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If there were ever a Michael Jordan of contract killing, it was Richard Kuklinski. His nickname The Ice Man came after a victim he'd frozen to confuse time of death was found on a sweltering New Jersey day and the autopsy revealed ice crystals in the corpse. Before his capture in December 1986 -- it took eight men to subdue him -- Kuklinski claims to have killed more than 100 people, including Jimmy Hoffa and the head of a mafia crime family.
Kuklinski killed often, brutally, and without remorse. He beheaded, stabbed and poisoned. He jammed credit cards up asses and burned testicles with flares. He duct-taped victims, fed them to rats and videotaped the proceedings. The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer details these and countless other murders. At times, it's like GoodFellas in prose.
What's missing is nuance. Best-selling author Philip Carlo (The Night Stalker) spent more than 240 hours interviewing Kuklinski and offers play-by-play of his life, from his abusive father to his marriage with a woman who didn't learn of Kuklinski's double-life until after his arrest in 1986. But Carlo's brisk, sometimes superficial account adds little to what HBO uncovered in a series of specials, collected in a DVD, The Iceman Interviews, where Kuklinski talks on camera about his extraordinary ability to hurt people. "I am probably the loneliest person in the world," he disclosed at the end of The Iceman and the Psychiatrist, the last of the interviews. "Since there's no love in my life, I had to have something to replace it with, and I replaced it with hate." Absent equivalent reflection -- and covering many of the same murders, with some variation of detail -- The Ice Man is a rare case where the book just doesn't measure up to the movie.
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July 20, 2006