Cold-Blooded: The Origin Story of the Iceman Richard Kuklinski
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
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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.
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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.
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