Chilluminati Podcast - Episode 300: Richard Kuklinski Part 1 - Maniac Meets Murder

Episode Date: May 25, 2025

The Iceman Cometh...in EPISODE 300!!! Mike takes Alex and Jesse, as well as the show, back to its roots with a "sequel" to the Tommy Pitera story... MERCH - http://www.theyetee.com/collections/chilluminati Thank you to - All you lovely people at Patreon! HTTP://PATREON.COM/CHILLUMINATIPOD Factor - http://www.factor.com/chill50free code chill50free Jesse Cox - http://www.youtube.com/jessecox Alex Faciane - http://www.youtube.com/user/superbeardbros Editor - DeanCutty http://www.twitter.com/deancutty Show art by - https://twitter.com/JetpackBraggin http://www.instagram.com/studio_melectro

Hey, are you looking for a True Crime Podcast to binge? Check out True Crime Obsessed, where we recap the true crime documentaries everyone's talking about. We've been one of the top true crime podcasts for almost nine years. And we have over 400 episodes for you to check out right now. We cover the cases everyone is talking about, and we also highlight the cases that have been under-reported, overlooked, or forgotten. With over 30,000 five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts, if you've never checked out True Crime Obsessed,

now's the time to give us a try. Find True Crime Obsessed wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Jaluminati Podcast episode 300. As always, I am one of your hosts, Mike Martin, joined today by my other true host, the American Rosso of LA, Jesse and Alex. Hello, boys. Hey. Hello. Hello.

Who are American Rosso? American Rosso are an Australian comedian duo that was active from 96 to 09. They basically did standup comedy together, and then as all up and coming comedians who get a bit of fame, do they got their own little TV show, a couple of radio shows. And that was the end of it. They got a couple of DVD specials. They got a book out of it. That's it. Nothing's, you know,

all right. They're like, they're like the us of their, of their genre. You know, something really funny about this that I know. Yeah. Pretty successful. Not like a tier. I know someone else is going to correct us and be like, happy 300. They were quite famous and we're going to, we'll probably get a message from them and be like, listen, I'm comparing, I'm comparing them within their own pool of like what successes in Hollywood. Right, right. They're the us of talented people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Talented Australian people. Understood. And like we made it pretty far with no talent and that's impressive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Sorry, Alex. Did that hurt? Yeah. Is this going to be the last episode where I do a duo? No, I don't think so. So, you know, it's a nice- Oh, is that the big thing you had planned is that you're like, and I'm done with duos.

No, that was not what I had planned for the big thing. Now it's Trio. Now it's, now it's, I'm famous animal. Because it's 300 plus, Ben. Yeah. Uh, no, no. Uh, it is, it's, I can't believe we've been doing this for 300 episodes. It's just a crazy number.

I don't think I've done- Genuinely, candidly, it completely snuck up on us. And it's, it is an honor to be around for so long, but it's, it's also funny. Yeah. It's also fun. I was thinking like I've done 300 episodes of like a binding of Isaac gaming series on my YouTube channel, but I was also putting out like one a day. This is 300 episodes, but one a week, which is impressive because it's like a much longer run. Yeah.

This is a still I'm, I'm so old and, and doing this for a long time that this isn't the longest show that I've been on and actually for sure. Yeah. And Jesse and I have another show we've been doing even longer than this show, which is like another thing that's wild. That show is the reason you two are on this show, which is like another thing that's wild. That show is the reason you two are on this show in the first place. Yeah. And even that show isn't as old as my other show. That's even older. It's just, it's just, we're just all old.

It's good to be 300 years old. Um, so what did you, what did you cook up for the big three? Oh, oh This the end of the episode actually you can find out at patreon.com slash Oh my gosh, where the actual episode is gonna go live. This is gonna be what would you say that? This is gonna be now it's gonna be on reddit. I'm gonna read some guy being like it's not even funny This is the first 45 minutes of every episode just doing ad reads. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah, that's what we like This is me an hour. I gotta read that dude. Don't do that. Don't play games. Only ad reads. Listen, these guys aren't people to me. Give me the info. Okay. So sorry. Uh,

Oh my God. I must stress if we just did an entire episode of just ad reads, that'd be the greatest end of a show ever. Like, you know what? We're done. Here's four hours of ad. That would be, I think you just gave me a great idea for next April Fool's. No, no, no. It'll be like when Rick and Morty does the episode where they don't write it, you know?

It'll be famous. Right, right. Our fans will love it. Well, I think maybe you can do an episode about a topic presented in two-minute ad read chunks throughout the whole hour episode. Yeah, you know what I mean. Maybe, yeah, maybe. Shilluminati ads only. Yeah, you know, maybe. Maybe. Yeah, maybe.

Is Illuminati ads only? Yeah, I would love that. No, there's something special for today's 300th episode, boys. Again, we've been doing this for so long and I, you know, I look back at all the things we've done. And one of the earliest, maybe the earliest, it's big series we ever did is also like one that people reference constantly when I see like

a Reddit post of a new listener who wants a recommended like bag of episodes to go listen to her series. And it's always Tommy Patera, Tommy Karate, just sits at the very, very, very top. It's one of the oldies and goodies. And it has a funny joke in there. I still remember like being in an Airbnb out here. And I fucking I think it's that Momo con or something where I was reading the book. Like I was instead of like enjoying a little vacation. I was just sitting on the couch with like a YouTube video in the background and just

reading through the book. And that was what I was doing. So I figured let's we haven't really had a sequel to Tommy Pottera and this has been on my list of people to be doing for a long time. So we got another big boy chunky multi-parter head of us as we are finally going to cover none other than the Iceman himself, Richard Kuklinski.

HBO's favorite serial killer, man. Yeah, there's so many different documentaries and interviews with him. The Iceman Tapes is like one million bazillion episodes. It's crazy. Yeah. I think it's HBO. Of the many sources I've used,

listening to those was one of them, but the main book we're going to be using is going to be written by the very same author that wrote my main source book for the Tommy Pitera series, which is Philip Corso's, The Iceman Confessions of a Mafia Killer. It's going to, it's a big chunky book. You can get it out there.

It's been out since late 90s, early 2000s. And right at the top, I will say a lot of that book is basically Philip Corso's interview talking to him about all of his crimes. So a lot of what we're getting comes from the mouth of Richard Kuklinski. And as we've talked about on other serial killers and other killers, it's always take what he says with a grain of salt in a lot of his cases. However, the cases that they were able to corroborate with the

evidence that they have in what he was saying often line up pretty well. So even if he is, shall we say, um, maybe embellishing a bit on some of his skills, again, the evidence that we have of some of them show if he was in Bella embellishing, it wasn't by much because a lot of the tools and the way they found the bodies, uh, and the way they've died all line up with the kind of horrific things that Richard Kuklinski did because much like Tommy Petera I believe and we'll see if you feel like at the end of this Kuklinski was a serial killer that very much fell into the job made for him working working for the mafia. Very Tommy Karate adjacent.

Extremely and so much so that they very likely cross paths in a couple of familiar bars, never talking to each other. But I do, I need to go back and listen to the Tommy Pitera, but I have a vague memory of Tommy Pitera talking about how he was in one of those bars where all the families would come together and he, he saw they had heard of and knew of Kuklinski Iceman had seen him because the dude is enormous and like was just well known as like a killer that all the families use, but never like spoke to him or anything. Like they just kind of like cross paths once in a bar.

Um, but we'll, again, we'll talk about that more later because this is going to be a big boy. Uh, and today is just part one of this guy. Now, do you guys, as I like to ask, do you know anything about this guy? Have you seen the not even remotely really? Okay. This is, I think when I was a kid, I might've watched them like on cable. And like scared the shit out of myself, but not in a way where I remember the details.

They're there. Remember his face. Iceman movie. That is just called, I think. Yeah. The Iceman. It's a crime thriller. Richard Kukulinski is played by Michael Shannon in this.

Oh, I have seen that. I've seen that movie. I watched a little bit of it and turn it off because it's awful. It is a romanticization of who he was. They present him as almost sympathetic in that movie in a way that he is not in any way. He's weirdly likable. He's weirdly like, they started showing him as like a family man and yeah, he had a family, but he didn't love them at all and we'll see that like but the movie is just like a weird

Propaganda it's just I don't know me Hollywood was just trying to make a different one purpose just a Hollywood movie I don't know what the purpose was. It's 2012 was the movie. So it wasn't that long ago But like he's still a killer in it. Yes. Yes killer He's like he's like a mob they try to show like a dual life where he like was a family man who was traumatized to becoming into killer over time or whatever. After learning how they got, uh, uh, the Godfather made, do you think it was similar in the idea of like, it's not about the mob. We don't want to upset the mob. It's about family. Yeah, maybe.

And that's kind of what they did here. I didn't think the movie was bad, but I didn't know the real story, right? Like as a movie, it works. It's not like a bad, it's not like a poor film. If I did it the other way around where I watched the movie first and then did my research instead of doing all my research first

and then being like, I maybe should watch this movie, that would have been a better, I probably would have enjoyed it in some way, but because it was immediately clear, like this isn't at all who this man is. It's not, it's not even worth watching. Yeah, it's not even worth watching for research purposes. So with all that said and done, and our source is kind of out there, let's go ahead and dive into the story of who would one who would eventually become known as the Iceman, Richard Kuklinski himself. Now, Richard Leonard Kuklinski was. Does anybody call him the Kuk? No, no, just the Iceman, Richard Kuklinski himself. Now, Richard Leonard Kuklinski was anybody to call him the cook.

No, no, just the Iceman, dude. Come on. No. And he didn't like, uh, the cook Kuklinski. Come on. Richard the cook Kuklinski. Nope. You don't call him the first guy who did.

That's why it's called the Iceman. Oh shit. Uh, yeah. He was born on April 11th, 1935 into a home in Jersey City, New Jersey that could only be described to me as a domestic war zone. As many people who are traumatized like this are. Just complete battlefield of working class trauma in a Polish-American household. His father, Stanley Kuklinski, was a Polish immigrant from Warsaw who worked as a brakeman for the Lackawanna Railroad. Physical descriptions of him is

like he wasn't super tall, but he was fucking built. He was very strong because he's worked as a railman. He was a brakeman for the railroads back then. Handsome, they some say he resembled Rudolph Valentino, which you can look up, but he's a pretty handsome man. Rudolph Valentino? Yeah. With his hair parted in the center, slicked back tight against his scalp, you know, fashion of that era.

Richard's mother as well was Anna McNally. She was an Irish Catholic whose own parents had immigrated from Dublin. And after her father died of a pneumonia and her mother was tragically run over by a truck She and her two older. Yeah, I know Her and her two older brothers Mickey and Sean ended up in the sacred heart orphanage on Erie and 9th streets in Jersey City

Which I found interesting because I went to a high school that was run by the brothers of the Sacred Heart Yeah, what is it? Yeah, this is any relation brothers of the sacred heart. Uh, yeah. What is it? Yeah. Is it any relation? It's sacred heart. Yeah. That's all, it's all Catholic. It's Irish Catholic. It's all in New England too. It's all in New England. This is, it's crazy how all these locations you're naming just sound like places in Buffalo, New York. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It is. At first I was like, hold on, are we in Buffalo? Wait, this isn't right. Nope. Jersey city. Yeah, exactly. It is at first. I was like, hold on. Are we buffalo? Wait, this isn't right. Nope Jersey City

There Anna endured a brutal upbringing The nuns would beat this up. This is again nuns were beating them physical discipline was everywhere at this time And before she even reached age 10 She was sexually assaulted by a priest an experience that really stole a lot of her humanity that would shape how she acted moving forward, becoming a very cold and unfeeling woman from that point on, understandably. And this is where I guess I'll say like trigger warning for the entire series. Like this shit is only bad and gets worse as time goes.

So Anna met Stanley at a church sponsored dance and three months later, in July of 1925, they were married. She was probably trying to escape her past, but Stanley, who obviously looked good on paper turned out to be jealous, possessive tyrant of a husband who would beat her bloody any opportunity he was angry. He was also a heavy drinker. And when drunk, his temper got worse. He accused Anna of being a tramp and a whore because she hadn't been a virgin

on their wedding night, a secret shame that Anna carried because of the sexual abuse, uh, but she never really revealed to him the priest's violations like around that time. He ran around with other women and when he came home, his rage was just unleashed on Anna and eventually their children. You know, my favorite part about this is what to this day, it's still my just a treasured bit of hypocrisy that I love seeing. Oh yeah. The idea that like this dude is you weren't a virgin on our wedding night. How dare you? You disgust me. Now I'm going to go around and sleep with other random women.

Like those women I don't care about, but you're mine. And so like, how dare you put those other women. I'm not even worried about that. I don't even care. I don't care what they do. Don't worry about it. Like it's just hilarious to me that that is a thing that like dudes definitely Justify in their brains and it's like what yeah If you it's all around that like religious as well like the woman must serve the man kind of thing and that's was beaten to Her too as a kid, you know

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at the best price, of course. Thank you again to ghost bed for sponsoring today's episode. And Stanley, the father would beat not only Richard, but his older brother as well. And they would, he would beat them for any like perceived infraction, talking too loud, making eye contact when he didn't want it. Sometimes just simply being there and in the way was enough for him to beat them. And he didn't just use his hands. He had a very particular weapon of choice,

a thick black garrison belt that he'd often wrap around his hard knuckled fist to make the blows heavier, whip him with the belt. He literally wore it like brass knuckles and then punched the fuck out of them. And Richard went on to say it was like being struck by a two by four. He was fond of hitting his sons in the head, often knocking them unconscious. And Anna again, by the way, head trauma, classic serial killer. Mark that on your serial killer. It's just another one of these. Yeah, yeah, at least in the beginning. Like I said, he knocked him out and Anna, the devout Catholic who lit candles every Sunday,

often joined in the abuse. Or at least did nothing to stop it. Joined in? Oh yeah, she would beat them too. And if she wasn't, she didn't do anything to stop it when it was happening. She literally would crack Richard in the head with frying pans, broom handles,

wooden spoons, shoes, and she once even knocked him out cold with a broom handle after he tried to stop her from hitting him for stealing food to feed the family. Yeah, he stole food once when he was a kid and she just beat him unconscious with a broom handle. So, you know, she wasn't great either. You know, a very godly woman going to church every Sunday.

And Richard had an older brother, Florian. Sorry, what was that? His older brother, Florian. Florian is kind of a badass name. Admit it. Yeah, dope, dope name. Very D and D. I was literally going to say I bet you'd name a D and D character that. Yeah, it is a D and D character. Florian Scrimshaw's me name. Rogue I am. And bored. Well, maybe like like a rogue Florian was also a pretty frail boy a quiet by nature never really in good health Oh, no He had a very according to Richard a very delicate Intimid nature that often made him a target for his father's brutality If Florian cried he got. If he dirtied his bed, he got hit. And one night in a fit of drunken rage, Stanley struck Florian on the back of the head. The boy immediately fell to the floor and then he never got up.

No ambulance was even called. Oh my God. His son to death. He was 11 years old when he did that. She's and Richard was five. Stanley made Anna tell family, friends and authorities that Florian had died by falling down the stairs and striking his head. And no one questioned their story.

No charges were ever filed. Dude, what the fuck? Yeah, no. Yeah, it's the fuck. And Richard was witnessing this all while he was five years old. His mother told Richard that Florian had been hit by a car and died, a lie that was obviously just like a terrible one to try and cover up the truth, but he saw his brother, the only friend he'd ever known about at that time, lying in a cheap wooden coffin in their living room, surrounded by praying, crying relatives, and couldn't understand

why Florian wouldn't wake up. According to Richard, he literally had the thoughts of and said to him, wake up, Florian, wake up. Don't please don't leave me here alone. And it was the first dead body that Richard had ever really seen and it would be far from the last But after Florian's death for about a month The beatings from Stanley stopped Maybe out of guilt or maybe the fleeting fear that he'd actually gone too far with that when killing his son but that reprieve from his temper was short-lived and son, but that reprieve from his temper was short lived and the violence not only

returned, but it was even more brutal and even more frequent. And it all fell squarely on a Richard Kuklinski. He breaths any jokes you want to throw in boys lighten the mood a little bit. We're just going into page two of 16. Like, are we ready to keep going? They called him Kuk though, remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah, Kuk, Kuklinski. You want to, uh, you want a joke from Ranger Rick? Please. How do you, how do baby geese get out of their shells?

How? They follow exit signs. When the violence resumed, uh, Stanley seemed to blame. They awkward silences. Oh yeah, yeah. When the violence resumed, Stanley seemed to blame Richard for basically every injustice in his life at that point. Richard was beaten for things no child could obviously control. Obviously he was traumatized in peeing the bed, so he was beaten for it.

If he spoke too softly, beaten for it. Flinching when his father approached, beaten for it. If Richard cried, beaten for it. If he tried to explain himself, beaten for it. There were no rules. It was just random unpredictability. His dad just constantly beating the shit out of him. Yep, but never far enough to kill him.

At least he learned that lesson, I guess. Stanley ensured that fear became Richard's normal state of existence and beatings came without warnings. Lectures on manliness were then punctuated by fist to the face. Quite literally. He would call him coward, weakling, all this shit, and then beat the fuck out of them. And it would always be with the leather belt wrapped around his knuckles. The terror got so intense for Richard that he started wetting his pants at the mere sight or sound of his father, which, you guessed it, only led to more beatings.

And his mother's response during these episodes was often just to turn her back, face a wall, pray fervently, you know, hopefully God will stop him. That worked last time. And when prayer offered no solace, she would unleash her own violence upon him, striking him with whatever was at hand, like pots, utensils, shoes, and then in a weird perverse way would then tell them to go to church. She'd beat the fuck out of him. Be like, you need to go to church. So Richard often went to sleep bruised, aching, and sometimes so badly welted that he couldn't

even go to school for a couple of days. Anna, the religious zeal that she pretended to be, forced Richard into Catholic school, St. Mary's, a place that he came to loathe for its restrictive, what he'd deemed hypocritical teachings and the brutality of its nuns and priests. He was highly dyslexic as well and struggled very much to keep up with the class. Again, this is in the fucking 40s, 30s and 40s. So good luck with that. And when he used his fingers to follow the lines of texts,

the nuns would come over and then slap his hands with a metal ruler. Right. One day after a nun, I know, and this is again, and one day like a nun did it so badly his knuckles bled But then at that point Richard erupted and he screaming calling her a cunt and all these other things going like really going up nuts At her which I can understand being beaten with a ruler all the damn time. Just trying to read He was immediately brought out of class

And dragged out by an eye like a really pissed off apparently very red faced priest who then slapped him so hard his face stung and one other welt formed and then he beat him with a Bible. What? So Richard's just like yeah the priest beat him with a Bible. What is it? He's like a fucking character from a fucking book? Like what the hell dude? A lot of just like beatings. Beating him with a Bible is that's a first for me. Yeah right, that's a new one. Fucking insane brother.

You think he got Jesus' message that way? You know, I mean, I'm gonna stand by my profound truth that I truly believe that the vast majority of the people who follow the Bible have never once read it. So like, yeah, I bet he, I bet he absolutely is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Jesus says whack him with the Bible. That's what it's here for. Now in the interview to Richard said after he went home that night, his mother beat him again for misbehaving in school or still breaking the rules. But I just want to kind of like this point just like, it's important to like, remember, we say this a lot with serial killers. There are countless people who endure violent homes, who suffer abuse like this, even back

then and to this day. And that alone does not forge the kind of monster that Richard very, very quickly became. Because there is more to it than just that. And so by the age of 10, Richard wasn't just an angry abused child, he was actively beginning to experiment with cruelty on his own because it was the only thing around him. It was his norm. It was all he really knew.

And so like most early serial killers, his rage found an outlet in the torture of stray animals, devising tormented sadistic like just ways to kill them beyond what I think a child should be fucking capable of. Like a couple of the stories that are in the book. One he captured two cats and tied their tails together and then hung them over a clothesline just so we could watch them tear each other apart while they hung up there. He then on another story poured gasoline on stray dogs and then lit it just to watch them burn. He threw, he said, a few stray cats down buildings, incinerators, lighting it to enjoy their

desperate screams just to watch them try and scrape and claw their way out. Can you play a fucking song to play in my ears that's good, that drowns out when you go through lists of atrocities like this? Well, this is the only animal atrocities we'll be covering. Oh, well thank God. Yeah. And this is all coupled- Let's get to the people quickly. Yeah, let's get there quick. And this is at the age of 10.

This is the age of 10 years old. And then he also used clubs, pipe hammers- Cartoonishly evil, like what Bowser would do. Yeah, and this was coupled with him beating them animals to death with just like tools. Like this was just, this isn't just childhood fucking cruelty. This also was calculated, methodical. In a way, this is kind of him rehearsing

for what he would be doing later in his life. He would later confide to Philip Carlo that he enjoyed these acts and that he did it to see how the animals reacted and that it gave him a feeling of power. But most chillingly, I think he admitted, quote, that it was practice for the indiscriminate killing of human beings.

He cleared neighborhoods. He literally cleared his neighborhood of stray animals. Like this is corroborated by people who live like everybody knew he was the one doing it. But also like, I guess it's the thirties and forties and strays or animals are maybe looked at differently. Nobody did anything about it. They knew it was him. And he literally cleared all of them. So like, I don't, I don't understand like what thought processes the adults are at that time. But again, beatings are normal. So like I don't, I don't understand like what the thought process of the adults are at that

time. But again, beatings are normal. Like, I don't know, man. It was a different time, I guess. Unsurprisingly, Richard also didn't really play with the other kids. He didn't really even try to escape his horrifying home life. He began to lean into the darkness that really was starting to sprout up in this 10 year old boy

and by the time he turned 11 he had already kind of become something most people never really are a predator like a full-on predator that was sharpening his instincts to kill 11 years old he had killed and wiped out the town stray animals by murdering them all. And he is huge. By 13 years old, he's almost six feet tall, and he's like 200 some odd pounds. He must have the reputation around town of like a fucking junkyard dog, like the one from Sandlot. Everybody avoided him.

Everybody avoided him. You are dead on, like, correct. And if that wasn't enough. That's fucking nuts, bro. Like all at this point, like, he had honed his skill by killing animals all this time. Really it seemed like all he needed now was just like many serial killers. Just kind of needed a reason to accidentally kill somebody to finally have the experience of killing somebody.

Like we look at like John Wayne Gacy with the accidental like, oh, I was just defending myself because he came out and we have the knife. When in reality, he was cooking and breakfast in the morning, like shit like that, any accidental reason. And that reason to test his kind of new predatory instincts arrived just a few years later, embodied in a neighborhood bully named Charlie Lane. Charlie Lane was just a few years older, a foot taller, and much stockier than Richard was.

And this guy was the ringleader of a gang of what Richard called the Project Boys, who made Richard's life miserable after Kuklinski's family moved to a federally subsidized housing project at New Jersey Avenue and 15th Street. Like project boys. That's what he called them. Yeah. It's just like, cause that's slang of like government housing, the projects. Fucking yeah.

No, I know. Shit. Like this, this new apartment though, for him, for Richard was actually a step up. It was clean, modern, but the grounds that became a kind of new torment for Richard because these boys led by Charlie Lane didn't just tease him about his appearance his tattered clothes his kind of gangly thinness at the time and particularly they would constantly mock his Polish heritage

calling him a dumb Polak and locked brain. They also physically beat on him, pushing him, slapping him, throwing his baseball cap on the ground, uh, you know, typical bully behavior. And Charlie Lane in particular seemed to drive the most kind of joy from making his life miserable. This wasn't just teasing as a Philip Corso goes on to describe it. He goes and he kind of called it ritualized abuse. And Richard, while still frail and a loner at this time,

endured the torment daily. He didn't fight back yet. He was still just focusing his violence on animals. But one Saturday, after a particularly severe beating by two Irish brothers who lived on the block separate, this is totally separate from Charlie Lane's crew of people, just two other neighbors. Richard got beat up by them and ran home when he went into the door.

There stood his father who had quietly been watching the incident from their second story window. And instead of comforting Richard, he beat Richard and called him a coward as is just like Along calling him things like a chicken shit all this other stuff and when he was done beating him He demanded that Richard go back down the stairs and outside and go fight them and so He did he was confused his face was like the fuck. Are you talking about? He did. All right. Okay He went outside and the boys were completely off caught off guard and now Richard is like ashamed angry beaten And kind of just had he described actual mad. Yeah. Yeah, like truly a pent up hostility

He caught the brothers off guard and actually laid in on two of them, both of them, like some good hits. But before the fight really picked up much further, just as Richard got a few hits off the boy's father, who was also apparently watching a tall Irishman by the name of O'Brien came out and then roughly pushed Richard off of his boys. And what happened next, I think for me, like made in Richard's mind that might makes right in this way. Because what happened next was Richard's father Stanley leapt out of their second story apartment window, landed squarely on his feet, stormed across the lawn up to O'Brien and said to him, when your kids beat up my kid, you watched and did

nothing. What when my kid fought back, you stopped it. And then without giving O'Brien a chance to say anything, he swang at O'Brien clocked him in the face and knocked him out in one punch in front of his own kids. Like just clocked the neighbor's father. Did he die? No, no, no, no, like just clocked the neighbor's father. Did he die? No, no, no, no. He just punched him once and he got knocked out.

Richard wanted to like run to his father. He said to like thank him, but also knew he'd get beaten for it because affection was forbidden. So that day, I truly think Richard learned. Yeah. All right. Violence is how you get people to stop bullying you. Violence is how you get people to respect you. And this is where the violence towards animals began to kind of turn towards violence towards humans, because it wasn't enough to quell the rage

that was brewing inside him from Charlie, Charlie Lane's relentless bullying. Cause now he saw how his father handled it. So Richard became consumed by thoughts of revenge against the bully. You had been tormenting him for much longer for days. He would sit and think about how he was going to get it from and figure out a plan as to how he was going to get and beat Lane for tormenting him so much. Plans of destruction churned in his mind constantly. And the other thing I haven't mentioned is that also Richard Kuklinski was a huge fan of true crime magazines and he read them voraciously.

voraciously, and he learned how certain crimes, particularly murders, were solved from these pulp magazines that he'd been filling his head with all this time. So he considered stabbing Charlie, hitting him with a wrench, or dropping a cinder block on his head from a roof, which is extremely cartoonish. But none of this felt like the right way to do things. So on one really cold Friday evening, on a night when the wind was howling through the project grounds, he called them, icy sheets covered the walkways, Richard decided tonight was the night he was going to act. He went over to his closet and removed about a two foot long, thick wooden dolly out of it and used that metal pole, a like a really light metallic weapon, and he slid it up his sleeves. He donned a tattered sweaters under a kind of a threadbare pea

coat and he slipped the dolly up his sleeve and went out to find Charlie Lane. He was burning with anger. He positioned himself near the New Jersey av entrance of the, of where his home was and his back against the red brick wall containing the building's incinerator flu to make sure he had a warmth so he could sit out in the frigid air for as long as it took for Charlie Lane to pass him by. And after what he said felt like an eternity, just as he was about to give up and go home, he saw Charlie Lane to pass him by and after what he said felt like an eternity just as he was about to give up and go home. He saw Charlie Lane approaching.

Smitty knows what's coming, dude. He knows what's about to happen. He senses vibes very hard. Yeah, he feels is not going to be fun. Thank you so much to today's sponsor, Hungry Root. Listen, everyone in my house always has something going on. This always busy season for me. It literally never stops, which is why I use Hungry Root.

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hungary root.com slash chill code chill and get that 40% off of your first box and a free item of your choice for life. Hungaroo.com slash chill code chill. Thank you to hunger for sponsoring today's episode. So Richard said his tight, his stomach tightened. He could feel his heart begin to race and just as Charlie passed, Richard stepped out and Lane said probably the worst, he could feel his heart begin to race. And just as Charlie passed, Richard stepped out and Lane said, probably the worst thing he could have possibly said to him at this moment. What the fuck do you want? Polak? Oh my God, dude.

Richard just stayed dead silent. His gaze cold. I imagine hateful and Lane threatened him. Get the fuck out of my way. I'll give you another beating. You fucking dumb pollock. God, you just like an asshole, just asshole kid. What, what year is this again? Like 19.

So he was born in 35. He's like right after world war two, 1947 48 ish. Yeah, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'm just, uh, I keep thinking this is, uh, the America a lot of people want to go back to anyway. Let's move on. Just, I don't want to make this about that. No, no, no, we'd be racism. Richard breaking his cold silence, simply said, yeah, try. And so Charlie lunch, but Richard without hesitating just swung the wooden dolly that was hidden up his sleeve with all his might, cracking Charlie square on the side of the

head just above the ear. And shocked, Charlie Lane held his head and backed up, his eyes not only angry but clearly surprised and Richard, filled with a combination of both fear and pent up animosity, went after Charlie and struck him on the head again, knocking him down. This point, it wasn't a fight. It was a brutal, relentless beating. All that stored up rage, Richard harbored a world of it came pouring out as he struck the pro, the, the prone boy with all of his strength.

He didn't want to kill him though. At least that's what he says. He just wanted to teach him a lesson. But he didn't stop beating him until Lane was motionless. And even then he kicked him, cursing and crying at him with rage, demanding he get up and fight, but Charlie didn't move. And Richard, for a moment, said he felt a pulse in his neck, a trick that he learned from the True Crime magazines, and when he reached to check for a pulse, he felt nothing. He had beaten him to death. Goddamn, dude. His first kill, I think at, I think we're like 14, 13 years old,

somewhere around there. What the fuck? Now, Richard said he was stunned realizing Charlie Lane was in fact dead, killed by his own hand and his mind reeled. The important bit that both caught him by surprise was that it wasn't reeling with remorse for what he'd done, but the implication of what getting caught would mean. And he would be sent to prison. And because of what he read in the magazines, he dreaded what he called the big house. He didn't want to go to jail. And there was nobody he could

tell. So he thought and he planned. He knew he had to get rid of the body and he remembered a stolen dark blue Pontiac that he'd stashed in a lot on 16th street from that he'd stole a while back, a car that he'd found with keys in it and had taken for joy rides from time to time. So he ran off, starting to go get the freaking car, drove back to the, to the entrance of the housing unit and took Charlie's body and threw it into the truck into the car but even as heavy as it was Richard managed to drag him and using the slippery ice to advantage he heaved him up into the trunk and in the trunk he noticed a battered tool that Stanley often kept in his cars it was like a hatchet and a hammer. So with those tools in mind, but not ready to use them,

he drove off to onto Pulaski Skyway heading south with a plan forming as a new feeling of power and omnipotence began to sweep over him. He was proud of what he's about to do because he knew how not to get caught. He was glad that he killed Charlie. He had fantasized about it for so long and now having done it, he liked how it made him feel quote, I will never ever allow anybody to fucking abuse me again. Those were his words. And I mean, I guess kind of to his credit, he never did. After driving for about two hours credit, he kept his word.

Yeah, I guess, you know, and and and on whose word did he kill this kid? What do you mean his own word? He did it because he didn't like him as he was being bullied This is the guy who's calling a dumb pollock all the time and beating him up all this other He got in trouble for this. No, no, no, no, no. He knew he wasn't gonna get in trouble. He did it He yeah, he's he's the first thought he had after he killed him was I'm gonna get in trouble I'm gonna get in trouble. I'm going to get in police. I have to get rid of the body.

So we know for sure that he did this. Yes, but only years later, as well as you'll discover here what the town after about two hours of driving with Charlie Lane's body in the trunk, his mind was going over what he'd do. He reached the desolate marshlands and pine forests of South Jersey, he pulled over on a small bridge above a frozen pond surrounded by tall, blonde-colored reeds visible in the car's headlights, and getting Charlie out of the trunk, he laid him on the frozen ground. Remembering what he'd learned from the True Crime magazines about how investigators identified

remains, he remembered the tools that were in the trunk, so he used the hammer side of the tool to knock out all of Charlie's teeth, and then with the hatchet on the other side of the blade part of the other side, he chopped off the fingertips of each of Lane's fingers. He gathered the teeth and the fingertips into a cloth, planning to discard them in different places on his way back to Jersey City to further confound any investigation. And after ensuring Lane had no ID, he took some paper money from him and dumped the body off the small bridge where it broke through the ice and disappeared into the murky waters below.

And as he drove back, he got rid of the teeth and fingertips, knowing birds and animals would eventually consume them. And that's exactly what happened happened because they were never found. The fingertips and teeth were never found. To him, his very first murder was a perfect crime. And for a very long time, he was right. Charlie Lane simply vanished. There were rumors and suspicions, but no charges, no witnesses, no body. And to Richard, this just validated him. He had not only taken control of something that was out of control, being beaten and bullied, but spun it into something he had total control

of and nothing bad happened to him. He did the worst possible act that he had read about over and over. And not only did he get away with it, but he felt he did it better than anyone else that he had read about. And the boys who used to mock him now kept their distance, crossing the street if they saw him coming, avoiding him entirely. While they weren't sure. Did he put the word out? Did everyone just like, no. So while nobody, so that's the thing. While nobody said anything outright, the, at least the boys, the, the, the gang that was bothering him and everybody, everybody knew Richard was the one that kind of

killed animals. And also everybody knew Richard's family was hyperviolent. Nothing. This dude just vanished and they were like, Richard killed that guy. Basically is how they treated it is how did they treat it? Him was like, they kind of knew it was him, but they didn't say anything. And Richard, so really he got what he wanted. He got exactly what he wanted. And he didn't smile or brag about it. He just moved through them. Like he now owned them. He had a,

he had learned a very simple, but brutal rule. If you hurt the right person in the right way, the rest take notice. It's like a punch the tough guy in the jail first day kind of vibe. Yeah. You know, the war on the horrifying serial killer. Except it's on the street and then, you know, yeah, no, I did it. And then from and then from then on, if Richard wanted something, he didn't even ask. He just fucking took it. He became a very big thief.

And in the ensuing days, he systematically sought out and using a length of two by four, he found beat mercilessly every single boy in that little group who had ever bullied or abused him ever. Jesus. Didn't kill them, just beat the fuck out of them. It was then explained that for him that he truly learned it was better to give than receive his own quote about the violence beat up the biggest,

more the strongest person, just exactly like you said. All right. Yeah. Any jokes, Alex? Yes. I'm going to read you a random joke from our slash jokes. If this is from a bareback mountain as the user, if, if 12 is a dozen and 13 is a Baker's dozen, then 11 must be a door dash dozen. All right. First off, I get it.

Second off, let's not ever use door dash again. Third off, let's not ever use door dash again. Third off. Let's jump back into the misery. So at this point, we're looking at late teens. Uh, well, he's like 16 or so years old. And I want you to understand how big Richard is at 16. Now He had shot up in height to nearly six foot five at 16 and had packed on significant solid muscle becoming a broad, like just heavy dude with unusually long arms that made most people just kind of think twice before initiating any trouble with this guy and he intimidated adults and kids alike.

It wasn't just his intimidating size, obviously, but just the distinct way people talked about how he carried it. This a quiet unnerving stillness, almost like a palpable sense of coiled anger, just ready to be slid out at any moment. But he carried it naturally with a cat-like gait, walking on the balls of his feet, which allowed him to move with a dead silence. This dude, nearly six foot five knew how to move without being heard. Now I walk on the balls of my feet. Do you boy, are you boys traumatized enough where you have to silently walk on

the balls of your feet to not disturb anything? Am I traumatized enough to walk in the balls of my feet? I know what you mean. I look, I live upstairs in an apartment. Yeah, I do understand this. There used to be a man under me who would like blow a bugle at us from downstairs and hit the hit the floor. No, really dude? That's hilarious.

He was he was crazy. He used to watch us from his window shirtless and he'd like pull the blinds down and then one day our downstairs neighbor just had to sock him in the face. It was crazy. It was crazy. It's crazy. Can we use this guy? We just do an episode on that guy?

No, no, It's crazy. Can we use this guy? We just do an episode on that guy. No, no, it's not worth That's a hard no worth it Guys a piece of shit The reason I bring this up is because I imagine the reason he is he does this is because He had to walk around a house where any perceived Like infraction or being in the way got him beat. So moving without being noticed became extremely necessary. And I only bring that I didn't get beat in my house. But like I had a mother who was wildly suicidal and like having

to walk around to check on her without her knowing I'm coming so she couldn't lock the doors or any of that stuff, you know, moving around the house without creaking a board. You learn very quickly that walking on the balls of your feet and then like distributing your weight, really no matter how big you are, as long as you can literally just, nobody can hear you coming. And I scare people all the time

because that's how I walk like naturally now. And it's really like annoying to people that I like. You like Batman people constantly? Yeah, yeah, I don't mean to. It's like not, but yeah, like he uses it to serial kill. You know, it's a different problem. But so six foot five, like 200. Just goes to show you.

Yeah, exactly, Smitty dude. He uses it to serial kill. Yeah, he does serial killing. Just goes to show you, you know, the same tools in different hands, man. Trauma does different things. But also Richard, we'll talk about it more maybe in next episode, but Richard also does

have the thing where he doesn't feel fear. I forget what the actual like legit. Oh yeah. Like the legit psychological problem of like, he doesn't feel fear. He's not really like, he like one of the things he talks about in the interviews, if you go listen to them is how like he would like when he killed animals to a lot of the reason he did it was to see if he felt something and he never did and he found it weird that he never felt anything.

He was a true like true psychopath sociopath in the worst ways because he did find control and excitement over it. But if we're looking at him from a serial killer perspective, he didn't it wasn't the body he was after like much like Tommy Pitera. Remember, he very much didn't really like the body afterward. He cut it up, put him in suitcases, buried them in like national parks. This was very similar for for Kuklinski where he didn't really want the body, but it was like he loved as you see, as he gets into the mafia, he really loved doing a good job. Just like being clean. Like he loved being told how good he was at this.

He loved like doing it, being excellent at it. And then being told, wow, man, you're so good at this. Like almost like a kid seeking affirmation for doing like being seen. Like he learned that the one thing he could do was quietly and very, very meticulously kill people. And he was able to turn that into a tool that also earned him money and a life. And also people that not only respected him, but told him that he was doing a good job.

Here's the thing that sounds great to me also right now. Right. If you just if you take that and put it into the context of any normal job, you know, like you figure out what you're good at, like exactly. But it's all there's also some neuroses there of the idea that like I need like, please tell me I'm doing I'm doing good. You don't have that thing in you that's like, no, you did fine. I get it. Yeah. He also brain damage from being beaten in the head and knocked out by his father at the age of five and up, you know, like he's not, he's not completely right up there. But again, by 16, this dude is six, five, he's like 250 pounds and he, nobody fucks with him. Um, he walked around with a wild confidence and he moved silently. His capacity for violence was not just like a matter of sudden hot tempered outbursts either. It became like a calculated

deliberate system that he was meticulously building characterized in my mind by an unnerving emotional vacancy that we just talked about. His Richard himself in later interviews with with Philip Carlo would articulate like that he felt nothing inside for any of the people he killed when he asked, like, do you feel anything like regretting? He's like, no, I feel literally nothing. Quote, nothing. They had it coming and I did it. The only people that ever had any kind of real feelings for were my family. Those others, nothing.

Sometimes I wonder why I'm like this. Feel nothing inside. I wish someone could tell me I'm curious. And if you go listen to the interviews, he's just very, he's just very dead pan. And he's like, unlike Gacy or Ted Bundy or for instance, where all of them, they have this just like almost theatrical, like narcissistic love of hearing themselves tell their stories. I still think Richard Kuklin, see likes to hear himself talk, but there's none of that theatrical behind it.

There's none of that like smirking and laughing and like really enjoying it or whatever. He doesn't want to get caught. The other ones kind of love the idea of people seeing their work and this dude clearly doesn't want that. He does like hearing good job though, right? He does. Like when he got, I mean, obviously he got arrested, right? Cause the interviews happening in jail.

We'll talk about that at the end of the series, but for years, he never talked because he was loyal and he only started talking when he thought, I think he was in the clear that he wouldn't get in trouble for it anymore. Um, but that's, that's the last bit of the, the, the series. Um, the fact that, like I said, he was just like, he was curious as to why he felt nothing. It's all because of the, you know, the, the fucking issues with his own mental illness and in his own brain damage, I I'm sure, but the curiosity

for him, it just wasn't rooted in remorse, just a cold, detached observation of his own psyche. And that was kind of chilling, his ability to watch someone die and then calmly go home, make a fucking sandwich, utterly untroubled by nightmares or guilt, just a profound sense of internal peace and quiet. And that detachment would later extend to his terrifying threats against his own future family with Barbara Pederici. He would in no uncertain terms inform their own children that they would have that if

he ever accidentally killed his mom, their mom, that he would be forced to murder them as well just to eliminate any witnesses. And he didn't say this is a threat or like points of anger, just as points of like conversation of like, man, if it happened, cause he beat his mother. Just so you know, yeah. Yeah, it was just a stark rule for them. Like if he ever accidentally killed their mom by beating her,

they would have to be killed too. Just like, that's fine. And then from that point on, you are never mentally the same. You're broken. You live in a different world forever now, yeah. And his younger siblings, from Stanley and Anna's tumultuous marriage, Roberta and Joseph were also part of his early life during this period. So he did eventually have two younger siblings after his older brother was

beaten to death. Now Roberta largely managed to stay out of his increasingly violent orbit, but Joseph, even as a young kid, was already displaying clear and disturbing signs of anti-social personality and a profound instability. His younger brother, and his, he was also quick to violence, known to punch out teachers, and possessed a very clear budding psychopathy that would honestly tragically culminate in his own horrific crimes years later that we will talk about later in the series but just so you know he did end up having two younger siblings at this point Richard for his own part had kind of developed his own deep loathing for his mom obviously he's how old right now

56 16 17 right around there at this point he viewed his mother as nothing more than unkempt slovenly hypocrite, a per like something that solidified after he walked in on her having sex with a married neighbor on their living room couch and broad daylight. That were like at 16. This Catholic mom, by the way, you know, going to say, so he has that like, my mom spent her childhood beating beating into me to be holier than thou and she never was. So yeah has that like my mom spent her childhood beating beating into me to be holier than thou and she never was so Yeah, that wouldn't mess him up at all. Yeah, they walked in her just fucking the married neighbor

Obviously his visits to her became increasingly infrequent. He did however retain enough residual protectiveness Maybe maybe dominance is a better word, to confront his father Stanley. Now, learning that Stanley was still physically abusing Anna at this time, Richard, at this point a very formidable young man, found his father and pressed a 38 caliber revolver to Stanley's head, pulled back the hammer, and simply warned him through clenched teeth that if he ever went near Anna, his mom, or the family again, he would kill him and dump his body in the river. What the fuck is this Shakespearean shit going on right now?

Stanley undoubtedly recognized the fucking threat in his son's eyes, never touched Anna again. And for many years, Richard would not speak to his father though that deep Seated regret for not having killed him that day Lingered with him for the rest of his life so much so that it gets brought up in interviews and in books It's like a serious version of hot run. I Don't know the reference. That's right Is Ian McShane I Know the name that's right. Is Ian McShane.

I know the name. That's right. You just dig in a deeper hole. Yeah, man. I don't know why you try. Like I appreciate the attempts though, because every once in a while. You never know. Richard meanwhile, had basically long since abandoned his education.

He dropped out of school. His severe dyslexia made like just reading torturous because he just get hit for not being able to read and just not worth it for him. And the brutal environment of the Catholic school in particular with his physically abusive priests and nuns was no sanctuary for this man. No support there. So deeming it a complete waste of his time and I don't know, in a weird way in his particular instance, I kind of understand that aspect a little bit.

He began to frequent what any 16 year old kid would frequent at this time, the smoke filled dimly lit pool halls and bars equipped with pool tables in Jersey city and a book and just like the preachers warned us about. Yeah, exactly. And the game of pool with it's like, I guess like, I'm trying to figure out he became phenomenal at pool, like, and I truly think like, the requirement of having like precision and control and structure of this game is kind of like got into it from a conceptual standpoint. Yeah, like maybe he's like drawn to like, I don't know, maybe just like having to know the perfect angle and hair.

I can empathize with that. Yeah. Yeah. And he literally spent hours every single day honing his schools, playing pool is hearing that hand eye coordination that need to correct the stroke or make difficult shots. And his keep in mind is tall frame and his build gave him really gangly arms. Like I mentioned earlier, which was also a pretty big advantage in pool that something I didn't think about until I read about it in the book, which allowed him to kind of like lean into

and execute challenging shots easier than other people do or not built like him. So he also learned that pool could be a great source of income and once he was good enough began to hustle games aggressively and in key mind he's drinking beer like he's playing with adults he's drinking and smoking well they all know he's a kid at this time and he just starts hustling the fuck out of people in all these bars and when opponents refused to pay up or in Richard's eyes show disrespect you would he responded with the same brutal force that kind of he learned to wield on the streets readily using his heavy pool cue as

Justin improvised weapon to beat them with until they paid up Well, what the fuck is this fucking comic book ass story? It. Remember, do you like from Sin City and Tommy Patera's upbringing being a cartoon of him going to like becoming a huge kid who beat everybody up that people knew to stay away from. But then he got picked up by a karate guy. He went to like go karate and yes, this guy's the pool guy. He's like happening. Keep in mind, this is all happening in the same timeframe. And Tommy

karate is kind of growing up a state over. He's not far away. Don't make a fucking SKC you do. There's an SKC you here, man. There is I'm telling you don't make the SKC you right now for episode 300. It's too late. It's happening It's an SKC you if you want to describe the real world as the serial killer cinematic universe. That's kind of like It's also kind of true In a particular example that is often talked about He was playing cool pool for cash at a bar in Hoboken called Danny's Bar. Very original. His opponent was an off-duty police officer named none other than Doyle.

I thought you were going to say Dan. Oh, if it was O Doyle, we would have it. No, no, no. I'm sorry. It is O Doyle. It's not just O Doyle. All right. Well, thank God. Because otherwise, it's not nearly Irish enough. It really is O Doyle oh, Doyle rules. He, you, what's that? Oh, Alex, Alex, nevermind. Nevermind. Let it go.

I don't know what that is. Let it go, man. Okay. So I was going to say yes and just pretend I knew you're talking about, but I don't know. Yeah. Just be like, oh yeah, from that movie, right? You'd be right. From that entertainment property. You haven't seen Billy Madison really? Oh, when I was a kid once. Okay, all right. I'll take that. I'll take that. I'll take that. But that's I've only seen weird back at dinosaur story a handful of times. You know, don't worry about it.

We're back at dinosaurs. Is that the cartoon? I think don't worry. Don't worry about it. I'm just trying to provide levity to a very dark story. You see, can we get back to the really funny story of where yeah? Come on 16 year old boy is drunk I will drinking with a cop a off-duty cop in this bar the cop knows is a kid Oh Doyle's he's hustling him and The the cop became increasingly more drunk and more belligerent belligerent as he lost game after fucking game drunk and more belligerent as he lost game after fucking game after game. And then he started spewing insults at Richard.

Richard called Richard a cheater, made derogatory comments at his background, obviously being a racist and Richard just being calculating and cold, didn't engage in a verbal confrontation. He just quietly kept hustling him for his money. And after he was all done and he refused to pay, he simply just put down his in a verbal confrontation. He just quietly kept hustling him for his money and after he was all done and he refused to pay, he simply just put down his pool cue, quietly exited the bar and went to wait as the cop stayed behind and continued to drink. A couple hours later, when O'Doyle was passed out drunk in his car having stumbled his way back, Richard returned. In that time, he had procured himself a quart of gasoline from a nearby station.

Dude, what the fuck? He calmly, quietly walked up and poured the gasoline through the open car door because he was passed out drunk into onto O'Doyle and watching as he got soaked impassively before eventually he stepped back, struck a match, tossed it at him, and he caught fire. Fuck off. The vehicle instantly became engulfed in flames and Richard just stood back quietly watching long enough to hear Doyle screams and smell the roasting flesh of his person before he decided to turn away, walk home, satisfied for a job well done. And that's true. That is 100% actually true.

That is like a villain in Punisher Yeah, like when they can they they confuse the two and he's like, I'm not that guy. Yeah Yeah, like yeah Frank Castle fucking lights him on fire It was at this period again And again the cop couldn't even be even if he didn't burn the cop alive The cop was fucking drinking with this a 16 year old kid He couldn't like arrest him and take him in for like, you know, drinking illegally or anything because he was participating in all this. It was around this time as well that Richard actually acquired his first firearm where he purchased his 38 caliber

revolver with a long six inch barrel from a pool hall acquaintance. And after he got it, he began to carry it constantly. Not for protection, at least he would say, but because it made him feel prepared, balanced, and grounded. Which is what I hear out here in Texas all the goddamn time. I just like knowing I have the ability to wipe someone off the face of the earth. Yeah, exactly. And you never know. Whenever Richard Kuklinski is going to break into your house.

Rounded is such a crazy way to be like, yeah, you know, having the ability to take someone's life really like, eh, grounds me. My rest easy knowing that at any given point, I could blow someone to kingdom come with no notice. Yeah, yeah, it's, that's truly, it's like that makes him feel comfortable. Before long, as he's been, as he continues to hustle the pool halls, he has a gun on him now, he's got two kills under his belt at this age, he soon began to fall in with a crew that he would become friends with the Teenage Mutant

Ninja Turtles, the misfits and outcasts, predominantly blue collared youths from similarly violent households and impoverished backgrounds, all of whom shared a profound disdain for fucking rules and they didn't really know rules. Yeah. Yeah. The no rules gang. They did have a gang name though. And we're going to get there. This group consisted of five core members, three of them Polish, including Richard, one Irish and one Italian. And they share, they christened themselves with an actual gang name. What if you, this was you, you're Richard Klinsky, you're, you know, you gotta, he's got a, yeah, you're a gang of five.

1948 and nine ish somewhere around there. All right. So this is 40s gang name. Yeah. Yeah. What are you going to call your little gang of five of like five late teenager near do wells. The Justice League.

Love it. The Revengenators. Oh, that's like a nineties name. That's like the first draft. Yeah, you're right, you're right. That's like the first draft of the Avengers right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hold on, it's 1940s?

Yeah, 49. The Beach Boys, but they're thinking of Omaha Beach, you know, and they think cuz they're gonna beach. Oh, No, it's surprisingly a little more poetic than that the gang they call themselves were Coming up roses. The fuck are we doing with our lives? These gangs are naming themselves coming up roses, like a fucking hardcore band. Like what the fuck that is? That is, that blows my, that is like an anachronism that is like, you want to know why they called them said you can't imagine why. Because they're all coming to everything comes up, Rose. It's,

it all works out for them. It's coming up roses. Actually the reason they, they embrace is it was more of like a nod to their outlook on their own life that they all of them would eventually be buried by one like they'd have to all be buried because they would eventually die because of their life, their life of crime, they'd end up being killed, they'll have to bury each other. So pushing up roses, I think is like the play they're trying to do was coming up roses, a term of like I coming up roses a term of like

I know it's a term of like everything's coming up roses is good now. When did that origin it had to have been These guys they did it. Yeah, they changed the world when they made this game. Let's find out what origin of coming up roses Phrase, let's see the crazy crazy Nation and he's coming up roses for isn't until 1959. So that saying isn't even around yet. They invented the Cheyenne just saying the guys, I guess they may be kind of kind of invited it. Yeah, there you go. Uh, and to mark their bond to each other,

each member had a crude tattoo that got inked onto the palm of their left hand. And if you were the Coming Up Roses gang, what would your clan, like gang, clans, good lord, gang symbol be? A fucking rose. Yeah, like a, like a, like a rose, but above a grave, like a grave with a rose on it. Yeah, yeah, that's good. No, it's a parchment scroll bearing the words,

coming up roses. Well, they didn't have a derby. That's like inside the box thinking is what that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They didn't even go A to B and go like, let's put a picture of a rose. They were like, let's put a picture of something that says coming up roses.

That's crazy. Yeah, when you think about it, it's really not that great. What is our logo? It's a sign that says the name of our gang on it. I love it. Picture of a sign. I love it, bro. Everybody would be so fucking scared. And to them, this was a sign of not only unwavering loyalty,

but if anyone dared to mess with one member, they would end up as fertilizer. Another letter on the scroll. No, they get to become as fertilizer. Another letter on the scroll. No, they get to become fertilizer for actual roses. Now, this admittedly, that would be cool if their whole bit was that they buried bodies in Rose gardens. Like, okay, but that's not what they're doing. Well, they're not murdering. The gang doesn't murder at least. Well, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if they were out there burying bodies and it was like, yeah, no, buried him in the Rose garden. It was like, he's coming up. That's scar saying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if they were out there burying bodies and it was like, yeah, no, I buried him in the Rose garden.

It was like, he's coming up. That's scarier. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's cool. Isn't that like a dark creepy way, but again, that's more like a creative mind, Jesse, your creative mind, you know, these are not, whenever you start to see, uh, murders where people are buried in roses, you

now know, that was, that was just a rose at the crime scene. Oh shit. He's also a master thief. I got you guys want another joke to lighten the mood. Yeah, please do. This one is from our jokes. Uh, random one from pay the devil. I'm going to read this one like Rodney danger field. I'm estimated so good last night. The one I woke up this morning, my dick was in the kitchen making me breakfast. That is very 1948 coded. So like I get it.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm just picking these at random. You guys, I'm just picking random. Yeah, man. So now they got all this tattooed on their fricking hands, not in a reference to how much they'd murder other people, but that they would all eventually die. They all swore an oath of allegiance and then quickly escalated their activities.

Now instead of randomly robbing people and hustling them down the streets and stuff, they were meticulously planning and executing robberies of liquor stores and warehouses, burglarizing homes in more affluent areas like the Jersey City Heights and Lincoln Park, occasionally hijacking trucks. Richard, with his obviously imposing physique and culticisiveness, was the undisputed muscle of all of this, though his cautious nature and careful planning also made him the brains behind many of them.

Essentially, he became the de facto leader for everybody here. A second more detailed account of Richard's in a lethal encounter with that Irish cop O'Doyle kind of talks like it really gets at the perceived disrespect. I think Richard really resonates like it makes him angry. It's that respect. And I mentioned that because what we're about to walk into and how this all plays out is really difficult to like understand to and how this all plays out is really difficult to like understand unless you see things in that respect is really the only thing Richard wants. He only, nothing else matters to him. Just keep that thought in mind.

I know it kind of comes out of nowhere, but where we're about to move into, I think kind of requires it. Now they, as they were kind of robbing people and starting to rob stores and expanding their operations, they started getting a little bit braver with those that they were going to start hitting. And what ended up happening is they may have hit a mafia group at one point to rob them in the early successes, kind of like hitting small time rackets. They weren't destined for longevity. They were not making enough money, but their downfall would end up being because

of two of the members, John Wheeler and Jack Dabrowski acting independently. And without Richard's knowledge or consent decided that they were going to rob a mob run card game in Haboken. What the fuck are you talking about? Yeah, this was like a season one episode for Punisher. Yeah, I get it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Alex. Not kidding. Like this little group of five, they had things going pretty well. But two of them got pretty cocky. They didn't run it by Richard or any other gangs. They got word of a mob card game

That's happening in Habokin and thought They could handle it. They obviously underestimated the dangerous territory. How do they move through this? Yeah, just watch This is what I'm this is written that thought I put in your mind Keep that in mind for what's about to happen So this game was under the protection of a soldier in the powerful decavalante, uh, diva, cavala, cante family crime, crime family. Now during the robbery, despite their bandana disguises, someone at the game recognized John Wheeler.

John John Wheeler. Word of the transgressions reached the Decavalacante family hierarchy with incredible speed. This is before Batman stopped them, I assume. Yes, this is much before Batman got there. Hey man, you ever think what would happen if we ran into Batman? Nah, Batman doesn't worry me, he's probably not even real. He doesn't worry me. He's probably not even real. He's Cavalante's. A man by the name of Albert Parenti, who was a mid-level soldier in the Cavalacante family, he was described as a barrel-chested, weasel-faced man. And so bow-legged, he walked as if he just dismounted a horse, apparently,

sought out Richard as he was the one to kind of be sent on to deal with what just happened. And everybody kind of knew Richard was in charge of the coming up roses gang. And in the quiet corner of a Habokin bar, he found Richard and the bar was called Phil's. It's like this Danny's, there's Phil's. It's just one like, just a man's name for a bar at this time. Parenti didn't mince words. He walked up to Richard and simply said, uh, and we get,

let me get this here for somebody to read. Oh, it's a big one. Here we go. Who wants to be a mobster? I'll read that shit. Read that bullshit. Alex is already doing the mobster voice. I'll read that bullshit. I know two the mobster voice already that bullshit I know two of you guys stuck up my game on Washington Street I also know you had nothing to do with it or I wouldn't be talking nice to you right now but this is a courtesy we all know you're a stand-up guy we hear good things that's why I'm talking to you like this. Those guys are yours. They gotta go. There ain't no other way.

And Richard kind of just understanding the deadly seriousness of the DeCavalucante's justice system, he didn't attempt to deny his crew's involvement, nor did he beg for their lives. He did, however, try to negotiate an alternative, uh, first, let me say, I appreciate you talking to me like this, Albert. Uh, I had no idea about any of this. I'm real sorry. I'll make sure every fucking penny is paid back. They'll leave town. They'll disappear. They'll never come back. That was his attempt at bargaining and parenti remained unmoved because it wasn't about that. And this next quote is also for going to be for you, Alex, since you are this man.

I am this man. You are the man. I am this man. You are a bow legged man that walks as though you just got off of a horse. How did you know? It's not about the money, Richard. It's the principle. Look, let me cut to the chase. These guys gotta go and you gotta do it. They your responsibility. You do it or we do it. Gabi. And all he said back to him was a beach. Okay. And.

Okay. Yeah, that's it. Yeah. And he made sure it got done. Literally that day, I believe. First, he located Jack Dabrowski without warning without saying a word. He simply walked up to him and shot him in the head, ensuring Dabrowski just didn't see it happening at all. He left him there where he fell. And next he immediately tracked down John Wheeler as he was leaving his girlfriend's apartment. He found him and another just single bullet to the head without any warning and did Wheeler's life. Four people dead. He's

16 or 17 fucking Christ is movie bloodbath shit. It's not like, oh yeah, private murder shit. It's like he fucking lit a man on fire, dude Now, yeah exactly They were quick quiet Executed with just resolve And he goes on to say that he didn't feel that he felt a sense of loss having two of really the only friends he ever Had ever this is the only thing he really had his friend But he then simply said in the interview,

it was them or me. And that was the only justification that he offered with little solace. The other two members of the coming up roses were not targeted and they had reportedly descended into heroin addiction after all of this. And Richard who held drug users in kind of a contempt, he did not like you drug users at all.

He just reviewed them as weak and unreliable had just cut them off and distance himself from them. So he just didn't even bother. And with that, you guys used to be cool murderers. Now you guys are losers. Hey, they never murdered anybody. Thank you so much to hero for sponsoring today's episode. I don't know. You guys have heard me talk about here for it, right? If you don't, if you don't know, it was the heard me talk about Hero Forge, right? If you don't know, if this is your first time, you didn't know this about me, I'm an enormous nerd,

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Heroforge.com. The coming up roses gang, with that, it's misguided oaths and weird tattoo situation literally dissolved within days and more significantly Richard had demonstrated his unwavering ability to handle a difficult problem without complaint to follow orders explicitly and to execute them in a ruthless efficiency and the DeCavalcontes and other organized crime family figures took careful note. Richard Kuklinski had just passed a kind of audition

with these guys without even realizing it. He walks through a doorway at this point into the violent world of the mafia. They would observe him, test his discretion further before really entrusting him with more significant assignments, but for the time being, the Jersey police found no witnesses and no viable leads in the murders of John Wheeler and Jack Dabrowski. They quickly became just two more forgotten casualties of street violence.

And Richard's entry into the fringes of organized crime didn't mean he ceased killing for his own more personal reasons either. Shortly after dispatching Wheeler and Dabrowski, he took another life – an act that is entirely disconnected from any mob directive whatsoever, which is where we talk about again that he's a fucking serial killer too. During one of his solitary excursions to Manhattan, he'd often take the ferry across the Hudson, finding a strange solace in the anonymity of the city.

He encountered a homeless man there, under the dark, dank and desolate West Side Highway, and the area with its decaying piers at the time and really shadowy recesses was already becoming a landscape that Richard was getting familiar with. And when this unfortunate man approached Richard and belligerently demanded money, Kuklinski didn't hesitate for even a second. He immediately grabbed the man and before he could react, Richard plunged his hunting knife into his chest with two swift, strong, powerful thrusts.

There was no prolonged confrontation, no panic, just a quick silent brutal stabbing and killing. He later described this as a test for himself, an experiment to see how it felt to kill a complete stranger, someone that was completely disconnected from his own life because up to this point, everybody that he had killed in his mind directly or deserved it for some reason, whether it was because they went off and the mafia told him to, they were bullies, et cetera.

It was for this, there was no financial gain, no external order involved. And after he collapsed, Richard left the scene immediately, but they then came back later to the same spot to see that the body hadn't been taking moved or anything. He was still just dead there. And he just wanted to look at it again and see, engage his reaction to see how he felt looking at the body because he felt nothing when he killed him. And when he came back and looked at the body, he then also said he felt nothing when he killed him and when he came back and looked at the body He then also said he felt nothing so killing a stranger was Man, that's crazy. You know as impactful to him as killing anybody else

And it was around this period that a kind of distinctive and chilling habit began to manifest One that will play in an interview clip next episode. It was a faint Kind of like quiet clicking noise that Richard would make out of the left side of his mouth whenever he was starting to get really agitated and wanting to hurt somebody and usually precluded a murderous act or a very severe beating if you were his family. And it literally just sounds like when he's talking, he's like, as he's like talking and kind of just kind of keeps making that noise.

And during an interview, I don't know the document, one of the documentaries, the interview was asking, willing to try to press him for more details and he doesn't want to give them and he starts making that noise. And if you were aware of it, like, you know what it means, hey, he wants to fucking hurt the guy. So, and then those who became close to him in the next, in the following years that would become his like mafia life,

particularly his second wife, Barbara and his children would learn to recognize and dread the subtle sound as they, the precursor to the rages of his either homicidal moods or just straight violent ones. The murder of that homeless man kind of was just like Moving the overture like the window to a new more sinister phase of his development the west side of Manhattan Especially the dark kind of corners beneath the elevated highway kind of turned into his personal laboratory and hunting ground now I want to make up kind of say it up here that he claims and

That he's killed upwards of close to 200 people no way, dude. I don't think that number is accurate However, we do know that Tommy Patera killed likely 60 or 70 people the number likely even higher than that So I wouldn't be surprised if he is at least So I wouldn't be surprised if he is at least at the number that Tommy Patera was, if not higher, because as far as we know from Tommy Patera, like he had his cereal, but he didn't go out and like just stab people to see what would happen and like how he like tested himself. But this guy, you know, did. So there's a I fully believe this man probably killed a lot of people. He just didn't bury them in a graveyard of evidence

like Petera did where people could dig up body after body after body after body. So yeah, the West side of Manhattan, like I said, kind of just became his hunting ground. He would often just kind of roam these areas specifically to find victims for his quote unquote experiments. He obviously targeted the vulnerable, the homeless, the mentally ill, those isolated and alone individuals. He chillingly referred to

as practice people. He knew he fully knew like killing these people, the cops wouldn't care. They wouldn't want to deal with it. It'd be like too much work. The lesser the lesser dead as we've talked about, called them many, many times near very, for him, these were mere variables in his equation in a way. People's who disappear and wouldn't like would likely just never go unnoticed or unreported entirely. And of course he didn't limit himself to stabbing either. He began to kind of just like experiment in horrifying ways of killing people just out of curiosity.

Things like shooting them, strangling them, bludgeoning them with pipes, using ropes, wire, even a common screwdriver as a lethal weapon. And he would study like to a meticulous degree the effects of each technique, observing his victims reaction with the same detached curiosity they had shown when torturing the small animals when he was a kid. If one method proved too quick, too loud, or drew unwanted attention, it was summarily discarded from his tool belt, essentially. He wasn't merely killing.

He was systematically building his own effective toolkit of murder. One quote unquote experiment at a time. And these experiments would, for lack of a better way of phrasing it, pay off when he's really got involved with the mafia and they wanted very specific kinds of kills from him. And this awful trial and error of murder, he developed preferences. He liked certain ways more than others. A knife plunged into the base of the skull and thrust upwards into the brain, he discovered,

was both silent and instantly incapacitating. A precise aimed bullet, either just above the ear or under the jaw, was equally effective and final. An ice pick, easily concealable, proved also just as deadly as when driven through the eye socket or into the ear canal. He was methodically determining what caused the most immediate collapse, what resulted in the least amount of mess, and what was least likely to draw the attention of passerby or authorities. He wasn't necessarily like improvising as much as he was just

perfecting his craft. What he saw was he good at it. Oh, yeah. He was very, like I said that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like not like you like he is one of the most profound mafia killers in existence for a reason. Like he is known and he has a million documentaries about him for a reason. And of course, Hollywood had to try and make a weird ass like sympathetic movie showing him as a family man when he just threatened his family that he would have to kill them if he killed his accidentally killed their mom. You know, like that's where I was again.

Movie is garbage. Don't watch it. So, yeah, these gratuitous killings were just practice Curiosity, maybe just like maybe he's just bored sometimes Bodies would continue to turn up unidentified men Stabbed shot strangled their remains were all often abandoned under bridges or hastily concealed between dumpsters It's also important to know that he never would go out of his he went out of his way never to kill a woman or a child That was also like his weird principle. He only would kill men

So, I mean like I guess call it a principle whatever you want call it But the police often dealing with victims from transient populations Regularly failed to connect these these deaths in any way. To them, these appeared to be isolated incidents of bad luck, drug overdoses, violent squabbles among others, city vagrants. No one really suspected that a single methodical predator was running around doing different kinds of murder in different ways to see how it goes. Another thing about serial killers is they typically have their favorite way to do things.

Casey quickly learned his rope trick. Bundy would take his victims into the woods, tie him to a tree and, you know, torture them for days. This guy wasn't interested in finding a ritualistic way and killing people. He was just coldly curious about how different ways of killing people affected them. And you saw them as tools. So he was acutely kind of just aware anyway, he was obviously very acutely aware and in tune with this lack of scrutiny from the police and immediately just constantly exploited it.

These tests were not just about refining his methods for him. It was just making sure he perfected his craft. And as Richard honed his lethal skills on these poor fucking victims of Manhattan, he also mastered the art of compartmentalizing his existence with a weird, dramatically chilling precision. Like by day he could maintain a convincing enough facade of normalcy.

He would hold down odd jobs, adhere to somewhat regular hours, even participating in mundane neighborhood activities from time to time. No one who encountered him in these kind of contexts would have really suspected that he was the quiet, unassuming serial killer that was killing all these people. They may have suspected he was violent, like all that other stuff, which I feel like was kind of a regular thing for for back then. But no one really suspected of being quite what he was. The ability for him to seamlessly transition between that hidden life and his outward presented

life of norma normality became one of his more. Formidable weapons as well. We also see this in serial killers again,, Bundy, Gacy, everybody, he was fucking Gacy with the KFC. It's a joke in our fucking community, right? Like he was able to deliver these two lives and hide it from everybody. For him, he said that there was really no internal struggle

between the two, no warring dual identities or anything like that. That these were not two competing personas, which is a little different than the way Bundy or everybody else kind of phrases it. But just simply he kind of looked at it as different facets of this, of just him, of the same person that is coexisting without friction or internal conflict, which I think is even scarier because it's a weird way of him embracing this. So he's not shying away with it.

You know, again, other serial killers, uh, Dahmer, the only way he could kill the people that he would murder was he had to get fucking black out drunk before he would actually strangle these people. Like they all had their ways of like getting into the mindset for him in a weird meditative way. He looked at it and instead of in lay and he integrated it into himself. It was like this heinous part of me. I'm not going to heal it. That's who I am.

And he just accepted it. And that kind of made him scarier because he wasn't trying to hide from it. He'd left little room for fuck ups. And it was during this period of just constant escalating freelance, quote unquote, violence and his constant cultivation of his of compartmentalization of his life. That his personal world was on this cusp of yet another significant, but ultimately tragic turn as he was about to meet Barbara Petarici, the woman who would become his second wife and the mother to three of his children.

Now, at this point, his double life was already well in motion. Before Richard was fully embedded in the world of contract killing professionally, he did, like many serial killers, attempt to build a sort of normal whole life, though all of these attempts were deeply scarred by his own violence and control over the family he had to need to have his first for like kind of like significant a dip into domesticity began around the age of 16 as we've been talking about when he started living with a woman named Linda, a woman that was nine years older than he was. They resided together in Jersey City and have presented this facade of a

regular couple to the outside world, but of course, behind closed doors, Richard's violent nature was already very apparent. When Linda became pregnant, Richard, who had no genuine affection for her and did not want the fucking kid, demanded that she had an abortion. She refused, and in an effort to do it himself, he punched her in the stomach as hard as he could. But the pregnancy continued and their first child, a son they named Richard Jr. survived. That's so dark.

Why is he named Richard Jr.? Yeah, it's fucking, yeah, shit, dude. Yeah, he got like, hey, son, you know, I love you now, but I tried to murder you when you were still in your mom's stomach by punching dude a little bit like bomber dude Like there's a little projection there. No shit. Yeah, a little bit. It's like a tiny just a tiny little bit and despite his home violence and Lack of love for Linda Kuklinski married her at a city hall

Anyway later claiming that he did it for the kids sake and their relationship Did not improve. Did she have like good moments with him? if there were They don't get talked about Yeah, the relation never improved Richard controlled fucking everything he just came and went as he pleased his behavior was just He just came and went as he pleased his behavior was just volatile and unpredictable If Linda ever complained he would do what his fucking he learned through his family He just physically beat the fuck out of her Linda eventually had a second son with him named David in this turbulent Like this turbulent chapter with Linda would come to a very decisive end quickly after that after Richard discovered that she was with

another man named Sammy James. Fucking love that name at the Hudson Hotel. And so Richard beat James wildly bad. Huh? Nevermind. Okay, I think we're gonna get into it. You said you beat he beat James and I'm sorry, I was taking a moment because I was just like just very very badly in a feud of rage and Mutilated Linda by cutting off her nipples Whoa didn't kill her though. He didn't cross that line. Like you said he would never

Fuck man Later they got divorced a great shit great time Alex for a breather a little breather You want one? Yeah, yeah at the end of the episode. We're almost there Okay, a man goes to the doctor and he says man. This has to be the smallest doctor's office I've ever been and then the doctor says get out of here, man. I'm taking his shit Where's that come from that That's from our jokes. Awesome. Thank you. Reddit.

Sometime after his relationship with Linda, that's when Richard met Barbara Petarici. She was 18. She was an 18 year old Italian American working at the Swift line trucking company when Richard encountered her. He was immediately infatuated seeing Barbara as kind of like a departure from the woman he had previously known, and he pursued her intensely. And despite warnings from her boss about Richard and not doing it, and the initial disapproval of her own family, she did it anyway.

Fuck it. Love can't be stopped, baby. And they began their relationship. And this relationship was obviously immediately tainted by Richard's possessiveness and brutality and when Barbara expressed expressed a desire for hey maybe I need a little space he stabbed her in the back with a humped hunting knife as a warning and threatened to kill her entire family if she ever left him Not killing her though. Well, that's romantic

That's like I get it. I want to kill your family. You can't leave. I need you. That's a bummer Yeah, and so what else then Barbara basically is now trapped what the fuck else you gonna do this poor woman? Yeah, is it goddamn trapped in the situation where. And the thing is, like, he would do it like he is one of the ones that truly like it's more than a threat. He would actually go through with the whole goddamn thing, I guarantee it. So soon after Barbara became pregnant, she fled terrified at that point to her father in Miami.

She just couldn't take it after she she got pregnant, she was too scared, but Richard was relentless and eventually tracked her down. And after Barbara's mother, Genevieve provided Richard with money to finalize his divorce from Linda. Richard and Barbara were married in a simple ceremony at Miami city hall. He found her and then their own parents paid off his divorce and then they got married. Good God.

And of course, so of course the fucking cycle of violence continued with fucking Barbara. She suffered a miscarriage after Richard and a fit of rage forced her to sit on a metal stool all night. They returned to New Jersey after getting married in Miami where Barbara would endure constant abuse and lose two more babies. One of those miscarriages directly followed a severe beating from Richard despite. So again, the movie is shit. The movie is a lie.

The movie is a lie. The 2012 movie is garbage despite, but despite this domestic backdrop, Richard and Barbara eventually did have three children who survived Their first born daughter Merrick born on March in March of 1964 followed by another daughter Chris and later a son Dwayne to the and again much to everybody has on the outside of all this Richard Continued to try and cultivate the image of a dedicated family man. He took his kids shopping and showered them with toys and groceries. However, to his children and with Barbara, he was obviously just a figure of pure terror, a monster.

Infamously he told his eldest daughter that he also warned his this family that he would kill them all if his mom died The kids have to die too and he maintained a rule of never physically striking the children that he had with Barbara But the psychological torment was fucking constant instead I mean this man just said I'll kill you like yeah I get it his moods constantly shift from, in an instant from cracking a joke to just explosive violent rage, smashing furniture, terrorizing the entire household. And the children learned to recognize that dreaded clicking sound that he made from the side of his mouth, the tick that often accompanied his violent intent.

And Barbara did attempt to leave him once, but Richard found her again, dragged her back, and then beat her into submission. And from that point on, she and the children remained trapped. Behind the facade of their suburban home, Richard Kuklinski was now the provider and the predator all in one. By the time he was in his early 20s, his ability to just withstand cold, deliberate violence was just well established. His actions were just calculated decisions carried out with an eerie, like, this is my job mood. And when the author of the book

that I used, Philip Corlow, like asked him what he felt during these acts, much like his response to everything else, he said, nothing, nothing. He claimed he felt no guilt, no pleasure, none of it. He was just totally detached, which made him an ideal candidate for the brutal world of organized crime. And it was around this period that his kind of his like efficient murder capabilities caught the attention of none other than Carmine Genovese, not the infamous, not the infamous New York crime boss, but a soldier for the de Cavalacante family in New Jersey, nicknamed Meatball, because his head looked like a meatball.

Well, I mean, yeah, dude. Okay. All right. We're back in it. We're back in cartoon land again. Welcome back. We're out of like the worst cable television show you ever heard and back into cartoon comedy. Yeah. Now it's Dick Tracy, dude.

Yeah. Word had reached Meatball about some Polish enforcer who didn't flinch and execute a task with zero hesitation. So one afternoon, Carmine invited Richard and the leftovers of the last remaining heroin addicts of the Coming Up Roses crew that he was once a part of to his Hoboken home. And this wasn't like a dimly lit back room meeting. This was like a Jersey style traditional lunch as meat sauce and sausage fried. Carmine had some casual conversation. They had some cheap red wine.

Slit a, this like your typical, like what you would expect in a movie. Sure. Like of these mafia. Don't you call that wine cheap in front of him though. That would never. He'll start. He'll start ticking. As they were having casual conversation in a cliche way, Carmine slid across the table, a grainy black and white photograph.

And the photo showed a man that was stepping into a black Lincoln. All Carmine said to him was, uh, this guy right here in Lincoln Park. He's a problem. He's got to go That was it. The instructions were clear. That was that was all I got to go The hit had to be clean fast and silent success was really the only matter so the Reunited with the with his old gang the crew staked out the targets house Observing for routines trying to figure out when the best time to hit him would be and when the opportune moment arrived One of the gang members that was with him Who was supposed to carry out the hit?

froze Instead he was pointing the gun at him and he just was unable to pull the trigger All he was able to pull the trigger. All he was able to say is, I can't do it. I can't do it. So Richard very calmly took the 32 revolver from him stating very simply, I'll do it. And he executed the mark with a single shot to the back of the head. And the next day he actually returned to Carmine's house, and Carmine was surprised to see them

because he didn't think, he think it'd be a few days that before he got the hit. They did it in under 24 hours. And when he came back, there was already a newspaper like headline about the murder. And when he showed them the newspaper, cause he was confused, he said, ah, you sons of bitches, you did it. Bravo.

And brought them into the house, poured them all drinks and paid them each 500 bucks. 500 bucks each, baby, just to kill him. And Richard said, and he looked at Richard and said, literally to him, you kid, you have a future. There was no formal induction, no oath, just the promise of more work would be coming his way because, god damn, that was smooth. And the work did indeed come quickly. Carmine began assigning Richard contracts that demanded more than just simple executions.

Some required bodies to vanish without a trace. Others called for the victim to endure a meant suffering before death. In one kind of instance mentioned in the book, a man was taken to the Pine Barrens, tied to a tree, gagged, stripped, and left to be devoured alive by rats. Richard apparently filmed the entire thing, delivered the tape to Carmine as proof, who then doubled the payment for the extraordinary suffering that was inflicted. Like he told him he has to suffer, kill him. He has to suffer.

This shit was like an English teacher saying I need a creative writing page one, creative writing thing, one page long. And you hand him like 20 pages, a short story like this. He didn't expect this level of credit. Professionalism. Pying him into a tree, ganging him, letting rats eat him alive. Another time to ensure a body would never be properly identified by confusing the time of death, Richard utilized a technique that he's, he was said to have kept the victim's body in an ice cold well for nearly two years before he would go back and dump it this method

basically along like with freezing bodies is how we earned his nickname but we'll get to that in a future episode yeah he was he worked cleanly swiftly and never ever ever asked questions this was the arena where Kuklinski truly excelled he wasn't a made man and not being Italian. He could never formally be part of the family. I don't know how much you remember about the Tommy Patera stuff, but being a made man is basically like what Tommy became. I think if I remember correctly, you got you get the apartment,

the money, infinite riches. You have people who work for you all this stuff, but he was Polish. So he could not be part of the family officially. But he would become something even more valuable to a lot of these people, their preferred independent contractor, the outsider who delivered results and maintained absolute silence.

And as his contracts grew in complexity and his body count mounted, the distinction between his personal proclivities and his professional assignments just dissolved. The killings became his routine. He wasn't just a tool the mob could use. This man was turning into the specialist they relied upon for the most gruesome, heinous, and sensitive tasks any mob could give somebody. People disappeared, some were never found,

others surfaced too late, their bodies offering no useful clues regardless, and Richard remained a ghost in these operations. He didn't linger around, he never revisited, he didn't drink or get drunk, never left a mess. He simply appeared, did what he was told to do, and then fucking vanished. And with the, did what he was told to do, and then fucking vanished. And with the significant money that he was now making with the mob, because they paid

him and he loved it, and it was like the most money ever made from just one job, he would eventually buy himself a Lincoln. He would wear tailored suits and continued to play a part of that ordinary blue collar New Jersey family man taking his children shopping and bringing home groceries But underneath it all he was the murderer for the fucking mob and those who paid him obviously knew precisely who he was and to avoid him if you didn't need to deal with him and Soon that reputation brought him into contact with one of the most violent figures in mafia history, Roy DeMeo. Oh shit.

DeMeo, a soldier in the Gambino crime family, operated a notoriously brutal crew out of the Gemini Lounge in Brooklyn. He was intelligent, exceedingly dangerous, and like Kuklinski, had a penchant for kind of just building up a body rack, like just a lot of dead bodies behind him. Their meeting wasn't like a matter of chance either, but just kind of inevitable with the

path that he was on. And De Maio wasn't concerned that Kuklinski wasn't Italian either. What he valued was Kuklinski's unflinching ability to do what others would not do or could not do. And they would eventually form an alliance that marked a huge escalation for Kuklinski because he was no longer just the freelancer for a New Jersey family. He was stepping into what he called the major leagues of organized crime,

about to collaborate with one of the most violent crews the American mob had ever produced. And that's when we'll pick up in part two with Kuklinski now firmly in the orbit of Roy de Mayo That is formidable Cambino network and what came next was far more structured far more prolific and far more disturbing than anything We talked about in this episode because now he's not an outsider. He's becoming essential This is no wonder they made a movie about it though. It's like fascinating in like a character growth way Yep, and this is the area where he would maybe where he not he would maybe he would

technically become Brush paths with Tommy Patera. This is where going into the Mayo and going into New York and all that stuff where Patera is working with the mob who is part of the family who did work with the Gambino crime family. Even though he was working with the begins the B I can't remember it. This is where the universe you know Benino. Yeah, I think that's correct.

But yeah, this is where the universe comes together. I think it is no no no no no no no no family. The banana banana like that. But this is where like the universe cross paths because they're active at the same time and This is like this is the New England mob So you got two serial killers kind of actively working for but again, that's what we'll pick up next week That's the end of episode one for Richard Kuklinski the Iceman We're back in the mob world, baby the mob world in the serial killer world married together again. There you go. Hey boys feeling, uh,

you want to take us out on a joke, Alex, a nice breath of fresh air. Sure. You know what? Just to wipe that clean. Hey, what would you, what would you call Pac-Man if he owned a chocolate factory? Ready? Willy wonka wonka wonka wonka wonka wonka wonka wonka wonka wonka wonka solid dad joke. I'm here. Yes. Yeah I like our jokes good. Oh god. All right. Thank you guys for supporting us We'll be back next week when the other episode we're gonna do mini soda red major not comps. I'll shoot a pot We appreciate you. We love you. Bye. Thank you for 300 episodes. Goodbye Anyway

Me and my wife were sitting outside indulging on our porch one night enjoying ourselves. I needed to go to the bathroom so I stepped back inside and after a few moments I hear my wife go, holy shit get out of here. So I quickly dash back outside, she's looking up at the sky in awe. I look up too and there's a perfect line of dozen lights traveling across the sky. I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man

I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man I'm gonna be a man, I'm gonna be a man Thanks for watching! We'll be right now.

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