contract killer. Join us as we unravel the layers of deception, ambition, and ruthlessness that defined DeMeo's ascent to power, and explore the shadowy world of organized crime that he would come to dominate with an iron fist. #TrueCrimeTales #MafiaChronicles #CriminalMasterminds #roydemeo #serialkiller You can learn more about Organized Crime and Punishment and subscribe at all these great places: https://atozhistorypage.start.page email: crime@atozhistorypage.com www.organizedcrimeandpunishment.com Parthenon Podcast Network Home: parthenonpodcast.com On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/@atozhistory https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage https://facebook.com/atozhistorypage https://twitter.com/atozhistorypage https://www.instagram.com/atozhistorypage/ Music Provided by: Music from "5/8 Socket" by Rico's Gruv Used by permission. © 2021 All Rights Reserved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210vQJ4-Ns0 https://open.spotify.com/album/32EOkwDG1YdZwfm8pFOzUu Begin Transcript: [00:00:00] Welcome to Organized Crime and Punishment, the best spot in town to hang out and talk about history and crime, with your hosts, Steve and Mustache Chris. I'm excited again to be joined by Chris to talk about the background of a really infamous and in a sick way. Intriguing Mafia figure Roy DeMeo. Chris and I are jumping into a really the deep end of the Mafia pool here, and we're really glad you joined us today. This episode and the previous episode on Richard Kuklinski, the Iceman, is going to build a lot of background that we'll use to talk about the 2012 movie Iceman. So let's really get into [00:01:00] it. And I think Roy DeMeo is maybe not a Mafia. He's probably not one of the names that really comes up as one of people's first, like, most known Mafia figures, especially, uh, compared to his contemporary of somebody like John Gotti, but he was really extremely influential in his time, and maybe one of the most intriguing Mafia characters of all time. What do you think, just like, your first brush and your first blush, I guess you might say, of Roy DeMeo? Yeah, as Luke pointed out, Roy DeMeo isn't, um, as particularly, particularly well known as some of these other Mafia guys. I think one of the reasons is where Hollywood and popular culture tries to present the Mafia as kind of glitz and glamorous to a degree where it almost seems like kind of like a fun thing. Where, like, when you start reading about Roy DeMeo, it's the exact opposite of that. It's the... Kind of really, [00:02:00] really what the mob is, you know, boiled down to its essence and Roy kind of perfectly represents that where it's, it's not glitz and glamour, uh, glamour, it's, it's rough, it's dirty, it's kind of vile and disgusting. It's a horror story, really. I mean, if you, if you took away and said that this wasn't real and you just told somebody about a, I mean, not to give away too much, but a place where people go in, they get murdered, and dismembered, and just disappear. It's literally a scene from a horror movie, Ray D'Ameo's life. Yeah, you know, and it's, it really does come across, yeah, his entire life is, it's like a, kind of like what you would think would be like, almost like a cheesy B kind of horror film. Um, where, you know, this guy is, he's one thing, uh, to certain group of people, but then like when he's not away, when he's [00:03:00] away from those people, he's, he's an upstanding citizen. It's a really, but you know, this is real. It's a, it's a hundred percent real. I am doing a little bit of ancestry. com. I knew from my family that there was de Mayo's that sort of overarching, uh, family that my family belongs to as my. Great grandmother was, her maiden name was DeMeo, and I tried so desperately to see if I was some connection to Roy, I didn't find it, but it's not that uncommon, it's not that common of a name, I, I'm gonna keep finding out, maybe we'll do an update at some point and see if there's, in some weird way I'm distantly related to Roy DeMeo, but um, really the, the best way to start out trying to dig into Roy DeMeo and try and learn something about him is, His kind of messed up childhood. Tell us, tell us about Roy DeMeo's really screwed up childhood. Yeah, it [00:04:00] wasn't as bad. It wasn't like, don't get, it wasn't anything like Richard's, but it's, it's, yeah, it's a pretty weird childhood. Like, Roy was, uh... I mean, he would struggle with weight issues his entire life, but growing up, he was picked on for being overweight, but from the other kid, his brother was kind of looked upon as the golden child. He was going to become the doctor and the family kind of devoted their attention to him and Roy really looked up to him too. And pretty early on, he went to go serve in Vietnam. I believe he volunteered. He wasn't drafted or anything. And he was, uh. He was killed in Vietnam and Roy had a really hard time dealing with this because he didn't really have his older brother there to protect him from the bullies. So he learned to protect himself. This is he started weightlifting and took up boxing and became. You know pretty known as pretty ruthless street fighter, [00:05:00] but then, you know shortly after his brother, uh passes away he uh, his father dies unexpectedly, too And this is a really weird thing is his mother came up with this idea that she was gonna go back to Italy, you know to be around friends and family and kind of left roy by himself and his you know What was he in his early 20s at the time not even right? Yeah, that whole thing with Roy's childhood, he's the de Mayo's and they, they kind of spell this out and it's, it's hard to psychoanalyze somebody who's been dead for 40 years and, uh, you know, things that happened 60 years ago, but he, um, he's. His family was successful. His one uncle was a, uh, uh, high ranking prosecutor in Brooklyn. Another was the head medical examiner of New York City or some part of New York City government. [00:06:00] Uh, so doctors, lawyers. Roy's father was working class, and they lived in a pretty rough and tumble, rough and, uh, rough part of Brooklyn, but a lot of successful people came out of there, so you can't necessarily just say that Roy came from a rough family like Richard Kuklinski, like you had mentioned, but you also can't say it. So it wasn't all just his background. There was something in Roy, I think, that he, he was mean. And all these things like his brother getting killed in Vietnam and the, the mafia thing that was kind of floating around this rough part of Brooklyn that he lived in, it all kind of got boiled down in him and just. Brought out the very worst in Roy, I think. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, he, he had to learn to take care [00:07:00] of himself at a pretty young age. And, you know, in comparison to Richard, yeah, this seems like a cake walk, but I mean, that's pretty tragic. His brother died. In Vietnam, and then his father passing away pretty, uh, when he was still young, and then his mom leaving for Italy, and I mean, that to me, I really, I just can't understand the logic in her head, but I mean, maybe she talked to Rory, and Rory told her, you know, just go, but it seems like a really weird choice to make, and Yeah, you know, and he, I believe he ends up becoming like a butcher's apprentice and a delivery driver. And he does really good at that. And he actually becomes like the best, like, delivery, meat delivery guy. And he ends up earning extra money and learning quickly that he can use this extra money to do, you know, Some, you know, low tier loan sharking. Did you maybe, when I was, when I read that Roy DeMeo's mom brought, I think it was his younger [00:08:00] brother to Italy to go live. Did you think that maybe there was just some kernel that she was trying to get the younger brother away from Roy? It's, it's very possible. I mean, their mothers know their sons. Probably better than anybody, right? And maybe she saw the direction that Roy was going in and didn't want her youngest son to fall in those, uh, fall in that, uh, type of crowd. It's very possible. That's another one, you know, the what ifs, but what if Roy's brother had come back from Vietnam as a hero? And Roy, I think that that could have been something where Roy goes and joins the Marines too, and goes to Vietnam, and then we don't have Roy DeMeo, like, I honestly think that it could have been that Roy became so embittered with everything that at that just really critical time in his development, he sees his brother do something [00:09:00] that A lot of people, like, I think the father wasn't so much into the brother joining the marines, but it really, it really did, like, open up all this anger that Roy had clamped down inside of him. It just gave him a, an escape valve to just say, you know what, screw everything. Steve here again. We are a member of the Parthenon Podcast Network, featuring great shows like Josh Cohen's Eyewitness History and many other great shows. Go to Parthenon Podcast to learn more. And now, here is a quick word from our sponsors. Yeah, for sure. Especially at a young age, the that type of, uh, tragedy, uh, you know, losing, losing a young brother can trigger those types of emotions. And some people, I mean, it's fairly common for [00:10:00] that to come out of people. Most people are able to, like, reign it back in over time, which they, they go through, like, the that just never happened. Then I think one other element to the whole story is that the Mafia was really never that far away from where they were, where they were living. I mean, they were living in an area that there was mobsters all over the place. And was it Roy's mom who wound up going to live with Joe Profaci's One of the biggest mafia guys of all times, widowed wife. Yeah. And it wasn't like, this might get me in a little bit of trouble, but like many Italians, Italian Americans at that time, uh, that we're talking about kind of, they viewed the mob where those are our bad guys. You know what I mean? Where they, it was just something that people grew around with and they grew up around with, and they just kind of accepted it. It's like every group [00:11:00] has their. You know, quote unquote bad guys and the mob just happens to be our bad guys and you know, it's kind of, um, it's a, I use a comparison. It's kind of like the hell's angels a little bit up here in Canada where, especially in like the Quebec area where it's just something that's just, it's not as bad as it used to be, but it used to be like, really, like All over the place, and it was just everybody kind of knew somebody who was kind of part of the Hells Angels, you know, even if they were just on, you know, the very edges of it, or they're, they knew somebody that knew somebody and I mean, this is kind of how the mob was, and especially in like areas like Brooklyn at the time, where I mean, everyone just kind of, especially if you were Italian, you probably knew somebody who was You know, some, you know, somewhat related to the mob to one degree or another. And it was, um, you know, you also didn't really trust the federal government and state authorities at the time, too. So you didn't really talk to them about it either. And everybody knew. Kind of what happened to [00:12:00] people that I talked to. I know. Does that make sense? Yeah. And I think especially somebody like Roy who had this legitimate part of his family who were at the highest levels of government. But like you said, nobody in Brooklyn in the 1950s or the 1960s was that far away from some connection to the mafia, even as straight as people wanted to be that it was still, you were. In school, I think, um, I can't remember who was the mobsters that were, that lived just down the street from Roy DeMeo and he would hang out with them. It might have been the Profaci kids, and I think both of those Profaci kids wound up becoming doctors or lawyers or something legit, but it was, that was it. It was never that far away from being from some connection to the Mafia. Now, Roy clearly doesn't go into the legitimate direction. He fully [00:13:00] embraces the Mafia. What's kind of his early career? And crime, well, it's like I pointed out, he was a apprentice butcher and he was very good at that. And he was like a delivery boy. And he, you know, we do more deliveries and everybody else. And, you know, he, with the extra cash that you earned from doing this, he would loan money out to, you know, early loan sharking at exorbitant interests. And then quickly he got into auto car. theft, basically, you know, stealing car parts, stealing cars, um, chop shops. And he was doing this under the Casey family, which is one of the five families, but who are actually more known for, this is the kind of weird part about this story, like the glue Casey family were kind of known more for like these blue collar kind of crimes or the like auto theft and what have you, but, uh, Somebody in the Gambino family, um, named Nino Gaggi sees Roy DeMeo and sees, [00:14:00] you know, this guy's really good at what he does. He's really effective and he's a good earner and says, well, come join, you know, come with me, come join the Gambino family. You'll make even more money. And this is kind of how his criminal career starts. Yeah, he, Roy, starts off, and like you said, there was the five families, and we've talked about the five families a little bit, but at this point, not all families are equal, and the Lucchesis are kind of a low end mafia doing these things that are kind of low end crimes. And then Nino Gaggi comes in, and I think that Nino really saw the potential in Roy DeMeo, that Roy DeMeo could make a lot of money. Yeah, and he makes a lot of, makes a ton of money, uh, doing this and this is also the time period where he starts setting up the early part of like the DeMeo crew. And this is where he meets, uh, Chris Rosenberg, who is a pretty [00:15:00] fascinating character. He's this Jewish guy that grew up in an Italian neighborhood and hated the fact that he was Jewish. You know, you know, basically. Thought of himself as Italian. I mean, he was Italian and anything, but, you know, I guess genetics or race or however you want to view it. And he had this dream that he was going to be the first Jewish guy that was going to be made in the Italian family. And I mean, I mean, it's pretty ambitious. I mean, they didn't even make, they didn't even make a Meyer Lansky. So he's like, he's, he's a funny guy, not. But not really, because he's, we'll get into it later, he's completely ruthless, but Roy takes him under his wing and kind of views him as his kind of little brother or kind of like a son sort of, and you know, Roy would line up, uh, Chris was also into big into drug dealing, and they'll Roy would loan him out money so he can buy more amounts of drugs. And Roy would make money and Chris would make money and Joseph and [00:16:00] Patrick Testa and Anthony center. And there were a couple other guys, but those are the three, those are like the, the main guys in the demo crew. And yeah, he goes from there. And I mean, somehow during this time period too, somehow Roy wounds up being like. Uh, part of the board of directors of a credit union that he uses to, uh, launder money and, um, from his car theft, uh, operations, but also like the drug dealing, uh, operations that he has going on with, uh, Chris Rosenberg. I don't think it's too far to say that Roy was really a criminal genius. He really understood how to make money with all these different things that he did. I mean, it's really, it's crazy. All the different ways that he was earning money. One thing though, is that at this point in the, the mafia in the seventies, early seventies, the, they say opening up the books is that they weren't. Making a [00:17:00] lot of new mafia members at the time. So there was a lot of people like Roy DeMeo who were not strictly by, by definition in the mafia, they were attached to people like Nino Gaggi, who was a made man, but they weren't, a lot of new people weren't being made at that time. So you had people like, uh, Roy DeMeo making fabulous amounts of money, but they weren't. Directly a part of the Mafia, which gave them a lot of latitude to do things like drugs and working with with Jews and Irish and all these different other gangs in a way that if they were fully made members of the Mafia, they wouldn't be allowed to do. Yeah, and it would in the book Murder Machine, they get into this where like Nino we've been is trying to when we get to it, we'll get to when we get to that part. But like Nino is trying to would tell Roy sometimes, you know. You're probably better off not being made because if the, you know, the guys at the top of [00:18:00] the family found out some of the stuff that you were up to, it would, you know, cause a lot of problems for yourself. But, you know, that we'll get into that, um, um, a little bit later into the podcast. Well, why don't we talk about a little bit right now about Nino Gaggi because he is a really interesting character in this whole thing. Yeah. So. Yeah, Nino, he's a mate guy in the, uh, Gambino crime family. And he, he grew up around the mob, right? And this has basically been his, uh, his entire life. And he ends up becoming a capo, which is the boss of the, like a crew kind of how it works in the mafia after Gambino dies and Paul Castellano takes over. And. He's like a weird guy because he's, he's, he's old school, but he's not really old school. And I don't know, how would you describe him? He's, I think that really is, he's the old school in a lot of [00:19:00] ways, but he's also, um, I think he's very American in a lot of ways too. Yeah, I mean, and there's this great story. I don't know if you want to consider it great or not, but like, he got into, uh, an argument with, I believe it was a boxer. I'm trying to remember this guy's name right now. Oh, Gennaro was his last name. Yeah, Gennaro, and he, like, broke his nose or roughed him up a little bit, and Nino Gaggi just swore revenge, and it took about... 12 years and got his revenge after repeated, repeated attempts of trying to get his revenge on this guy. This is just the type of person like, you know, was an example like the story. It shouldn't be funny, but it is kind of funny. It seems like something that you would, you know, that would come out of a comedy. You kind of Nino just seemed to a guy like he wanted to think he was Vito Corleone from the Godfather. I mean, he even talked about a lot about that, but he was [00:20:00] Really, a small time hood in a lot of, in most every way, he made a lot of money, but he wasn't very well thought out with it or anything like that, and he wasn't hitting, hitting guys all the time, or, and he screwed up a lot of things, he just, he's a low end. To me, a low rent mobster. And I'm, I'm glad he's not alive to hear me say that, but he's just not very impressive. Yeah, I would, yeah, I would agree with that, but I mean, he definitely knew he's very like as much, he might not probably wouldn't like this, but he's very much a street guy. Right. Um, and doing like low end crimes and, you know, stuff that's not particularly glamorous. But I mean, if you do read this book, Murder Machine, I suggest you look into it too. Is the, it might not sound sexy, you know, doing chopped cars and selling used car parts and stealing cars, but you would [00:21:00] not believe the amount of money that's involved in these types of operations. And, uh, I mean, I think Nino would probably, is probably the best boss that Roy would have because Nino's the type of guy, he's just going to turn a blind eye to most of the stuff that Roy was up to, um, minus maybe one thing that we'll get into a little bit. But even then, you know, just kind of, you know, yelled at Roy a bit and then just kind of let Roy do his own thing again. I think Nino, all Nino was concerned with was money, whatever was happening, he just wanted. And he was a really bottom line kind of guy. He didn't want a lot of stuff getting in the way of the bottom line. Loan sharking is a really interesting part of the mafia because it really is the nitty gritty. And like you said, it's the not very sexy part of the mafia, but that's where they made a Loaning money out at these [00:22:00] exorbitant rates where people would have to pay huge interest balloon payments. We might call them now called the VIGs once a week of. You know, huge percentages of the, of the, uh, base amount that the, the people would take out. And they would really have to take out another loan shark loan to be able to just pay the interest on these loans. And it was kind of a, once you got into that system of taking out a loan shark loan, you were never gonna get out of it. Yeah, and people like Roy would use it too, or, okay, like, okay, whatever, you're never gonna pay, be able to pay your loan again. Okay, so I'm part of your business now, 50%, or in the case of the Gemini Lounge, the guy who had actually owned the bar. The time had a loan out, uh, for Roy and he was never going to be able to pay it off. So Roy said he saw an opportunity. It's like, oh, this is where I can do my business. It's got an apartment in the [00:23:00] back and you know, it's, uh, it's a nice place. I like it. I don't get whatever, give me your bar, just send your bar off to me. And that's it. We'll call it even. And that, that a lot of the times, this is how these mob guys would build up. These little bars, these people would take loans out of 5% of the business or 50% or just the entire thing. Steve here again with a quick word from our sponsors. Let's talk about Andre Katz. That was one of the first big murders that Roy DeMeo was involved with. And it was one of the first ones that really got a lot of police attention put on him. Yeah, so Andre Katz was he was involved in the chop shop business with Roy and it's not exactly sure what happened or he ends up getting busted with and Chris Rosenberg was there too and some People say it was like related [00:24:00] to the drugs that Chris Rosenberg was selling at the time. And, but Andre Katz just kind of comes to the conclusion. He's like, well, I'm not going to jail for these guys and, you know, volunteers to go talk to the authorities about, you know, the chop shop and the drug, the drug business that was going on in his, uh, in his, uh, facilities. Roy finds out that he was doing this because Roy had paid, uh, police officers off in the stolen vehicles department of the NYPD. I'm not exactly sure what the department's called, but this is what they, they specialize in stolen vehicles and said that, you know, Katz is talking and Roy comes up with this plan. Well, we can, he knows too much, we got to get rid of them. So they, they hired this, this young lady to lure. Cats into I believe it was like a hotel or something and Roy and his crew kidnap them and then they end up, um, killing them at [00:25:00] the this meet at this, uh, supermarket and dispose of the body. And this is where the Gemini methods kind of. Slowly starts where, you know, they chop the body up and they start, you know, depositing parts and various dumps around the city, but they don't do it quite well this time because apparently some pedestrians saw like a leg, um, sticking out of a trash can or something. And then, um, they end up learning that they have to become, you know, more efficient, cleaner at this. And this is, um, we're going to be getting into some things that are definitely not family. Friendly, so to speak. And we're not going to be graphic with it at all, but this is very brutal stuff and I would definitely suggest that maybe for the next, uh, couple of minutes you screen this for content if you're listening in the minivan, but the Gemini method, that Gemini was the name of the club that Roy had. Taken over [00:26:00] through his loan sharking and so the, this crew of really psychotic killers that Roy gathers together and the very broad strokes and we don't really need to get into all the nitty gritty people can read a murder machine and there's plenty of other information out there on, uh, on the specifics on how they killed people at the Gemini, but in general, what were they doing? At the Gemini. Yeah. So they use the jump. They was called the Gemini method because it took place in the Gemini lounge and they would lure people into the back apartment, which was at the, you can look up pictures. You can see the Gemini lounge. You can see this for the apartment building was they would lure people back there and. Basically, without getting into like a ton of the details, because it's, it's rough stuff. Um, they came up with, they pretty much the most efficient way and cleanest way of getting rid of somebody who was [00:27:00] trouble and disposing of the body. So there was, there was really no way to, if there was no body, there was no crime at the end of the day. They, they, the cops could be like, well, we, we saw him go into the Gemini, Gemini lounge. Roy could be, well, you know, he left. You know, a couple hours later, and then the cops just let, if they can't find a body, they have no, they have nothing to pursue. And this was highly effective. You know, there's different reports about, you know, did Roy and his crew kill up to 200 people, 100 people. I didn't think it was probably around 100. I think it was 47 or 49, they can officially confirm we're done by the DeMayo crew, but, you know, to kind of put this in perspective, nobody really had taken industrial murder. Um, nobody had done this since pretty much, you know, Murder Incorporated. Yeah, they would, um, they would really dispose of the bodies. They had a garbage dump and... [00:28:00] Nobody's going, those garbage dumps, like in New York City, they're getting feet of garbage piled every single day in there. And so, I mean, if you don't know about something, if you want to look for something that happened a week ago, you could be digging through hundreds of feet of garbage. It's just never going to happen. You know, no police department in the world has the tools to do that. Yeah, and they were at one point they did think about, like, start digging through this garbage later on when they were trying to find some of these bodies so they could pin more, you know, crimes on Roy and they, I, they looked at and they said, like, this is just not possible. There's no way to do it. I mean, and if you know, you look into how they came up with the Gemini method and then the disposal of the body is, is School ish, but I mean, it is brilliant. It worked for the amount of murders that these guys were [00:29:00] doing, you know, and Roy was personally, personally did a lot of these murders himself. I mean, so if we're looking at like a hundred people. Let's just say, let's just say, let's just say it's a hundred people. I mean, how many did the Green River killer kill? Nowhere near that, I don't think. I mean, you could say that, like, Roy was one of the worst, if not the worst, like, serial killers in American history, depending on how you look at it. I wouldn't say Roy was a serial killer just because there's a little... I don't really want to, you know, compare and contrast, but I mean, in terms of just the body count, yeah, it's like a hundred people. That's in Ted Bundy wasn't anywhere near that. It's also, I think that this is a good place to really mark that Roy, the Roy, the businessman as a mafia guy, he saw within this time period, if I'm not mistaken, he does get his button. Or he gets, becomes a maid member of the mafia, kind of [00:30:00] against, not everybody wanted him to become a maid man. No, uh, well, so, Bino dies, and Paul Castellano becomes the head of the family, and so the books open up. And Roy is bonding, you know, get me, you know, get me my button, get me my button. I've earned and I've earned it. I mean, and for the family, he, you know, he was taking murder contracts and he was doing all the dirty work that nobody else really, well, it's not that nobody else really wanted to do. It was just nobody else was doing it as good as Roy was. And Paul kind of looked down at these street guys. He didn't really like being associated with them. And I mean, that's not. But, I mean, that's not fair from, you know, from Paul to be saying that, because he would take their money anyways. Uh, but the 1 thing that Paul was like, Roy, he's uncontrollable. He's this guy is a loose cannon and I can't really. I can't really trust him so Paul didn't [00:31:00] really want to make him a made man and so Roy comes to the conclusion well I just got to make even more money and then they can't possibly deny me. And he opens up an alliance with the Westies who are a pretty infamous gang of the, I believe it's the Hell's Kitchen area of New York. They're like the Irish mob and by opening up this alliance with The Westies, he's able to, um, he opens up like construction contracts, which is what Paul was really into. He was more into like the labor union type stuff, the more white collar crimes. And the Westies end up becoming kind of like a, an arm of the Gambino family because of. Uh, Roy DeMeo and, uh, Nino Gaggi setting up a meeting between, I can't remember the head of the Westies at the time, him and Paul Castellano, and later on, Roy ends up becoming the, the, the goal between, between the Gambino family and the Westies in terms of [00:32:00] just all business deals. And this is like a pretty huge deal because the Westies are infamous game because of their brutality, but they also controlled like a. They had a lot of power in New York at the time, and this is basically, because Roy's able to pull this off, Paul really can't deny making him a, a maid guy anymore, and he gets his maid status. We're going to leave it at that for today. I just want to mention, though, the best thing you can do to help us in this podcast is if you enjoy what you're hearing, Tell a friend, tell a couple of friends about the Organized Crime and Punishment podcast so that your friends can become friends of ours. You've been listening to Organized Crime and Punishment, a history and crime podcast. To learn more about what you heard today, find links to social media, and [00:33:00] how to support the show, go to our website, AtoZHistoryPage. com. Become a friend of ours by sending us an email to crime at AtoZHistoryPage. com. All of this and more can be found in the show notes. We'll see yous next time on Organized Crime and Punishment. Forget about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coming Soon on Organized Crime and Punishment! You can learn more about Organized Crime and Punishment and subscribe at all these great places: https://atozhistorypage.start.page www.organizedcrimeandpunishment.com Click to Subscribe: https://omny.fm/shows/organized-crime-and-punishment/playlists/podcast.rss email: crime@atozhistorypage.com Parthenon Podcast Network Home: parthenonpodcast.com On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/@atozhistory https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage https://facebook.com/atozhistorypage https://twitter.com/atozhistorypage https://www.instagram.com/atozhistorypage/ Music Provided by: Music from "5/8 Socket" by Rico's Gruv Used by permission. © 2021 All Rights Reserved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210vQJ4-Ns0 https://open.spotify.com/album/32EOkwDG1YdZwfm8pFOzUuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Teddy Roosevelt faced many challenges at the end of his life. Racked by rheumatism, a ticking embolism, pathogens in his blood, a bad leg from an accident, and a bullet in his chest from an assassination attempt. But none of that stopped Roosevelt from attempting to reassemble the Rough Riders for a final charge against the Germans in World War One, pushing them into a likely suicide mission of a cavalry attack against 50 caliber machine guns.Suffering from grief and guilt, marginalized by world events, the great glow that had been his life was now but a dimming lantern. But TR’s final years were productive ones as well: he churned out several “instant” books that promoted U.S. entry into the Great War, and he was making plans for another run at the Presidency in 1920 at the time of his death. Indeed, his political influence was so great that his opposition to the policies of Woodrow Wilson helped the Republican Party take back the Congress in 1918. To look at Roosevelt’s final years, Scott Rank, host of History Unplugged, speaks with Bill Hazelgrove, author of “The Last Charge of the Rough Rider.” It was Roosevelt’s quest for the “vigorous life” that, ironically, may have led to his early demise at the age of sixty. "The Old Lion is dead,” TR’s son Archie cabled his brother on January 6, 1919, and so, too, ended a historic era in American life and politics. Subscribe to History Unplugged with Scott Rank:Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3Ysc7ZgSpotify: https://spoti.fi/3j0QRJyParthenon: https://www.parthenonpodcast.com/history-unplugged-podcastSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Title: Chilling Portrayal: The Iceman's Legacy on Film Original Publication Date: 8/16/2023 Transcript URL: https://share.descript.com/view/xgTnsXwkc7o Description: In this episode of Organized Crime and Punishment, Mustache Chris and Steve delve deep into the chilling world of the critically acclaimed movie "The Iceman." This episode dissects the mesmerizing portrayal of the notorious contract killer Richard Kuklinski by Michael Shannon and disentangles the intricate web of organized crime he was a part of. From the gritty streets to the suspenseful courtroom scenes, we analyze how the film captures the chilling reality of a man leading a double life – family man by day and ruthless hitman by night. Tune in to explore the moral dilemmas, the complex characters, and the parallels to real-life criminal enterprises. As we explore the shades of gray in the criminal world, we raise questions about justice and punishment. Join the conversation using #RichardKuklinski #TheIcemanMovie #ColdBloodedKiller #ContractKiller #RealLifeCrime #TrueCrimeStory #OrganizedCrimeSaga #CriminalMastermind  as we unravel the cinematic portrayal of organized crime and its consequences. You can learn more about Organized Crime and Punishment and subscribe at all these great places: https://atozhistorypage.start.page email: crime@atozhistorypage.com www.organizedcrimeandpunishment.com Parthenon Podcast Network Home: parthenonpodcast.com On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/@atozhistory https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage https://facebook.com/atozhistorypage https://twitter.com/atozhistorypage https://www.instagram.com/atozhistorypage/ Music Provided by: Music from "5/8 Socket" by Rico's Gruv Used by permission. © 2021 All Rights Reserved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210vQJ4-Ns0 https://open.spotify.com/album/32EOkwDG1YdZwfm8pFOzUu Begin Transcript: [00:00:00] Welcome to Organized Crime and Punishment, the best spot in town to hang out and talk about history and crime, with your hosts, Steve and Mustache Chris. In the last couple of episodes, Chris and I talked about the real history and background of mobsters Richard the Iceman, Kuklinski, Roy DeMeo, and his famous crew. Today, we're going to talk about the 2012 film based on these events, the Iceman starring Michael Shannon, Winona Ryder, Ray Liotta, and more. So I really want to share a quick comment from our last YouTube live stream from one Wolfgang Schmuck. That's a great, [00:01:00] that's a great, uh, YouTube name. So, um, he says the guy on the right has the most perfect, clean looking mustache I've ever seen. Uh, mustache. How you doing? Oh, doing good. I'm pretty, uh, like the rest of my friends and family make jokes about the mustache. I've had it for so long now. I just, I'm just going to keep it. I'm never getting rid of it. And apparently, uh, somebody else pointed out that I look like, uh, Chris Rosenberg. And then I just, we were just looking at a picture and I was like, yeah, it's actually a little bit uncanny. Like his eye, like his hair is longer and stuff like that. But. I mean, I see it in the eyes, and then the mustache, I mean, there is definitely some similarity there. Wait, when did Chris Rosenberg die, and when were you born? Are you Chris Rosenberg reincarnated, maybe? I don't know, it'll be for the people to decide. Now this movie, uh, The Iceman, I have to say, it has, [00:02:00] I watched it probably more or less when it came out, and I liked it. This movie has so grown on me, to, to maybe it's one of my favorite mob movies. Of all time, because I wouldn't say just overall, it's not the most accurate movie I have ever seen, but it really captures something about the times, about Richard Kuklinski, and about what else was going on in the New York mafia scene in the 70s and the 80s. What did you think in your first couple of watches of this movie? Like you, when it first came out, I watched it right away because I heard about Richard Kuklinski. Michael Shannon, I always kind of, I've always enjoyed his acting, so I just, I watched and I enjoyed it, but, and I knew a little bit about Roy DeMeo and like a little bit of the history, but not a ton. But like, since doing like the 2 kind of deep dive background episodes and really [00:03:00] reading about that particular area and time period of the mob, I've. Like yourself, I actually kind of appreciate this movie more than I did before, which is, I've heard opposite, I've heard the opposite from people where they, they read more about Richard and they're like, Oh, this movie doesn't, doesn't do it properly. And it's, well, I mean, we'll get into that a little bit later. I think, like you pointed out to me and you were talking earlier in the week, it, it really captures the whole feel of that era that you get from when you do some research into, uh. Because it's a very particular era, like, era of the mob, especially like the DiMeo and Kuglinski, like, even location of like where they were doing a lot of their work, it's um, it's a very particular feel to it, and I believe the movie captures it really well. Yeah, we'll get into some of it. We'll talk about some of the scenes that we really enjoyed and talk a little bit about the historical, historical accuracy of it. But I think people will see that even [00:04:00] though some things weren't exactly historically correct and they changed some names and they, they did some weird stuff with the, with the timing, it really was, each scene was something that Richard Kuklinski Talked about or that had actually happened. Yeah, so let's maybe talk a little bit about some of those details that were changed right off the bat. If we look at some of the main characters. So Michael Shannon played Richard Kuklinski. Winona Ryder played Richard's wife. They called her Deborah. But, um, her real name was Barbara Kuklinski, and I think she might be the first person to talk about because I think she really nailed something with Barbara Kuklinski. You can watch some interviews she did on some shows in the 90s and in the early 2000s, and I think she captured something. So [00:05:00] specific about and so accurately about, uh, Barbara Kuklinski. What did you think? I agree with that, too, but no, the writer really captures that kind of working class, like home, like homeless. And I'm trying to what's the word I'm thinking of, like that working class. Like she's working class, but she, you know, she's very wholesome. Yeah. I think that's the best way I can describe it. I think she also, you, you get through her acting and several of the scenes that. She knows there's something up with Richard, but she's willing to turn a blind eye to it, and I think that that's what I really got from the, from the real Barbara. She knew, somewhere deep inside of her, obviously she knew Richard had a Hair trigger temper and he would trash the place, but I think she intrinsically knew that there was something way darker to Richard than even [00:06:00] what she saw in the house. Yeah, and it you see it right up like the first scene with them when they're on their first date. She notices he's got a grim Reaper tattoo on his. On his hand and it's all you know, I had this one back in the day. I was trying to look tough and you get a sense that she's, she's attracted to it because she probably, you know, is attracted to the, the tough guy, the bad boy, the reformed bad boy. I know it's a cliche, but it's the truth. Um, in actuality, the tattoo wasn't a grim reaper was, um, come, it was Yeah. It was a tattoo that him and this gang that he, when he was pretty young, coming up with the coming up roses gang, they all got the same tattoo on the hand. Um, but I mean, the grim reapers says, you know, serves the same purpose now that, um, I think it's probably good we talk about the Gemini crew of Ray Liotta playing Roy DeMeo, James Frank, or not James Franco, he'll come in later. But David Schwimmer playing, [00:07:00] they called him Josh Rosenthal, but he was really representing Chris Rosenberg. And then Robert Davi playing, Leo Merckx, but who was actually Anthony Gaggi, Nino Gaggi, and I think there was something about each one of those that so masterfully just absolutely grabbed who they were supposed to be, especially Ray Liotta. I've been saying this for weeks that we've been talking about this. Roy DeMeo was the role. Ray Liotta was born to play. Oh yeah, for sure. Like, and just watching this movie and, you know, going and doing the back research for the Roy DeMille episode, it just makes me want to go, it's terrible to think that we're never going to get a Ray Liotta. Roy DeMeo movie because it would have been perfect. Um, yeah, he was born to play this role and I mean, I, this might be a little because he doesn't have like a ton of screen time in the movie, but if you had somebody else playing Roy DeMeo, I just don't think the [00:08:00] movie would have worked as well. Because you need somebody with the same kind of intensity that Michael Shannon has to play off back and forth off each other because, you know, reading the movie that seemed to, I mean, reading for the movie that seemed to kind of be the relationship that Roy DeMille and Richard had in real life, according to Richard, depends on who you believe, but Yeah, there used to, there was like a certain level of intensity between the two of them. Then, um, the, the interplay of Chris Rosenberg, uh, Josh Rosenthal and Roy, uh, I thought that they got that really well too. I know some people criticize that it seemed that they played down Chris, Chris's role, but I think that he Really, they really got something with that in that David Schwimmer looked close in age to Ray Liotta. I don't know how close they are in actuality. They're probably fairly close in age. [00:09:00] Um, and, uh, Chris Rosenberg was just a little bit younger than Roy, but they really had a father son relationship. Yeah, and David Schwimmer, just as an actor, I thought was a perfect choice to play Chris Rosenberg. I know that sounds kind of crazy because he's like the guy from Friends, but when you read Chris Rosenberg, he comes across as a guy that tries really hard to be funny. To not be what he is, which is like a Jewish guy, uh, like tries really hard to be really Italian and it comes across when you read it that he comes across almost as like a try hard and David Schwimmer plays that type of role. That was basically the role that he played on friends and it comes comes across perfectly in this movie, but you get to see him as this brutal killer to like. Chris Rosenberg had absolutely no problem killing people. And I And didn't you get that? I think that came through with [00:10:00] David Schwimmer. Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, and like Chris Rosenberg was like his, well, I don't know. We won't get into it. It's pretty, pretty graphic. But, uh, yeah, you definitely get that sense with David Schwimmer in this movie. But when he shoots out the, the two, uh, coke dealers, right, you see the ruthlessness there, uh, for sure. But it, you know, I would have liked to have seen more of them in the movie, but I mean, there's time constraints and. But yeah, I thought David hit it out of the park. And here is a quick word from our sponsors. And then, uh, I loved Robert Davi as, uh, Nino Gaggi. [00:11:00] Even though his role was tinier, uh, smaller than even, uh, Ray Liotta's or David Schwimmer's. I think he, again, he captured something of the pompousness and... Maybe the foolishness of Nino Gaggi, like the pettiness, how pompous and petty Nino was. I think Robert Davi really grabbed that. Oh, yeah, for sure. It's, I'd like to, I don't really know why they didn't use Nino Gaggi's name. I, I assume it's probably some legal stuff, like maybe descendants of like Gaggi or something, the friend of Sue, and that's why they use Leo Marx. Uh, it's probably nice. I would assume it has something to do with that. Um, yeah, he like he really does capture just like the pettiness of Nino and the cheapness and there's a couple scenes that illustrate that and this is the thing with this movie Like we pointed out like yeah, it's not historically accurate in some ways, but it really it Captures everything that you need to know about, like, Nino Gaggi, like, in terms of not [00:12:00] wanting to pay for work that he said he was gonna pay for, and, like, the pettiness, some guy, you know, they get into a little, you know, scuffle, or what have you, and then he hires a hitman to go kill him, you know, that's something Nino would do, we know that, because Nino, Ends up killing that boxer that got a, he got into a fist fight with like 12 years later, he's still steaming about it. You know, just like pettiness over a broken nose. And then the last one I think we have to, we have to mention is Chris Evans. He played Robert, Mr. Softy Prongay, and they called him Mr. Freezy in the movie. That might've been because Mr. Softy is a trademarked, uh, name. I didn't know, I had never seen much with Chris Evans, but he captured. Magnificently, the craziness of Robert Prange. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's, I guess he's most famous for playing like Captain America, right. And like the all American boy. And I mean, he plays that really well. Cause he kind of does [00:13:00] look like the part, but. He, I'm totally surprised at just how well he did Robert, I didn't even know it was Chris Evans when I first watched the movie, but then upon multiple viewings, I realized it was him and, you know, and researching the movie and he. Based off what Richard told us about Robert ProE. Chris Evans, yeah. Hits it out of the park. Like he captures that certain, that craziness that is, uh, that Robert ProE was, let's take it. So we, I mean the acting was really out of this world and we, we didn't even, I guess we should mention Michael Shannon as Richard Kuklinski. I think one thing that you had mentioned, what did you think about, you mentioned earlier. You know, just talking now that you thought you loved the intensity he brought, but you didn't feel that he brought the physicality of Richard Kuklinski. No, I like the intensity for sure. Um, but when you see [00:14:00] pictures of Richard Kalinsky and you read about people describing Richard Kalinsky, he is like literally a monster, right? Like he's six five over 300 pounds. I mean, Michael Shannon's pretty tall, but he doesn't look like he's over 300 pounds in this movie. Uh, and I mean that to me, that's like a little nitpicking thing, I guess, because I'm, how many actors are you going to be able to find that would match like the talent of Michael Shannon and the intensity and plus be six, five, you know, 300 plus pounds is not many. There's not many actors that probably out there that you could hire to pull it off. But that's one little thing I would have liked. I would have liked to. A guy that was more physically intimidating. Yeah, I looked at Michael Shannon. He's tall. I think he's well over six feet tall, but he's thin. He's, you know, even when they showed him in the movie, like a, uh, up next to Winona Ryder, he was much large, taller than her, but he didn't physically dominate her [00:15:00] and or even, um, Ray Liotta as Roy DeMeo, like standing next to him. He was. Tall, but he didn't physically just completely dwarf these people like he did. I think I even noticed one of the scenes he was clearly wearing lifts to make himself a little top, probably to make him look a little taller. I mean, they look like seventies shoes too. So it could have been just that. Yeah, yeah, that's just my, my, I don't know. That's one, that would have been like something they could have done maybe differently, but then it's not that big of a deal. I think Michael Shannon did the role very well. So let's talk about a couple of those individual scenes that really stuck with us. What's maybe one scene that really stuck with you? I mean, um, I would say like the, the, like the, the scene in the porn lab between Richard and Ray, because according to Richard, this is kind of the way he met, um, sorry, Richard and Roy DeMeo. This is kind of, uh, [00:16:00] how they met was Richard was working at this porn lab. And I think there was, if I'm remembering correctly, there was some problem with. Uh, I don't know. There wasn't the shipment was going to make out make out on time. And, you know, Roy just smacks him around a bit. And according to Richard, like he. Said to himself like he swore revenge. He was gonna get revenge on uh, Roy for ever putting his hands on him and it just really captured the the intensity of Richard and the Intensity of Roy and you have like these two You know psychotic guys staring each other down it was uh, perfect and It kind of shows like the stuff that Richard and Roy were into we didn't really get into it Uh so much in the background episodes, but like Roy was funding a ton of this Pornography that was going around in the United States at the time. And it wasn't a lot of, it wasn't just like normal pornography. There was some pretty vile stuff that we were, um, um, shipping [00:17:00] around and Richard was right into it too. And you know, it's yeah. So I don't know, to me, that was one of the better scenes in the movie. I liked the scene and it really, I think it like it, it, it got to me and I think I didn't really understand it when I saw it and I probably didn't even understand it the last couple of times I watched it. I was just watching it today and it hit me that scene where Richard meets with his brother. Joseph in the prison, and that's the scene where I think we get the real hint of Richard's childhood. That's something that they don't show at all in the movie, except for one five second flashback in that scene. And it really gets dropped after that, but I think that for me, that's what made me think that this movie you really need to know the story of Richard Kuklinski going into it, or else I think you can go on a kind of a false narrative. And I don't know if that's what [00:18:00] the filmmakers were trying to get. It's to get, they built this narrative of Richard being like the typical classical family man who maybe starts to fall apart where, um, Richard had all this background before he even met Barbara, which if you go back to the previous episodes, you'll hear. And that one scene gave us a little taste of that. A little taste, yeah, and it was something that we had, we didn't get into on the Richard, uh. Podcast two is that that's accurate. His brother was murdered. Um, I believe it was a young lady and he was in that he was in jail for that. Um, and then the Iceman, uh, Philip Carlo book you hear about Richard talks about like trying to help. He was trying to help his brother and they were actually pretty close. And then after his brother Joseph did that, he kind of cut him off. And that's what you see in the. And that scene is Richard basically just [00:19:00] saying, like, never call again, like, it's completely done. Um, but the one thing I really liked about that scene is his brother screaming at him saying, like, you're going to wind up in here with me. And that's exactly what happened. I think it was a few cell blocks away from his brother. Yeah, when he was finally caught, then I think it was the very next scene after that, or maybe it was a little bit longer down when Richard Kuklinski gets into that road rage incident. Yeah, and I think you again, you see who the real Richard Kuklinski was that that whole. facade and even the facade that the movie puts up that he's the all American family man, you know, dad of the year. And then he goes on this insane road rage. That's who Richard was a hundred percent. And that, and then if you, in the. The Iceman, like, documentaries and the books, he talks about, like, just going on these freak road rages, and I mean, that's pretty accurate to what Richard did in real, like, [00:20:00] in real life, he says he, he killed a few of these people that he went on road rages with, but I mean, it captures, it shows you that they This is something that triggers Richard off is like, uh, is, uh, certain road, uh, road rage, uh, episodes. Were there any other scenes that really stuck out to you? Um, I like the mod, like, so when Roy DeMeo hires Richard to be his personal, his personal, like, side special assassin or what have you, like me particularly, I don't think that's. Exactly how their relationship was. But let's just say in the movie, this is how they show it. They do a montage of Richard doing a bunch of jobs for Roy and a lot of the, the, uh, killing that he does in that montage is killings that we hear about in the Philip Carlo book. Like, I like that touch. So it's not historically accurate. How? All those killings went down or what have you but you know we get the he uses like the rope in one [00:21:00] scene and there was like a couple of other ones and I just liked it because it I don't know it was a certain attention to detail and they yeah they change things a little bit but I mean it is somewhat it is. Accurate in spirit one that seemed that they switched around is, um, I think it was in both of the books. The two major books on Richard Kuklinski. He said that Roy pulled an Uzi on him at the Gemini and. Was probably gonna kill Richard, but Richard was so ice cold like he didn't move and he didn't, uh, he didn't give that fear factor back to Roy that Roy was really looking for and they kind of showed that in the car scene where, uh, Roy pulls a gun on Richard and I That scene they never really talked about in any of the books, but I think that was kind of a mashup of scenes to just show, like, how ice cold Richard Kuklinski was, that even somebody like [00:22:00] as psychotic as Roy DeMeo couldn't shake him. Yeah, that, that's what When we talked about it earlier is like that's something that the movie did particularly well was changing the scene a bit to make it the movie flow a little bit better but still capturing the spirit like historically accurate right rich like Roy pulling out the Uzi as you pointed out yeah they changed it a little bit but they they kind of recreated it in a sense that made more sense in the movie the movie really got me thinking And this, I wanted to bump this theory off of you is, so we really, we, in that first Richard Kuklinski episode, the background episode, we really came to the conclusion that we thought he was full of it. But I wonder if the way the timeline works out, if you look at it, Richard's doing really, really well up until the early 80s. And then Roy DeMeo dies in 83, I think it was somewhere in thereabouts. And [00:23:00] it's really after 83. And when you get into the mid 90s, that Richard really started screwing up. And I wonder if maybe. There is some truth that Richard, maybe he was not an international, uh, hit man assassin. I mean, I think that's preposterous. And I think that that's stuff that Richard pulled out later just to get people going. And, uh, especially his last interviewer. I think maybe he was doing that just because he knew they would eat that up. That's preposterous. But what do you think that about? Richard was earning under Roy, and once Roy died, that's when it really fell apart because Richard then had to make his own criminal enterprises after that. Well, that and it would, Richard, that was his connection to... Like hit contracts, right? I guess and Roy was kind of is his personal capo.[00:24:00] Um, I, yeah, I can totally, I can see it. I personally think that, like, I think Roy was doing hits for the mob. I think he did special jobs for I think he did some special jobs for Roy, or Roy at the very least pointed people in Richard Kuklinski's, uh, direction if he didn't really want much to do with them and, you know, word got around, I, that's what I personally think, um, and I, I guess when he saw Roy go down, maybe he started thinking to himself, well, I mean, if they're going to take, they can take Roy out, then it's only a matter of time for me, maybe And maybe subconsciously he starts getting sloppier, knowing that he'll get caught, at least in prison, he'll be somewhat safe. It's also that it could be that after Roy was killed, that Richard and everybody associated with Roy was such damaged goods, he couldn't just go work for John Gotti or for the Westies or for somebody else and make the [00:25:00] kind of, uh, money that he was making. Through Roy, and so he had to get, he had to push himself way further than he really was ever comfortable with and I think he had been stealing cars and stuff, but it was all such sloppy stuff. I think he, because he had, in all the books, they say that he spent money faster than it came in, and once that Roy money dried up, and they kind of show that in the movie too, where Roy says everybody has to stop doing everything, and he essentially laid off Richard, that that's when Richard started getting really sloppy. Because he had to earn, yeah, yeah, he had to earn and it's also implied in the movie that like he had to he had this urge to kill like that was one of the things is like, oh, I'm really good at what I do. And it's like, yeah, part of it's like, this is how I make my living. But part of it is if I can't just. If I can't kill people, then I, [00:26:00] I'm going to start taking it out on my family and what have you. And you kind of see it in the movie where he freaks out, uh, in real life. This happened a lot more often, but I mean, in, in the movie, he freaks out. And that's when he comes to, Oh, I'm going to reach out to Robert Prange. And we're going to start doing jobs in the side. Cause I think it was implying that he couldn't hold these urges back anymore. And he had to, um, he had to. You know, unleash them somehow, and he also had to start making some coin. Yeah, that's, I think, that's another thing that the movie shows. It's this whole thing with Robert Prange, and how much of it, how much of the things that he did with Robert Prange, do you believe, especially what they showed in this movie, industrialist. Freezing, uh, set up going and that they're both just doing one contract after another. And I don't get that that was really what they were doing. I mean, from my [00:27:00] understanding, they did kind of work together. Did they non, they like shared tricks of the trade. Uh, they, they bring up the cyanide spray, which is apparent according to Richard, Robert Prong is the one who taught him that trick. And I mean, he talks about it on the, uh, The tapes that they, uh, where he, I don't know, they used it as evidence against him in the, in the court case or whatever the wire tap, uh, he talks about like the cyanide spray. I mean, and we talked about Robert Pongay, like, they did find a guy who was like, shot up near, uh, inside his ice cream truck and, you know, he was an arsonist and like, sounded like a pretty insane person. I mean. I would, I think this part's accurate. Like, I mean, a lot of, to me, a lot of it hinges, like, Richard's story hinges on Robert Prange. Like, I wish we could have known a bit more about the guy, because it just seems, if he had made it up, like, the whole Robert Prange thing, if he made [00:28:00] it up, it's I mean, what a waste. He should have been a novelist. It's true. One thing that they did with Robert Prange is that whole, the whole, uh, discussion that they had that Robert or Richard and Robert had about Robert wanting to devise this plan where they kill each other's families. And, um, Richard kills him there, but then he leaves him on the bench. I think the real Robert Prange, if I'm not mistaken, was found shot in his Mr. Softy truck. Yeah, he was shot. Yeah. He was saw that's where they found him was that he was shot up in, I believe it was in his truck or it was in his shop where his truck was parked. Um, but the, the, his idea of killing each other's families, according to Richard, That was, uh, that was the thing that Richard decided, Oh, this guy's so this guy's like, it's so crazy. I'm going to have to take care of him myself. Um, I mean, in Robert Prongy's defense, I mean, in a weird kind of twisted [00:29:00] way, the logic makes a bit of sense. You know, Richard's not going to want to do that to his own family. And Robert's not going to want to do that to his own family. So, I mean, why not use each other's, you know, skill set, it really is something that's almost from like a Novel, a spy novel that a really high end Special Forces guy becomes a Mr. Softy truck driver so that he can just scope out neighborhoods without being noticed so that he could be a hitman. Like, it's, it's so insane that it, it has to be true. It really, that's, that's what I mean. Like, it seems like if Richard made that all up, like, what a waste. He should have been a film director, a novelist, write comic books, something. Yeah, he would have made millions. Yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. Cause I can, I can only imagine the type of stories that he come up with in his head, you know, and we're supposed to believe that like Richard just kind of stumbled across this, [00:30:00] this Robert Progge's murder, uh, in like some, You know, obscure newspaper and, you know, put all the story together that, you know, with the ice cream truck and this is what he was actually doing. I mean, I don't know, man. It seems pretty, it seems pretty far fetched. Maybe Richard exaggerated a bit of what Robert Prage was doing. Maybe, but I don't know. They must have, he must have been a hit man and Richard must have known them and they must have done some work together. Now, what were some things that you, I mean, I think in general, I really like this movie, but I had some, um, things to nitpick it. What, what, what were some things that you didn't love so much about this movie? Um, to, to be honest with you, like the whole, they played up too much. Richard being like the perfect family man. And like trying to set that like dichotomy between the two. I mean, in the early interviews, this is he does present that kind of picture. In the later interviews, he starts being a little [00:31:00] bit more honest. And I'm like, even Barbara talks a little bit more about what actually happened. It almost seemed like in the movie there. It was just convenience, like we're just going to use the first couple interviews and then we're just not going to deal, we'll deal with some aspects of the later interviews, but the first couple of interviews is a much more compelling story. So we're just going to go with that. Uh, I mean, it's, this is where people kind of have like a serious problem with the movie because it presents this false picture of Richard Kuklinski, where he was like. He was able to just keep his ruthlessness, you know, as like a business. And he was a nice family guy when he came home. And it's just not true. He was, well, you guys know from listening to the earlier Richard Kuklinski episode, he was a monster to everyone around him. Steve here again with a quick word from our sponsors. It made a really compelling, compelling [00:32:00] narrative arc for a movie that he was a a family man who. Just kind of cracked once the stress came on too much, but I mean, this guy really was a monster. Barbara knew it. Barbara kept the sun away from which they cut out entirely the sun, which it didn't really matter, but they she really tried to insulate. I think the son's name was Joseph, if I'm not mistaken, but she tried to insulate him from Richard as much as possible because she was worried that Richard would be become jealous of the son and try and take him out or, you know. Abuse him. And that's not necessarily portrayed at all in the movie that, you know, this that really vindictive and jealous side of Richard. No, it's not at all. And I mean, somewhat in defense of the filmmaker, if you read the Philip Carlo book, I mean, I don't know, like, what [00:33:00] type of male lead do you have? To deal with there, I mean, they still capture that Richard was completely ruthless and I mean, they, you know, they show him killing that homeless person for no particular reason and killing that guy at the pool hall because he, you know, made a joke about his wife or, you know, I'm not his wife at the time, his girlfriend or what have you. And I like, so they show, they show that he's a serial killer, really. Um, but like, You know, we're not going to get into all the details about the Carlo book, but I mean, how I mean, how would you depict that? Like, I don't know. I'm asking you, like, how would you do it? I don't think you could do it. You can't do it in that format. I think you in a movie. You can't. I think it's too difficult to show those 2. Different sides of Richard that he more or less was a normal family man more or less. I mean, he did. I mean, he was absolutely violent and all [00:34:00] that stuff. But you got to also remember that this was in the. 50s, 60s, 70s, I think some of that domestic abuse sort of thing that he did was a lot more common than in suburbia, if you will. Not to the extremes that Richard took it, but I think that if a cop came to that scene, I don't think that he would haul off the person. Maybe he would, maybe he wouldn't. But, um, And the fact that on the other hand, that Richard Kuklinski was a, a mafia hitman serial killer. It's too hard to jam all that together in a two hour movie. Yeah. And it's he, there's just literally nothing to like about Richard after reading the Carlo book too. Like there's nothing there's, I don't know. There's nothing to like, at least like, but this movie. He can walk away from and obviously Richard's despicable and an evil person, but you can walk away and go like, you can think to yourself, well, this guy was kind of a badass, right? [00:35:00] He was a hit man for the mob. Do you know what I mean? Right. Um, but they almost, some people say they try to make them seem sympathetic. I don't really think the film does that. I don't know what's your opinion. I, I think sympathetic might be too far. I think they're trying, they're trying to turn him into an anti hero, I think. To some degree, when he's just rotten to the core that I, he, in the, I think you're, I think you're, I agree with you at the, in the later interviews, he did a lot more to turn himself into the anti hero. Then. Even what he did when he was in the earlier, in his earlier story, but he's, he, he wasn't that at all. No, there's nothing, there's nothing remotely heroic about Richard at all. I mean, you can walk away even after reading the Carlo book and go, I mean, at the end of the day, the guy's kind of a badass. Like he was doing hits for the mob and he was, you know, unlike a lot of these other [00:36:00] serial killers, he was actually killing tough guys and, you know, guys that could probably You know, compete with him in terms, in terms of physically and what have you. I mean, you could walk away thinking that I know, I know I did. Um, but there's nothing, you know, there's no, you don't want to sit and talk to Richard. And, you know, I don't know, maybe I would, if he was still alive, just to kind of understand the guy a little bit better. But, um, yeah, there's nothing like you wouldn't want there's at no point do you go to yourself? It's like, oh man, I wish I had Richard as a friend. No, no. I think then that leads us kind of to the end of what we could do to make this movie better. And I think that we'll get into one. We'll set aside the obvious one for a minute. I think anybody who's really watched this movie and followed Richard Kuklinski, there's one obvious thing that they could do. But I think that one scene I would have loved to have seen them include was, um, It was in one of the Iceman tapes. I think it was the earlier one. Richard [00:37:00] explained this hit he did on, um, I think it was his friend even. And it was at some sort of nightclub, like 70s nightclub, and everybody's dancing disco and everything. And Richard dressed up in the most outrageous disco outfit he could find. And so the six foot five 300 pound guy, he says he danced and shimmied all through the through this disco. And then he got up to the guy and the guy recognized them. But before he could do anything, Richard blew cyanide in his face. And, um, They showed something of that scene, didn't they, in the movie? Yeah, like, Leo Merckx, Nino Gaggi, hires him, hires Richard to kill, uh, Sicoli, who's the henchman that Roy's with, which is, I never, I don't understand why they didn't just use, like, Joseph Testa or Anthony Senter. Um, and he goes into the club, and he does the [00:38:00] cyanide spray. Kaila in the nightclub, but he's not wearing like the, the crate. They should have, I don't understand it. Why, when they just haven't put on that crazy suit and just recreate that, that scene, um, yeah, he, Richard, he just explains it so well, and he gives you such mental imagery and the movie just fell completely flat on that one. Yeah, I guess maybe they tried filming it with the crazy disco suit and it just, they're like, no, we just can't do this. It looks ridiculous. It just takes you right out of the scene. I maybe that's their logic. But I mean, if you're going to watch a movie. About the Iceman, I don't know, most people would probably go in there thinking, knowing a little bit about the guy, I guess, right? I, I would have just filmed it with the crazy suit on it because that's part of Richard's story is, you know, these, you know, him wearing these crazy suits and like disguises and, you know, it sounds like he had like a whole room just full of disguises with like fake noses and [00:39:00] wigs and. Different suits and now I think, and I'll leave it to you. What would you love to have seen them do with this movie? I, to be honest with you, I would have, me and you were talking earlier. I, I would have liked to have done like a, like a mini series, to be honest with you, where you have, uh, Roy de Mayo's and Richard's story running parallel. Uh, we were mentioning it earlier. I would have loved to have seen, uh, Ray Liotta do the Roy DeMeo story, but I also would have loved to have seen Richard's story, you know, running parallel to Roy's because they're, they're connected, but they're not connected and they're connected enough that, and they Thank you. Around there at the same time that you could tell Richard story and you can tell Roy story and be like, you know, we're all we're spending 20 minutes here and then 20 minutes there. And there's episode 1 and do, I don't know, like a 5 part mini series where you show. The entirety [00:40:00] of Roy's story and the entirety of Richard's story, I think it would have worked really well. They could have really played it up too because Roy was almost in competition with John Gotti. There was all that was going on pretty much in parallel too. I think to have the Gotti story, the Roy story, with Richard Kuklinski in there, and all the stuff with Neal Delacroix, and uh, Nino Gaggi, all of that bouncing off of each other at the think that's the story that really needs to be told. And unfortunately, Ray Liotta can't do it because I mean, that was, that's one of the, I think one of the things where we'll all have to live with is that Roy Ray Liotta couldn't play, uh, Roy de Mayo more if you were to do it now, who would you have play Roy just out of curiosity? I can't think, especially once Ray Liotta played him, I don't think anybody, I think that's just an idea that'll never [00:41:00] happen. Yeah, the only person I can think of off the top of my head, I know it sounds weird because he's not really Italian, is, uh, Tom Hardy, because he has that certain level of intensity. But still, I think, Ray Liotta, I mean, he was just the, the king of the Mafia movie, and, it, it just, I don't think it would end, just out of respect for Ray Liotta, I think it has, it's, It's done now. Yeah, it's just the more I think about this mini series and the two, the two stories running parallel, like, oh, my God, would have been brilliant. I think that that might be something that comes back around because we're kind of in a low spot of mafia movies that, you know, there was a big. A lot of them in the 90s, the early 2000s, and that genre has lost popularity a little bit. I think when it comes back around, I think we'll see some good things come out that may be like that. Yeah, well, we need a new crop of actors to be able to play [00:42:00] some of these roles. A lot of these guys are, you know, they're dying now. Ray passed away, I believe. Paul Servino passed away recently. Yeah, I mean, Martin Scorsese is not getting any younger. Um, I mean, there's Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro. Like, these are old men. We need a new crop of mob guys. I think it's maybe another, it's maybe a genre that'll be revisited and viewed in a different way, too. I think that This, this Iceman movie, in a way, was kind of a throwback to an earlier kind of movie, kind of like what, I mean, we haven't talked about it yet, and we probably will, the Irishman was an, a throwback movie, but I think we need something new out of the mob genre. Yeah, I would agree with that. Like the Irishman was kind of like Martin Scorsese's swan song to the whole mob genre, which I mean, really, I wouldn't say built his career on it, but it was a huge part of his career. [00:43:00] Um, I don't see him doing another mob movie. I don't see any of those guys ever doing another mob movie. That was like their farewell and we're good. We're gonna end up doing that movie. But, um, you know, it was quite. Quite well done, but I, yeah, we need, I don't know, something, yeah, we need somebody, we need some different actors, we need some fresh blood into the genre. We're going to leave it at that for today. I just want to mention, though, the best thing you can do to help us in this podcast is if you enjoy what you're hearing, tell a friend, tell a couple of friends about the Organized Crime and Punishment podcast so that your friends can become friends of ours. You've been listening to Organized Crime and Punishment, a history and crime podcast. To learn more about what you heard today, find links to social media, and how to support the show, go to our website, [00:44:00] AtoZHistoryPage. com. Become a friend of ours by sending us an email to crime at AtoZHistoryPage. com. All of this and more can be found in the show notes. We'll see yous next time on Organized Crime and Punishment. Forget about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coming Soon on Organized Crime and Punishment! You can learn more about Organized Crime and Punishment and subscribe at all these great places: https://atozhistorypage.start.page www.organizedcrimeandpunishment.com Click to Subscribe: https://omny.fm/shows/organized-crime-and-punishment/playlists/podcast.rss email: crime@atozhistorypage.com Parthenon Podcast Network Home: parthenonpodcast.com On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/@atozhistory https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage https://facebook.com/atozhistorypage https://twitter.com/atozhistorypage https://www.instagram.com/atozhistorypage/ Music Provided by: Music from "5/8 Socket" by Rico's Gruv Used by permission. © 2021 All Rights Reserved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210vQJ4-Ns0 https://open.spotify.com/album/32EOkwDG1YdZwfm8pFOzUuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Title: Beneath the Ice: The Secrets of Richard Kuklinski Revealed Original Publication Date: 8/16/2023 Transcript URL:  https://share.descript.com/view/gQGAxbZu3M2 Description: In this chilling episode of Organized Crime and Punishment, we delve into the life and career of Richard Kuklinski, famously known as "The Iceman." Our hosts explore the chilling details of Kuklinski’s journey from a seemingly ordinary family man to a ruthless contract killer responsible for over 100 murders. Discover the method behind his madness as we analyze his notorious use of freezing techniques to confound forensic investigations. Join us as we uncover the sinister secrets of this enigmatic figure and shed light on the cat-and-mouse game he played with law enforcement. Tune in to this gripping episode and explore the dark world of one of history's most notorious hitmen. #TrueCrimePodcast #OrganizedCrimeChronicles #TheIcemanCometh #ColdBloodedKiller #MurderMystery #CrimeWorldRevealed #CriminalMastermind #UnmaskingTheIceman #ForensicInvestigation #LawEnforcementPursuit You can learn more about Organized Crime and Punishment and subscribe at all these great places: https://atozhistorypage.start.page email: crime@atozhistorypage.com www.organizedcrimeandpunishment.com Parthenon Podcast Network Home: parthenonpodcast.com On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/@atozhistory https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage https://facebook.com/atozhistorypage https://twitter.com/atozhistorypage https://www.instagram.com/atozhistorypage/ Music Provided by: Music from "5/8 Socket" by Rico's Gruv Used by permission. © 2021 All Rights Reserved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210vQJ4-Ns0 https://open.spotify.com/album/32EOkwDG1YdZwfm8pFOzUu Begin Transcript: [00:00:00] Welcome to Organized Crime and Punishment, the best spot in town to hang out and talk about history and crime, with your hosts, Steve and Mustache Chris. The whole story of Richard Kuklinski, the Iceman, meeting Barbara is really interesting because everything to me screamed that Barbara should have stayed a million miles away. And it was really, she, this is my impression. I got of it. She got caught up in his gravity. He's like, he was like a black hole. And once she got too close to him, there was no escaping him. Yeah. Like he was working [00:01:00] at, I believe it was a, it was like a shipping and receiving thing. And. At first, he just kind of bumped into Barbara and they talked for a little bit and the manager, the boss told Richard, you got to stay away from her. Don't you talk to her ever again? And Richard wasn't even thinking about her romantically in that sense. But as soon as the boss is like, you couldn't, you can't have her. That was like, okay, Richard, like Richard's like, I got to have her and pretty much almost kind of starts like stalking her and they start dating a little bit and then. At one point, Barbara's family, because they're picking up kind of weird vibes from him, they hire a private investigator to kind of look into Richard and they start, you know, seeing things that, uh, not the murder, but just a bunch of other like low end crimes and stuff that he'd been doing and just words on the streets. And at one point, like Barbara steps back, but she's, she says to herself, like, well, that's in the past. He's not doing that anymore. And then. You know, this whole [00:02:00] time he's still married to his first wife, which is another wild thing. And that's like a big thing in the, uh, in the confessions of a hitman book where people are really focused on her family's really focused on like, well, you got to get a divorce. You got to get a divorce. And Richard kind of struggles, like to get the money to get the divorce. But we talked about this earlier. He has like low impulse control with that. Eventually he ends up getting her pregnant and. She starts seeing the real Richard, and she doesn't like what she sees, and she runs away, I believe, to live with her father in Florida, and he goes and talks to her mother, and her mother's like, well, I'll tell you where she is, but you gotta show, you gotta prove to me that you got the divorce, he ends up getting the divorce, and she shows him, she tells him, um, um, um, Where Barbara is, and he finds her and they end up getting married because I guess it's the right thing to do in that time. And, um, it's probably the worst. Just while Barbara will tell you it was the worst [00:03:00] decision she ever made in her life that and the fact that once he was in, he. There was just no leaving and Barbara knew it that there was no leaving him that either he went to jail somehow, or somebody was going to die her mom, her dad, her, and how many times did he cause her to miscarry? I think it was three times through beating her or... Yeah, it was like three times and like, even before they got married, he was like poking her with knives and like threatening her entire, like, I shouldn't laugh, but I mean, it is like, it's insane. Um, and she like. She told her mother this and her mother's like, Oh, no, so this is where she is in Florida. And, you know, I got like, and during their relationship, um, because like Richard refused to like do any contraceptive or what have you, they would, she would get pregnant all the [00:04:00] time. And like the first three times that she was pregnant, as you mentioned the, she had miscarriages because of Richard's insane temper. Yeah. That's I. I've really tried to think of what could Barbara have done to get away from him. And then you think in so many cases with the, with the abused wives and there's gotta be something, but in a lot of cases, especially I think in this most extreme case, There was nothing she could do period. No, nothing she could do. Well, yeah, because I mean, you can get in this particular case, he, he would have, he would have killed her entire family. Yeah. You know, she could have gone, you know, say it wasn't nowadays with, you know, there's social services for the, for, uh, abused women and all sorts of things. Even if that was available to her, he was going to kill her entire family and probably her. I, and at that time she [00:05:00] was young, she might've even still, Barbara still may have been in her teens at that point or early twenties. She had zero choices. I mean, you hate to say that, but she really ditched. There was zero she could do to stay away from Richard, even her uncle. Um, Who was, I think, a police officer and somewhere in New Jersey, he went and talked with Richard and Richard, Richard terrified him and made him worried that he was going to kill him and he was a cop. And this is the one that we haven't mentioned this yet, but like Richard Kuklinski was literally a monster, like in terms of like the stuff he did, but like he was a monster physically. He was like six, five, 300 pounds. Yeah. Just built like, like, uh, strong as a strong man. And I mentioned this to you earlier. Like I was at the gym earlier in the week and I saw a guy and I'm like, Oh, he kind of reminded me of Richard just because we were talking [00:06:00] about it. And I, like, I'm not a small guy at all. Like I'm, you know, like I'm short, but I'm pretty thick, right. And well built. And I saw this guy and he was like six, five, he must've been like two, like three 30 and there's nothing I could have done if you really wanted to do something. He was just a freak of nature. And yeah, that's just something like that. We need to, we didn't really mention at the beginning of the show is like, like, not only is he insane, but he's also like a monster physically. He's like the incredible Hulk. Yeah. I mean, they have. Stories where he literally ripped the door off of a car, ripped the door off of the hinges, and I believe it. Oh yeah, because it is, it is one, it is possible to do it, you know, and he's picking up like, uh, I think it was like, at one point it was like a marble table they just bought, and he throws it out the window, and Barbara... Mentions like it took like four guys to just get [00:07:00] that up the stairs and Richard just picked it up himself and just threw it out the window just because he was angry. And you think about it, somebody who is that strong just naturally and then when somebody's enraged and pumped full of adrenaline and they're even, you know, that magnifies their strength like that. He is. Dangerous of a person with the, you know, absolute as short of a fused temper as you can possibly get, and they're a physically a monster like, I mean, this guy was as he was a bad dude. Oh, yeah, you know, and that was and we mean, you were talking about it earlier. This is what kind of like separates Richard from. Some of these other type of serial killers were like Richard was we'll get into it like his hitman like a career and shortly is he was like, you know, he's doing hits against, you know, other tough guys and Richard was like a legitimately like tough guy. And physically strong and where, like a [00:08:00] lot of these other guys, they're kind of, I don't know, they're kind of pathetic and they're weakly and they prey on, you know, women and like the elderly, like in terms of like Richard Ramirez, and they weren't like really fighting and taking on guys that were maybe could have gave them a chance. Steve here again. We are a member of the Parthenon Podcast Network, featuring great shows like Josh Coen's. Eyewitness history and many other great shows. Go to Parthenon podcast to learn more. And now here's a quick word from our sponsors that leads us really into this mid part of his life where Richard, he's established. Eventually, Barbara and Richard have three children, two girls, Marck Chris, and then a boy Duane. Richard's absolutely over the moon over his [00:09:00] first, his eldest daughter, Merrick, eh, with his daughter, Chris, and he has a pretty cold relationship with his son. So that's his family life. They move into a nice suburb in New Jersey. But really, Richard's career this whole time... It's mostly just small time rackets that he's into, but what he claims is that he's making his money as a hitman and as an enforcer, uh, either killing people or collecting money for the mafia. People like Nino Gaggi, uh, who's somebody who's as a name, keep that name in mind because Nino Gaggi is a, uh, capo in the Gambino family and his name will come up as we talk about Roy DeMeo and Richard, but I get the feeling that. It's almost, you have to believe that Richard was [00:10:00] probably just making his money through the pornography at this point, and maybe as an enforcer for the mafia, but it just seems to me like there's not a ton of independent evidence to support this being a hitman. No, there's not, and I mean, he claims that he got into contact with Ro Well, back it up a little bit. He claims that he was doing hits for the Devacanto. How do you pronounce that? The, the Jersey family. It's the, um, is it the Devacanti family? They were the ones who the Sopranos was based on and they were the big family of New Jersey. Oh, yeah, he claims that he was doing hits for that family and I'm trying to remember. I can't remember the life of me. I can't remember the guy's name that he was doing the hits for and he did that for a bit. And then he stopped doing that. And that at the point that we're talking about right now. He's doing his [00:11:00] pornography, peddling stuff, and this is kind of where he claims he gets into contact with Roy DeMaio, because Roy DeMaio was basically the one funding all of this, and I know Roy takes a shine to him, and kind of sees this is what Richard claims, and kind of sees that Richard, they're like kindred spirits, and hires, hires him for special jobs that, um, You know, he can't really get involved in or, you know, people within his crew really can't be taught, can't, uh, getting, uh, can't get involved in. So I don't know. People claim that this seems like this is a stretch that Roy DeMille would have a guy like this because, you know, when we get into Roy DeMille, he didn't mind getting his hands dirty himself. Um, You know hundreds of times so I mean but this is like a big part of Richard's story that he claims happened it wasn't just like he was just he was like a freelance guy too so he was like doing work for all the for all the different families right because he was polish so [00:12:00] he could never get made and he was always kind of like kept on the outside he was like a distant associate I somewhat believe that this was the case um just because If you look at something like, say, like Murder, Inc., one of the reasons they hired a lot of Jewish and Irish guys, and there were Italians in it, but they hired a lot of Jewish and Irish guys, was because it gave them a little bit of distance from the inner, the inner, uh, Italian circle of the five families, and I mean, I don't find it's a stretch that they would pay them a fair amount of money to do some of the hits that um, They talk about in the book, a lot of these hits were like kind of personal jobs to, you know, so and so, uh, broke my cousin's heart. And, uh, so I heard that this guy, you know, uh, did some things to his sister and things of that nature and like collecting debt. It depends. Maybe you just don't have the time and you hire it out to make sure that it gets done. Yeah, it, um, it's the DeCavalcanti family of New [00:13:00] Jersey. So we were pretty close with the name. And it doesn't, it's not super important, but, um, I think the, the only, the, probably the most important fact is that he, the, if we believe Richard, that was his in to the mafia. The, the boss of the De Conti really liked him and Richard says he did a lot of work for him and that got that guy Richard's name in with these other families in, in New York City proper. Some of the other things that, I think in the Carlo book, and I think a lot of this is based on Richard's interviews is that he makes himself out like he's an international hitman, like, um, almost like the movie assassins or that video game. I can't think of the video game. Is it called the hitman where the guy's bald? Yeah. Yeah, I know who you're talk Yeah, I know what you're talking about. It just, it's, it's kind of insane. Like, there's one where he [00:14:00] supposedly went to Rio de Janeiro to, um, initially work out a drug deal with, uh, these, uh, Brazilian, uh, gang members who were, uh, in. competition with the Colombian drug lords, but then eventually Richard kills them. And the, so the story is so preposterous. It's either so preposterous it's true, or it's just total garbage. I don't think there's any gray in there. I think in particular, like his international travels, like there's like a whole section in the Carlo book. Where I don't he's doing like the Nigerian money scheme and he's going to like Zurich and he's doing these like international like drug deals with the Colombians and Brazilians. I, me personally, I don't, I don't, I think he's just kind of telling fibs about that, but I do think I do believe that he did was. He did, did hits [00:15:00] for the mob and I do believe that he had more than just a kind of a passing relationship with Roy DeMille. Like, I think Roy DeMille knew who he was and either hired him to do work or told other people to hire this guy to get certain things done if you wanted to, you want it done correctly and you would be able to keep a certain amount of distance away, uh, distance between yourself and the, the crime. Um, being committed. I mean, and at the same time, Roy would never, you never would have been really part of the DeMayo crew anyways. I mean, he, him being Polish and, uh, various other reasons. I mean, that's not necessarily, I mean, Lansky was Jewish and we'll get him when we get into good fellas, uh, Robert De Niro's character was Irish. Um, but you know, Polish, Polish seems. I don't know like the jews and irish had always been doing work with the italian mob. Anyways, the polish thing was I don't know. Probably what I don't think I don't think it's a stretch to [00:16:00] think that that that was like something else Entirely and they really kept him to the outside and only used him for special hits And I mean, and he also claims like he killed like hoffa and I don't know I find that hard to believe and he was like part of the paul castellano hit but then he gets like certain details wrong about the about how that hit actually went down. I mean, I mean, it's possible that he was part of those hits. Um, but I don't think, I don't think he had anything to do with that. I don't know. Maybe do you have a different opinion? I think it's, I really, my strong sense is that he was always peripheral to the, to the real, the real mafia that he was running his own scams and his own operation in New Jersey. Enough to make money and he would supplement his income with things that were going on through New York City. But I, and I think he probably did have some [00:17:00] connection with, uh, Roy DeMeo's crew. What did they call them? The Gemini. We'll get into that. At a different point, but that with his with Roy DeMaio, but I just don't think he was ever central to any of it that he was always just a useful pair of hands that for certain jobs as far as the Zurich thing, I think maybe he could have been involved in some small time early. Money, wire fraud type deals, but I do not think that Richard was going to Zurich acting like he was some sort of, um, international businessman and it's just, it couldn't be, could you picture somebody, but if you go and listen to the Iceman tapes, he has the. Thickest Jersey, North Jersey, working class accent. He's six foot five, three hundred pounds. He's just not passing himself off [00:18:00] as a high end businessman in Zurich. I don't buy it. Maybe it's true, but I think that maybe he was involved in some sort of early 80s. Wirefraud type scam is just one of as many ways to earn. Yeah, that's, you know, that's very possible. And like you pointed out, like, he was always kind of on the periphery, like, during this whole time, he's doing, like, B& Es and other, like, he's constantly doing, like, different scams, um, you know, and. I'm sure it was like pornography distribution. He probably did travel around the United States. It would make sense. I mean, LA, like going to places like LA and like some other bigger cities. But, um, I mean, like, I don't know, it seems going to, I like the image of him going to like. Being like this high, like, financial, like, scammer guy with that thick Jersey accent going to, like, Switzerland and, like, just talking to these people. It's just, it is a funny image. Yeah, and, and then [00:19:00] going over to Zurich and I think he claims to have killed at least two people in Zurich and, like, to see that and to think of that image, it's so crazy. It's like a, Like you said, like a Bond villain or something, so that comic. Yeah, it's, it's so crazy. So then that really leads us into, um, his relationship with another person, this Robert Prongay, who was called Mr. Softy. He was the, um. He's the one who supposedly taught Richard to freeze the bodies and he, uh, Robert Pongre, if I'm not mistaken, he was a something with the army. I heard a couple of different things. He had some sort of military service. He could have been as much as a, um, a Navy, not a Navy SEAL, a Green Beret or something, special forces. But then I thought I read somewhere else that he may have been in the Air Force, which is not known generally for its. [00:20:00] Assassin style killing. But anyways, the, they really laid Robert set Robert Prongay out as he sort of a, um, mentor assassin for Richard that brings them up to the next level. Yeah, it's, it's really, yeah, this is to me as one of the more kind of thing, one of the, one of the aspects of Richard's story really hinges like is if Robert Prongay is real. Then it lends a lot more credence to some of the other stuff that he says. And well, we know that Robert Prongate was a real guy and, um, because there is a newspaper article about a guy that was, you know, pretty much sounded like he was insane and was shot and killed like at an ice cream truck. Um, Yeah, so Richard bumps into Robert. I guess they were doing a job, um, two separate jobs at the same hotel or something like that. And they bump into each other at the bathroom. This is how [00:21:00] Richard describes it. And they just kind of stare each other down because they both kind of realize that they're the same person where they're doing the same thing. And they just kind of strike up a relationship, almost kind of like a friendship where they're You know, they're like showing each other just different ways of how they get their jobs done. And Richard had been fooling around with poison, um, like stuff like cyanide, just because it's really quick and it's efficient. Apparently, Robert Prong had created this cyanide spray and. Various other ways of having to use it, uh, using it and, um, using like explosives, I guess that was from his military background. And, but the thing that makes Robert Prange really stand out is he would drive around in an ice cream truck and with the full like regalia and everything that, and he would use this ice cream truck for surveillance. And I mean, it is kind of a brilliant idea because nobody would think that they're being surveilled by. You know, a good dude and an ice cream truck serving kids ice cream. Cause he would actually, he would [00:22:00] serve kids ice cream too. And they seem to strike up kind of a, a pretty good friendship. And it's the way Richard describes it is this kind of sounds like the only friend that he ever really kind of had. You know, somebody that he, they both really kind of understood each other because they were essentially the same person in a lot of ways. And if you believe Richard's story, it's that Robert Prange said he wanted to have Richard kill his own family for some reason. And I think there was a, it was kind of a convoluted reason of somebody who was. Pretty insane, and Robert claimed that he, Robert Prangay claimed that he was going to poison a reservoir that it would, uh, to kill one person, but the, an entire community fed off of this reservoir that it would have killed an entire town or something, supposedly, I mean, I don't know, and then Rob, [00:23:00] so I think that, I don't know if Richard, it, I think he did wind up getting convicted for Robert Prongay's murder after he had been in jail. He copped to it for, um, something else. I think he copped to it so that he, uh, he, he wouldn't get the death penalty or something. And it was pretty, I mean, but I think that Richard probably killed him, but I don't think it was necessarily that important that he did kill him. No, but it's, it. The thing is, it's like we, we have that one newspaper article and I mean, it checks out, like apparently he was threatening to kill his family and he was like an arsonist and like, was pretty insane person. And this kind of checks out with what Richard is saying. And I mean, it kind of lends a little bit to some of the other stuff he's saying, or like, I, I do think that this Robert Prong a character did exist and [00:24:00] was somebody like Richard that did, you know, hits for the mob and did hits for various people and used his military training background and, uh, to you. To his advantage and was, you know, like a serial killer, like Richard was. And the, the rice and thing is interesting. You mentioned that. Cause he, his logic was like, well, if I just poison this whole reservoir, then they can't like pin, they can't say like, Oh, it was just directed at the two people that I was trying to kill. So they would just have no idea. It's so smart. I guess it's so stupid. It's, it's so smart that it's stupid. Do you know, do you understand what I'm saying? Like, like, I understand his logic. But it's interesting that like even Richard was looking at Robert and going, yeah, this guy's insane. So how insane do you have to be for Richard to go if this is too much? Steve here again with a quick word from our sponsors. [00:25:00] Before we go to the end of his career. And, and how he's eventually caught. Let's quickly talk about the, the Jimmy Hoffa murder, because that hit, that's a, that's a key one there that I think we need to talk about. Nobody knows who killed Jimmy Hoffa and a whole bunch of people have claimed to have done it. Uh, most recently, probably the two that really the most famous one is that Frank Sheerman, who was, um, the wrote, I think it was a. His biography was called, and we'll, we'll probably talk about this later, was called So I Hear You Paint Houses, which was turned into the Irishman movie. He claims that he's the one who actually was the one who killed Hoffa, and then they had his body incinerated, and that was pretty much it. Richard Kuklinski says that he was a part of a hit team, and some of the details line up, actually, with what Sheeran says, that they [00:26:00] lured him to this house. Hoffa to this house, but in, um, Kuklinski's, they, rendering of the story, they load Jimmy Hoffa's body into a car, drive him back to Jersey. They bury him somewhere and then they dig him up and then they put him in the trunk of a car, which is compacted. And then it was sold off as scrap. So Hoffa was. Incinerated when they melted down the car. Presumably. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. Like, it's possible, but everything that I've read about people saying, like, it was, you know, it was Richard there when hopper was scale. I don't know. They seem they seem to think it's ridiculous, but. I mean, I mean, if he's telling the truth about Robert Prongay, maybe he knows a thing or two about this, right? Like, that's, that's, that to me is what's so fascinating about this story is you're reading it and it's like, well, where does the truth start and where does the truth end? And like, like, is he telling the truth here? Is he not telling the truth here? [00:27:00] It's, um, I don't know. What's your opinion on his? Connection with Hoppa, because I think you had a slightly different take on it. I think it's not entirely impossible. There, there were some things that seem believable on the story that maybe as, especially as opposed to Frank Sheernan, that Frank Sheernan was really good friends with Hoppa. And Frank Sheernan, Will's also really good friends with Russell Bufalino, so maybe he would do the hit. But if, if we believe everything, that's what we have to do, is if we believe everything that, uh, Richard said about him being a hitman, then he would be a really good person to do it. If he's full of it, then he's really, he's completely full of it. Um, and so, or maybe Frank and, sorry, and then maybe Frank and Richard. Kind of did it together and like not no, I assume they probably had no idea who [00:28:00] they, each other were, but you used Frank to, you know, cause Frank and Jimmy were best friends to get them in the house. Cause Jimmy didn't think that Frank would, you know, backstab them. And, you know, then the rest is history now. Eventually, Richard is caught in the mid 80s by a task force, uh, federal and New Jersey state law enforcement. And I kind of wonder what were your thoughts about this? It's a, it's a pretty complicated story of, um, undercover officer who went by the name of Dominic Provenzano. He was an ATF agent who was in deep cover and Technically speaking, it, this had nothing to do with his job as an ATF. He was loaned out to New Jersey because he was such deep cover inside of the mafia. It's just so weird to me that the murders that Richard did, that he winds up eventually getting [00:29:00] convicted of, they had very little evidence. That he did it. There was, I think, for one, there was only a body of all the murders that he was eventually convicted of the four or five of them. There was really only one that could definitively be attached to Richard. Yeah, I mean, it's. I just, well, and you mentioned Dominic Provenzano, I think, so, in the book, he talks about how he wears this wig, and it just seems to really bother him, and he just keeps on talking about this guy wearing, wearing this bad wig, um. It is interesting that they only got him for, I mean, I think he was charged with the five and that there was only the one 100% for sure, but they do have them on tape talking about using poison. Um, this is, I mean, at the, I don't know, there's different theories about why Richard was being so like, kind of sloppy near the end. And I, [00:30:00] I, I tend to think that maybe he was just getting tired of it and he just kind of wanted to just have to be over with. But there's also the theory that like, he was just talking so openly because who cares? It didn't matter. He was going to kill Dominic anyways. That was, that's what he was going to do. He was going to kill Dominic and the, I believe he made up this Jewish kid that was. Um, and this is why he needed Richard to, he needed Richard to kill this Jewish kid and he was going to get them the cyanide. And, and it's a, it is funny because like Dominic's like, oh, it's got to get done right now. And Richard said, well, it takes a couple of days to make the spray. And he's like, no, we're We'll put it in egg salad sandwiches. And Dominic provisional comes up this whole story about like how this Jewish kid likes loves egg salad sandwiches. If you put an egg salad sandwich in front of him, he's going to eat it. And like, right now I just, that was just, uh, just something that he comes up with on the fly just to make sure he gets it, [00:31:00] um, yeah, it is interesting. And I like it, it is interesting how sloppy Richard kind of gets near the end where he's just kind of openly talking about killing people and using different poisons. I think that in all, I, I never completely understood why they were so hot to get Richard. I don't understand where the pressure was coming from because he really criminal wise, if Dominic Provenzano, uh, I can't remember his, uh, his real name, but that was his undercover name. If he was so deep into the mafia, It seems like there's a lot bigger fish to fry than Richard, because I think they must have honestly believed that he was the serial killer hitman that he was. I mean, that could be a piece of evidence to say that he really was the person that he claimed to be. That's what I personally, that's what I tend to think. [00:32:00] Um. Because it is kind of weird that they would be such this hoopla about even at the time like this was before Richard talked about anything if you can go back and look at the news stories It was like a big deal when they got richard glinsky. Um, this mafia hitman So like that the story about him being a mafia hitman goes Way goes way before he started doing the HBO before he did the HBO documentaries, um, which is why I find it hard to like people say that he's just like making it all up. Like, I find that I don't know. I think that's that's not believable at all. I do do. I think he made up some stuff. Yeah, but he was definitely. I think he was definitely a hit man for the mob, and he definitely killed a lot of people. You've been listening to Organized Crime and Punishment, a history and crime podcast. To learn more about what you heard today, find links to social media, and how to support the show, go [00:33:00] to our website, AtoZHistoryPage. com. Become a friend of ours by sending us an email to crime at AtoZHistoryPage. com. All of this and more can be found in the show notes. We'll see yous next time on Organized Crime and Punishment. Forget about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Coming Soon on Organized Crime and Punishment! You can learn more about Organized Crime and Punishment and subscribe at all these great places: https://atozhistorypage.start.page www.organizedcrimeandpunishment.com Click to Subscribe: https://omny.fm/shows/organized-crime-and-punishment/playlists/podcast.rss email: crime@atozhistorypage.com Parthenon Podcast Network Home: parthenonpodcast.com On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/@atozhistory https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage https://facebook.com/atozhistorypage https://twitter.com/atozhistorypage https://www.instagram.com/atozhistorypage/ Music Provided by: Music from "5/8 Socket" by Rico's Gruv Used by permission. © 2021 All Rights Reserved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210vQJ4-Ns0 https://open.spotify.com/album/32EOkwDG1YdZwfm8pFOzUuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Title: Cold-Blooded: The Origin Story of the Iceman Richard Kuklinski Original Publication Date: 8/9/2023 Transcript URL: https://share.descript.com/view/j6tJb4VQxS1 Description: In this episode of Organized Crime and Punishment, Mustache Chris and Steve delve into the captivating life of Iceman Richard Kuklinski. Join us as we explore his early years and the circumstances that led him into a life of crime. From his troubled upbringing to his initial steps into the underworld, we uncover the intriguing journey of this notorious figure. Tune in for a chilling tale of a man shaped by darkness. #IcemanChronicles #TrueCrimeTales #ColdBloodedCriminal You can learn more about Organized Crime and Punishment and subscribe at all these great places: https://atozhistorypage.start.page email: crime@atozhistorypage.com www.organizedcrimeandpunishment.com Parthenon Podcast Network Home: parthenonpodcast.com On Social Media: https://www.youtube.com/@atozhistory https://www.facebook.com/groups/atozhistorypage https://facebook.com/atozhistorypage https://twitter.com/atozhistorypage https://www.instagram.com/atozhistorypage/ Music Provided by: Music from "5/8 Socket" by Rico's Gruv Used by permission. © 2021 All Rights Reserved. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=210vQJ4-Ns0 https://open.spotify.com/album/32EOkwDG1YdZwfm8pFOzUu Begin Transcript: [00:00:00] This episode will bring up topics that are not necessarily appropriate for all audiences. Uh, we're gonna really try not to be graphic. I mean, in all honesty, we'll try to make it as less graphic as, as possible. But we will be talking about mafia, and killing, and contracts. Pillars, just to let you know in advance. So what we're going to do today, Chris and I are, we're going to try to build some context on Richard Kuklinski, the Iceman, and this will lead into the next few episodes where we'll talk about mobster, Roy DeMeo, and then the 2012 movie, the Iceman, we really think you'll enjoy these conversations and really this whole series and the series within a series. Uh, We're going to break down Richard Kuklinski's life into several sections, because that's really how the, the books break up his life and [00:01:00] how he broke up his life and his jailhouse in a series of three or four sets of jailhouse interviews, hours and hours of interviews, really his early childhood, his early life and life in crime, and then his later life in crime. Um, And then his, uh, the end, where he's finally captured and prosecuted, and then his life in jail, which was a whole nother life after life. Just initially, Chris, what did you think overall of Richard Kuklinski? When we started looking into the Iceman, we were like... Really started looking into it like, yeah, we got to do this guy deserves his own episode because it is really a crazy, crazy story about like, you know, is this guy telling the truth? Is this guy not telling the truth? Is, um, how much, how much is he lying? How much is he not lying? It's it. And there's opinions that vary where people say he's lying about everything. And there's people that just take them exactly at his word. And [00:02:00] yeah, Richard Kuklinski, I mean, in terms of mafia guys, if you can really call him that, I don't, he's not really a mafia guy. He was kind of around them. I mean, he's, his story is fascinating. I remember when the Iceman tapes came out in the late 80s, maybe early 90s on HBO, and it was even too creepy to, for me to watch. I remember watching a little bit of it and turning it right off. And then a couple of years ago, I, Listen to some podcasts about him. I'm like, this is a strange guy, but then watching this movie and then diving into the deep dive of the research that we did. There's so much to him. And I think for me, it's he really dives into. What history is, and I think that we're going to learn a lot more about him. Hopefully when historians start looking into a story, as opposed to journalists who [00:03:00] are looking at it and looking at it in different ways, I think that we're going to learn a lot more about him because like you said. There's so much obscured about his story. We were relying so much on what he said that I don't think, at least for a while, that we'll know the full story of Richard Kuklinski. And it's also just the nature of... The mafia in general, where a lot of this stuff is still obscure, like it's still covered up and yeah, we know a fair amount, but there's a lot of, uh, I mean, if you look, listen to like Sammy, the bowl, he puffs himself up and I don't know, a lot of people take his word on a lot of things that went down, but I mean, somehow he always makes himself look good. And he's, uh, you know, one of the. Sources for a lot of these journalists and just to like kind of use an example like Richard Konglitzky Is he's not a household name, but he's pretty he's a pretty famous serial killer I mean and [00:04:00] the five families which is uh by Celin Robb, I believe that's Rab How you pronounce his name is considered like the bible of The Mafia in the initial prints, they weren't even they mentioned Richard Kuklinski, but they weren't even spelling his name properly. And another guy, Robert Prage, which we'll get into the story too. They weren't spelled. They didn't spell his name properly either. And it just kind of shows you. Like the layers of, um, onions you have to peel back to kind of get at the core of this story. That's the, the, I guess, the logical place to start is in Richard's early childhood. That's another one that you see it develops along the way and it. If you listen, if you listen or read, uh, some of the early accounts, you get a slightly different version of Richard's early life. And then as you, in the later accounts, you get a more fleshed out version of his life. What was the early childhood of Richard Kuklinski like [00:05:00] in coming up in northern New Jersey in the 1930s, 1940s? It sounds like it was But as rough as you could possibly imagine like they the whole family grew up poor I mean he talks about having to steal food to just you know feed himself and then feed the rest of his family but his parents were Something else like you would trigger. Oh, maybe the mother was a little bit motherly. No, she was Abuse of and her his father. He will actually refers to his mother is just cancer. Like that's how he refers to his mother and doesn't even call her by his name and he doesn't even call his dad by his Doesn't even call him dad or father or anything like that. He calls him by his first name with Stanley and Stanley was About as evil as a, as a father could be to his own children, you know, there's a story of him beating, uh, one of his younger brothers and just, you know, [00:06:00] punching him in the back of the head and he killed him and, you know, and like Richard would get these types of beatings all the time and his brother, Joseph, and we're going to talk about his brother, Joseph, it, the whole, the way that he was raised, it was like a, yeah. If you could set up a scenario to produce somebody like a Richard Glinsky, uh, like a hit man slash serial killer, you couldn't like pick a better factory to create it. Yeah, it really does seem that with this, with this family background, that. It's when you look at nature versus nurture, it really took both of them, that he was born with the genes or the propensity to be evil. And then every single thing in his life just promoted that it was like an incubator to be evil. Like you said, his father killing his brother, uh, and child abuse right in front of Richard and then everybody in the family covering it up. And [00:07:00] Richard. Being so young, he sees his brother, he vividly describes that of seeing his brother laid out dead, and he just doesn't understand it. His brother was there one day after, and then after the beating that the father regularly gave all of them, he's not there anymore. And you could see how that somebody who is wired to wired for. That sort of, uh, to be a killer and to be, you know, to break bad, you might say, everything lined up to just make this guy not right. And I would almost say when you listen to it, his early stories, I almost feel bad for the guy. I, I'm not gonna lie, I do, because... He just didn't have a chance. You didn't have a chance, you know, and then like you pointed out, like there's the, uh, there's not an exact science to it, but there, there is a theory that there is like a, a psychotic gene that certain people get, right? Like, uh, there's a certain people that are born, [00:08:00] they're not afraid of, uh, danger. This is like a lot of people, like they're, they tend to go into activities like, uh, race car driving, skydiving, that type of stuff. And the, the theory goes is like. It doesn't necessarily mean that you yourself or you're going to become psychotic, but you pushed in a certain direction. You're more likely to have that come out of you. And I mean, Richard, yeah, he didn't have a chance. Not to mention he was like bullied too when he was a kid. Yeah. So he's getting it from all angles that he's, he was Polish raised in a primarily Italian neighborhood in New Jersey. And so he was mercilessly bullied his mom more or less hated him. And you can almost not even blame his mom because she was born in brutal circumstances, grew up in a terrible orphanage, uh, where I think they said she might've even been abused in the, the [00:09:00] orphanage. Like. I, you know, in a lot of ways, you, uh, it was like mass PTSD of, you know, generations of people. And it's not surprising that it was a more brutal world back then. Not that long ago. Like in, you know, depending on how old people are out there, like your grandparents or great grandparents, they lived in that world. That was just not as. It didn't have as much of a margin as we have today, I think. Steve here. We are a member of the Parthenon Podcast Network, featuring great shows like James Early's Key Battles of American History podcast, and many other great shows. Go over to ParthenonPodcast. com to learn more. And here is a quick word from our sponsors. And it's also like this particular family lived in this, [00:10:00] like, alternate universe where, like, Richard talks about it in the in, uh, in the confessions of a hitman, the Philip Carlo book, where, like, his father, he kills his brother. And then, like, he like. slows down for like two months and it's just like, okay, yeah. And then he just goes right back to it. Like he didn't like at no point did he just, he just started doing the exact same stuff again, but in their mind it's like, oh, well it's been two months, you know, like, you know, I calmed down for a bit. Like, you know, like it's just something that's very difficult for, you know, like a normal human being to really understand. But within that environment, I guess it would kind of make sense for. This is just how you were raised. You're just constant abuse around you all the time. And like you pointed out the mother, and I think Stanley had a similar kind of upbringing. And then you just, this is how, this is how like, uh, people talk about like generational poverty or generational violence. But I mean, this is kind of how it [00:11:00] happens. It's like, well, this is how I was raised. What's, why is it any different for them? Bad. Richard does his very first murder when he's about 12 years old, he has enough of this bully and he really just goes to beat him with a, uh, I think it was a clothes, the thing you, the pole you hang your clothes on, he takes it and he beats this boy to death. And he doesn't get caught for it. And I think that's probably, uh, I'm pretty sure that this is a hundred percent true, and I think that that's what really set him that, Hey, I did this, I can get away with it. Nothing ever happened from it. That's probably the thing that really set him off for the rest of his life. Really? Yeah. And then like, it also started early too, with, uh, cats and dogs and like events of ways of like, Getting rid of cats and dogs. Um, I mean, you know, play our impaired psychologist or what have you is, you know, he's having control over these [00:12:00] particular this bully and then those animals lives kind of in the sense the way his father has control over him. And he wants to have that type of power over other individuals that his father had over him. Um, and make sure like nobody else has that type of power over him like his father does or did. Um, yeah. Yeah, I mean, and then those are like, there's like, you know, mutilation of like cats and dogs is usually is usually a good sign of like, this person has that type of gene. Yeah, there's a good chance that it doesn't necessarily mean that like kids are some kids are just weird and they do weird things, right? It doesn't necessarily mean that, but it's it's a sign. Yeah, I think they say there's three things that they look for and. You could even have all three of those things like torturing animals, and I can't remember what the two others, you could have one of them, two of them, three of them, and it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a serial killer, but if you start seeing those things, [00:13:00] it's probably something you should really look out for. Yeah, and even with this bully and, um, according to Richard from, because he started reading a bunch of true crime stuff, he, you know, like, so to make sure that he didn't get caught, he's like, Oh, I got to remove the fingerprints and any dental records, which is just goes to show you that he's like, even at this young age, he's thinking like he he's got, he's, he's pretty smart, actually, because the, you know, most 12 year olds probably wouldn't even think of that, but he's thinking about it. Because Richard was not dumb, and we're gonna see that in this next phase of his life where he, he's coming up, he's a small time hood in, in Northern Jersey. He has a small gang that are doing small gang type stuff of stealing and stealing cars, roughing people up. But in the meanwhile... At least according to Richard, and this is something we can talk about, [00:14:00] Richard's basically going into the predominantly of the West side of Manhattan. And he admits to that, that it was almost one neighborhood. I think it was the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, which was right across the river from where he lived in New Jersey. He was going over there and killing vagrants, killing homeless people, killing people he would get into bar fights with. And it was, he was killing them in all sorts of different manners, using guns, using knives, beating them, and he was using the knowledge that he had gained through these, um, true crime novels to just kill people. And it's kind of amazing that he, it's amazing in one way, and you can kind of see how he did get away with it in the 1950s of killing a lot of people. We don't know exactly, but he certainly killed a lot of people. Yeah, and it was like also the randomness of it and I think he mentioned something about like the the methods in which he did it to he would always try to change it up so [00:15:00] like the cops wouldn't be able to figure it like all this seems to be happening like a couple of times in a row now where, you know, he like you pointed out he was just Be people I think at one point he used a crossbow. He just happened to get a crossbow and just wanted to see what it would do. And then like just random homeless people a lot of the times, which I mean a lot of the times these people they don't have, well I mean they have family but. You know, their families are strange for them and they don't know where they are. And it takes a while to identify exactly who these people are because there's usually not carrying identification and the cops don't really care all that much. And, you know, the rest of society, um, you know, you can say whatever you want about that, but it's, it's the reality. Um, yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, and I tend to believe this part of the story too, because it's hard for people to understand, like, we're constantly under surveillance and there's stuff like forensic evidence now, but in like the 50s, none of this stuff existed, there wasn't like cameras everywhere, you could easily [00:16:00] just get away, you could easily just like kill somebody and like leave them on a park bench and nobody would actually really know until probably Maybe a day later, two days later, or even a couple hours later. And by that point, you're long gone. Yeah, you think about it. And the neighborhood, he was doing it in Hell's Kitchen. If you go to Hell's Kitchen today, it's full of cute coffee shops. And, but that was back then was ground zero. It was a tough neighborhood in a tough city. And people were dying all the time. And some beat cop's not going to take... Two seconds out of his time to really investigate a murder of a homeless person, you know, so it very likely that unless somebody actually saw Richard doing it, nobody would not even not be the wiser. Nobody cared. Yeah. DeMille episode. I mean, this is where the Westies were [00:17:00] from, which are Infamous. And I'm sure the cops didn't particularly like going into these neighborhoods in general. He has, for the most part, you would go in there and try to find out what happened and nobody would talk to you because everybody knew what would happen if you talk to the cops. And probably in general, the people who lived in these neighborhoods didn't like talking to the cops in general, like even if nothing was going to happen to them. Then it's, it's interesting to bring up Richard's. First family for somebody who all he talked about in the Iceman, uh, interviews was that he would do anything for his family and family, family, family. Yeah. He had a family when he was young. I think he was still in his teens. Even when he had started his first family, he had three kids with his first wife who cheated on him. And it was a whole thing, but Then he just completely drops them, which is interesting to me. He, uh, it really seemed to me like he [00:18:00] hated them. Yeah, it's weird in the, in the, uh, Carlo, uh, Carlo book, like they mentioned he had this family and I mean, they talk about it for a little bit, but they don't really get into a ton of details. Like exactly why Richard hated this family so much, and he didn't even really view the kids as his own. Maybe. If she was sleeping around, maybe he did think, Oh, there's a possibility that they're not even my kids. And, you know, he kind of got stuck in this situation, I guess, to a degree where like you mentioned with his second family, it was like, Oh, he was always talking about his family, family, family. Maybe he felt the same way. With this, but he was really young and it just didn't work out. And it's it, you know, the relationship in general kind of reminded them of the relationship, you know, his mother and his father probably had. And it's weird because in the book they talk about it and then it just kind of dropped. You just never hear about these people again. I mean, I guess they're lucky to a degree. Dodged a bullet. [00:19:00] For sure. Steve here again with a quick word from our sponsors. Then Richard, then the next phase of his life really is that he, he tries to go straight. He's a, uh, he works as a trucker and an unloader and it's interesting that he winds up working with and under Tony Provenzano, who was a major mafia figure and Major player in the Teamsters Union, which will the Teamsters Union will come up in another, uh, part of the conversation today, but he doesn't really handle that very well that type of work and at the he's winds up getting a job in a, uh, movie production facility where they're making duplicates of masters of Disney movies, I believe, and he's [00:20:00] Uh, gets into some deals where he makes extra copies and then bootlegs them, which that sort of thing, like it sounds really scummy now and it sounds like something that, you know, like you would get fired instantly. But I, I get the feeling like back in the fifties and the sixties, that's just stuff that happened. Yeah. And they would sell the bootlegs to. You know, not really bootlegs, they're just copying the masters and selling them to like local theaters at like half the price, right? And, I mean, the local theaters are happy, they get to make a few bucks, it just seems like it's a win win situation for everybody, and the studios are still making a lot of money, so they don't really care all that much. Yeah, it's not, it's not like today where they're so, uh, that copyright has become... Iron clad and a lot of that started changing probably because they did over bootleg, but, um, as a part of that, where [00:21:00] Richard had this production facility for making tapes, um, real to real tapes, he gets into pornography and he really becomes, uh, a low end. pornography peddler. And that's really the big thing that he's doing. But it's I get the read that it wasn't exactly illegal what he was doing. Some of it wasn't exactly illegal, but it was something that the mafia was heavily involved in. And that's probably that's really how he gets his first interactions with the mafia. Yeah, yeah, it was something that the mob was heavily involved in. And I mean, it depends on The, the stories that you believe, like, he was just doing, like, he was just peddling, like, kind of normal, regular pornography, but then there's, there's stories about some of the more extreme stuff that apparently Richard was peddling, too, and we'll get into that with the Roy DeMeo and, um, But yeah, he was, from my understanding, he was really [00:22:00] successful at it. That's where he made a big chunk of his coin was distributing pornography and bootlegs. He just seems like he was the type of person who he never hit. I mean, he freely admitted it. As soon as he got money, he just blew it. Instantly, and during certain parts of his life, he was a gambler and he would gamble away all his money, or he would drink all of his money, or he would use it to buy hot cars, um, which will be interesting. That'll, it'll bring us to some other interesting avenues, but he, he was just a guy who. For, I mean, for a gazillion reasons, even in the mafia game and in the crime game, he never seemed to be able to get ahead and get ahead of himself. Yeah. The, the, the spending money as soon as you get it is, um, and there's, there's been research about this. People that grow up in like kind of extreme poverty, the way Richard did is, um, They have this tendency [00:23:00] to as soon as they get it, they spend the money because they're worried that the next day it's not going to be there. And it's just kind of like something that goes down from generations to generations. And you'll notice it in real life too. Just if you're an observant person, if you notice certain people that are. Not the greatest with money. If you kind of get to know them a little bit, it's there's usually a whole backstory to it. That's interesting. You bring that up because I think that that with a lot of the things with Richard Kuklinski, they were multipliers. You look at him and. He is somebody who had zero impulse control when somebody would give, flip him off on the highway, he would just go berserk. And that's he supposedly, or at least he claimed to have killed many people where he just went, went nuts, impulse control, or Barbara would talk about it. And his kids would talk about it where, when he would just completely trash the house in bits of rage and people who have impulse [00:24:00] control. A lot of times if they have money, they're just going to, they're going to spend it wantonly. And so I think that's another multiplier of that extreme poverty that he came out of, that you've got to spend money. You've got to look good. You've got to wear good clothes. You've got to have the car and then the impulse control to thinking, well, If I save some of this money, maybe I can reinvest it into even if you're a criminal, I can reinvest it into more crime stuff. He didn't do that either. No, and it's, it's funny you mentioned like, uh, it's one of the funnier things about his story is he used to buy like these really bright, like flashy suits with his money because he just enjoyed. Like having flashy suits and I don't know, just, I always found it kind of funny. Like you watch the Iceman interviews from the HBO documentaries and then you read a story and then this guy's rocking out like a baby blue, like or yellow suit. It's just, it's, it's funny, you know, but it's like, what are these things? That's, uh, [00:25:00] I mean, that makes them like a larger than life character. I mean, he really does kind of come across as like a comic book villain. We're going to leave it at that for today. I just want to mention, though, the best thing you can do to help us in this podcast is if you enjoy what you're hearing, tell a friend, tell a couple of friends about the Organized Crime and Punishment podcast so that your friends can become friends of ours. Forget about it guys. You've been listening to Organized Crime and Punishment, a history and crime podcast. To learn more about what you heard today, find links to social media and how to support the show. Go to our website, A to Z his history page.com. Become a friend of ours by sending us an email to crime A to z history page.com. All of this and more can be found in the show notes. [00:26:00] We'll see yous next time on Organized Crime and Punishment. Forget about it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.