Cold-Blooded: The Origin Story of the Iceman Richard Kuklinski

Title: Cold-Blooded: The Origin Story of the Iceman Richard Kuklinski
Original Publication Date: 8/9/2023
Transcript URL: share.descript.com/view/j6tJb4VQxS1
Description: In this episode of Organized Crime and Punishment, Mustache Chris and Steve delve into the captivating life of Iceman Richard Kuklinski. Join us as we explore his early years and the circumstances that led him into a life of crime. From his troubled upbringing to his initial steps into the underworld, we uncover the intriguing journey of this notorious figure. Tune in for a chilling tale of a man shaped by darkness. #IcemanChronicles #TrueCrimeTales #ColdBloodedCriminal
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Begin Transcript:
[00:00:00] This episode will bring up topics that are not necessarily appropriate for all audiences. Uh, we're gonna really try not to be graphic. I mean, in all honesty, we'll try to make it as less graphic as, as possible. But we will be talking about mafia, and killing, and contracts. Pillars, just to let you know in advance.
So what we're going to do today, Chris and I are, we're going to try to build some context on Richard Kuklinski, the Iceman, and this will lead into the next few episodes where we'll talk about mobster, Roy DeMeo, and then the 2012 movie, the Iceman, we really think you'll enjoy these conversations and really this whole series and the series within a series.
Uh, We're going to break down Richard Kuklinski's life into several sections, because that's really how the, the books break up his life and [00:01:00] how he broke up his life and his jailhouse in a series of three or four sets of jailhouse interviews, hours and hours of interviews, really his early childhood, his early life and life in crime, and then his later life in crime.
Um, And then his, uh, the end, where he's finally captured and prosecuted, and then his life in jail, which was a whole nother life after life. Just initially, Chris, what did you think overall of Richard Kuklinski? When we started looking into the Iceman, we were like... Really started looking into it like, yeah, we got to do this guy deserves his own episode because it is really a crazy, crazy story about like, you know, is this guy telling the truth?
Is this guy not telling the truth? Is, um, how much, how much is he lying? How much is he not lying? It's it. And there's opinions that vary where people say he's lying about everything. And there's people that just take them exactly at his word. And [00:02:00] yeah, Richard Kuklinski, I mean, in terms of mafia guys, if you can really call him that, I don't, he's not really a mafia guy.
He was kind of around them. I mean, he's, his story is fascinating. I remember when the Iceman tapes came out in the late 80s, maybe early 90s on HBO, and it was even too creepy to, for me to watch. I remember watching a little bit of it and turning it right off. And then a couple of years ago, I, Listen to some podcasts about him.
I'm like, this is a strange guy, but then watching this movie and then diving into the deep dive of the research that we did. There's so much to him. And I think for me, it's he really dives into. What history is, and I think that we're going to learn a lot more about him. Hopefully when historians start looking into a story, as opposed to journalists who [00:03:00] are looking at it and looking at it in different ways, I think that we're going to learn a lot more about him because like you said.
There's so much obscured about his story. We were relying so much on what he said that I don't think, at least for a while, that we'll know the full story of Richard Kuklinski. And it's also just the nature of... The mafia in general, where a lot of this stuff is still obscure, like it's still covered up and yeah, we know a fair amount, but there's a lot of, uh, I mean, if you look, listen to like Sammy, the bowl, he puffs himself up and I don't know, a lot of people take his word on a lot of things that went down, but I mean, somehow he always makes himself look good.
And he's, uh, you know, one of the. Sources for a lot of these journalists and just to like kind of use an example like Richard Konglitzky Is he's not a household name, but he's pretty he's a pretty famous serial killer I mean and [00:04:00] the five families which is uh by Celin Robb, I believe that's Rab How you pronounce his name is considered like the bible of The Mafia in the initial prints, they weren't even they mentioned Richard Kuklinski, but they weren't even spelling his name properly.
And another guy, Robert Prage, which we'll get into the story too. They weren't spelled. They didn't spell his name properly either. And it just kind of shows you. Like the layers of, um, onions you have to peel back to kind of get at the core of this story. That's the, the, I guess, the logical place to start is in Richard's early childhood.
That's another one that you see it develops along the way and it. If you listen, if you listen or read, uh, some of the early accounts, you get a slightly different version of Richard's early life. And then as you, in the later accounts, you get a more fleshed out version of his life. What was the early childhood of Richard Kuklinski like [00:05:00] in coming up in northern New Jersey in the 1930s, 1940s?
It sounds like it was But as rough as you could possibly imagine like they the whole family grew up poor I mean he talks about having to steal food to just you know feed himself and then feed the rest of his family but his parents were Something else like you would trigger. Oh, maybe the mother was a little bit motherly.
No, she was Abuse of and her his father. He will actually refers to his mother is just cancer. Like that's how he refers to his mother and doesn't even call her by his name and he doesn't even call his dad by his Doesn't even call him dad or father or anything like that. He calls him by his first name with Stanley and Stanley was About as evil as a, as a father could be to his own children, you know, there's a story of him beating, uh, one of his younger brothers and just, you know, [00:06:00] punching him in the back of the head and he killed him and, you know, and like Richard would get these types of beatings all the time and his brother, Joseph, and we're going to talk about his brother, Joseph, it, the whole, the way that he was raised, it was like a, yeah.
If you could set up a scenario to produce somebody like a Richard Glinsky, uh, like a hit man slash serial killer, you couldn't like pick a better factory to create it. Yeah, it really does seem that with this, with this family background, that. It's when you look at nature versus nurture, it really took both of them, that he was born with the genes or the propensity to be evil.
And then every single thing in his life just promoted that it was like an incubator to be evil. Like you said, his father killing his brother, uh, and child abuse right in front of Richard and then everybody in the family covering it up. And [00:07:00] Richard. Being so young, he sees his brother, he vividly describes that of seeing his brother laid out dead, and he just doesn't understand it.
His brother was there one day after, and then after the beating that the father regularly gave all of them, he's not there anymore. And you could see how that somebody who is …