Richard Leonard "The Iceman" Kuklinski was a Polish American convicted murderer and notorious contract killer who was of Polish and Irish ancestry. He worked for several Italian-American crime families, and claimed to have murdered over 200 men over a career that lasted 30 years; he killed his first victim at age 13. He was the older brother of the convicted rapist and murderer Joseph Kuklinski. By the age of 10, Richard Kuklinski was filled with rage and began acting out. For fun he would torture animals and by the age of 13, he claims to have committed his first murder. Taking a pool cue while at a bar, he ambushed Charlie Lane, a local bully and leader of a small gang who had picked on him. Unintentionally he beat Lane to death. Kuklinski felt remorse for Lane's death for a brief period, but then saw it as a way to feel powerful and in control. He then went on and nearly beat to death the remaining six gang members. Richard then believed that "giving is better then receiving." Association with the Gambino crime family came through his relationship with the mobster Roy DeMeo. This relationship started because Kuklinski owed an associate of DeMeo's a lot of money, so DeMeo was sent to 'talk' with him. He and his gang pistol whipped Kuklinski. After he paid back the money he owed, he began staging robberies and other assignments for the family, one of which was pirating pornographic tapes. According to Kuklinski, one day, DeMeo took Kuklinski out in his car and they parked on a city street. DeMeo then selected an apparently random target, a man out walking his dog. He then told Kuklinski to kill him. Without questioning the order, Kuklinski got out, walked towards the man and shot him in the back of the head as he passed by. From then on, Kuklinski was DeMeo's favorite enforcer. Over the next 30 years, according to Kuklinski, he killed numerous people, either by gun, strangulation, knife, or poison. The exact number has never been settled upon by authorities, and Kuklinski himself at various times claimed to have killed over 200 individuals. He favored the use of cyanide since it killed quickly and was hard to detect in a toxicology test. He would variously administer it by injection, putting it on a person's food, by aerosol spray, or by simply spilling it on the victim's skin. Initially nicknamed "The Polack" by his Italian associates because of his Polish heritage, Kuklinski earned the nickname "Iceman" following his experiments with disguising the time of death of his victims by freezing their corpses in an industrial freezer. One of his favorite methods of disposing of a body was to place it in a 55-gallon oil drum. His other disposal methods included dismemberment, burial, or placing the body in the trunk of a car and having it crushed in a junkyard. He also claimed to have left bodies sitting on park benches, thrown bodies down "bottomless pits" and fed still-alive victims to giant rats in Pennsylvania. Kuklinski died at the age of 70 at 1:15 a.m. on March 5, 2006. He was in a secure wing at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton, New Jersey at the time, although the timing of his death has been labeled suspicious; It is said that one Jamie R may have been tied to this untimely death, Kuklinski was scheduled to testify that former Gambino crime family underboss Sammy Gravano had ordered him to murder New York Police Department Detective Peter Calabro. [READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE]
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