Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 326: Richard Kuklinski Part I - Origins of the Iceman

Episode Date: August 4, 2018

On the first of our three part series, we cover one of the most successful hitmen (serial killers?) of our age: Richard Kuklinski. Join us as we discuss his terrible upbringing, his early years as the head of the Coming Up Roses gang, and the possibly dozens of men he murdered in New York City in the fifties just for the practice. Save 30% on your 23andMe Health + Ancestry service kit through August 9th at http://23andme.com/left

There's no place to escape to. This is the last talk. On the left. That's when the cannibalism started. What was that? So I remember growing up with the mob, right? And it wasn't, like, good fellas kind of mob. I always felt like, I think I grew up with C.T. mob. Yeah, like the potato mafia. Who was the mob of your little Polish neighborhood? It was the Gambino family. It was during Gotti's reign. And I remember it was just a big fat guy. He'd be like, hey, come over here. Hey, chubby little kid, come over here.

And I'm like, mister, the only thing I want to do is entertain. And he's like, okay, okay, how about this. Me and my boys sit over here in this couch and you jiggle around like you're my wife and I'll give you a free Pepsi. Hey, it was like the potato mafia. And so I would go and I would make yucks at the mob guys and then they give me a free soda from the soda machine. And the whole time I was like, wow.

Showbiz. So he had to give me this bag filled with stuff and they say take it to the guy on the corner and I just go, you got it, mister. And they just like walk over and drop off a bag. And so I'm a made man. Yeah, if you weren't so unbelievably awkward and inept, you might have had to work for the mob. Okay, this is the last podcast on the Left, everyone. I am Ben Kissel. Look at it, Marcus Parks.

Hello. How are you, buddy? And then a beautiful, horribly hot Los Angeles because he's not wearing a t-shirt. Henry Zabrowski. It's belly slap time. It's belly slap time. Here comes the bats. Look at that. Watch out. All right. Well, Henry told the mafia story up top here

because that ties into the subject of today. This dude, he's known as the Iceman. His name is Richard Kuklinski. Kuklinski. Kuklinski. And I'm going to say mean guy. I'm just going to throw that out there. Brave.

Brave. Brave. Well, Richard Kuklinski was an unrepentant murderer who killed at least 100 and possibly as much as 200 people during his 30-year career as a freelance mafia hitman for New York's infamous five families in addition to two New Jersey mob families. And that's a big get. To have somebody who can operate for all of the different families is very difficult.

You have to be very good at your job, technically, quote unquote, swish, swish, swish. And also, we are not normally a mob podcast. No. No. Right. A lot of us, because mob guys, you know what I mean? It's a job for the most part. And so for us, it's like, normally it's like, we'll get to Al Capone when we're on year like 15 of doing the show.

And we're also doing like, sometimes food goes bad. Marcus, what's one of the top 10 worst bad foods? Oh, that's great, actually. Apples, oranges. But pizza never goes bad. Exactly. Kuklinski is a special. Yes, absolutely.

And I do wonder if you registered with the Freelancers Union to get health care. That's important. Now, Kuklinski never once failed to fulfill a contract, nor did one ever go even slightly askew. From the moment Richard took a contract, you were a dead man walking. Yikes. The media dubbed him the ice man. But to those who knew and feared him, he was simply called the devil.

The devil. Oh, even a scarier term. Why does media make these people like give them the awesome nicknames? Because Dean Malinka was a wrestler named the Ice Man, and he was just boring. But this man, nothing boring about this guy. His bosses were scared of him. Yes. His family was scared of him.

His friends were scared of him. He was six foot five, 300 pounds, kissles fucking size. He could move like a cat. They said that he naturally moved on the balls of his feet. Yeah. He moved silently. He could move silently. Imagine being your size, but still being able to hide.

Oh, imagine me being flexible and in shape. No, I'm not going to do that. I just don't feel like going down that road. Kuklinski wasn't in shape. Kuklinski was 300 pounds of beer and pierogi. But he comes from a long line of, like me, deceptively able Polish people. Deceptively physically able. The fastest man within 10 feet, we showed it on the stream.

He is, and he could just do it and he would pride himself. I mean, like, the funny thing about me is, is that you never see me coming. And you're like, stop it. Creepy. That needs to be on your tombstone, by the way. The fastest man within 10 feet. I love it. No, the biggest question when it comes to Richard Kuklinski and when it comes to

Hitman and assassins in general is this, can and should Richard Kuklinski be classified as a serial killer? All right, I'm going to withhold my opinion. This is a question. Thank you, Ben. No problem. It's withheld. This is a question that we hope to answer by the end of our three-part series.

However, this question, as well as Kuklinski's story, is muddied by the mythology that has sprung up around Kuklinski owing mostly to the 2013 Michael Shannon movie, The Iceman. Marcus, you are unseasonably mad about The Iceman. I am incensed about this movie. You were texting me at like 2 o'clock in the morning, just being like, this is a shame of what this does. I cannot believe that the tarnishing of the American flag in this movie does come out. Did you leave a comment on Rotten Tomatoes, Why Any Chance?

Because that's too much. I can't say. Re-watch the movie this week. This movie is among the most offensive adaptations out there of a true crime story. It paints Kuklinski as a sympathetic, loving family man who was forced into killing and never killed anyone who didn't deserve it and only got angry at his family like twice. Hey, dog meat, I would say it's like he got mad at his family twice, but it lasted for 15 years at a stretch.

To the day he stopped being mad, one of them just fucking had it, you know, leave the cabinets open, and then all of a sudden you walk through and you try to take something out of the bottom cabinet, you lift your head up and you fucking pop your head in the corner of the fucking cabinet door, and I'll kill the whole family. Yeah, and it swells up like an animated cartoon there, and then you gotta push it down with your finger, but then it comes out your temple. I know how it works. So they gave him sort of the John Cusack treatment from gross point in blank.

They made him like a lovable character. I wouldn't say lovable, not necessarily. They made him very sympathetic. Okay. Now in reality, Kuklinski was a dead-eyed, murderous force of nature who terrorized his wife and three children constantly. He brutally beat his wife as a matter of course and openly told his kids that if he ever accidentally killed her, he'd have to kill them too in the cover-up.

Again, I'm not gonna say this is a reasonable thing to say to your family. No, it's not. But he's correct. It's what has to be done. Well, I do think that he was speaking matter of factly, which is probably why it makes it more terrifying because he wasn't joking. Or maybe this is a Polish mafia joke. I don't know.

No, no, no, no. As far as the sweetness goes, he always made sure to tell his oldest daughter that he'd have the hardest time killing her because she was his favorite. What? Thank you. Like, what, do you say to that exactly? It's technically a compliment from him because Richard Kuklinski, once we get into it, you're gonna see that he legitimately, not even as a bit, killed every single one of his friends

in a very bizarre, organized Berserker mode. The only way a professional contract killer could go into Berserker mode in which he systematically murders every single person that he knows. Okay. Berserker mode, that ties into serial killers and withholding judgment, but I'm putting that in the file. Yes. But it's not Berserker mode because Berserker mode is completely and totally unhinged.

This was controlled, this was calculated, and it was pulled off perfectly. I'm taking it out of the file. And, you know, as far as his family goes, all that shit, that's not even mentioning the first family that he completely abandoned. Richard Kuklinski was not a family man. He was not the family man serial killer. He was a piece of shit. And as far as his murders went, he by no means only killed, quote, unquote, bad guys.

If Richard Kuklinski is to be believed, he killed numerous motorists for actions as innocent as flipping him off in traffic. Can we say this, though, about the first family? They really dodged a bullet. They really did. They really did. Out of all the, like, you hear stories about, like, parents or fathers leaving the family, but in this case, probably a good thing.

And as far as killing people goes, as far as just murdering random people, he won't shot a dude in the forehead with a crossbow just to see how well it would work. This is what you have to remember. How it went down. Yeah. Guys, it's just, he pulled his car over. He bought a brand new crossbow. Oh my.

He's fucking with it. And he's just like, hey, I don't know if this is going to be doing anything, or if this is some kind of fun little lock, I can kind of swing around. He sees a guy on the corner and he's like, hey, excuse me, give me. And the guy walks over, he's like, yes. And he shoots him in the head with a crossbow, just as he's looking in the fucking window. And that's it. That's all he did.

Could have done without that, sir. I mean, that is horrifying. He's like Jason Voorhees in an urban environment. He's about the size of Jason Voorhees. Good lord. Now, although he certainly killed many of his victims with shots to the chest and knives to the brainstem, as the movie portrayed, what they didn't portray is that he constantly found new and inventive ways to kill victims based on how much his mob contractors wanted

the marks to suffer. He was so into the idea of finding new ways to kill people that he'd watch Wiley Coyote cartoons and take notes. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, if you know someone who watches Wiley Coyote cartoons and takes notes, it's either someone who maybe, I don't want to be, I'm not going to malign anyone, but maybe it's not the larger bus, or it's someone who was a serial killer, or a hitman, rather.

It technically sounds like a mentally handicapped person planning their wedding, but he is there. And that is he. We love everyone on this. He is watching the cartoons and they'll be like, the thing is, though, how can I get a rubber band that big, I'm not a good enough painter, in order to do that trump-tally-ole on the wall to convince people that the highway keeps going. Yeah.

But if only I could have been good if my father just let me paint like I wanted him to. Just got a bunch of rubber black circles lying all over the house he throws against the wall just to run through. You fall down. Hey, Barbara, come here. See if you fall down this. God. God damn it.

God damn it. Yeah, he ripped off guys' tongues and shoved them up their asses. Oh my God. I don't remember that in a Wiley cartoon. He used road flares to burn off dudes' genitals. And other guys, he left to a fate so cruel and inhuman that we're going to have to wait to explain that one fully. Okay.

Yeah. This is a three-part series. And we're going to be covering quite a bit of the mayhem that Richard Kuklinski caused. What I will say though is a lot of the beginning ideas were kind of given to him by his bosses. But also, when you just give him like freestyle moment, like if you just so like, and Richie, you just take this one. You just do what you're going to do. And the way the guy, because Richard was one of those very silent types.

So he would barely speak a word, which is interesting as to how it would pan out to now having three hours worth of documentary on the books. And I said, he sits and he's just, he would go, and then they leave and you know those bosses are all like, God, I should have just told him to shoot him in the head, right? So he's basically the hitman equivalent of running. He's running the triangle. Bill Jackson's the triangle. You got a lot of leeway.

You can really kind of create whatever you want. Richie starts building his library by grabbing old copies of VHS's of Nickelodeon's Doug to see if there's anything in there, like some rug rats. Now granted, some of these guys that he murdered had committed grievous acts of violence. And one could even argue that some of them might have deserved it. But half the time, Richard didn't even know what these people had done. If the boss said, make them suffer, they suffered. And whenever Richard could, he enjoyed it up close and personal.

This is a clip of him saying why. What did you want him to think as they died? I see my pretty face. I take it to them what the last thing they ever saw was me. And if they carry that glimpse to eternity, infinity or whatever it is, I'm going to be thinking of me all that time. Yikes. Yeah.

Now I have a question. Now did he carry a boombox that played that ominous music at all times like the Joker had the laughing machine in his pocket? You hear it. It's like, oh man, Iceman's here, at least make sure. You know what he likes, get him a hot dog Chicago style and two Boilermakers. That sounds good. Now Richard Kuklinski did at least have some morals, pretty much no women or children.

But the perspective on Kuklinski taken in the Iceman is similar to if we made a movie about John Wayne Gacy and just focused on how great of a clown he was. That's a fantastic movie. I'm saying, honestly, I want to play that. I want to do that where it's truly just John Wayne Gacy wanted to be a classic boof all and then everybody was just getting in his way. I do like, I love the whole movie happening, just John Wayne Gacy as the cloud and then at the very end, just a screen, 29 bodies were found on the floorboards of Mr. Gacy.

And then just leave everybody like, what, what did we just watch? Now, the reason why we know so much about Kuklinski is because Richard talked as we've already heard. He began with an HBO documentary in the early 90s called The Iceman Tapes, Conversations with a Killer. Now, it seems like the movie Iceman, the Michael Shannon movie, took its narrative from just this first documentary, ignoring everything else Kuklinski and his family said afterwards. In this first one, Kuklinski's portrayed as, you know, like the movie, you know, as

a family man who just happened to be a vicious killer and even his wife speaks of him in fond terms. But Kuklinski kept talking. He did two more HBO documentaries and each time he was more and more truthful. And finally, he was most forthcoming with author Philip Carlo, whose book, The Iceman, Confessions of a Contract Killer, makes up the bulk of the information we'll be using for this series. And I like to imagine that our audience, for the most part, is a little bit more true

crime educated than other audiences, and it's probably seen the documentaries more so than seeing the Michael Shannon movie. So I think people really kind of get a glimpse more of what the animal is, and it's more just the what Hollywood does, and the way it kind of, they fuck things up, where it's like the movie would have been so much better if you just did it like it was in reality. And you had Michael Shannon actually just get to be the Iceman. I mean, because that was, that sold me to begin with, I was like, oh, I love Michael Shannon.

It's like, I want to see him fucking do the tree, which we'll find out what the tree is later. I want to see him do that shit. Now, there are a few reasons why I'm more inclined to believe Kuklinski over other killers. First, the more Kuklinski and his family talk, the worse they all sound. Nobody comes out looking good here in the end. Some of his stories do sound just a little bit too good to be true, but he's not like a lot of other guys like Dennis Nielsen who make themselves sound better as time goes

on finding excuses for their behavior. But what we do have with Kuklinski is there are news stories that back up a lot of his crimes. There's a lot of stuff that you could tie to that he did do this shit. But I also, I do believe he trumped some of it up, but I think we're in the world of like when we did the Satanic government or we do any of these type of things where it's like, if even just 10% of it is true, it's pretty insane. Right.

Yeah. After he spoke in the HBO documentaries, they cleared 13 cold cases. Just on him talking about shit and then taking what he said and matching it up with police records and news stories at the time. I think the reasons why Kuklinski talked were simple. First, he was proud of his work. He was one of the best in America and therefore one of the best in the world, but he'd never been able to talk about it so openly because before he had to think about both getting

caught and the safety of his family. But by the time he talked to Philip Carlow in the 2000s, he'd been in prison for nearly 20 years and the mob families he'd worked for were either completely dismantled or dead by the time he talked. Kuklinski felt like he had carte blanche, but as we'll see, Kuklinski may have been wrong on that point. Okay. Dead wrong.

Yep. Yeah. But also, yeah, yeah. Good work. Good work. Talk to me. Thank you. I will say, he is also in many ways obviously terrible man, horrible monster, but he was

the Polish warrior that my home country needed in the 30s because if your grandfather came over that hill, stomped like as he's walking backwards into Warsaw, and he looked over and he saw Kuklinski doing the fucked up shit that he's doing, we maybe could have had a little bit of a fighting chance. Yeah, maybe, maybe. So Richard Kuklinski, as per the diagnosis he received in the third HBO documentary, The Iceman and the Psychiatrist, suffered from antisocial personality disorder, and a part of that disorder is complete and total fearlessness.

As Dr. Park Dietz explains, some people who have inherited this disorder become race car drivers, experimental test pilots, bomb squad technicians, or any other number of high risk, high pressure professions. All guys that are currently fucking your girlfriend when you're not around. Oh my goodness. And maybe people who used to jump horses off of high platforms. Yeah, but guess who's doing the jumping in that? The horse.

So what it comes down to is the horse is the one that's doing the fearful part, not the man on top of the horse. He's actually, maybe he's the only one who truly understands what's happening, but the horse still has to do the jumping. That's true. These guys usually turn out good because they come from loving, caring families. But the guys with this disorder that come from an abusive background usually take a different path altogether.

In other words, nature gives them a tool and nurture determines how that tool is used. And you can probably guess what kind of childhood Richard Kuklinski had. Honestly. Nice one. No. No. No. No.

Try again. Natalie actually was talking to me about this, about how the big, she was talking about the history of stunt people. She had a lot of original stunt people were guys that were just who didn't give a fuck. So they're like, yeah, I'll jump through a fucking window. Yeah, I'll get hit by a car. They were just like crazy guys with no fear that we'll just do fucked up shit. Which I think is the majority of hit men as well.

Like I've been trying to find research as to whether or not there were other ones like Kuklinski that took their work so quote unquote personally. And I'm certain that there was and we'll probably hear about it. I love people, listeners, if you know stories of other fucked up hit men please send because I love reading about them. But I wonder where the differences are. Yeah. So Richard Leonard Kuklinski was born April 11th, 1935 in Jersey City, New Jersey to

an evil sociopath named Stanley and a hollow shell of a woman named Anna, a woman that Richard would later call simply cancer. I would have named maybe something like AIDS, but that's got to do with fucking. But I'm talking about my mother, okay? You say one more to just spag the my mother. I can't say anything bad about your mother, but you nicknamed her cancer. How is that fair? Come here.

What? I got this crossbow. It's fun, right? Could have done without that. Stanley, Richard's father was Polish and had immigrated from Warsaw while Anna was an orphan whose father had died of pneumonia while her mother had been hit and killed by a truck soon after. Jeez.

It's like the beginning of Johnny dangerously. She grew up being beaten by nuns and molested by priests, so her demeanor was possibly a little more understandable with even Richard saying that she was a victim of her own life. The way that my mom and my uncles and my father and his uncles talk casually about how often everyone was molested by priests in the 1940s and 50s is fucking brutal. Yes. The way they just toss it out, they were like, yeah, and so once he was done molesting me, then we went down to the park and played handball and we were just like, Jesus Christ.

What was that first part again? You know what? Let's skip it. Let's just go to the park. Well, Stanley, on the other hand, was just pure evil, at least from his family's perspective. He was a violent drunk, but the beatings could come at any time. It's just that when he drank, the beatings got worse. And so Richard Kuklinski grew up facing unprovoked beatings on an almost daily basis.

Richard was so afraid of his father that he would sometimes wet himself at nothing more than the sound of his father's voice. And guess what that did to his father? Made him real fucking mad every single time he pissed his pants in front of him so we'd wail on him again. To a very, very horrible cycle and the father looked like flat top from Dick Tracy. Really? Scary.

I don't like this Stanley guy one bit. Oh, no. No. And it wasn't just Richard who was on the receiving end of the violence. Anna got it too, to the point where Stanley once stabbed his own wife in the back. Jesus. But neither one got it as bad as Richard's frail older brother, Florian. Well, Stanley liked to hit Florian on the back of the head and we're not talking slaps

here. We're talking bull on punches. And Stanley, he was a railroad breakman, he was a small guy, but they said he was strong as a bull. I'm sure. So one night, Stanley hit Florian over and over again in the back of the head until the young boy fell to the floor and never got up. He killed his kid?

He beat his own son to death. Right in front of the family because you remember, this is like tenement housing, they lived in like one room, so it's like he beat him to fucking death in front of his own family and Richard, they're all just sitting and watching and then he's like, the father has to turn around and be like, this didn't happen. Like honestly, like they all, because he was also a Polish native and they all like everyone had to turn the other way immediately. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And just go back to eating like, oh, Salisbury steak is on the table. Like, I mean, how crazy is that? Yeah, and they just told everyone in the neighborhood that he fell down the stairs. And they're all, everyone nodded in unison. I was like, oh, because they were all also burying a son that they just accidentally beat him.

Yeah. Are your stairs by any chance made of human knuckles? Because that seems to be what looks like in the back of his head. But it's true. I bought my house on this new real estate. Have you, this real estate agent, have you met, his name is David Cronenberg? But after this, instead of Stanley learning a lesson, Richard's beatings only got worse. Oh no.

And his mother was just as bad as Stanley. Richard's mother once beat Richard so hard with a broomstick that Richard passed out and when he woke up, it took him a while to remember his own name. And this was after Florian was killed. Dog meat, give them some credit. He said that he did lay off for almost a month. After Florian died, it was a one-month hiatus, one-month break. He would go like, ooh.

And everyone would be like, no, this is a reasonable time. And they're like, oh yes, yes, we're reasonable now and at last we're a very short period of time. Crazy. And the beatings didn't just come from home. Richard, who was a bit of a late bloomer, spent a lot of his childhood and adolescence as tall but thin and somewhat fragile. So he got the shit beat out of him by bullies in the neighborhood on a regular basis.

But Richard was also getting lessons in violence from his father. One day, Richard ran home for comfort after a neighborhood pummeling and when he told his dad what had happened, Stanley beat him with a belt and told him to get his ass back out there and take care of it. I feel like he would really like that song, Jeremy, by Pearl Jeremy. I think he might really get into it. And so Richard went back down and beat the livin' fuck out of the two boys who'd beaten him earlier.

And then when the boys' father came down to stop it, Stanley came down too and beat the hell out of him, knockin' him out in one punch. He said, yeah, you didn't do anything when my boy was gettin' beat up, but then when your boys were losin' you come down, so he just fuckin' one punched his ass. And the way they described it, the way Kuhlinski described it, is that his father jumped out the front window and landed on his feet and ran out and beat the shit out of the dude. Have you ever seen your dad jump? I did one time.

I hope they tried to think it was possible. I did it one time and it was terrifying. I watched my father, like, move fast, one time, and I was like, oh, wow, he actually, he can move fast. Is it strange to think that that was actually kind of a sweet moment in his childhood when his father defended him at least? I don't think so. I don't think so.

I don't think so. I don't know. It was more like you're beatin' up my property. Well, sure. Yeah, it wasn't like you're beatin' up somebody I love, it's like, I beat the fuck out of my boy. You don't beat the fuck out of my boy. When I was a child, I was basically in home during the winter time and these kids, these

bullies, threw a bunch of snowballs at me. I fell off my bicycle and I was weeping like the young kid in Christmas story, just crying and crying. And then my father went over there, he knocked on their door, and the guy hid in the bathroom and my father screamed at him, and it was very cool. And they were like juniors in high school, I was in sixth grade. I just don't really understand why anybody beats up on the big kid. I don't understand that mentality.

You prefer the big kid, you groom him to be your protector. That's what I understood. We have a finite amount of time where you can bully the big kid because our brains, we just want to be loved, and then everyone's like, you can't be loved, you're too big. And then it takes a long time for us to love ourselves enough to say, you know what, stop pickin' on me. Don't pick on me anymore. That's what I told them.

Kissel, can I just ask this, you may not be able to answer this on air. But where are the bodies? Oh, come on, I live in an apartment for crying out loud. Well, after the incident with the two boys and Richard's father, Richard learned a lesson. He learned that he could turn violence to his advantage. Stanley and Anna had a couple more kids after that, including Richard's brother, Joseph, who we'll get to later. Yeah, yikes.

Yikes on Joseph. Yikes. Big yikes on Joe. Big yikes on Joseph. Okay, wait for that. But eventually, Stanley shacked up with a Polish woman, and for the most part, left the family alone. The Polish women satisfied.

Okay. But by that point- I'm going to get a T-shirt that says that for myself. But by that point, the die had already been cast in Richard. By the time he'd reached adolescence, Richard had already fulfilled two out of the three points of the McDonald Triad, and to give a refresher, the McDonald Triad is a set of three factors that occur in childhood that are predictors for future violence. Red Wedding, arson, and animal cruelty, and Richard managed to combine two out of the three.

Creative! I guess. He started by tying the tails of stray cats together and throwing them over clotheslines just to see the cats rip each other apart. But his most cruel habit was throwing cats down the incinerator in his apartment building. He'd throw them down the chute, turn on the incinerator, and then sit and watch through the window as the cats would try to claw their way back up. I just feel like you're waiting for an accident with the incinerator in the apartment complex.

I don't think they'd do that anymore, and it seems like it was a horrible idea to start with. Who's building the apartment and be like, let's put a fire in the middle of it? What kind of thinking is that? Yeah, why do- why does every apartment building need a crematorium? There's no real reason. But he would say he- Richard Kuklinski, I think in the comparison will come up again and again, is very similar to Carl Pansram because he did have a- he did have a sort

of a self-conscious- like he would seek within himself like questions about why is he the way he is. And he said after the fact that the reason why he murdered the animals is because he was curious about why he didn't feel anything. Yeah. Where you'd sit and he'd throw them and then he'd be like, I should be feeling something. Like why don't I feel it? Wow.

And it's like, I don't know the name of the condition, but when you don't feel any physical pain, he didn't feel any emotional pain. Not really. No. And he- and dogs, hell, he'd do it to dogs too. Like he'd find dogs, pour gasoline on them, light them on fire, watch them run around. He'd bludgeon dogs to death, he'd tie them to the bumpers of buses, and eventually he killed so many animals that the whole neighborhood completely bereft of strays.

He called it his pastime. I mean, but they had to notice that something was going on. Like, did anyone try to stop him and be like, hey, Richard, come over here, let's have some cake, let's not kill a dog today. We are of a generation that has begun to infantilize our dogs and cats because our generation's not really having many kids. Back in the day, I do believe that they would look at stray dogs and cats as a nuisance. And again, it's more of a, oh, that huge kid's doing his hobby again.

And they have to go and be like, oh, thank God, because they would attack, they would attack our rutabagas. I don't know what that is. 1930, what was it, the 1940s, I suppose. This is 30s, 40s, yeah. So since Richard's mother only worked menial jobs and there were four mouths to feed in the house, Richard started stealing food to make sure everyone had something to eat from Drake's delivery trucks to train cars.

The classic Drake's? Oh, the classic Drake's? Drake cakes? Drake cakes, yeah. Coffee, Drake's coffee cakes. Yeah, I mean, he just started stealing food to eat and then he found that he liked stealing. So he started moving up to stealing cars and he also engaged in petty theft, particularly the true crime magazines, which he'd take every week from the local candy store.

It wasn't long before Richard realized that the only thing he'd ever be good at was crime. He was the first true crime super fan to then also use that knowledge for himself. He understood early on being like, oh, I'm a criminal, oh, this is what I do. Right. Sort of like a Charles Manson, I guess, in that regard, right? He was a professional criminal. He's also just, I mean, he's just straight on pansoram. He's just straight on, like, he is a, he's a villain.

That's why we'll talk about, again, serial killer, I don't know, villain, yes. Like would you call Genghis Khan a serial killer? I mean, technically, he is like the, you know, to use again, the Dan Carlin, the capital G, great man, but that doesn't, doesn't necessarily mean good man. You know, with Genghis Khan, I wouldn't call him a serial killer to his face anyway. That is for sure. And please, Henry, it's Genghis Khan. Oh my God.

Oh my God. God damn it. God damn it. Good Lord. He's dealing true crime books and becoming a criminal, uh, mags, and becoming a criminal while he does it. Mm-hmm. Well, out of those true crime magazines, the kind of crime that Richard paid attention

to the most was Myrder. Really? Myrder. I don't know, I just had a vision of a centerfold for a true crime magazine, just like a Glock, or just like a big knife, like, like, what's the centerfold for a true crime magazine? Goon of the Month, where I was just like, guys with like Balaclavas on and nooses, yeah. Well, definitely not blame in the true crime magazines here, uh, but it was only a matter of time before Richard started applying the knowledge he was learning to how he was going

to kill people himself. Okay. And he started with the gang of bullies that terrorized him every day. Woo. The victim was the leader of the gang, Charlie Lane, and the original plan was just a simple beatdown, but like it is with so many other killers, that beatdown edged its way into murder. Myrder.

What I will say is that it's like the group of bullies from a Christmas story. I was going to say that. If they ran into Jason Voorhees. Yeah. It's like, if this group of like, they flipping coins, I mean like, get out of here, tall boy, yeah, get out of here, tall Polish boy, hey, Polish, hey. Hey, those are big things that they always make in front of them because he's fucking Polish.

But guess what? You know what happens sometimes when you make fun of a Polish person? What? Oh, it builds and it builds and it builds and it builds and it builds and just one day bam, bam, bam. Now, now are we still talking about Kuklinski or is that you? Well, you know, they never made a Christmas story too. Ralphie very well have may have become a serial killer.

We don't know. They did make a Christmas story too. Oh, come on. Really? There was a sequel. Yes. Where it's him in summer camp. I believe trying to like a pork, the neighbor girl.

I don't remember. It's some weird like other 1960s plot. Okay. Well, Richard's plan was to take a wooden clothes pole from his closet and beat Lane when he came home late at night. Just simple revenge. Okay. Fuck with me.

I'm going to beat you up. Now, when you say plan, did he jot this down like it doesn't seem like that much of it. It's not a very, it's not elaborate. No, no. Well, he sat like, yeah, he doesn't have blueprints. He doesn't have like a neighborhood break now, but he, this is, will become the trademark of Richard Klinsky. He is an incredible planner and knew exactly.

He knows what to do. And that's a part of what's really, again, it's very surprising because you didn't think a man is essentially, I would use the human category of lug. He is a lug and you'd think that he wouldn't do this shit, but he was very clever. Oh, very clever. That's a weird Helmer Fudd. Well, that's what, I mean, he did actually sit and wait for hours upon hours. He said that they all lived in the projects together.

And so he sat at the entrance waiting for Lane to come home. And then when Lane came home, Richard confronted him and Lane called him a dumb pollock. Oh. Immediately. And then you think, you're not even going to say hello, maybe like, hey, Richie, why are you staring at me? Hey, Richie, it seems like you've been standing here for a couple hours, you dumb pollock. I'm only calling you a dumb pollock because you should be out having fun.

Yeah. I could have just called him a pollock. It's understood. Oh. I've got to do a little bit of a roast, but that's a bit of a roast. Builds and builds and builds and builds and then pop, pop, pop. Well, when Charlie Lane called him a dumb pollock, something snapped. Richard hit him right above the ear and that sent Charlie right to the ground, but once

Charlie was on the ground, Richard just kept hitting him again and again and again and again. Finally, he threw down the dolly and they just started kicking him again and again and again. Jeez. And then finally, he stopped and composed himself and looked down. Charlie Lane wasn't moving anymore. So Richard, using a trick, he learned from his true crime magazines, checked Lane's pulse

and found he'd beaten his bully to death. And then he said, not so dumb pollock. Not so dumb pollock, huh? Because a dumb pollock would have kept you alive. Oh, no, Richie. So again, Richie, using his true crime knowledge, knew that he had to get rid of the body. And this tells you how fearless this guy was even as a teenager. He just accidentally killed someone and he just immediately thinks like, how do I take

care of this problem? Right. So he grabbed a car he'd stolen, bundled Charlie Lane's body into the trunk and took off driving south. And he said, the further he drove, the better he felt about killing Charlie Lane. Jeez. Said it made him feel invincible. And thus, killing became Richard Kuklinski's defense mechanism.

And it's like when we discovered that if you're funny, you don't get wailed on as hard. Right. And then we turned it into this. Yeah. Into this lifestyle that we've chosen. Yeah. But he was like the opposite. All of this is sort of like if the Scooby-Doo gang was reversed and if the Scooby-Doo gang

was actually like the Firefly family, killing people and then covering it up. Ooh, excited for that new movie. The funny thing is that they said Kuklinski, when he was younger, he was actually like the class clown in Catholic school. But then the nuns beat that out of him. Ah, I see. I do get the feeling if he could have, he would have been listening to Bruce Springsteen. It's a real Bruce moment, I think.

He loved country music. Oh, well, come on. Country music. Yeah, he likes the music that you like, Kissel. You're not swaying Jennings. He likes old school country. He likes all that stuff. Well, Bruce is the country of the East.

I've heard that. I'd say the same Bob Seeger as well. Okay. Well. Okay. That's it. That's it. No, I agree with you.

I love Bob Seeger. Turning the page. Let's you know what to do. Well, Kuklinski wasn't done with Charlie yet. Richard took his first victim down to the Pine Barons, home of the Jersey Devil, and brought the body out of the trunk. He then took a hammer and knocked out all of Charlie's teeth. After that, he chopped off the tips of Charlie's fingers with a hatchet he'd brought, both

done to prevent identification, both things he'd learned from True Crime magazines. Oh, I see. Finally, he dumped the body off a small isolated bridge and drove home, throwing fingers and teeth out the window as he went. Like Lorraine of Bobbit? Yes. What is going on here? Yes.

Yes. Like it's confetti for a celebratory parade in Halloween Town. Richard later told Philip Carlo that this was the first time in his life that he felt like a person who merited respect. He was 13 years old. What? 13? 13?

What? Years old. He was over six feet tall. He knew to knock the teeth out of a person's mouth and to chop the fingers off of the... I remember not wanting to go to the bottom of the trash bin. Right. Like I remember my mom called me a wussy because I didn't want to go to the bottom of the trash bin and get some of the budget stuff and I was like, eh, it's gross.

It is gross. He dismembered a body. Okay. So yes, he's full pansoram. He's full. But now, Marcus, you said earlier that he was a late bloomer. Are we talking... He's killed more than he has pubes.

Like are we talking pubeless, pre-pubescent, 13 years old, cutting fingers off? No. If he's truly Polish, he is completely covered with hair. I don't know. I mean, late bloomer is in like he was a big, like he wasn't like a big, big dude. Oh, okay. And to drive the point home that he needed to be left alone, the next day, he took a two by four and beat every other member of Charlie Lane's gang and they never bothered

him again. And we know this happened. Charlie Lane was reported missing. Wow. Nobody ever knew what happened to Charlie Lane. But nobody even came close to thinking that skinny little Richard Kuklinski was capable of such a thing. Man, I do kind of wish that Ben, the character from It, would have done this when it comes

to that guy being such a mean person to him. Yeah, but he got a reputation then and then he started learning, which is what he will use the rest of his life, is that when you come at somebody 10 times harder than when they come at you, you gain this like they're now scared of you. Because what it is, is to put my psychiatrist cap on, is that he is taking power back. Again, he grew up his whole life with no power. He was subject totally to the abuse and the whims of his parents and to everyone around him.

So now what it's going to do is being like, you're going to think about me, what I want you to think about me, which means instead of calling me, you may be calling me the dumb Pollock, but it's not going to be dumb Pollock scaring me all the time, if that's what you want. Okay, interesting. Because after that, he found a baseball bat and he started going around Jersey City and beating the fuck out of anyone who had wronged him in the past. Wow.

And when the bat became too cumbersome, he started carrying around a hunting knife and he'd slash the face of anyone who crossed him. Yikes. And of course none of this behavior was conducive to the school system. So Richard dropped out and got his education in pool halls and bars. He loved pool. Love pool. Really?

Expert pool player. Very good at it, huh? Very, very good. Yeah, because he was playing pool every day for the time he was 13. The hustler. He would go and just hang out in pool halls and no one said anything to him, because he was scary to adults. Yeah.

He was this little kid who'd be like, give me the cue, Pauls, it's my time to start playing pool. And I'm like, the little pull up kid's scaring me for a little fucking, okay, all right, okay, here you go. Here's the pool cue. And he was great at it. And those pool halls, that's where Richard bought his very first gun, a 38 special with a six inch barrel.

And eventually, for the first time in his life, Richard started making friends. Oh. Yeah. And pretty soon, he had his very own little gang, about five guys. Oh, that's nice. It's little wise guys. Yeah. It's cute.

Yeah. Little funny, cute little wise guys. Yeah, they called themselves the coming up roses games, because anyone who fucked with them would end up as fucking plant fertilizer. Oh, I thought it was a nice coming up rose without everything that's coming up roses. But also, it had the other, it had the other connotation as well, coming up roses, because they said that they knew that their future, as long as they stuck together, their future would be bright.

And guess what would happen? What? You'll see. Oh, okay. Yeah. And to commemorate the gang, each one of them got a scroll tattooed on their left hand with the gang's name written on it, which is much scarier than the goofy, stupid fucking grim reaper tattoo they show in the Iceman.

So they got, so it was C-U-R, that's what they got? No, they coming up roses. They actually had coming up roses. They were able to write all of that? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it probably wasn't very good. No.

That's not what it was about. And if you made fun of their fucking tattoo. I'm not. You're trying to make fun of these little wise guys' tattoos? No, I like their tattoo. Now, by this time, Richard Koklinski had developed a reputation around town as a guy who'd beat you just as soon as look at you, but there were still some people who hadn't gotten the message just yet.

One of these, and one of these people was an Irish city cop named Doyle who played pool in a Hoboken bar called Danny's. He was also in West Side Story, and he was also in every other movie in the 1950s, but there's always one with a W.C. Field's nose and a slightly crooked hat. It's been like, I tell you Richie, it's been a timer tool since A.P. pool swinging his fucking baton around. Yeah. It's like when he was born, the doctor gave him to his mother and she was like, Mrs.

Whoever, you've got yourself a cliché. That is, it's always Doyle? It's always Doyle. It's Doyle's way or it's the Haywee. I tell you what, if you want to take the Haywee, speed limits to 55. If you don't drive 55, you better be seem eager, because if you're not, oh, you're gonna get a ticket there. Oh, no.

So one night, Richard was playing pool against Doyle, and Richard was beating Doyle again and again and again. And the more Richard won, the more names Doyle called Richard, you know, cheater and of course, dumb pollock. Oh, no. So Doyle might have gotten away with just a beating had it not been for one thing. He looked strikingly like Richard's father. And the one thing you don't really want to do around Richie is to look like his dad.

Yeah. Yeah. Because he didn't, he didn't really enjoy his father to the point where he, I mean, he also never called him his father. He called him Stanley. Yeah. And so Richard went outside and waited. After a while, Doyle came out, got in his car, led a cigarette and passed out with

the driver's side window open. Different times. It was. Different times. Yes. This is the cop, by the way. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. He didn't drive. Yeah. He didn't drive. Yeah, he didn't drive. And speaking of which, you know, like, Richard could have easily just slit this guy's throat. But the guy was a cop. He knew, Richard knew this, the crime was going to be investigated.

And he knew that he'd be the first suspect because the two had just had a very public fight inside Danny's bar. Yeah. And if you take out this officer Doyle, there's only a hundred officer Doyle's left. So because Irish families reproduce in packs of 13 by law. But instead of going smaller, Richard went over the top with this one. He went to a nearby gas station, bought a quart of gas, poured it on Doyle, threw in a lit match and stood nearby so he could hear Doyle scream and smell Doyle's flesh

as he burned to death. Wow. This happened. I will tell you this. This has been worse than hearing an Irishman scream while he's on fire. I agree with that. It's just, hey! Hey!

Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!

It's piercing. You know, but he shouldn't have done it. He shouldn't have done it. No. So is this now, is this the second kill? This is the second confirm. This is his first premeditated murder. Okay.

He was 16. 16. Oh, right. Years old. This cop was playing, that's the other thing, is that the cop was playing competitive pool, full grown cop, playing competitive pool against the 16 in a bar. Right. And no one said anything because he's drinking too.

He's 16 and fucking drinking and he's sitting there just fucking, everybody's illegal. Very weird. Yes, very strange. Yeah, but 16 was still old enough to run a fairly successful street gang in Jersey City. Coming up, Rose's gang broke into warehouses, robbed liquor stores and burgled the nicer homes in town. Hmm. And Richard seemed to be inviting violence more and more.

Because as we said, Richard Koklinski, he's your size. And he had been- Well, we don't have to clarify that every time we talk about his size, but- Well, he's your size. It's important for people to understand. He's a big guy. He's on a scale because people have seen pictures of the three of us together. They know the differences in our heights.

So yeah, he's your size. So he's hairy like Henry and he's my size. Yes, yes. He's big. No hair up top. Yeah, no hair up top. And as you know, big guy, you kind of stand out a little bit. Richard made himself stand out even more by wearing bright yellow and pink suits.

And he'd wear them every time he went to these sleazy New Jersey pool halls and bars. All right. You know what it was? I actually, I get it for why he did it because a part of it was the way that they described it in the book is that he grew up with like threadbare clothing. They had nothing. They, he had a steal food for the family. So soon as he started earning money, he wanted to look like a big shot at the time he'd go

and buy the fanciest clothes that he could buy because number one, he wanted to look good. He wanted to show everybody that he can afford it. And also what you were saying, Marcus, which is the day to say, tell me something about my suit. Yeah. Right, right, right. What was that?

You think I look like Big Bird? I didn't say anything, sir. It's like, I think I heard you think that I look like Big Bird. And he's just like, no, sir, no, sir, and it just ties him in a fucking knot. Like he's Shrek. Well, that's the thing. When you're very big, people are always coming up to you and yelling at you and talking to you.

Big guy. You don't have the opportunity to speak with them, though, and you can win hearts and minds that way. I guess you could have won a heart and mind, but no, you just slashed him across the face this combat. He did the opposite of that. Well, Kissel, maybe you should start doing it the other way. Maybe you could get more votes if you do more stuff like, it's more like grabbing people

by the shirt and showing them how big your hands are, like petting their hair a lot and like being like, what's in your pockets? And they really can't do anything because you're just sticking your hands in their pockets. So since the roses were pulling off so many jobs without getting caught, they were eventually noticed by the Decavacanti crime family. Decavacanti. Decavacanti and were recruited by a member named Carmen Genovese, aka Meatball. Who's my size?

It's a lot easier. So how do you say you're called Meatball? Yeah, because they said he had to look like a big meatball. So they call him Meatball. Yeah, it was not a great of a name. And he wasn't one of the New York crime family Genoveses, like he was, yeah, he wasn't related to them at all. Oh, I love it.

Why did you guys call me Meatball? Your face looks like a meatball. Oh. Ah, okay. That actually makes a lot of sense because for me, if I looked at myself, they'd be more like Mr. Yarn, he's Yarn Man, he's a man made out of Yarn, but also I just run criminal enterprises. I don't give myself nicknames to other people and he's got a creative name.

Oh, right. So we got the Aquatine Hunger Force of Mafia family that's going out there and they're recruited. Oh, everything's coming up roses. So Meatball brought the gang to his house one afternoon, made them a big spaghetti, and gave them their very first contract killing. Now, this was a big deal for the roses as they've been trying to find their way into organized crime for a while.

It's strange for him for an older man to bring, I mean, honestly, with him, we say older man, but we don't realize that people just had to work much harder earlier in the fifties than now. Right. So you could be 23 and be like a made man and be called Meatball and look like you're 27. Yeah, sure. Because it's 1955 and everybody looks like that.

So he bring it in there. He's making the spaghetti and he's got a bunch of 16-year-olds just hanging out in this fucking living room and he's like, ah, I was thinking maybe she's kind of way out of line or something. But I think you four children would be great at murder. That's a weird little rascal situation. Well, the only problem was is that Richard and two of the other guys in the coming up roses gang were Polish and another one. That's not good.

And another one was Irish. Oh. Only one of them were Italian. That means that he was the only one who could have possibly become a made man. Oh. The closest that you could get is a position called the Giovanni di Aure, which means that a mafia associate, which is like somebody that says, so you could be a side guy, which can't be a made guy because you got to be in the family.

Now, that's a part of also too. I think that Clint's got an immigrant sort of mentality, which is like, I got to be what I got to be harder than everybody else because I'm Polish and an Italian one. Well, I mean, couldn't you do like, you know, recitoni, eat or aviolis, like can you convert to being Italian? No, you got to be born. You got to be born. You got to be born.

It's not like Catholicism. Can't even marry into it. You can't marry into it. No, you got to be Italian. Oh. Yeah. It's an Italian thing, baby. Like those shirts that you get in Staten Island.

Yeah. I didn't realize it was. No. Yeah. I mean, the best these guys could hope for independent contractors. That was essentially what it was. So hoping to get into the big money game, the gang, they took the murder contract that meatball had just put right up in front of them.

So they piled in a Richard's car and they went hunting and the guy who they thought was the toughest dude, John Wheeler, was supposed to pull the trigger. But once they found the mark at a bar in Hoboken, Wheeler froze and couldn't get his hands to stop shaking. And so Richard just said, I'll do it. So he grabbed the gun from Wheeler, walked up to the mark in the bar's parking lot, put the gun to his head, pulled the trigger and walked back to the car without a change in expression.

And after they'd driven a few blocks, Wheeler turned to Richie and said, man, Rich, you're cold like ice. And that's why we all think we should call you. Okay. Daddy Ice Buckets. I like that name. Wow. Well, that's how the nickname Iceman was born.

Oh, Iceman. Iceman is better. Iceman. Iceman is better. Iceman. Yeah. And Richard, he found that he really, really liked being called that. And he liked, well, he just liked getting at a boy.

He loved the adulation that he got for murdering someone. Yeah. Again, it is a cool nickname. It's a great nickname. But then no one should be a contract killer. Yeah. And when they returned to Meatball, boys were all poured drinks. They each got 500 bucks.

And Richard Kuklinski was officially in the world of organized crime. So 1950s. Hey, banjo. No, no, it's nice. Make them a cake. It's a nice. That's a lot of money, isn't it? 500 bucks each.

In the 50s? In the 50s, yeah, that's a good amount of cash. Two grand. And it's a big deal. Do you ever notice in Williamsburg, they don't do it as much anymore, but I remember when I first moved there, because Williamsburg, where we lived for many years,

that was like the epicenter for a lot of mob activity for quite a period of time. That's where the movie Serpico takes place, like all of that should Donnie Brascoe, all of that's there. Graham Avenue, think Kings of New York as well. But they used to do a thing, and I don't know if they do it as much anymore,

where they would put up a sign that said like, congratulations to Mario and Luigi. That was like, they would do their like commemoration ceremony where they have their big party, where they became made men, and they'd just tell the neighborhood that they were having a party. And they are only allowed to be made men

after they murder someone? Yeah, you gotta make your bones. Yeah, that's what they call it. They say you're making your bones. Interesting. You know what, Williamsburg, also the L train, the Warriors, that movie took place on the L train. And I watched that movie recently.

They're very tiny and weak. They actually look a lot like the people in Williamsburg now. They filmed it on the L train? They did. It takes place on the L train, much of it. Yes, it does. The Warriors take the L. Absolutely not.

No, they're bopping down to Coney. They're bopping from Bronx to down to Coney Island, which was north to south, and the L only runs east-west. Marcus Parks. I've seen the Warriors more times than I can count. How can you count? No, the L train.

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 15, 15. So, no, I'm pretty sure they took the L train. No. Well, we'll just agree to disagree and we'll Google that to the show, and we'll see if I'm right, this will stay in, and if I'm not, you'll never know it was edited out.

So, now that these boys had made their bones, Meatball started throwing a lot of work over to the roses, and it wasn't just small-time stuff either. These teenagers managed to hijack an armored car. What? Two million in currency and gold, and they got $200,000 each. Wow.

But every single bit of Richard's share was pissed away on gambling. Ah, because Richard- He loved it. Oh, he loved it. He had a lifelong gambling problem, and because his gambling problem was so bad, he always needed money,

but as soon as he got that money, he'd head over to an illegal gambling game, like a backroom somewhere, or he'd go to Atlantic City, or he'd go to Vegas, and Vegas, that was his favorite because that's where Liberace played, and Liberace was his favorite entertainer. You know, it's always the psychopaths that like the most effeminate musicians, always.

I don't know why that is. It's the way they can express something close to sensitivity. Sure. If you could go and sway and listen to Liberace, and you're like, this is class. And also, the guy was very much about, like, if you look at Liberace's, like his modus of operandi,

is that he liked being flashy. It was about him showing off his money. So at the time, it was very like, I would say it's similar to the gangster rap, where you'd go and you'd listen to somebody bragging about how much money. Right. I gotta say, man, the balls on the people

that beat him at poker or anything, I cannot imagine, I would just let him win, I think. Actually, he never lost his temper over a card game, or gambling, or anything like that. No, because he had rules. He knew what was fair. Okay. He also liked the game. He was also playing with other mobsters,

and he knew often, what you're gonna learn, that you don't fucking shit where you eat. Right. Because it's a really bad idea, because that's how you get enemies that can kill you. Right, right, okay. Because the coming up roses gang actually fucked up on that.

Two members decided it would be a good idea to rob a card game, sponsored by a maid man from the same family where the boys worked. Now, even though both of them were hiding their faces with bandanas, they worked with these dudes. So they were easily made. Yeah, dude, they were kids. They were also just children.

So it's like a bunch of grown men watching these two kids stick them up, and they're all just like, okay, you really want this money? Like, you want me to give you my money? Because then it's officially a robbery. You know that, right? And they'd give them the money, and then they'd leave, and they're like, now we gotta fucking do something

about this. Oh my, they'll never recognize us with these, I got these glasses, and they have a fake nose and a mustache on them. They're never gonna recognize us. Oh, it's Groucho. Yeah, so a D. Cavalcante soldier, he knew Richard was in charge of these guys,

and the thing was, is that Richard had the respect of these mob dudes, even from a young age. So they figured they should go and talk to Richard. They figured, hey, this is your problem, you gotta clean this up. All right. Kind of like, I have a weird inner, my inner thoughts are that they knew

that he was the only one who was truly serious about it. I think that they knew that he was the one who really could make any, saw the rest of them as a bunch of drips. It's kind of like how this CIA hired me instead of hiring you two guys. Oh, that's an interesting, strange reveal. Oh my God, what have I done?

How much acid have they given you for free? So the mob gave Richard two choices, kill your friends, or we're gonna kill you. Oh, okay. Now these were Richard's first and only friends in life. Yeah. But on the other hand, these guys had fucked up, and furthermore, they had broken one of Richard's rules,

don't steal from the mob. Right. I think it's a good rule for everyone. Oh yeah. I would say just don't, hey, if you meet a mob member, don't steal from him. Or any organized crime organization. I'm gonna say or anyone, or any organization at all.

That's nice. And so Richard decided his friends had to go. Both friends were found and popped in the head before either one knew what was happening. Wow. And after that, the rest of the coming up roses gang decided they didn't wanna hang out with Richard anymore. Yeah.

Why? Yeah, that's when you kinda slowly walk out. And with these two murders, Kuklinski had killed five people, including two of his best friends when the rest of us were just graduating high school. Wow. And it was only about to get worse from there.

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And according to Philip Carlo, and I didn't know this, Polish people have a penchant for walking? What? I will tell you how I originally lost all of my weight. I walked for six hours a day up and down the streets of Toronto, but I do believe that it was also out of rage and guilt and sadness,

which is also the Polish have a penchant for. Now I don't want to be like Mr. Roast Mode, but is it possible it's because they don't know how to drive? It is possible that there is a Polish joke in there. But also if they ask him all the time to be like, how'd he get so big? And they're like, you know, Philip Carlos would be like, solid year, exercise with weights or something.

And Richie said, the only exercise I ever did was lifting dead bodies. And you're like, oh, that's a funny, that's a funny tagline there. The world's strongest and scariest man. So in order to get his walking in, Richard took to taking the ferry to Manhattan and walking up and down the West side.

What's your main form of exercise? Brooding, it's mostly brooding. Yeah, that's like the guy from the cure. That's how, but then he stopped. Once he got the money, he stopped being sad. That's why he got all fat. I like that. So this is the point in the story

where the argument for Richard Kuklinski being a serial killer can truly start to be made. Okay. And it all started with one angry bum. Richard said he was mining his own business when a homeless guy demanded money. Richard kept walking, but the bum got aggressive and grabbed Richard on the shoulder.

And in response, Richard turned around, whipped out his combat knife and quickly stabbed the bum twice in the chest and kept walking. And once Richard reached the battery tunnel in Southern Manhattan, he turned around and walked back north, right by the homeless guy's corpse. And Richard found that he liked seeing the guy lay there,

dead by his hand specifically. He's really liking the worst parts of his life? Like the things that like everyone else would be throwing like, ugh, don't feel good about that. Yes, he liked power. Yeah. I feel like that's the end we're gonna see this here where the idea of someone being rendered dead

is that I guess we'll find out. It's like he didn't really get sexual pleasure out of murdering, but he definitely loved the idea of I can control whether you live or die. And after that incident, Richard regularly went to Manhattan just begging for homeless people to cost him in some way.

So it's just him literally walking down the street with a yellow suit on going like, like swinging his arms back and forth, being like, did I hit you? You wanna fucking hit me? I ain't got money. He's got like a dollar bill hanging out of his fly. Be like, come and get it, come and get it.

I'm a big dumb bollock, big dumb bollock. Look me get robbed. So he's honey potting the people without the homes. Yep. And once a homeless guy did a cost him, Richard would either stab or bludgeon them to death, either leaving the bodies on the ground or cutting the stomachs open

and dumping them in the Hudson River so they'd sink to the bottom. I mean, but just where, where is everyone? Like, it's like, this is back in the day. Yeah, this is in the, this is in the 50s. So like a lot of, and at night, a lot of the West Side of Manhattan, it's not like it is now,

like 10th Avenue was fucking deserted. Well, it's still is even a little bit now, yeah. Yeah. And every time Richard got pissed off enough to kill, he'd make this little clickin' noise with his mouth. And this was a lifelong habit. And if you heard that sound, that meant violence was coming soon after.

In the case of his future wife, it was a beating. And in the case of everyone else, it meant you were about to die. Geez. Now, interestingly, this sound was actually captured in the first HBO documentary Richard did. Now, it's pretty faint, but listen and see if you can hear it.

Are there any murders that you committed that haunt you that you just sort of, you feel and you do? Nothing haunts me. No murders haunt me. Do you hear it? Oh, yeah, I kind of hear it. I heard it. He sort of sounds like the guy from Uncle Buck

who had the toothpick at the bowling alley. I think his name was Pal or something. Well, his whole thing is how he talks real low, real slow, so you can hear every word. So this big Polish mouth can make his tiny Polish teeth clickin' together. But he would do this face too, where he'd snarl. Like in a dock where he'd pull his top lip back

and he'd snarl and he'd get these little, like he'd travel between extremely bored and momentarily enraged, but you can't really tell the difference because he wouldn't modulate his voice. It was always like this. Every single time he'd talk about something, it's just slow, patient.

He's horrifying. He had to be haunted by some of this stuff. He just had to be. I don't know. I actually don't know. I don't think he was. I don't think he was at all. Because we're gonna talk in the next episode

about some things that he did to try to make himself feel something, and it had a tiny effect on him. He would have to game his own brain. He would have to sit in it. That's why he would make his crimes more heinous to see if he could feel things. Yeah. That's so strange.

And the reason why Richard made the sound in that interview is because he later said that he fucking hated the guy who was interviewing him, because he felt like that question in specifically, like that question specifically, the do any murders around you, he thought it was judgmental. And he said, I undo this interview to be judged.

So he doesn't, he's sensitive. He's a very sensitive guy to strange with it. You go tell him he's sensitive, Kissel. No, I'm positive. You go tell him. Go tell him he's being too sensitive. And plus what Richard hadn't been told when he agreed to the interview

was that the guy had brought along law enforcement to listen in on the conversations. I mean, he's in jail. Yeah, he's in jail, but he wasn't told that law enforcement was involved in this. And Richard figured it out halfway through the interview because there was a cord running from the recording machine under the next door to the next room.

So, okay guys, I got a couple of Dixie cups. We're gonna put these to the window, put our ears to the Dixie cups. We're gonna be able to hear everything. Just, that is ridiculous. The law enforcement, they make such stupid mistakes sometimes. Yeah, sometimes.

And it was years before that interviewer found out that he was just a hair away from being murdered on camera by Richard Kuglinski. Geez. He almost did it. But as per Richard's burgeoning murder career in the 50s went, he started treating the west side of Manhattan like a finishing school for killing.

He was constantly experimenting, seeing what the fastest and most efficient ways of killing someone actually were. Eventually, he found that stabbing someone in the back of the head, into the brain, straight up, worked best and produced the least amount of blood. Geez. But he didn't just stab and bludgeon,

he strangled guys too. This is him talking about his strangulation method. I actually did it in a way that's maybe, maybe this is original. Maybe not, I don't know. But I put the rope around his neck, twisted it and threw him over my shoulder and held him there.

So actually, I was the tree hanging him. Yeah. And he eventually just stopped kicking. I mean, it's like, I'm trying something original. It's a crow nut. It's a croissant and a donut. It's like, what was that for? Like, maybe this is original, maybe it's not.

What's he talking about? Well, they've been plumbing him, asking him what he would do. And so he honestly, at some point, is kind of like, I don't want to disappoint these people. Right. Everyone wants the fucking Ice Man show. And so he starts talking about all of this shit.

And yeah, I mean, if you're big enough to do the tree, then you can do the tree. If you're big and strong enough to do the tree, that's what people could do. And it's kind of like the razor's edge by Mr. Ramon. Mr. Ramon. Oh, yeah. The only man of that height and strength

can get a man up that high and do the razor's edge. Right, right, great finisher. Then Kuklinski started experimenting with ice picks, finding that if you practiced enough, you could get pretty good at getting it right into the eyeball or into the ear canal. And that would give you an instant kill. So this is, he's really leaning in here.

This is a little punny. He's getting a little bit punny with his character. Well, the Iceman, it didn't fully take hold until later on. The nickname Iceman, it was with his friends, and some people, they would call him that. But it wasn't until later when he figured out a new way of disposing bodies that the Iceman became his true nickname.

And by the way, the whole Iceman thing blown way out of proportion. The media blew something out of proportion? Yeah, yeah, yeah, the media, yeah, no way. But yeah, they blew the whole Iceman body disposal thing way, way, way out of proportion. And all this time when Richard Kuklinski was murdering dudes in the west side of Manhattan, the cops

thought that the bums had just gone crazy and were killing each other. Can you imagine how crazy that would have been? Just a bunch of bum stabbing each other in the eyes with ice picks and shit? It's just the easiest way to get out of police work. They've gone nuts. What's your official conclusion, Officer Doyle?

They're crazy. It's cats and dogs out there. And that's the only thing I'll say about it further. No, it's my father. It's my father as a police officer. At this point, my dad was just a plumber. Oh, he was just a plumber, OK. At this point, he was just a plumber.

My dad became a cop in the 70s. And he was more of a, because this is like 60s, early 60s. This is when he was coming up. When my dad was coming up, he was just in motorcycle gangs and fucking. Well, I mean, you'd think that cops would notice that the entire west side of Manhattan was just littered with dead bodies.

But back then, back in this time, because this was still about mid-to-late 50s, there were no city-wide murder statistics kept at all. And precincts didn't talk to each other at all. So they didn't know the scope of the murders. Precincts in Manhattan is like six miles. They still live. Just throw a rock.

Everything is so close. That is the dumbest thing. The eagle of the cops, the CIA and the FBI, obviously, used to do it too. Not talking to each other is so juvenile. And then Richard started preying on another section of the population that is long than the target of the serial killer, gay men.

However, Richard said he didn't kill them specifically because they were gay. He killed them because he knew cops wouldn't investigate the murders. In fact, it's kind of weird how much this man, who killed up to 200 people, wanted to make sure that people knew that he was totally cool with gay people.

He said it like three times at the dock, where he's just like, I'm not disparaging the gays. I'm just disparaging anything with the pulse, anything that's alive. OK, well, I mean, I guess that he understands. Yeah, he's like, no, it's not wrong with being gay. It's not wrong with being gay at all. Right, yeah.

He's like, now you're going to have a lot of people all mad at me because I'm saying bad things about gay people. And you're like, no, man, we're scared of you because you killed 200 people, Iceman. Yeah, all right, well, I'll take him at his word then. So this target group became clear to Richard as he was hanging out in a gay bar one night just looking for a drink.

Guys started hitting on him. Richard declined, and the guy followed him outside. Eventually, Richard lost his temper, picked up a loose cobblestone, and smashed the dude's head so hard that his brain matter flew out and stuck to a store window. Jeez. And Manhattan was not Richard's only killing ground.

This was done in Newark and Hoboken as well. But even though Richard had no friends, he wasn't completely alone. By this point, Richard had been dating an older woman named Linda for years. My mother is named Linda. Huh. Interesting.

OK. Of course, Richard, like his father, had been beaten Linda this entire time. Once Richard reached his 20s, Linda became pregnant. Now, Richard tried to make her lose the baby by punching her in the stomach, but when that didn't work, he married her instead, quote, for the kids' sake. Oh, she got a promotion.

That's so nice. She's so lucky. She got to have a whole husband. That's incredible. Eventually, they would have two kids together. And Richard said he never loved any of them. But like we said earlier, they didn't know how lucky they were that he didn't love them.

OK, this is the first family, huh? Yeah. Meanwhile, the mob hits just kept coming from meatball. And the mob hits started to get more elaborate. Richard's first important job was a used car salesman who had done something, quote, very disrespectful to a mob guy's wife. They see it's a weird thing, OK?

But he went in there, she was doing a test drive in a new buick, and did not to mention any words, and under no uncertain circumstances. He fought it on her. Oh, no. They had disrespectful. No reason to do that. No reason to fought on a man's wife.

No reason to fought on a man. So this guy, he's got to go. He's got to go. Now, the request was that the guy should suffer, then disappear. And to prove that the mark suffered, Richard needed to bring back a piece of the guy. And in a dramatization, Carlo wrote, Richard asked, how big of a piece?

To which meatball replied, that's so big. Maybe like his hand, I don't know, some toes. OK, something fun. Something nice. I don't know. You cut it. I mean, deal's choice. Freestyle, like always.

Deal's choice. Oh, my. That's not good. Now, Richard said that he never particularly enjoyed the act of killing itself, to the point where he almost had a catchphrase about it. He'd always say this. I never felt one way or the other.

Richard, yeah, when they asked him like. It should be coming up roses. Yeah, everything's coming up. No, man, he killed his friends. Yeah. It's a bad memory for him. Oh, OK, all right. Now, what Richard really enjoyed was the stalking.

And in this, you could make a case for Richard Kuklinski being a serial killer. If this is true, then that would help the argument that Kuklinski was a process killer, meaning that it was everything leading up to the actual kill that gave him pleasure. But what sets Kuklinski apart from the others is that he never got a sexual charge

from any of his murders, or at least never admitted to one. The only thing that got him hot was when a complicated hit went particularly well. It was a job well done that made Richard horny. I really do believe it's more of a weird immigrant's pride. When he looked at it like he wanted to do a really good job. He wanted to be the best of the best.

It's very strange. It's more of a mechanization of murder. It's more of like he figured out how to make a living off of it. He figured out a way to make, like he gamed the world by running what he thought was like the ultimate scam. It's like because it's easy for him because he doesn't feel anything.

So he makes a fuck ton of money killing people. But then he has to like like the psychopath because he obviously has some form of the anti-social personality disorder as he gets bored easily. So a part of it is making interior games to make it interesting for himself. So it's like, OK, so he's happy with the job well done. He's all alone.

There's no team. Does he just dump the Gatorade bucket on his own head? How does what kind of celebration is this? He gets an attaboy from the meatball. From meatball. From meatball. Meatball says attaboy. Good job.

But then he goes and he spends a bunch of money gambling. And then he plays pool. And then he drinks six or seven Boilermakers and never sleeps. Yeah, he said the only thing that gave him an adrenaline rush was just regular old boring sex. Like he was apparently like very, they said he had a huge dick, though.

OK, I'm so happy that we were able to reference the size of the man's penis. It's officially the last podcast on the left and not another true crime show now. OK, great. Good thing to clear that one up. Well, OK, so the sexual charge thing, the lack of sexual charge.

That tells you that he doesn't fit into the two biggest of the four categories of serial killer. He's not power control, nor is he hedonistic, both of which are rooted in sexual desire. Nor does he fit into the categories of the missionary killer or the visionary killer, meaning he wasn't crazy. This right here, actually, we have what Richard

thought about himself. Did you think of yourself as an assassin? Assassin. Sounds so exotic. I was just a murderer. It's just the way he can, because it's unironic the way he does it, where he goes like, I'm an assassin.

He makes us sound so exotic. And then, like, he does that little laugh, and then it just drops. Yeah, right, right. Yeah, at his murder. It's really horrifying, yeah. Yeah, I mean, at his core, he's a lot like Carl Pansram. He's a criminal who liked killing.

However, when Richard wanted, his killing methods could be just as cruel and vicious as a Ted Bundy or a Richard Ramirez, possibly even more so. Well, in the book, the first thing he says is that Mike makes right. He said that was the first thing he listened, which was also the Pansram model. And so I think a part of it is that I don't know if it's,

again, I don't know if it's enjoying killing. And I don't know if it's the escalation, is his own personal, like, his proclivity. I think it's he felt life and people were cruel. People are animals. Everybody's going to die one way or another. This is like, every single time Mike upped the ante of the violence of my crimes,

I'm giving more of a big middle finger to the world that has given me nothing but pain and sorrow. And so it is weirdly a missionary killer in a way, maybe. Maybe. But that's also this. This is part of the reason why a lot of people want to get rid of the whole four category thing. Because it's too narrow.

And how many times have we talked about a killer and we're like, well, he's mixed. He's both controlled and uncontrolled. He's both hedonistic and a missionary killer. So I mean, because really, we got to remember, like, the field of serial killer research is still pretty new. And I will say, we are intersectional serial killer experts.

So we believe that you can mix them all together. Sure, sure. Well, for an example of Richard's cruelty, let's take the used car dealer. OK. Richard stalked him, knocked him out, bundled him into a trunk, and took him out to the pine barons.

And once there, he took the salesman out and tied him to a tree. Richard then told the salesman that he'd been instructed to make him suffer. And it seemed like the guy knew exactly why he was there. I didn't want to try to fart on her. I wanted to try and it was an accident. I wanted to punch him, punch him, punch him, break his head.

I didn't want to fart on her. I didn't want to. Well, he did something wrong there. Richard then took the blunt end of the hatchet and smashed the guy's knees and ankles before chopping off his fingers one at a time. Well, the guy was alive. While he was alive.

It's like the beginning of the movie Dark Man, when he chops off the fingers with a cigar cutter. That's right. Brutal. That stuck with me for a long time for some reason. OK, I love him. I love Dark Man. He didn't have to.

He could have killed him and just gotten a body. Like, he really, no one was watching him is what I'm saying. You know, it's a weird kind of honesty, I think. I really think it's a weird kind of honesty is that he was told to do a job this particular way. And so he did the job this particular way. His moral compass is like a compass in, like, what is it, the upside down world?

It's just like all over the place. It's so weird. Yeah. Where is the upside down world? I think that's a stranger thing. Oh, stranger things. Stay stranger things. So Richard, he was planning on just bringing back

the fingers as proof of suffering. But after killing the guy, Richard got a better idea. Light bulb. Yes, yes, like a Wiley Cartoon, Wiley Coyote Cartoon. I don't remember this Wiley Coyote Cartoon when he does this, but instead of just fingers, Koklinski took the hatchet, hacked off the guy's head, and brought it back to meatball in a bag.

And when meatball saw the head, he smiled and paid Richard $10,000 for a job well done. You know, I'll say, if I could just make a plaque for employee the month, I'd put you on it, Richard. But I know that that would identify you as a murderer. And also, this is very scary and highly unnecessary. Thank you for doing this, I guess. Here's $10,000.

Don't do it to me. Is that a going to stop this? Oh my god. All right, so he went above and beyond. Yeah. And with that, Koklinski became the go-to guy whenever someone needed an unnecessarily painful death. Oh my god.

I don't know if anyone ever needs an unnecessarily painful death, but sometimes they do, Kissel. I guess so, I guess so. And from then on, he was known only as the Pollock. Oh yeah, that's like Batman. You take the name of the thing that bothers you as your own name. This would actually be a trend throughout his life. What's the symbol?

What light symbol do you throw up in the sky when you need the Pollock? It's a fucking screen door on a submarine. I'm needed. Oh, right. Yeah, the whole thing, like people not knowing his name, that would be something that Koklinski would take throughout the rest of his life.

And that's partly why he didn't get caught, was because people didn't know who he was. They didn't know where he lived. They didn't know he had a family. He's either known as the Pollock. Sometime they just called him Big Guy. Big Guy, love it. Love the Big Guy.

Koklinski, after this, became Meatball's main collector and enforcer, making sure that anyone who owed Meatball money would pay up. And those that didn't pay up died, simple as that. But even though Koklinski was killing for money, he hadn't stopped his trips to Manhattan. When he was asked by Carlo just how many of these murders he committed, Koklinski said, quote,

All the fingers on both your hands, five times. Wow, now I got to do math. 50. No kidding. It's 50. Wow. Jeez. That was your old eight-finger Tony.

And then it's fucking 40. I don't know. I don't know. Who knows? Wow. But still, since these guys were mostly homeless, the cops didn't really give a fuck. Meanwhile, the mob hits just kept getting weirder.

Once, they asked Richard to kill a mob boss who was stealing from the family, and shoved his credit cards up his ass. Well, that is not a purse. That is not a wallet. It's not a purse. That's what he's trying to do. Yeah, yeah, go make this guy a pocketbook, Rachine.

He's just like, all right. He's like, whore, flat, flat, flat, flat, serious face. And Richard did so out in the pine barons, but not before breaking the guy's arms, shoulders, collar bones, and ribs, and finishing the job with a rock to the head. Jeez. He then shoved the credit cards up the guy's ass,

could have done without that, rolled the guy in a tarp, and dumped him in an abandoned lot in Bayonne, just to make sure everyone got the message that you don't fuck with the Decaval Contest. Decaval Contest. You don't deal with these guys. I mean, in the end, my question is, how like, where did you get the idea to fuck with them

in the first place? Yeah. I don't know. My god, we have a human ATM over here. This is horrible stuff. And after that, Richard's reputation spread. Pretty soon, he was working for other mob families as well. But now, he killed a mob boss, but that didn't go against his.

He killed a mob boss on behalf of the other mob bosses. He'd do this again and again, like, well, definitely find out in the next episode that when you needed a big job done, you used Kuklinski. You called up the Pollock. Yeah, yeah. Let's give him the mongo. It's that type of thing.

We can't get mongo. You know what it is, too, is that it's specifically because you didn't belong to any one of the families. The commission all had to get together. All of the heads of the bosses had to get together. And it had to be a three-fifths agreement to kill another one of the bosses. They all had to do it.

And so that's the only person who could make a hit. And then what's great by him is that he's an independent contractor so that he could just do it without worrying about repercussions from one of the other families. And because the mob works with rules, you can't fuck with them because essentially he's doing it for money just like everybody else.

They took an up or down vote. Yeah. I mean, you know what they should have? They need to have the filibuster. And the guy who was just like, guys, I know you want to kill me, but let me speak. Let me speak. Well, some of Richard's hits were done quickly same day

while others took weeks to find the target. So this is the montage with, like, taking care of business every day where he's going and doing it. Yeah, he's getting up in the mob, new suits. Was there a scene in that Michael Shannon movie? No, there was a montage scene, but it was him just killing a whole bunch of people. And they did show the tree very, very briefly

in that montage scene. But yeah, there was definitely a montage. Every mob movie has a montage. Well, you have to. Otherwise, how do you know time is passing? Well, the other thing too is that the reason why all these mob movies have montages is because mob stuff is horribly repetitive.

Sure. It's like doing the same shit over and over and over again until they get caught. That's what I always think. When I think about mobs and all the murders, I'm like, mundane. You're prepared to copy, paste, I get it, OK. Well, Richard, though, he always got his man.

And the patience that he learned in always getting his man was applied to his personal murders as well. That would have been a great montage. All the times he's waiting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just sitting and hanging out, chewing gum, thinking about pierogies. Oh.

See, in addition to being an anti-social personality, Richard also had paranoid personality disorder. This meant that Richard was essentially incapable of forgiveness. Any humiliation whatsoever demanded revenge. And for Kuklinski, revenge almost always meant murder. Case in point was a bouncer who was just doing his job. Kuklinski had gotten particularly drunk one night

at a bar, so the bouncer threw him out. Richard might have let it slide, but on the way out, the bouncer kicked him in the butt, which Richard felt was unnecessary. Let's just go ahead and say, yes, it is unnecessary. Sure. It is unnecessary. But.

You don't want to make intentions to de-escalate. So Richard waited for two days. Two days. Two days sitting there, staring at the bouncer, watching his every movement, checking out all of his patterns, when people came in, when people came out. So finally, Richard waited until just the right moment,

got out of his car, hammer in hand, and hit the bouncer in the head with the hammer so hard that it stuck in the dude's skull. Fuck. Yeah, dude. But this has also made him swear off of drinking too hard. He blamed the drinking. Yeah, oh, he did.

I'm drinking too much. I can't do this anymore. I get mad when I'm drunk. And I can't do it. Like, he had his safe bars where he'd have to go and be like, this is where I can't. This is my home bar. This is in Hoboken.

I can't fuck around here because then, where am I going to drink? Right, right. And by the time that murder happened, Richard estimated that he'd killed over 65 men. He was 25 years old. 25 years old. 25?

You can't have over double your age in murders. That is, this is ridiculous. If I was around him, I'd say, this is getting ridiculous. Yeah. You need to be while he's strangling you. And you're like, this is ridiculous. Unfortunately for Richard, Meatball, his main guy, got murdered.

Got shot in the head while he was cooking some spaghetti in the kitchen. That's classic. Every time. Because you know how it is too, is it's Meatball being like, just know in my will, if I die, I want to be drowned in my gravy. And so they have to go and shoot him in the head.

And they're like, we got to show him a little bit of respect. Meatball's been a part of this family so long. He's like, you're right. And they just stuck his head in the sauce. I want to know more about that second hit man there. Who is that guy? That's all his white guys. They all have weird consciousness.

Good consciousness. For some reason, after Meatball got killed, the other mob guy has kind of cooled off on Richard for a little bit and work dried up. So Richard had no choice but to go straight temporarily. So he got a job at the Swiftline Trucking Company. Now this wasn't a change of heart for Richard. The only reason why he got a job at the Trucking Company

so he could case the best trucks to hijack. Yeah, was he flipping through the phone book and he finally got into the S's? And he's like, serial killer jobs. Here it is, Trucker. That is like, well, yeah. Oh, he worked on the Docs. Oh, he was a Doc guy.

He was a loading guy. He was a loading guy. I see. That must have been strange, the jokes he made about how he used to pick up bodies and throw them in the similar fashion. But it was here at the Trucking Company that Richard would meet the unfortunate love of his life,

Barbara Pedrici. Eventually, she would call the day they got married as the worst day of her life. And if the people who made the Ice Man would have had any balls, the stories we just told would have been the first act of their movie instead of it being Michael Shannon acting cute by hanging a fucking spoon off his nose.

Yep, wow. That's how the Godfather began, right? A huge wedding. That would have been a nice place to start. Yes, that's right. I gotta re-watch a Godfather. Yeah. It's good.

Yeah, I heard it's good. I heard it's good. Yeah, I heard it's really good. You know, he put cotton swabs in his mouth. And outside, the next episode is a bit of a laugh. You can't feel. All right, there it is. That's where we'll pick back up for Richard Kulinski part 2.

Kulinski part 2. This is a fascinating story, a crazy life story for this guy. Yeah. Yeah. All right, everyone. Well, thank you all so much for listening. What do we have to do? We have to make this plug because we got an extra show.

Yeah. We're going to be doing it here. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, we added a show to the Phoenix show that's coming up. We're doing Phoenix on August 17th. Can't wait. And then the next day, we're going to be flying to California, and we're going to be doing a show in Santa Ana.

Santa Ana. First county, we're coming for you, bro. LBC, man. Oh, it's candy. Coming down there, let's see if I can come watch our way, or let's come see our sundries in Santa Ana. Yes. Yeah.

And I want to see those tan surfer bods. I want to meet everyone in their clothes that have the glove on them. I've always heard that we're really big in the surfer community. Is that right? Yeah, the world's most electrocuted surfer who listens well surfing. I just want to say thank you.

Everybody's stuck around. It's like, I got a couple. I want to say Spring Hill Jack Coffee set me a cold brew set. And it's just powerful. Good. I am vibrating. The backs of my knees are making coffee soup right now. I think it's good.

I think it's good. Oh, that's a good assessment. Yeah, I think so. All right. I think it's good. And the tickets for that Santa Ana show we're going to go on sale next week, I believe, on Monday or Tuesday.

So be sure to check our Twitter and our website to see exactly where you can buy those tickets. Or you can just Google Santa Ana last podcast on the left. Yes, cannot wait to see you in Phoenix. We cannot wait to see you. And again, apologies for the last time. We will be there, and we cannot say how much enthusiasm we have. Cannot wait to get into that 110 degree weather.

I like the heat. So everyone complains about it. But I love the heat, because I'm not like the Iceman. Honestly, it would be nice if you could wear less layers. I don't want to. I know, but you are obviously hot. I am coated in sweat on a regular basis. Slip rate.

And I like that. Because you got to wear some layer. Man, wear tank top, man. I hope body is less. We all got bodies, man. My shorts are getting higher. My clothes are getting tighter. I'm just doing this.

Whether I'm getting fat or not, that's what I'm doing. You have a strange comfortability with your form. Yeah, man, because I'm accepting that every body is a gift that we're handed, and some gifts are kaleidoscopes, and some gifts are flashlights, and some gifts are flashlights. Does that make sense? Does that mean that makes sense? It's just named a bunch of cylindrical things.

That's me. That's me. And that's why they call it the present. Thank you for sticking with us on our two-week break. It wasn't really a break, because we were working really hard. But we want to say thank you. We're back, and we're ready to fucking go again. And it feels good to fucking do our shit.

Yes, and I want to thank Mary as well. She put together those best ofs. And she did such a great job. Thank you, Mary. So thank you, Mary Kelly. You are the best. She did a wonderful, wonderful job. Now you're going to want to give to the patron

if you want to give us money. We're going to be back to doing some interviews. Right, Kissel? That is right, Henry. And I read some fun creepypastas this week as well. So check that out. One involves a lot of honey, which has got a lot of honey. So it's a weird story.

When you're the poo themed, that Christopher Robin movie makes me want to fucking go on a killing spree. Well, why did they do that? They look so weird. I hate it. I hate it. That's awful. Leave them alone.

Just get them out of there. Just stop. Do it when you're the poo. I don't want to hear Christopher Robin. I think that Christopher Robin in their real life would probably turn out to be Jeffrey Dahmer. Who knows? And E.O.R. deserves more of a movie, you know?

More respect. More respect. You know, he was right about everything. And I am going to also postulate out there if we're ever going to do a Riverdale version of Winnie the Pooh on the guy. I'm saying it out loud right now on the show so that it can be willed into existence.

Nah, they already cast Jim Carrey. Ah! Hey, I'm sorry. Jim Carrey! Please, if you want to follow us on social media for whatever fucking reason, follow us on Twitter at HenryLovesU and Marcus Parks and LP on the left for all of the rest of it.

I've re-deactivated. Again? You do this every week. You are becoming like Oprah with her weight with Twitter. But I am loving Instagram. So follow me at BenkissleOne on Instagram. And yeah, that's basically it, I guess. That's it?

All right. And listen to all the other shows here on the OPN Network. Just peruse around. I'm sure you'll find something you like. All right, everyone, hail yourselves. Yo fuckers, goodbye, hail Satan. Hail Geen. And the Magoos Dalatians.

Hail me! Hey, guys, if you're going to be a contract killer, why don't you use that energy to go ahead and become like a scientist? We need them. Oh, yeah, we do.