A massive figure at 6-foot-5 and nearly 300 pounds, Richard Kuklinski was a presence that demanded attention. But it was not his stature alone that earned him the nickname “The Iceman”—it was the cold, methodical way he killed. Kuklinski’s early life offered few signs of the violence to come. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, to a Polish immigrant father and an Irish-American mother, he was the second of four children.
He claimed his father was a violent alcoholic who regularly beat him, while his mother was also allegedly abusive, using broom handles and other household items. His brother Joseph was convicted in 1970 of raping and murdering a 12-year-old girl. In the mid-1960s, Kuklinski worked at a Manhattan film lab, where he began copying and selling bootleg Disney films and pornography. He later led a burglary gang, and his criminal activities escalated to murder.
His first known killing came in January 1980, when he murdered George Malaband during a meeting to sell him tapes. Malaband was carrying $27,000 at the time. Kuklinski dumped his body in a 55-gallon drum near a chemical plant in Jersey City, severing the victim’s tendons to fit the corpse inside. Two years later, he met Paul Hoffman, a pharmacist who wanted to buy stolen prescription drugs for resale.
Hoffman drove to Kuklinski’s house with $25,000 in cash and was never seen again. Kuklinski later said he attempted to shoot Hoffman, but when the gun jammed, he killed him with a tire iron and dumped the body in a drum. Hoffman’s remains were never found. By the early 1980s, law enforcement had begun investigating Kuklinski’s burglary gang.
When a member named Percy House was arrested and agreed to inform, Kuklinski’s world began to close in. He later killed his own associate Daniel Debner and enlisted his daughter’s fiancé to help dispose of the body. The remains of another associate, Louis Masgay, were discovered in New York in 1983 with a bullet hole in the back of his head. Masgay had vanished in 1981 with $95,000 in his van.
The discovery of his body, which had been stored in a freezer, prompted law enforcement to call Kuklinski “The Iceman. ”
A joint task force between the New Jersey Attorney General’s Office and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was formed to catch him. ATF agent Dominick Polifrone went undercover for 18 months, posing as a mob-connected criminal. He recorded Kuklinski discussing corpses kept in a freezer, plans to kill informants, and a desire to obtain cyanide.
On December 17, 1986, Kuklinski met Polifrone to obtain cyanide. After testing it on a stray dog and finding it was not poisonous, he became suspicious and abandoned the planned murder. Hours later, he was apprehended at a roadblock. Law enforcement also discovered large sums of money in Swiss bank accounts and a flight reservation.
Kuklinski was charged with five counts of murder, weapons violations, attempted murder, and robbery. Following his arrest, he told reporters, “This is unwarranted, unnecessary. These guys watched too many movies. ”
At trial, his former associates testified against him, as did the undercover agent.
In March 1988, jurors found him guilty of murdering two of his associates, though they determined his conduct did not directly cause their deaths, sparing him the death penalty. He was sentenced to 60 years in prison. He later pleaded guilty to two more murders and received additional life terms, making him ineligible for parole until age 111 in 2046. After his conviction, Kuklinski made startling claims that he was a Mafia contract killer who worked for all five New York City families and carried out dozens of murders on orders from mob figures.
He claimed involvement in high-profile hits, including the murder of crime boss Paul Castellano. Authorities and biographers have disputed these claims, and Kuklinski’s own biographer admitted that one of his accounts was false. In October 2005, after nearly 18 years in prison, Kuklinski was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease, an inflammation of the blood vessels. He was moved to a hospital in Trenton, New Jersey, where his wife signed a do-not-resuscitate order.
Although he had asked doctors to revive him in a cardiac emergency, the order was not revoked. Richard Kuklinski died of cardiac arrest on March 5, 2006, at the age of 70.