Serial Killer Documentary - Exposing the Iceman： Richard Kuklinski

Serial Killer Documentary - Exposing the Iceman： Richard Kuklinski 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
On December seventeenth, nineteen eighty six, fifty one year old
Richard Koklinski left his home in the upmarket neighborhood of Dumont,
New Jersey. He placed a package of cyanide lace sandwiches
in the boot of his car and an automatic pistol
under the driver's seat. It was to be a normal
day at the office for this season killer.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
He had a family, he had children, and yet he
was able to go out and kill somebody and then
come home and wrap Christmas presents.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Over a thirty year career, Richard Koklinsky had perfected the
art of murder by any means necessary.

Speaker 3 (00:49):
Methodical, very cunning, and frankly frighteningly efficient in the way
he killed.

Speaker 4 (00:55):
He really liked to make sure he was ready for anything.

Speaker 1 (00:59):
Detectives investigating Koklinsky knew they needed cold, hard evidence to
put a stop to his reign of terror.

Speaker 5 (01:07):
He figured he'd never get quote out. He controlled everything,
and he controlled you if you're could.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Richard Koklinsky, known as the Iceman, was about to be
unmasked as one of the world's most evil killers. Richard

(01:45):
Koklinsky is believed to have been one of the United
States most prolific contract killers of the twentieth century. Working
for New York and New Jersey's infamous crime families. He
claimed responsibility for over one hundred murders. Robert Carroll was
part of the task force that helped bring Koklinsky to justice.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
No remorse, no conscience in killing, and that's the most
dangerous criminal.

Speaker 5 (02:13):
You can get.

Speaker 1 (02:14):
Koklinsky cut down associates who dared to cross him, as
well as wealthy customers who came to him for drugs, weapons,
and pornography. Detective Dominic Polyphroone infiltrated Koklinsky's crime underworld and
eventually got the killer to confess in a series of
secret recordings.

Speaker 5 (02:33):
He was just brutal. He was explaining to me how
we murdered people, and the joy like INNA's face. He
goes to Clint.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
This killer's story begins in Jersey City, New Jersey. Richard
Leonard Koklinsky was born on April the eleventh, nineteen thirty five,
the second of four children of Polish and Irish immigrants.

Speaker 6 (03:06):
He grew up in a home that was violent and chaotic.

Speaker 5 (03:12):
He took beatings from his mother and father, sometimes for
no reason whatsoever.

Speaker 1 (03:17):
Criminologist and author Jennifer Sutton has researched Koklinsky's life story.

Speaker 4 (03:24):
His father, Stanley, he was very aggressive. He would come
home drunk attack their mother. His mother was an orphan.
She never really experienced a loving family, and I think
that was detrimental to the way she was able to
be a mother to him.

Speaker 1 (03:39):
In February nineteen forty one, when Koklinsky was just five
years old, his older brother, Florian died. The official story
was that he'd met with a terrible accident, but Koklinsky
would later claim this had been a cover up. He
believed that Stanley Koklinsky had beaten his seven year old
son to.

Speaker 7 (04:01):
If you imagine being a five year old and you're
subject to that kind of violence, you are utterly powerless.
You don't have the physicality or the resources to be
able to escape from that. You have to survive it.

Speaker 1 (04:16):
In his early teens, Kaklinsky began to drift into crime.

Speaker 4 (04:21):
One day, he decided that he was going to steal
some wine because he wanted to get a bit of money,
and then he went home and absolutely panicked, thought that
the police were going to come for him. And then
when nothing happened, no one came for him. That was
the turning point for Richard. That was when he realized,
you know what, it really doesn't matter if I do
anything good or if I do anything bad, nobody notices.

Speaker 1 (04:43):
According to his own testimony, at around the age of thirteen,
Kaklinsky decided it was time to start facing his problems
head on.

Speaker 8 (04:53):
Although Richard Koklinsky was to grow into a very large
man as a child who was comparatively pune, and he
was bullied relentlessly by a local gang.

Speaker 5 (05:05):
The kids around the block would take advantage of them
until one day he started ruling himself and wound up
beating up people and showed that, you know.

Speaker 8 (05:16):
He's the man, and he decided to take his revenge
on this particular gang leader.

Speaker 5 (05:22):
He got tired of being abused from him. He beat
him to death and felt good about it too.

Speaker 1 (05:31):
This was what Richard Kotlinsky later claimed, though prosecutors were
never able to prove it.

Speaker 7 (05:37):
The earlier criminal career starts, especially something like that, the
less likely it is that it's ever going to end.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Now fully invested in a life outside of the law,
by his early twenties, Richard Kotlinsky had developed a range
of money making rackets.

Speaker 5 (05:56):
He formed his own crew. He had several people that
were working for him.

Speaker 4 (06:01):
They formed a gang where they would rob cars to order.
They had a place where they could offload the goods
that they stole to be sold quickly. Money laundering, you know,
a bit of extortion. So he started setting up some
companies in agistimate companies which he then used to launder
money through.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
Richard Koklinsky had the perfect physeeke for the line of
work he'd chosen.

Speaker 9 (06:24):
He was huge.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
He was about six or four, about close to three
hundred pounds, dig man, scary looking guy.

Speaker 1 (06:37):
Kaklinsky married young and had two sons, but the marriage
was not destined to last.

Speaker 6 (06:43):
Spooked by a.

Speaker 1 (06:43):
Minor theft charge, in nineteen fifty eight, Kotlinsky found a
job with a trucking company in North Bergen, New Jersey,
and it was here two years later that.

Speaker 6 (06:53):
He met nineteen year old Barbara Pidrici.

Speaker 4 (07:00):
Bo was a receptionist at the time, and he thought
she was absolutely beautiful, so he spent as much of
his time as he could try to woo her.

Speaker 8 (07:07):
They began an affair, but Barbara wasn't entirely convinced that
this man who appeared on the surface to be courteous
and kind was actually that in reality, not just the
fact that he was married and had two children already,
but also the fact that he had this incredibly violent
streak which would sometimes come to the surface.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
This violent streak emerged just a few months into the
affair when Barbara tried to leave Katklinsky.

Speaker 8 (07:39):
When Barbara told him that perhaps they weren't made for
each other, he lost his temper.

Speaker 4 (07:47):
He grabbed her and told her very sternly that if
she left him, he would have to kill her and
her family because he was the only one.

Speaker 8 (08:01):
A stander in the back with the tip of a hunting.

Speaker 7 (08:06):
Knife, and he would have killed her if she tried
to leave. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind
that he would have done.

Speaker 1 (08:14):
Koklinski left his first wife for Barbara. Then something happened
that made it even harder for the young woman to
leave him. Barbara discovered she was pregnant.

Speaker 7 (08:25):
It is quite possible that he forced her to be
pregnant because it ties her to him for the rest
of her life.

Speaker 8 (08:35):
Barbara reluctantly agrees to marry Richard Koklinsky. The marriage takes
place in early nineteen sixty two. She's several months pregnant,
and then, perhaps inevitably tragically, Koklinsky sets about her and
beats her very badly, so badly in fact, that she miscarries,

(09:00):
verified of the consequences if she left Barbara stay. She
became pregnant again, and again her husband's violence caused her
to lose the baby.

Speaker 1 (09:10):
But in nineteen sixty four they had a healthy child together,
and Richard Koklinsky set about creating the image of a
wholesome New Jersey family.

Speaker 5 (09:21):
They had three children. Then he moved to dumartin New Jersey.

Speaker 8 (09:26):
As far as their neighbors were concerned, in New Jersey,
they were an upright family.

Speaker 9 (09:33):
His children went to nice schools.

Speaker 4 (09:35):
His wife was always dressed beautifully, They had holidays. On
the outside, he looked like this wonderful, dutiful husband and
family man.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
This persona could not have been further from reality. Violence
was now a way of life for Richard Koklinsky. By
the nineteen sixties, when he was in his early thirties,
Koklinsky had begun running a video where is the Operation,
something that drew him deeper and deeper into the world
of serious organized crime.

Speaker 6 (10:08):
He had a little.

Speaker 3 (10:08):
Business called Sunset Studio, pirating tapes. Quite quickly he got
into pornography and that was pretty lucrative for him. The
interesting part of that, of course, is pornography involved mob
These tapes were going out to different organized crime people,
and a fellow by the name of Roy DeMeo, who
was ruthless individual had his own crew in New York,

(10:31):
got wind of Koklinsky's activities.

Speaker 1 (10:35):
Also heavily involved in the making and distribution of adult movies.

Speaker 6 (10:40):
By the late nineteen sixties, Roy de Mayo.

Speaker 1 (10:43):
Had become unhappy with Richard Kotlinsky encroaching upon his business.
Hearing about Koklinsky's willingness to employ violence, Demeyo came up
with a way that this rival pornographer could pay his
dues to the family. He could take care of their enemies.

Speaker 3 (11:03):
Boyd de Mayo was known in organized crime circles as
a vicious, vicious killer himself and also an enforcer. The
Mayo immediately recognized that Koklinsky was evil, that he was
absolutely heartless.

Speaker 4 (11:18):
They asked him to kill a homeless person just to
prove that he would be able to do it, which
he obliged, shot them broad daylight, got back into the car.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
According to Koklinsky's own claims, this murder marked the beginning
of his relationship with some of New York and New
Jersey's most infamous crime families. New Jersey Prosecutor Robert Carroll
would later try to follow the trail of destruction Koklinsky
had left as a killer for hire.

Speaker 3 (11:46):
As we sampled these things on salved burders, we would
check the travel records and you'd see Koklinsky was there
for a day, and then something would happen. He would
go to Switzerland, stay for a day, somebody would be
killed on solved murder.

Speaker 5 (11:58):
He went to Hawaii, Maui.

Speaker 3 (12:00):
There was a man thrown out of a third floor
balcony on a hotel.

Speaker 5 (12:04):
He died that night. Kequinsky left the next day.

Speaker 7 (12:07):
This was a man probably with anti social personality disorder,
had never experienced empathy maybe in his life.

Speaker 6 (12:16):
So yeah, it was all business to him.

Speaker 7 (12:18):
None of it was personal to him.

Speaker 1 (12:22):
Until Richard Koklinsky was arrested, the extent of his contract
killings was not known, in fact, until the early nineteen eighties.
He was not yet on the radar of homicide detectives.
But in nineteen eighty five, a newly formed Organized Crime
and Racketeering Task Force was handed an interesting case file.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
We were brought together as a group of experienced detectives
from different areas in New Jersey and outside of New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
New York to focus on austra, which is the mob.

Speaker 3 (13:02):
We were assigned to handle complex and sensitive cases around
the state of New Jersey, and there was a series
of burglaries, carthefs and things that were occurring in the
northern part of the state.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
As officers in the early eighties had investigated the crimes
and had begun to chase up their prime suspects, they
noticed a sinister pattern.

Speaker 3 (13:25):
Persons who were involved with those crimes started showing up dead.

Speaker 1 (13:30):
No killer had ever been caught, but in nineteen eighty five,
the Organized Crime Task Force began to painstakingly reinvestigate the
murders in the hopes of proving a link between them.
On February fifth, nineteen eighty the mutilated body of forty
two year old George Maliband had been discovered in Jersey City.

(13:51):
He had last been seen on January the thirtieth, carrying
twenty seven thousand dollars in cash. He told his family
the money was going to be used to buy a
batch of tapes.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Mister Malaband was found with his body hanging out of
a fifty five gallon drum.

Speaker 5 (14:10):
He was a big man, he.

Speaker 3 (14:11):
Was about six three and two hundred and eighty eighty
five pounds. In order to get him into the drum,
his tendons and so forth had been sliced, and then
the drum had been thrown off a ledge area in
Jersey City, and as it rolled down the hill, it
reached the bottom and apparently broke open, and then someone
noticed the body.

Speaker 1 (14:28):
The businessman from Pennsylvania had been shot five times.

Speaker 6 (14:33):
This was the first in the.

Speaker 1 (14:34):
Series of unsolved murders that would, in nineteen eighty five,
land on the desk of the Task Force.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
The only clue that we had at that point was
that mister Malaband maybe meeting a subject by the name.

Speaker 5 (14:48):
Of Richie or Big Richie. That's all we had.

Speaker 3 (14:51):
That case remained unsolved.

Speaker 1 (14:53):
Seventeen months after the murder of George Maliband, another Pennsylvania
businessman had disappeared on his way to a meeting.

Speaker 3 (15:02):
And approximately July of nineteen eighty one, the subject by
the name of Lewis Masgy traveled to New Jersey to
buy some videotapes.

Speaker 4 (15:11):
He's a family man. He run a business with his son.
He had a convenience store and his plan was to
buy a load of blank tapes for recording for people
to buy for their VCRs at home.

Speaker 3 (15:22):
When he arrived in New Jersey, he went to a
diner and later on he just disappeared. The van that
he was driving was found shortly thereafter on a highway.

Speaker 5 (15:32):
In New Jersey.

Speaker 3 (15:34):
When he was gone. There was no evidence, nothing indicating
foul play at that point, but again that was a
cold case. It had not been solved. But by talking
to his family we learned that he had been carrying
a large sum of money.

Speaker 1 (15:47):
The fifty year old Lewis Masgate had been carrying forty
five thousand dollars in cash when he disappeared. His family
also gave investigators another piece of tantalizing information.

Speaker 3 (16:00):
He too was supposed to be meeting a subject by
the name of Ritchie.

Speaker 1 (16:04):
Seventeen months after Lewis Masgi's disappearance, in December nineteen eighty two,
an employee at the York Hotel in North Bergen, New Jersey,
began getting complaints from customers.

Speaker 3 (16:19):
There was room thirty one that had a terrible smell
in it, and when they finally investigated, they found.

Speaker 6 (16:26):
A body under the bed and it.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
Was secured in a box like structure. The body was
of an individual by the name of Gary Smith. Gary
Smith had been in that room for several days and
was pretty far along in terms of decomposition.

Speaker 1 (16:44):
Thirty seven year old Smith was from Vernon, in the
northeast of the state. At the time of his death,
there was a warrant owne for his arrest on the
charges of stealing and caching checks, and autopsy revealed ligature
marks on him neck he'd been strangled. Smith's skin also

(17:04):
had another unexpected.

Speaker 3 (17:06):
Feature, cyanosius, the pink lividity that it was depicted on
a body at the time.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
There's only two things that would cause that in one
has carbon monoxide and the other's cyanide.

Speaker 1 (17:17):
Poisoning Officers who initially investigated Smith's murder didn't know what
to make of this unusual discovery, but just a few
months later, in May nineteen eighty three, a cyclist riding
through a wooded area in West Milford, New Jersey, noticed
a large turkey buzzard hovering over something on the ground.

(17:41):
Thirty four year old Daniel Deppner, and known carthief, had
disappeared three months earlier. Again, the autopsy results were intriguing.

Speaker 8 (17:50):
There are suggestions that there might have been cyanide poisoning
involved in his death.

Speaker 3 (17:56):
We found undigested food in the stomach that conveyed to
the medical examiner. Was that whatever had been eaten, you know,
was fatal because the summit he died right away and
there was no other indications of trauma to the body.

Speaker 1 (18:11):
If the victims had really been killed with cyanide, it
was a truly unusual method of murder.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Cyanide's not easy to get. During the jewelry business, they
use it, but it's not easily campy it in the
drug store people who know how to do this.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
As the task Force re examined the murders of Smith
and Deptner in nineteen eighty five, the same name came up.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
They were connected to him. It was just by a
name big Ritchie, or a phone number. Somebody's wife would
call up and say that my husband went to meet
somebody his name was Richie, and she never came home.

Speaker 1 (18:54):
Investigators realized there was only one Ritchie that Gary Smith
and Daniel Deppner could have been meeting. Both men were
known to be members of Richard Koklinsky's crew. Four months
after Daniel depth That was found dead, the body of
missing man Lewis Masgay turned up in a park near

(19:15):
the New York New Jersey border with a single gunshot
wound to the back of the head.

Speaker 5 (19:22):
When they found the body, it looked like it was
only dead a week two weeks, maybe because the body
didn't decompose. It had the same clothes on from when
he disappeared.

Speaker 3 (19:33):
His body had been methodically wrapped in plastic bags. When
the medical examiner examined the body, it was very well
preserved and it actually had what's called ice crystal artifacts
president the body.

Speaker 1 (19:46):
Lewis Masgay's family had been searching for him for over
two years since he'd vanished in July nineteen eighty one
on his way to meet Richie.

Speaker 5 (19:56):
And they find out that this person allegedly was meeting
with Klinsky and he wasn't dead for a week or two.
He was frozen in a freezer for two years.

Speaker 1 (20:10):
This unusual tactic to cover the tracks of his killings
earned Koklinsky.

Speaker 6 (20:15):
The nickname the Iceman.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
Now linked to a fourth murder, the Organized Crime Task
Force knew that Koklinsky had to be stopped.

Speaker 2 (20:27):
It just seemed that wherever this guy Koklinsky went, people
were turning up dead.

Speaker 3 (20:33):
It was time sensitive because we knew there were other
criminal affiliates, so we knew that while the investigation was occurring,
is a possibility other persons.

Speaker 5 (20:42):
Could be killed.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
By early nineteen eighty five, fifty year old Richard Koklinsky
had been linked with four brutal murders. The victims were
all known associates of his or men who wanted to
do business with him. But with only circumstance evidence, it
wasn't enough for the New Jersey Organized Crime and Racketeering

(21:05):
Task Force to bring him in.

Speaker 3 (21:08):
We did not have evidence that we could charge him
with at that time.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
In the spring of nineteen eighty five, Robert Carroll and
his team launched Operation Iceman.

Speaker 3 (21:20):
We decided that we would introduce an undercover agent into
the operation, and the undercover agent, though had a very
difficult task.

Speaker 5 (21:30):
I did a call from my buddies at the prosecutors
of saying, we have an individual that's here in Bergen
County area and there's been murdering people with pure cyanide.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
Agent Dominique Polyphrone, who'd previously gone undercover to get information
on New York's most ruthless crime families, was the obvious
choice for the high risk sting.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Dominic, in my opinion, was probably the best undercover in
the country.

Speaker 9 (22:01):
He just fit the profile. He talked the talk, he
walked the walk.

Speaker 2 (22:05):
He was able to make people feel comfortable in that
world that he was part of that world.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
Though detectives suspected Kotlinsky use cyanide in some of his murders,
they had no direct proof of this highly unusual method
of killing.

Speaker 5 (22:21):
They needed direct evidence. That's was my mission to meet
with them to find out how he murdered these people
and get that direct evidence.

Speaker 1 (22:32):
Getting what they needed would be dangerous even for such
an experienced agent.

Speaker 9 (22:38):
Risks were very high for Dominic.

Speaker 2 (22:41):
Richard Kokwinsky was an evil, very capable murderer.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
As they prepared to send Dominic Polyphrone into the Lion's Den,
the team dug deeper into the disappearance of a fifth
man who was now believed to have done business with
their target.

Speaker 8 (23:00):
On the twenty ninth of April in nineteen eighty one,
a pharmacist called Paul Hoffman was invited to a meeting
with Koklinsky. Hoffman thought that Koklinsky could supply him with
prescription drugs at a cut rate.

Speaker 3 (23:16):
He was looking for this tagament that he was buying
for his pharmacy.

Speaker 1 (23:21):
When he left to meet Richard Koklinsky, fifty one year
old Hoffman was carrying twenty five thousand dollars in cash.
He was never seen again. The cold case gave investigators
another insight into what appeared to be one of Koklinsky's
favorite schemes.

Speaker 4 (23:40):
You would look for opportunistic businessmen, businessmen who were looking
for a deal, businessmen who were financially were on the
rocks and needed some help.

Speaker 3 (23:49):
What Koklinsky would do was would put the word out,
find out what you were interested in. Okay, if you
were interested in videotapes cheap, but you had cash money,
he wouldn't hear about that, too. Criminal network. He would
build up a desire and expectation that this was a
good deal, and eventually, once he was sure that you
would come with cash money.

Speaker 5 (24:08):
He would do his thing.

Speaker 8 (24:11):
He would invite people to a secret meeting, he would
kill them and he would steal their money.

Speaker 1 (24:17):
This was what detectives believed to have happened to Paul
Hoffman along with George Maliband and Lewis Masgay. Now they
needed agent Dominic polyphrone to get the proof. Kaklinski and
his crew were known to base themselves in the city
of Patterson, New Jersey.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
There was a location on McBride Avenue where they called
the store.

Speaker 5 (24:41):
They had a burglary ring where they would go to
different locations, rob them all these different homes in Bergen
County area and bring it back to the store and
then see what they have. And guys would be hanging
out just like Goodfellas.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
And there was so gambling and then a bunch of
other illegal activities going on in there. And Dominic was
able to get into that location and become friendly with
a couple of guys.

Speaker 1 (25:11):
Needing a backstory that would convince the thieves and gangsters
who frequented the store, the task force created a faith name,
a rap sheet and mugshots for agent polyphron.

Speaker 5 (25:24):
I was using the name of Dominic. Michael Provenzano. Anthony
Provenzano was the head of the union, big time union,
big mafiosa man, and they assumed that I was in
blood relationship with Anthony Provenzano and I had card mines.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
Dom put the word out that he had access to guns, drugs,
everything that a criminal would advertise.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
For one day, he walked into the store with a
mysterious black case.

Speaker 5 (26:00):
I opened up the attache and inside his ten high
standard twenty two caliber silences, no manufacture serial number one.
I can come back to you. In addition to that,
stolen military plastic explosives with the Latin block numbers still
on them when they saw that they were deserved. This
whole now word is out at the store. The Dominic

(26:26):
Michael Provenzano, who wind up getting everything.

Speaker 6 (26:30):
With stunts like this.

Speaker 1 (26:31):
Dominic built relationships with associates of Richard Koklinsky. He got
the reputation of a man who could get his hands
on anything, no matter how nefarious. But more than a
year went by without the target showing his face at
the store.

Speaker 5 (26:50):
Richie was avoiding the place because it was kind of
hot with the cops and everything. Because he met people
there and they disappeared, so he was keeping assistance.

Speaker 1 (27:00):
Then one day in late summer nineteen eighty six, out
of the blue, a bite from the Iceman.

Speaker 5 (27:09):
Phone rings and he said, it's the big guy wants
to know if he can meet with you at the
donut shop, which is around the block. I said, whin.
He says in about a half hour.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
That was the make, make or break meeting between Dominic
and Koklinsky.

Speaker 5 (27:28):
I pull up in my Lincoln. He pulls up in
his Camaro, and here comes the jolly green giant man, big,
big dude. He gets out of the car. I get
out of the car and I'm looking him. Grow man,
he's just growing. He looked at me with these orange
tinge glasses. I tell you he was taking my soul out.
But I didn't budge. He looked and it was the longest,

(27:50):
like five seconds you can think of.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
Koklinsky tested them, and Dominic testing him right back, and
turned out that he wanted to do thisiness with him.

Speaker 5 (28:01):
Then he says, I can have fell off the chair.
He goes, can you get pure cyanide? I said, yeah,
I can get it.

Speaker 1 (28:09):
The Task Force had their first solid evidence tying Koklinsky
to the use of cyanide the suspected cause of death.
In the cases of Gary Smith and Daniel Deppner. It
was the breakthrough they'd been waiting for, but they needed more.

Speaker 6 (28:26):
They needed to hear.

Speaker 1 (28:28):
Richard Koklinsky admitting killing all five victims Maliband, Masgay, Hoffman, Smith,
and Debner. Dominic began wearing a secret recording device for
every meeting.

Speaker 9 (28:44):
Dominic used the law of.

Speaker 2 (28:47):
Obtaining cyanide for Koklinsky, and during that time he was
also talking to him and trying to get him to
talk about how he would kill somebody.

Speaker 3 (28:58):
We had huge number of surveillance teams that were always
in place, so we had a quick response team in
the event something would happen.

Speaker 1 (29:06):
The fear of something happening to Dominic was uppermost in
the minds of his handlers.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
The fact that he was skilled at using cyanide created
a high risk, the highest risk situation he could have
in an undercover operation because he was capable of killing
in a matter of seconds.

Speaker 5 (29:23):
He loved to use a nasal spray that he said
he used wood in cyanide, pure cyanide and squeeze it
and then watch you die. You know, if you caught
you of God, your history, I always had my leather
jacket and I always had a three eighty pistol in
my pocket. Always pointed at him, I said, LA pulled

(29:46):
out a spray. I'm killing him. I'm telling you right.

Speaker 1 (29:50):
Now, prepared for anything. By September nineteen eighty six, agent
Polyphrone had his fish on the hook. Over the next
four months, he secretly taped his meetings with Koklinsky.

Speaker 3 (30:05):
Saturday on the carrent meeting with Richard kokt a body
service station, Dominic himself was posing as a murderer, that
he was a hitman and he had ways of killing.
So they were, at least in Koklinsky's mind, a murderer
talking to a murderer.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
The two men would meet at a service area of
a busy intersection, where Dominic would turn the conversation to
methods of killing.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
When he got to the topic of cyanide, Dominic was
able to say, well, how do you use that?

Speaker 5 (30:32):
I never used cyanide. I'm I'm a gun and steel guys.
The way dom used to put it, he goes, listen,
my friend, it's nice and easy, simple, I used to say,
A little boost, little squirt. You watch him kill over
looks like they died of a heart attack.

Speaker 6 (30:50):
Wearing a hidden recording device.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Agent polyphrone got the killer on tape explaining exactly how
to lace a victim's food with cyanide.

Speaker 10 (30:59):
Powder, while saying, is that if by a couple, guy
would talk of business, who people tell me they want
to take it.

Speaker 8 (31:07):
They want him not, don't that's what they want him not.

Speaker 10 (31:10):
So you gotta be very careful. You got a wait
for an opportunity. If you're working it out and you're
in a restaurant with a guy, he will sprits little
cad over there right.

Speaker 11 (31:24):
Hopefully your gravis he comes back and eat his meal
somewhere along the way, he's going to go by by.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
Over the next four months through the ultimate early winter
of nineteen eighty six, Richard Kaklinsky described to dominate in
graphic detail how his victims had met their deaths.

Speaker 6 (31:43):
Under the guise of looking.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
For tips on killing his enemies, Agent polyphroningcouraged his target
to boast about poisoning his victims with deadly cyanide.

Speaker 10 (31:55):
One guy was life. I couln't believe you get the
whole all the murder here, lots of h hungry.

Speaker 1 (32:10):
With the help of crew member Daniel Deepner. Koklinsky had
used cyanide to murder their colleague Gary Smith at the
hotel in north Bergen.

Speaker 3 (32:21):
Gary and Danny were being hidden out because the police
were looking for them, and Kokinski was basically hiding them
in different hotels. Now we know now that he was
doing that eventually to kill them.

Speaker 5 (32:34):
In Gary's case, he.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
Brought food in and he brought a hamburger in with
cyanide on it. He didn't die completely right away, so
Koklinsky ripped a light cord orphan, then wrapped it around
his neck and finished it by garreting him. He had
Danny do that, so then they put the body under
the bed and then they left.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
Dominic Polyphrone had hit the jackpot. It was the next
crucial step in building a watertight case against their To
silence Daniel Deppner, Katlinsky went after him too.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
Danny Depner then was one night was brought food by Keokwinsky.
We believe it was was beans because that's what was
found in his stomach. He ingested the beans and then
died from cyanide.

Speaker 1 (33:16):
During one of their meetings, Koklinsky boasted to agent Polyphrone
about why the body of Lewis Masgay had been discovered
so well preserved in nineteen eighty three, more than two
years after he'd vanished.

Speaker 11 (33:32):
Said he was dead two weeks and actuality he was dead.

Speaker 5 (33:41):
Praise have maintains everything you want to tell me.

Speaker 6 (33:44):
This guy was career and his features.

Speaker 11 (33:46):
And everything was the same.

Speaker 10 (33:50):
Yeah, the same pans, own the same shoe, same shot,
sand sweater, Say.

Speaker 11 (34:00):
Yes stuff.

Speaker 1 (34:02):
The recordings revealed to detectives. Koklinsky's willingness to use a
range of methods to kill his victims.

Speaker 9 (34:09):
Wasn't just limited to cyanide.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
He also killed by shooting people and stabbing people.

Speaker 1 (34:14):
He admitted to shooting George Maliband, who'd been found in
a barrel in Jersey City in nineteen eighty The motive,
Koklinsky admitted was the forty five thousand dollars he bought
with him to buy tapes.

Speaker 5 (34:29):
In my opinion, why Richard killed all these people for monies.
He didn't do it just at random. He would really
set them up perfectly, and they'd bring him large sums
of money and they would disappear.

Speaker 1 (34:45):
Greed was not his only motivation.

Speaker 5 (34:49):
Koklinsky loved killing, he says, because I own them. He
was absolutely say it is brutal, son of a gun.

Speaker 7 (35:02):
I think we need to remember that Koklinsky started life
with zero power and was routinely beaten and humiliated. And
I don't think he was ever ever going to be
in that position ever again. He was going to have
all the power. He was going to control absolutely everything

(35:24):
in his life and everyone in it.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
Having collected admissions on tape of all five of the murders,
the final stage of the Task Forces plan was to
catch Richard Koklinsky in the act.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
Barby Carroll came up with an idea about having someone
set up to be killed.

Speaker 3 (35:43):
We would tell Kolkhinsky that there was a kid, we
called him the rich Kid, who was coming up from
Florida with a lot of money to buy drugs. The
kid would bring the money, they'd set up the meat,
and the kid would be killed and the money would
be taken.

Speaker 1 (35:56):
Detective Paul Smith would pose as the target agent. Polyphrone
put the idea to Koklinsky at one of their service
station meetings.

Speaker 10 (36:05):
You know, I think it'd be a crook squat if
you wants all yeah, when it comes along all the time.
Did they get that they he'll bring a break all right.

Speaker 5 (36:14):
Then you're gonna have to give me the.

Speaker 1 (36:17):
Dominique Polyphrone assured Koklinsky that the cyanide he'd long been
promising to supply would finally be in the killer's hands,
just in time to take out the so called rich kid.

Speaker 3 (36:29):
So we had a state police lab, we got a
fake cyanide, and the idea was that he would put
it on one sandwich and a rich kid would eat it,
just like Gary Smith was killed.

Speaker 1 (36:39):
On the morning of the seventeenth of December nineteen eighty six,
undercover agent Dominic Polyphrone waited at the Vince Lombardy service
station in Richfield, New Jersey.

Speaker 5 (36:51):
Koklinski meets that morning, I give him the cyanide and
the three ahs, saying which is.

Speaker 1 (36:57):
The plan was that once the rich kidder, Dominic would
distract him while Koklinsky doctored one of the sandwiches with
what he believed to be real cyanide.

Speaker 6 (37:09):
The rich kid.

Speaker 3 (37:09):
Would buy it, and then we would go into the
room and arrest him. The problemly is Dominic, what happens
if he pulls out a gun.

Speaker 5 (37:16):
And shoots both or shoots the rich.

Speaker 1 (37:17):
Kid Fearing the sting could get out of hand and
end with a bloody shootout. The task force took advantage
of a change in Koklinsky's plans. As he was leaving
to lace the sandwiches, he told the undercover detectives to
wait because he'd be a little while.

Speaker 3 (37:33):
When he got home, he had to take his wife
to wait doctor's appointment.

Speaker 1 (37:37):
Koklinsky then drove the nine miles to his home in Dumont,
New Jersey. Two hours later, he and his wife emerged
from the house and got into their car, and a
waiting tactical team took their chance.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
We sprung and we executed the arrest and search warrants,
and at the time he tried to get away, he
started to drive. He went up the grassie area, jump
the current. I realized he was surrounded.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Once we had him handcuffed, his wife started screaming and
he had there was about six of us on top
of him. He just went berserk and he actually pushed
the straight off.

Speaker 3 (38:12):
His man because he was caught, and he found a
loaded gun under his seat. So that basically was the
end of Richard Koklinsky.

Speaker 1 (38:19):
And when officers examined the sandwiches, Koklinski had put in
the boot. They found fake cyanide, not just on the
sandwich intended for the rich kid, but also on the
one Dominic would have eaten.

Speaker 3 (38:33):
He was going to kill Dominic, so the witness was
going to be heard.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
Agent Polyphron heard a different version of how Koklinsky was
planning to kill.

Speaker 5 (38:42):
Him, to make sure that when I bring down to
a location that his hands were on a staring reelsycond
blows brains out.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
Fifty one year old Richard Koklinsky was charged with five murders,
one counts of attempted murder, and a number of weapons charges.

Speaker 6 (39:00):
This is unwiring, is unnecessary. Watch too many movies. Never
showed a dge, never had me my rights nothing.

Speaker 5 (39:14):
They think their gang muster's thirty seven guys to pick
up one little guy.

Speaker 11 (39:18):
It's ridiculous.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
In February nineteen eighty seven, District Attorney Robert Carroll confirmed
the severity of Richard Koklinsky's alleged crimes at a bail
hearing before Judge Chiolino.

Speaker 12 (39:32):
Total, he has ten complaints which cover approximately nineteen different charges.
He is facing roughly three hundred years in custodial time, exposure,
hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of fines and
obviously the most serious penalty.

Speaker 3 (39:47):
Of all, the death penalty.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
Bail was set at two million dollars and Koklinsky was
detained at Bergen County Jail to await trial. On January
twenty fifth, nineteen eighty eight, fifty two year old Richard
Kaklinski stood trial at the Bergen County Courthouse for the
murders of Gary Smith and Daniel Depner.

Speaker 6 (40:11):
He pled not guilty.

Speaker 5 (40:14):
It was loaded with press I mean you couldn't even
walk in the court room. It was so packed. It
was mind boggling.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Agent Dominique Polyphrone testified in court about the audacious undercover sting,
but it was his covert tape recordings that provided the
most shocking testimony.

Speaker 10 (40:32):
For reply, what did you get to set the assistance?

Speaker 5 (40:36):
There's no way to.

Speaker 11 (40:37):
Get it out. I guess he has got about possibly
three to five seconds.

Speaker 3 (40:47):
Then the tapes conveyed a story of a cold hearted
murderer that was in the prime of his murderer's career
and was highly skilled with many methods of killing.

Speaker 1 (41:01):
Koklinsky's trial was attended by his victims' relatives.

Speaker 7 (41:07):
For the families left behind. It's devastating, absolutely devastating. You've
got some of those details coming straight from the mouth
of the person who did it on a tape, and
they're a person given to bragging. I can't imagine what
that would do.

Speaker 9 (41:28):
To a family.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
After only four hours of deliberation, on March sixteenth, nineteen
eighty eight, fifty two year old Richard Koklinsky was convicted
of the murders of Gary Smith and Daniel Depner. He
later pled guilty to killing George Maliband and Louis Masgay,
and as part of the deal, he finally admitted what

(41:54):
had happened to pharmacist Paul Hoffman invited.

Speaker 8 (41:58):
Into a garage and then needed to try and shoot him,
but the gun drammed, so Koklinsky, without a moment's hesitation,
beat him to death with a tyron.

Speaker 3 (42:07):
His body was then cut up and put into a
fifty five goalon drum, and he put a small layer
of concrete on it on the top to seal it up.
He took the fifty five goalon drum and he dropped
it off at a roadside coffee shop.

Speaker 8 (42:22):
That oil drum with Hoffman inside it disappeared Hoffman's body
has never been found.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
So there's rowing no closure, and that's a very tough
thing to tell a family member.

Speaker 1 (42:37):
On April the twenty second, nineteen eighty eight, Richard Koklinsky
was given two life sentences for the murders of Gary
Smith and Daniel Deppner, with a minimum term of thirty years.
He later received the same sentences for killing George Maliband
and Louis Masgay. He was sent to Trenton State President

(42:58):
in New Jersey. He remained until his death in March
two thousand and six. Press interest in the Iceman's serial
killer continued for decades after his trial, fueled by Koklinsky's
claims that during his lifetime he had killed over one
hundred people.

Speaker 7 (43:18):
There were no barriers for him. Violence was violence, and
he was quite happy for the violence to be extreme.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
That's what makes Kolinsky so dangerous. He wasn't driven by sex,
he wasn't driven by uncontrollable wurges. He was driven solely
by greed and evil.

Speaker 5 (43:35):
I call him the devil himself. That was actually the
devil walking on earth.

Speaker 1 (43:41):
Richard Koklinsky claims to have killed his first victim at
just thirteen years old Throughout his life, he continued to
demonstrate that life was cheap and that almost everyone who
crossed his path was nothing more than a potential victim.
After a killing spreethe that, by his own testimony, lasted

(44:02):
at least thirty years. Richard Kotklinsky will be remembered as
one of the world's most evil killers.