On a warm September day in 1983 the Rockland County medical examiner found ice crystals inside the body of Louis Masgay, fifty, which had turned up near Clausland Mountain Road in Orangetown, New York, with a bullet hole in the back of the head. Masgay had vanished more than two years earlier, on July 1, 1981, on his way to meet Richard Kuklinski at a New Jersey diner to buy a large quantity of blank videocassettes, with $95,000 in his van. He was wearing the clothes his wife and son said he had left in. His killer had kept him in a freezer and dumped him fifteen months later still wrapped in plastic bags, which held the cold in. Had the body thawed first, the examiner said, he would probably never have noticed. The discovery gave the man the police were building a case against his nickname, the Iceman.
Kuklinski was born on April 11, 1935, in his family's apartment on 4th Street in Jersey City, the second of four children of Stanley Kuklinski, a Polish immigrant railroad brakeman, and Anna McNally, a devout Catholic who worked in a meatpacking plant. By his account his father was a violent drunk who beat the children and sometimes their mother, and his mother beat him with broom handles. In 1941 his older brother Florian, seven, died of a beating by their father, and the parents told the authorities he had fallen down the stairs. A younger brother, Joseph, was convicted in 1970 of raping a twelve-year-old girl and throwing her from the roof of a five-story building. "We come from the same father," Kuklinski said.
He married twice and had five children, and lived with his second wife, Barbara, in the suburb of Dumont, where the family and the neighbors took him for a successful businessman. Barbara described two men, "good Richie" and "bad Richie"; the second broke her nose three times, once tried to run her over, and when she said she wanted to see other people stabbed her from behind with a hunting knife and choked her unconscious. In the mid-1960s he worked at a Manhattan film lab, bootlegging copies of films and then pornography, which brought him into contact with members of the Gambino family, among them Roy DeMeo. He was charged once, with passing a bad check, before the murders. He also ran a burglary ring with Gary Smith, Daniel and Barbara Deppner and Percy House.
His victims were men he did business with. On January 30, 1980, he shot George Malliband, forty-two, five times at a meeting to sell him tapes, cut the tendons of his leg to fit him into a 55-gallon drum and left it near a chemical plant in Jersey City. On April 29, 1982, Paul Hoffman, a fifty-one-year-old pharmacist hoping to buy stolen Tagamet, went to meet him with $25,000; Kuklinski said his gun jammed in a rented garage and he beat Hoffman to death with a tire iron. The drum he put the body in outside a motel in Little Ferry disappeared, and Hoffman was never found. When Percy House was arrested in December 1982 and began informing, Kuklinski hid Smith and Daniel Deppner at the York Motel in North Bergen, and then, by Barbara Deppner's testimony, decided Smith had to die. He fed Smith a hamburger laced with cyanide, and when it worked too slowly Deppner strangled him with a lamp cord. The body lay between the mattress and box spring for four days while guests slept in the room, until the manager found it on December 27. Deppner himself was killed in a Bergenfield apartment between February and May 1983 and dumped in garbage bags off Clinton Road in West Milford, where a cyclist found the body among vultures on May 14; the medical examiner noted pinkish spots that might mean cyanide.
A New Jersey State Police detective, Pat Kane, linked him to the burglary ring and then to the five dead men, of each of whom Kuklinski was the last person seen with. The state attorney general's office and the ATF formed Operation Iceman, and from 1985 ATF agent Dominick Polifrone, introduced through a longtime friend of Kuklinski's, posed as a mob-connected criminal named Dominic Provenzano. He bought a handgun and silencer from Kuklinski and recorded him talking about a corpse kept in a freezer, about cyanide ("Why be messy? You do it nice and calm"), about killing a man with a poisoned hamburger, and about plans to kill "a couple of rats," Barbara Deppner and House. On December 17, 1986, Kuklinski met Polifrone to collect cyanide for a murder, tried it on a stray dog, found it was not poison, and went home. He was arrested at a roadblock two hours later.
Charged with five murders, weapons offenses, attempted murder and robbery, held on $2 million bail and said to have Swiss accounts and a flight booked, he told reporters, "These guys watch too many movies." At trial House, Barbara Deppner and Polifrone testified against him. In March 1988 the jury convicted him of murdering Smith and Deppner but found the deaths not proven to be by his own conduct, sparing him the death penalty, and he was sentenced to a minimum of sixty years. He then pleaded guilty to killing Masgay and Malliband and received two consecutive life sentences; he admitted Hoffman's killing too, but prosecutors did not try it. As part of the deals, a gun charge against his wife and a marijuana charge against his son were dropped. He would not be eligible for parole until 2046, at 111.
In Trenton State Prison he gave interviews to prosecutors, psychiatrists, writers and HBO, which broadcast The Iceman Tapes in 1992, 2001 and 2003; the forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, who interviewed him for the last, diagnosed antisocial and paranoid personality disorders. He claimed some two hundred killings, by crossbow, ice pick, remote-control toy bomb and cyanide spray, a first murder at fourteen, homeless men killed for practice, contract work for all five New York families and the DeCavalcantes, and parts in the killings of Carmine Galante, Paul Castellano, Roy DeMeo and Jimmy Hoffa. "I checked every one of the murders Kuklinski said he committed, and not one was true," said Paul Smith of the task force that arrested him. Former mobsters said they had never heard his name, and Philip Carlo, his biographer, later conceded the Galante and DeMeo claims were probably untrue. "I don't believe he killed 200 people," Polifrone said in 2020. "I'll go as high as 15, maybe." He remained a suspect in the 1984 shooting of Robert Prongay but was never charged.
One claim was acted on. In a 2001 HBO interview he confessed to the March 14, 1980, shotgun killing of Peter Calabro, a thirty-six-year-old New York police detective, in Saddle River, New Jersey, and said Sammy Gravano had paid him and supplied the gun. In February 2003 he was charged and received another thirty years, and Gravano was indicted. Gravano denied it, and the charges against him were dropped after Kuklinski died. Diagnosed in October 2005 with Kawasaki disease, Kuklinski was moved to a secure wing of St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, where his former wife had signed a do-not-resuscitate order and declined to rescind it. He died on March 5, 2006, at seventy. Michael Baden, reviewing the autopsy for the family, confirmed cardiac arrest, with heart disease and phlebitis.