When was the iceman arrested

Kim, who assumed leadership of North Korea upon the death of his father in , ruled the Communist nation with an iron On September 5, a Secret Service agent wrested a semi-automatic. Major General Henry C. Pratt issues Public Proclamation No. On February 19, , 10 weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl He did not set an official record, however.

Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. Near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright make the first successful flight in history of a self-propelled, heavier-than-air aircraft.

Orville piloted the gasoline-powered, propeller-driven biplane, which stayed aloft for 12 seconds and covered feet on its Tolkien, opens in theaters. On December 17, , a fire at a circus in Brazil kills more than people and severely burns hundreds more. The cause of the fire was never conclusively determined but it may have been the result of sparks from a train passing nearby.

Christmas week was just beginning, the Grant lashes out at Jewish cotton speculators, who he believed were the driving force behind the black market for cotton. This guy had an internal switch he flipped from the street to the dining room table.

When he was captured, his wife and daughter claimed they had no clue what he did for a living he had told them he was in Finance. Sure, they admitted to his having a wild temper and even threatening his wife a few times, but they never once considered that he was a cold-blooded killer by day and neighborly barbecue dad on weekends. Winona Ryder plays Deborah, Kuklinski's wife. Before you roll your eyes, you should know that Ryder is exceptional in the role.

Her tease in Black Swan gave us hope she had returned to form, but this turn displays the talent we always knew was there. The always dependable and creepy Ray Liotta is perfectly cast as Roy Demeo, the mobster for whom Kuklinski worked. The scenes with Shannon and Liotta together are bone-chillingly frightening. Kuklinski credits Prongay with valuable insight into poison and disposal of bodies. It's heart-warming to see that even contract killers have support groups. Demeo's link to the family head , James Franco as one of the hits , and Stephen Dorff as Kuklinski's incarcerated brother Joey.

Childhood flashbacks give us the table-setting necessary to understand the balance of nature v nurture in the Kuklinski household. Still, no matter how much abuse or misery one has a child, it's difficult to comprehend the stoic evil that possessed Kuklinski. And to be clear, Michael Shannon's performance is his best yet He has become one of the most interesting actors - one who can take the lead as he does here and in Take Shelter, or as a scene-stealing supporter in Revolutionary Road, Mud and the upcoming Man of Steel as General Zod.

He's not a flashy actor, just an extremely talented one. Vromen captures the gritty feel of the nearly three decades of "family" life in a manner that reminds of Kill the Irishmen The atmosphere and inner turmoil are similar, but there is no comparison the Kuklinski evil. Should you doubt this, I would highly recommend the documentary previously mentioned. Watching the actual dead eyes of the real Richard Kuklinski as he talks about his life is beyond horrifying.

Details Edit. Release date May 2, Lebanon. United States. Official site Japan. Shreveport, Louisiana, USA. Box office Edit. Technical specs Edit. Runtime 1 hour 46 minutes. Dolby Digital. Related news. Emma Roberts, John Gallagher Jr. Aug 26 MovieWeb. Contribute to this page Suggest an edit or add missing content. Top Gap. Kuklinski was pleased. Finally the stuff was working. Kuklinski signaled to Deppner that it was time for the next step.

He tightened it several times until his colleague-in-crime was no longer breathing. Even s he performed this grisly tsk, he probably knew he was watching how his own death would play out one day…maybe soon. When Barbara Deppner failed to return with a car to remove the body, Kuklinski had Smith placed beneath the mattress and box springs. Let someone else find the guy. And someone did. Four days later, just after Christmas, the fourth couple to rent the room complained to management of an ungodly odor.

When the mattress was lifted, the bloated, blackened body that had been baking all that time in the heated room was found. It was later identified as Gary Smith. While Deppner did the killing, he realized that now he knew too much.

Kuklinski didn't like that about anyone. When people learned too much about his business, they were gone. Deppner knew that his turn was next and there was nothing he could do about it. Since there was a warrant out for him for burglary and car theft, like Smith, he was being kept in a variety of motels, compliments of Kuklinski.

Then one day in January , there were no more trips to motels for Kuklinski. The "problem" had been solved. It wasn't until May that a giant turkey buzzard signaled Deppner's whereabouts. A man on a bicycle rode closer to see what the bird was doing and noticed a large shape wrapped in green garbage bags. When he saw a face and arm sticking out from a tear in the bag, he alerted the police. They noted that the dumpsite was just over three miles from a ranch where the Kuklinski family often went riding.

From photos in his possession, they were able to identify him. The cause of death was "undetermined," although pinkish spots on the skin were noted and photographed. Kuklinski became a prime suspect, but he proved to be the devil himself when it came to getting evidence on him. The man was clever and elusive. These were not Kuklinski's first murders. In fact, he'd been killing since he was fourteen years old, usually for profit but sometimes just to rid himself of a problem. By the time he took out Smith and Deppner, he'd been a hit man for the Mafia.

But it wasn't his sociopathic personality that earned him the nickname "The Iceman. Hit Man. Richard Kuklinski always had a deal going, and usually several at once. He stole cars and expedited trade in pornography, guns, and drugs. Anthony Bruno points out in his book, The Iceman , written with Kuklinski's cooperation, that he first killed someone in when he was fourteen years old. Protecting his territory against a bully, he fatally beat the other boy, although it surprised him to hear the next day that the kid was actually dead.

It also filled him with a sense of power. He now perceived himself as "someone. On a televised documentary on HBO, Kuklinski described his first premeditated kill as an adult: In Jersey City one evening, he'd used a car bomb triggered by gasoline to kill a man.

As he walked away from the exploding car, he felt nothing. That was his way. He detached himself from his victims, an attitude that he claims came from having to detach himself from the abuse his drunken father inflicted on him as a boy.

In fact, he had a brother Joey who'd gone to prison at the age of 25 after raping and killing a twelve-year-old girl and throwing her body from the roof of a building. He threw her dog to the ground with her, and for that he got life in Trenton State prison. Kuklinski planned on avoiding that fate but he didn't really care who he hurt. He just had to make sure it couldn't be traced to him.

Eventually he got involved in business deals with the Brooklyn-based Roy DeMeo, a one-time butcher's apprentice and the most feared hit man for the Gambino crime family. While Kuklinski wasn't great about collecting money due, DeMeo saw that "the Pollack" had what it took to kill people. Kuklinski admitted that he'd do anything for money, so DeMeo took him to a place where they spotted a man out walking his dog. Without a thought, and on command, Kuklinski walked by the man and then turned and shot him.

That brought him deeper into DeMeo's inner circle and he witnessed DeMeo's volatile moods. In fact, DeMeo had a strange assembly-line approach to his killings. According to a former associate, the target person would walk into the club. He'd be shot by one person, wrapped in a towel by another, and stabbed in the heart by yet a third person.

Then he'd be cleaned up, drained of blood, laid out on a pool liner, and hacked into pieces that were packaged like meat and tossed into a dump. Kuklinski knew he had to be careful, and once for no apparent reason he was nearly annihilated by the paranoid DeMeo.

Yet when DeMeo's renowned temper and mania for killing became disorganized and conspicuous, he fell out of favor with the Gambino family. A hit was put on him and eventually he was found shot to death in the trunk of his car in January of While by some reports, Nino Gaggi did the hit, Kuklinski smiles at the idea that it might have been done by him. At any rate, the man responsible for well over one hundred killings was now gone, but not before he'd taught Kuklinski a thing or two.

Apparently he killed a number of other people during the s, but the first one that police linked to him was George W. Malliband, Jr. Early in , he left home with Kuklinski to meet with Roy DeMeo. Malliband owed DeMeo money, and since Kuklinski had vouched for him, it was now on Kuklinski's head.

DeMeo was furious and it would be in character for him to shoot them both dead on the spot. What Malliband did not realize is that Kuklinski's own anger had been simmering since Malliband had come to his home the summer before. Kuklinski never allowed his business to penetrate his family life, and he'd been furious when Malliband had just walked into his yard during a family gathering, asking for him. Now that he was in a bind, Malliband reminded Kuklinski that he knew where his family lived.

It was a veiled threat and that was the last idea Malliband ever had. Kuklinski pulled over and shot him five times with a. Then he was faced with a body disposal problem. He decided to put the guy into a gallon steel drum, but Malliband was six-foot-three and weighed pounds—almost matching Kuklinski's own enormous frame.

Kuklinski knew it wouldn't be easy, and it wasn't. He stuffed the corpse into the drum, headfirst, and found that he couldn't quite make the legs fit in. The answer was to break one. Cutting the tendons behind the knee, he snapped the leg forward.

Then he placed the top on the barrel, secured it, and rolled it off a cliff in the Palisades. It hit some sixty feet below. Kuklinski paid off DeMeo and washed his hands of George Malliband. On February 5, the owner of a Jersey City building at the foot of the cliff noticed the dented drum.

The lid had popped and something was sticking out, so he went closer. When he saw two bloody human legs, he ran to get the police. They traced the corpse's identity, and soon heard from Malliband's brother that he had been seriously afraid of Kuklinski.

They now had a suspect. It was a year and a half before a similar murder was performed, and much longer before the victim was identified, mostly due to an idea Kuklinski got from a man named Robert Prongay, a. Mister Softee. Robert Prongay sold ice cream out of his truck to kids in North Bergen, even as he was dreaming up unique new ways to kill someone.

He was an army-trained demolitions expert who was highly versed in the art of destruction. He teamed up with Kuklinski for several deals in the pornography trade, doing hits for Roy DeMeo when needed. Kuklinski learned a lot from Mister Softee. One thing that Prongay was good at was using various types of drugs and chemicals to take a life, though he preferred cyanide. He taught Kuklinski how to put cyanide into a spray bottle, which could be used quickly and easily to take someone out.

Once the poison got into them through the nose, they were gone. He even demonstrated the technique, and in less than fifteen seconds Kuklinski watched a man fall down dead in the street. Somehow Prongay managed to get cyanide quite easily and Kuklinski never learned his source. Prongay also experimented with other things.

He wanted to know, for example, if a body kept frozen could foil the medical examiner's reading for time of death. If so, then a killer did not have to worry about an alibi. Louis Masgay became the guinea pig. Masgay was to bring a rather large amount of cash to Kuklinski for a shipment of blank videotapes. He'd already attempted this exchange several times before, and each time Kuklinski had stood him up.

Masgay didn't realize that this was part of Kuklinski's MO: get his targets all worked up over some nonexistent deal, increasing both the anticipation and the price each time.

But he never returned. The only sign that something had happened to him was his abandoned van, found on Route 17 in Bergen County. The secret panel in which he'd kept the cash had been ripped out and the money was gone. From different stories pieced together, it's apparent that Mister Softee helped Kuklinski hide the body.

One witness later claimed to have seen it hanging in a large industrial freezer in a warehouse rented by Kuklinski, but there was some reason to believe that the corpse had lain for at least part of the time in the freezer in Mr.

Softee's ice cream truckthe one out of which he served ice cream. No other freezer was found in the garages of either Kuklinski or Prongay large enough to store a body. He'd been shot and wrapped in plastic garbage bags. Oddly, he had on the same clothing he'd worn the day he vanished, but the medical examiner thought the body looked fresh. Yet during the autopsy, ice crystals inside the tissues gave away what had happened. Had Kuklinski only waited until the corpse had thoroughly thawed, he'd have gotten away with his attempt to foil the reading of the postmortem interval.

When Masgay was identified through his fingerprints, Kuklinski became a chief suspect. The cops started calling him the Iceman. Yet that didn't stop Kuklinski. He went on to kill a pharmacist, Paul Hoffman, 51, in the spring of Hoffman had been pestering him endlessly to get a shipment of Tagamet, a prescription ulcer medication, for a cut-rate price. Kuklinski had nothing for him but led him to believe a shipment was in.

Hoffman put the cash together and went eagerly to see Kuklinski at his rented garage in North Bergen, New Jersey. That was the last his family ever saw of him. Kuklinski eventually admitted to shooting and beating him with a tire iron, and then cementing the pharmacist into another steel drum.

He left the drum outside a motel next to a hot dog stand in Little Ferry, New Jersey. Occasionally he'd go have a hot dog and see if the barrel had been discovered. Eventually, it was just gone. Apparently someone had moved it and to this day Hoffman's body was never found.

Then in , it was Mister Softee's turn to die. He argued over something with Kuklinski and threatened his family. That was sufficient for Kuklinski to get rid of him. Robert Prongay was found shot to death in his Mister Softee truck in his garage in North Bergen…just across the street from Kuklinski's garage. Unfortunately for him, he'd also cut off his source of cyanide, which would prove regretful in the near future. Operation Iceman. Having collected what information they could on Richard Kuklinski, a task force was formed to try to stop him.

At that point they had no idea that Kuklinski would use almost any weapona bomb, a gun, a knife, strangulation, poisonto accomplish his lethal goals. Once he'd even decided to try out a crossbow. He opened his car window as if to ask directions, and when a man approached, he released the arrow. It went through the man's head, killing him.

Kuklinski was happy to know that it worked. Another time, he just shot a man at a traffic light. Although law enforcement did not realize it, as an enforcer and a free-lance scam artist, he may have killed over one hundred men, and later he admitted that loudmouths especially annoyed them. They reminded him of his father, whom he'd have taken great pleasure in killing. He'd even disguised himself as a gay man one evening so that he could walk unnoticed through a disco and inject a target victim with poison.

Special Agent Dominick Polifrone, who had extensive experience undercover with the mob, was hired to lure Kuklinski into a deal, specifically to get him either to admit to something on tape or to actually engage in the initial stages of a premeditated act of murder.

He took on the name Michael Dominick Provenzano, or just "Dom. It took over a year and a half to connect with Kuklinski, but he was ready.

As Dom, he promised Kuklinski a big score on cocaine and an arms deal, and to his surprise, Kuklinski asked if he could score any cyanide. That indicated that he was certainly up to something but had no other supplier. He and Dom called each other from pay phones, using pagers to initiate contact, and met from time to time at the Vince Lombardi truck stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

To everyone's surprise, Kuklinski revealed quite a bit to this man he barely knew, which meant that either he was not as careful as his reputation indicated or he was planning to kill the federal agent. He bragged about his cyanide methods and even talked about the man he'd frozen.

He didn't name names but the details he gave out matched those of the victims attributed to him. His confessions, captured on tape, were a gold mine. They also made it clear that he needed cyanide as soon as he could get it to take care of another "problem"—which indicated that he was planning another murder.

Eventually Dom asked Kuklinski for help killing a "rich Jewish kid" who would bring a lot of cash for several packages of cocaine. The plan was to poison his egg sandwich with the "cyanide" in actuality, it was quinine that Dom brought, and they would split the money.

The day arrivedDecember 17, and Kuklinski claimed he had a van all prepared for the hit. He took the sandwiches that Dom had bought and said that he'd be back. However, he did not return and another officer soon spotted him back at his house. The task force believed that Dom's life was now in danger, so they moved quickly to make an arrest. Kuklinski's wife, Barbara, was ill that morning, so he urged her to get into the car with him so he could take her to get checked out. In many ways, that proved to be a lucky break for the Feds because she became a point of leverage.

Although Kuklinski had beaten her up and threatened her life on several occasions, his family was sacred to him. Even the idea that the police had Barbara in custody and intended to charge her with possession of a gun because a handgun was found in the car , he was enraged.

He demanded they let her go and insisted that she knew nothing of his deals. Yet he'd have to give them something in return, which he ended up doing after his trial.

Because Kuklinski had actually applied the quinine to the sandwiches, it would be easy to use that to show at trial his intent to commit murder. He was charged with the five murder charges, and for these he faced two separate trials. The Trial. The prosecution team, Bob Carroll and Charles Waldon, said they would seek the death penalty.

Yet the case was circumstantial, since no witnesses came forward to say that they'd actually seen Kuklinski commit a murder. However, they did have a few aces up their sleeves. Rich Patterson, a man who had almost married one of the Iceman's daughters, admitted that he'd once unknowingly helped Kuklinski transport a corpse to a place near where they all went horseback riding on occasion. The man had been killed in his apartment one weekend early in while he was away.

The likely victim was Daniel Deppner. With this information, detectives searched beneath the cleaned carpet for blood and found it. The witness also said that he'd seen Tupperware containers in the apartment after that weekend that were consistent with those he'd seen in Kuklinski's home, which could mean that Kuklinski had brought food there, and that Kuklinski himself had scrubbed away the blood on the carpet.

The prosecution also called Barbara Deppner to the stand to tell what she knew. She was clearly afraid of the defendant. She knew about the two victims being hidden in hotels, and she recalled her ex-husband telling her that Kuklinski intended to kill Smith. Danny also described the events afterward. Her live-in companion and the former foreman of the car-theft ring, Percy House, testified that Kuklinski had admitted to both murders.

Defense Attorney, Neal M. Frank, tried to discredit this witness, but Kuklinski used his finger to point an imaginary gun at the man, and that's all the jury needed to give the witness credibility. Then Agent Polifrone took the stand and described his many encounters with Kuklinski. Parts of the tapes were played for the jury, particularly the description of how to use cyanide in food. There was also a part in which he talked about how long it took one of his victims to die, and how he needed more to take care of a couple of "rats.

Frank claimed that Kuklinski's statements to Polifrone were just braggadocio. He'd been trying to impress the guy. They also pointed out that an autopsy had shown no indication of cyanide in the two allegedly poisoned victims. However, the prosecutor hired New York medical examiner Michael Baden, who explained that cyanide degrades in a body into the natural elements of carbon and nitrogen. After a few days, there's no detectable trace of it, not even the odor.

However, the fact that it was used shows up in the lividitypinkish spots on the skin that indicate oxygen starvation. This was consistent with photos of both corpses. Along with the testimony of pathologist Geetha Natarajan, who indicated the ligature marks consistent with strangulation, the jury was convinced. It took them four hours to decide. On May 25, , they found Richard Kuklinski guilty.