The Iceman (22 page)

There was the time she’d talked back to him at the house. He didn’t sit on his temper that time. The explosion was immediate.

Barbara’s father had been scheduled to undergo surgery that morning in Florida, and she was anxious to hear how he was. She
and Richard weren’t even dressed yet when the call came from her father’s wife, and Barbara took it in their bedroom. She was understandably relieved when she heard that the surgery had been a success and her father would be fine. As she hung up the phone, Richard was just coming out of the bathroom in his underwear.

“So is the bastard dead?” he asked with a smirk.

She stared at him, stung by the senseless cruelty of his remark. “That wasn’t necessary,” she snapped back.

His face froze, and his eyes narrowed. Then she saw that look that always terrified her. His eyelids fluttered, and the eyeballs rolled back for a split second the same way a shark’s does just before it’s going to bite.

Panic filled Barbara’s chest. She was already backing toward the door when he lunged.

“You do not talk back to me,” he yelled. “Do you understand that? You do not talk back to
me
.”

She broke free from his grasp and ran down the steps into the living room, then down the flight of stairs to the front hallway, like a deer being chased by a grizzly bear. Though she was in her slippers and bathrobe, she didn’t hesitate to throw the front door open and run out into the snow. Outside she’d be safe, she figured. He never showed his temper in public. She stood on the sidewalk, out of breath, clutching the robe close around her neck, wondering how long she’d have to wait before he calmed down and she could go back in.

But then the sound of the electric garage doors startled her. As the doors rose, an engine roared to life, and she saw the tailpipe of the red Calais spewing out exhaust on the cold air. The car screeched out of the garage in reverse. Richard was behind the wheel in his T-shirt. He bellowed out the open window, “You do not talk back to
me
.”

Barbara could see that he was out of his mind with rage.

She started to run. The sound of spinning tires was right behind her. He drove up onto the sidewalk, determined to run her down.

She ran for the next door neighbor’s yard, slipping on the snow, heading for the big tree in the backyard. It was the only thing she could imagine that would protect her from the impact of the car.

She slipped once more before she reached the tree, falling on it, scrambling behind it, clutching it close, breathing so hard her chest hurt.

When she finally dared to peer around the tree, Barbara saw that the car was at an angle on the snow-covered front lawn. The engine was idling, and Richard was behind the wheel, but it wasn’t moving. He wasn’t pursuing her anymore. She took a closer look and saw that Richard was punching himself in the head, again and again, hitting himself hard with a closed fist. It was what he did when he was frustrated and couldn’t vent his rage any other way. If he couldn’t hit anyone else, he’d hit himself.

Reliving that horrible winter day, Barbara could feel her heart beat faster as she stared blankly at the menu in her hands. She refocused and started to read the selections quickly, afraid that Richard would know what she was thinking.

“Do you know what you’re going to order, Rich?” she asked, looking over the top of her menu.

“Hmm?” Richard wasn’t looking at his menu. He was staring at something at the back of the restaurant.

Barbara turned around and saw two couples seated at a leather banquette. One of the men was gesturing with his arms, telling a story that was making the others howl with laughter. The man was heavyset with a fleshy, oblong face and thin dark hair combed straight back. His jeweled cuff links glittered as he motioned with his hands. The women were considerably younger than the men, and one of them looked like a high-class call girl. The two men looked like hoods.

The corners of Richard’s mouth drooped as he stared at the man telling the story. His eyes were narrow.

Barbara couldn’t understand why this man was upsetting her husband. Her heart started to pound.

Richard Kuklinski touched his forehead where the scar was.

Barbara glanced quickly over her shoulder, but she didn’t see any resemblance between this man and anyone she’d ever met. She shook her head, confused and anxious that their evening would be ruined after all, fearful that he would erupt right here in the middle of the restaurant.

He kept staring at the man. Suddenly Richard’s eyes shot back at her. “That guy sort of reminds me of Roy.”

Barbara swallowed hard and looked down at her menu, praying to God that this wouldn’t set him off.

Roy DeMeo had a very bad temper, the kind of temper that flared fast and hot and came when you least expected it. A soldier in New York’s Gambino crime family, DeMeo was subject to dramatic mood swings. He’d give you the shirt off his back one minute and cut your throat the next if you hurt his feelings.

Richard Kuklinski had seen for himself how evil DeMeo’s temper could be one summer day in the late seventies, when DeMeo chartered a fishing boat out of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, to take a few of his associates out for a pleasure cruise. They’d brought beer and wine, Italian bread and provolone cheese, sandwiches made with all kinds of Italian delicacies. Roy was a jolly host that day, regaling his men with jokes and stories as he encouraged them to eat, eat. It was a bright, sunny day, and the cool breeze was a relief from the sweltering heat of the city. The boat went out several miles, taking them to good fishing waters. The mood on board was pretty raucous by the time the captain cut his engines and moved to the stern, where he started to chum the waters with cut-up chunks of fish and fish blood in order to attract game fish. Chumming often attracts sharks, too, and
Kuklinski noticed several fins starting to circle the bloody water around the back of the boat. The men joked about the sharks and threw beer cans at them. Roy DeMeo had just finished making a toast to everyone’s health and long life, his beer can held aloft, when out of the blue his face suddenly changed and he glared at one of his guests.

“You know, you got one motherfucking big mouth, pal.”

The man was stunned. Everyone was. “Roy,” he said, “I don’t know what you’re—”

“You know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

DeMeo reached into the beer cooler, pulled out a pistol, and shot the man in the head, just like that. The man collapsed to the deck, and DeMeo put another bullet into his back. DeMeo then ordered his other guests to throw the bastard overboard to the sharks. No one dared object. The agitated sharks lunged for the body before it even hit the water. Their violent thrashing as they tore the body apart gave the mobster a grim satisfaction that only he understood completely.

Richard Kuklinski would never forget the twisted, sadistic look on DeMeo’s face that day on the boat. It was a look he came to know very well.

DeMeo’s crew hung out at a bar called the Gemini Lounge, on Flatlands Avenue in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. Roy’s cousin Joseph Guglielmo lived in the apartment behind the bar. His nickname was Dracula. One night Kuklinski had gone to the Gemini Lounge to see DeMeo, and Roy invited him to stay for dinner at his cousin’s place. Kuklinski accepted the invitation and followed DeMeo through the back hallway into the apartment, where several young men were seated at the kitchen table. They were all members of DeMeo’s crew. DeMeo preferred young guys; he felt they were hungrier and more willing to carry out his orders, no matter how gruesome.

Kuklinski took a seat at the table just as DeMeo’s cousin Dracula was pouring out the big pasta pot into a colander in the
sink. Steam plumed up around Dracula’s head like a mushroom cloud. One of the young guys poured wine for everyone, and a big steaming bowl was brought to the table—angel hair and sausage. Kuklinski dug in. Wiseguys knew good food, and this was excellent. He was halfway through his meal, reaching for the bowl of grated Parmesan cheese, when all of a sudden DeMeo stood up and pointed a .22 fixed with a silencer at the kid across the table from him.

The kid dropped his fork. His eyes bugged out. “Roy! Roy! What—?”

“Shut up!”

The shots sounded like balloons popping. The kid’s chair toppled over backward, and he crashed to the floor, dead.

DeMeo sat back down and returned to his meal, twirling pasta on his fork. One of the other crew members got up to move the body. “Leave him,” DeMeo barked with his mouth full. “Finish eating,” he ordered. “Everybody eat.”

They all ate.

When DeMeo finally gave them the okay, his men did what they did best: They made the body “disappear.” They took the kid’s corpse into the bathroom and threw him in the tub, where they drained his blood, then proceeded to cut him up and wrap the pieces in small sealed packages. The packages were distributed to a number of Dumpsters around the city. DeMeo’s crew had honed this chore down to an efficient assembly-line process. They’d done it many times before. As the boys went to work, DeMeo and Kuklinski sat down to espresso and biscotti and talked business.

In the mid-sixties Barbara Kuklinski’s uncle had worked at a film lab in Manhattan, Deluxe Films, and through him Richard Kuklinski had gotten a job there. At the lab Kuklinski discovered that there was money to be made selling bootleg copies of popular films, particularly the Disney cartoon features. Kuklinski had access to 8mm loops, master copies from which legitimate copies
were made. But he soon found that on the black market there were lesser-known celluloid heroines who were far more lucrative than Snow White and Cinderella, played by actresses with names like Holly Bangkok, Ginger Sweet, and Amber Licke.

Bootleg copies of legitimate films could only be sold piecemeal; selling more than five reels to a single customer was considered a big order. But porno movies, Kuklinski discovered, sold by the dozens to adult bookstores and mail-order outlets. Kuklinski saw that there were big profits to be made in porn. All he needed was a little venture capital. But this wasn’t the kind of loan he could go to a bank for. The only alternative for financing illegal enterprises is a loan shark, and Kuklinski knew someone who knew someone who knew a loan shark who was an associate in the Gambino crime family.

Kuklinski was lent sixty-five thousand dollars, seed money to start mass-producing porno films. Kuklinski had no problem using the lab’s equipment after hours to make the films; the problem he hadn’t anticipated, though, was distribution. Selling porn wasn’t like selling Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck out of the trunk of his car. He was sending his product across the country, and payments weren’t always prompt. He had expenses to meet in order to keep his production up, so he just figured he’d put off the loan shark for a little while until those late payments came in. When he got paid, the shylock would get paid.

But Kuklinski had figured wrong. Back in the sixties he still had a lot to learn about dealing with the Mafia. To them, a due date is a due date. There are no extensions, and they rarely cut you any slack, especially when money is involved.

When Kuklinski fell behind in his weekly payments and then started disregarding the warnings, the loan shark sent someone over to see him, someone who specialized in “attitude adjustments.”

Late one night Kuklinski was by himself in the basement of the film labs, waiting for the elevator. He’d been running the loop
machine all night, making copies, and he was dead tired. All he wanted was to get home and go to bed. But when the elevator arrived, he was surprised to see three men inside. They walked out with their hands in their pockets, forming a circle around him. He had no idea who these men were, but they knew him. They hustled him into a bathroom and locked the door.

The biggest of the three stood right in his face. “So where the fuck is the money, Polack? Huh? C’mon, get it up.”

“Who the f—”

The man on his right side, the one with the dark, evil eyes, kicked Kuklinski’s knee out, and he fell to the cement floor. Then he was hit with something hard across the back of his head. Kuklinski linked his fingers behind his head and covered up. His ears were ringing.

“It must be true what they say about you Polacks,” the big guy said. “Too fucking stupid to know what’s good for them. Now I’m gonna ask you again: Where’s the money, Polack?”

Kuklinski kept blinking, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. “I—I don’t—”

“No more fucking around, Polack. Get the money. Now.”

The third guy booted him in the side and broke a rib. Kuklinski sucked in his breath and held it to stem the pain, but it didn’t help much.

“So what’s it gonna be, Polack? You gonna pay or what?”

“I—”

Evil Eyes kicked him in the kidneys. Kuklinski threw his head back and squeezed his eyes shut.

“No more fucking excuses, Polack.
We want the fucking money
.”

Kuklinski could hardly breathe. “This week,” he grunted. “I’ll get it.”

“When?”

“Friday … I’ll pay up on Friday.”

“How much?”

Kuklinski couldn’t catch his breath. He couldn’t get enough air. “What I owe … up-to-date … everything.”

“What the hell’s wrong with you, you dumb fuck? You think this is forgive and forget? No fucking way. The whole note. You pay the whole fucking note by Friday or you’re dead. You hear me, Polack?”

Kuklinski’s vision cleared a little. He saw three guns pointed down at him. He started to nod. “All right … by Friday … the whole thing.” Anything to get rid of them.

“Okay, by Friday. Now you’re not gonna forget again, are you?”

Kuklinski winced and shook his head.

“Yeah, well, I’d like to believe you, but you Polacks aren’t too smart. You people forget things. I’m gonna give you something so you don’t forget. Okay?” The big man raised his gun hand and bashed Kuklinski over the forehead with his pistol.

Kuklinski fell back on his haunches and clutched his head. Blood streamed into his eyes. The three men had a good laugh as they filed out of the bathroom. The big man called back to him from the doorway, “Now don’t you forget, Polack.”