In 2012, the American film Ice was released. At the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered, it caused a lot of controversy and discussion. With this film, Americans once again presented themselves as a nation glorifying criminals. Although, I must admit, they do it with talent.
Icy is the nickname for Richard Kuklinski, a hitman who worked for the Italian-American mafia. For almost 30 years, he shed someone else's blood for money and sent about 200 people to the next world. And he earned the nickname because of his habit of freezing the corpses of his victims in industrial refrigerators.
During his lifetime, his enemies were feared and his “friends” despised him. But at the same time, it is impossible not to admit that Kuklinski was a rather extraordinary person. Therefore, his biography subsequently gave filmmakers a lot of food for inspiration.
Richard Kuklinski was born on April 11, 1935 in New Jersey to a family of Polish, Irish and American roots. In general, the guy got the same family. Stanley Kuklinski's dad was an alcoholic and domestic tyrant who almost beat Dick and his other children.
When Richard was 5 years old, his father beat one of his sons, Florian to death. But the whole family, frightened by Stanley, told the police that the boy died himself, accidentally falling into a flight of stairs.
Richard's other brother, Joseph, was a pedophile, he was imprisoned for the rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl. In such a family it was difficult not to become a moral monster, and Richard became a murderer. Already at the age of 13, he killed a person for the first time.
Richard Kuklinski, accustomed to cruelty from childhood, to send a man to the next world was like breaking a chicken's neck. When he started working for the mafia, he had no moral barriers to murder.
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There were only fears of how well he would kill. Richard practiced the technology of reprisals on the defenseless bums of Manhattan. The police found corpses, but they were not very zealous in solving crimes, attributing them to an internal showdown among the homeless.
Kuklinski started earning money early for the Decavalcante mafia family. But for the execution of orders he was initially paid little. In an effort to live in a big way, the novice hitman got into debt to Roy Demeo, a mafia from another clan.
Somehow, Richard failed to pay off the debt on time, and Demeo brutally beat him with a whip and a pistol. Despite the fact that he was a real giant - under 2 meters tall and weighing more than a centner, Kuklinski stoically endured the execution, which earned Roy some respect. The mafia values unquestioning.
The mafiosi offered him to work for himself, but first he arranged a test. Demeo from the car window pointed out to Richard the first person he came across and suggested that Kuklinski kill him. He did not argue, he just got out of the car and, passing by the doomed passerby, shot him in the back of the head.
Since then, Kuklinski has taken assassination orders from all five of New York's largest mafia families. Roy Demeo was his most frequent customer. What distinguished Richard from other mafia hitmen was the variety of his arsenal. In the movies, gangsters are reckless, and Kuklinski loved cyanide most of all.
Because of this, the death of his victims was usually attributed to natural causes, and therefore no one was looking for the killer. Richard could have poisoned his victim's food, sprayed it in the face, or simply spilled poison on the skin. After 2 hours, it became difficult to establish signs of poisoning.
However, he also had to shoot. However, in this case, it became necessary to get rid of the corpses. Sometimes he dismembered the dead, packed them up in parts and delivered them to different dumps. The same was usually done by the people of the Gambino family, which were commanded by Demeo. More often than not, Kuklinski would roll the corpse into a 55-gallon oil barrel and bury it, or sometimes feed it to rats.
An unhappy childhood, of course, left its mark on the personality and character of Richard. With the example of a tyrant father before his eyes, who regularly beat his mother and beat his son to death, Kuklinski did not want a repetition of such a terrible fate for his children.
He married Barbara Pedrici, who bore him two daughters and a son. Richard doted on his children and tried to make his house filled with family comfort. None of his friends, neighbors and, of course, household members even knew what he was doing for a living. For those around him, he personified the image of a successful businessman and an exemplary family man. Who could, looking at him, think that he makes other women widows and other children orphans?
The mafia has strict orders, so Kuklinski often had to urgently leave home at any time of the day or night to fulfill this or that urgent order. He unquestioningly followed the orders of the mafia bosses. But in his family, he often complained that he hated his job when she took him away from family meals on weekends and especially if she did not allow him to spend Christmas with his family.
In criminal circles, Richard Kuklinski was nicknamed the Ice Man for freezing corpses in refrigerators. He adopted this method from his bloody craft teacher Robert Pronge, nicknamed Mister Soft.
Pronge drove through the streets in a Mister Soft ice cream truck. It was a great cover, and there was always a fresh corpse to hide in the ice cream van.
In addition, Robert taught Richard how to use poisons and explosive devices. According to legend, Prong asked Kuklinski to kill his wife and child instead of paying for his science. And he did it. Apparently, the heavenly judge did not tolerate this and punished Mr. Soft for reprisals against his loved ones.
In 1984, Pronge's body was found with a bullet in the head in the cockpit of his ice cream truck. After his death, there was only one amateur to hide corpses in the freezer. The police dubbed this method the “Kuklinski method”. The name stuck after a forensic expert found a piece of ice in the heart of one of the victims on a warm autumn day.
The police had long heard about Kuklinski's criminal acts, but they just could not take him red-handed. Richard was detained more than once on suspicion of murders, but they could not prove his involvement in them.
The fact is that when experts examined bodies that had been stored for a long time in a refrigerator, it was very difficult for them to determine the exact time of death. Because of this, the investigation could not build a clear version of the crimes and bring charges against the suspect.
And then the detectives took a detour. They pressed close friend Kuklinski - Phil Solimen, and he agreed to fulfill their order. On instructions from the police, Phil contacted Richard and said that there was an order for him. Their conversation was being recorded.
On December 17, 1986, Kuklinski was finally caught red-handed when he acquired cyanide for the upcoming murder from a trader who turned out to be a federal agent. After the arrest, a pistol was found in his car, which became serious evidence.
In 1988, a New Jersey court sentenced Kuklinski for 5 proven murders to 5 life sentences. After Richard had no chance to be released during his lifetime, he confessed to another crime: in 1980, by order of the Gambino mafia family, he killed New York police detective Peter Capabro.
At the same time, the killer said that he had been lying in a snowdrift for a long time, waiting for the detective. This further solidified his Ice Man's reputation and added another 30 years to his term.
In prison, real fame came to Kuklinski: he willingly gave interviews about his career and personal life to television producers and writers. Based on them, two documentaries were shot, which aired on the HBO channel in 1992, 2001 and 2003. And in 2006, the famous writer Philip Carlo published a book about Kuklinski.
However, the famous killer could not sit still. After he testified that he had received an order for the murder of a police officer from the Gambino clan, Richard, even behind bars, was seriously worried that he could be eliminated any day. For some reason, he thought he would be poisoned.
Therefore, when Kuklinski died in prison on March 5, 2006, his wife first insisted on checking whether he had been poisoned. However, pathologist Michael Baden concluded that the killer had died of natural causes.
Oleg Loginov