Richard Leonard Kuklinski was born in Jersey City on April 11, 1935, to a violent alcoholic father and a devout mother, in a family in which one brother, Florian, died in 1940 in circumstances the family recorded as a fall down the stairs.
He grew up big, and by adulthood was six foot five and heavily built, which is a good part of the story. He worked as a film-lab hand and later as a bootlegger of pornography and pirated videotape out of New York, and lived in Dumont with his wife Barbara and their three children, who knew nothing about any of it.
He was arrested on December 17, 1986, in an eighteen-month sting run by New Jersey detective Pat Kane, in which an undercover officer using the name Dominick Provenzano spent months getting Kuklinski to talk on tape about cyanide, silencers and contract killings.
At trial in 1988 he was convicted of five murders: his burglary associates Gary Smith and Daniel Deppner, and three men he had done business with, Louis Masgay, Paul Hoffman and George Malliband. He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms. In 2003 he pleaded guilty to the 1980 shotgun killing of the New York police detective Peter Calabro and took another thirty years.
Six murders were ever proved. What made him famous was everything else.
In prison interviews for HBO from 1992, and in Philip Carlo's 2006 book The Iceman, he described a second career as a freelance killer for the Gambino and DeCavalcante families, put his own total at somewhere between a hundred and two hundred and fifty, and gave detailed accounts of killing by cyanide spray, of feeding a man to rats in a cave, of a fellow contract killer who drove a Mister Softee van, and of a first murder at fourteen. He said he had helped kill Jimmy Hoffa.
None of it has been independently confirmed. Members of Roy DeMeo's crew and the detectives who worked them have said they had never heard of him. Journalists who have gone back over the interviews have found the stories growing steadily across the tapes.
The one part that was tested was his claim that Sammy Gravano ordered the Calabro shooting. It produced an indictment of Gravano that collapsed when Kuklinski died in 2006 before he could testify, and prosecutors had already concluded he was not a witness they could rely on.
He died on March 5, 2006 at a hospital in Trenton, aged seventy, of a rare inflammatory blood-vessel condition. In his last months he told his family he was being poisoned to stop him testifying. There is no evidence for that either.
He is worth keeping in the record and worth reading carefully. A man who really did kill six people, and who was believed about the other two hundred because he was enormous, calm on camera and a very good storyteller, is a case about how serial killer numbers get made.