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The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer
Books: CookBooks: Hors D'Oeuvres: Item 8
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The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killerby Philip Carlo
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14 of 19 people found the following review helpful: Best of Breed True Crime, July 1, 2006 Reviewer:Scott E. Meredith "SeeOtter" - True crime books leave a special taste in your mouth and grit on your skin. After reading them, you feel depleted, depressed, and disgusted with yourself and humanity at large. This book is no exception. But as depleting, depressing, and disgusting experiences go, this book is one of the best. The Publisher's Weekly review dings the author for not "applying objective insight into how such a murderer ... came to be..." This is just another typically idiotic comment from Publisher's Weekly. First of all, the author DOES in fact delve Kuklinski's past and childhood formative experiences, in quite substantial and depressing detail. Carlo provides exhaustive detail on the extensive abuse Kuklinski suffered as a child, and delves extensively into the parents' backgrounds as well. Beyond that, what exactly would Publisher's Weekly like Carlo to do? What would constitute explanatory "insight"? Is Carlo supposed to resolve the entire "Problem of Evil" for us? Or definitively settle the "Nature vs. Nurture" debate once and for all? Carlo did as much as can be done. Has anyone ever explained anything along those lines? In fact, there's nothing you can say about the star of this book and his life that isn't a cliché. The "Problem of Evil", the "Banality of Evil", "Nature vs. Nurture - its all been chewed over a million times and nobody is any closer to understanding anything. The authenticity issue raised by PW could potentially be a more serious concern. I'm not a forensic historian or professional criminologist, so I do need to take Carlo on good faith. But I think police agencies as well as HBO did some backchecking for their documentaries and it seems most of these claims have checked out, to the extent possible. I notice that in Anthony Bruno's interview with Kuklinski, Bruno states that having researched Kuklinski's Hoffa hit claim, he [Bruno] concluded it is false. But I gather from Wiki that this remains in dispute, i.e. it may yet be the truth. Basically, I found the whole account credible. It just hangs together well. Another thing I liked about Carlo's treatment is his laser exclusive focus on Kuklinski. He brings in peripheral context only and exactly where needed, unlike many Mafia books which get bogged down and way boring under the weight of voluminous confusing side stories about Mafia lineage and legal or political intricies. Here's a partial list of the methods by which Kuklinski murdered people (some done as part of a group, most were solo) - fist - stick - knife - gun - cyanide spray - cyanide powder - rats - sharks - off top of buildings Sometimes his contract stipulated torture, and in those cases he used so many things in combination (e.g. strategically inserted burning emergency flares, skinning alive, etc.) that I can't say exactly what killed "the mark". This story has many interesting deeper subthemes. For example, Kuklinski killed only adult males - no women or children. He apparently even rescued (by murdering their attackers) some exploited or raped women and children. Is he therefore the ultimate radical feminist superhero? Don't have a knee-jerk reaction, don't agree or disagree, just ponder what I'm saying here. Another interesting side light to consider is how slooooow the police and authorities were to pick up on this guy. He got away with hundreds of murders for dozens of years, totally clean and untouchable. C'mon people - he wasn't THAT much of a criminal genius! Let's face it - first, nobody really cared about his lowlife and underworld victims, and second, even more interestingly, he exploited the common human cognitive limitation that we always need a pattern, we can only function when a broad stripe of similarity connects all the dots for us. Kuklinski's methods and locations were so varied that the usual "cognitive miser" (i.e. dumb bunny) authorities simply could not put two and two together. This book should be of interest to any self-styled "martial artist". All that fancy posturing and training - how well would all that have served you up against this human white shark? Think about it! Go through each attack scenario in the book (mostly surprise attacks of course) and ask yourself, in the immortal words of Dr. Suess "What would YOU do if it happened to YOU?" Kuklinski was a consummate professional with natural talent for killing. This account of his life should rank high not only in the "true crime" genre, but also with compelling biographies of low-life geniuses such as the recent book "One of a Kind" about Stuart Ungar, or frankly any book that examines the nature of extreme talent, in legitimate domains as well. In fact, speaking of the legitimate world, this book exemplifies the adage that if you kill a few people (in Kuklinski's case, a few hundred) you get thrown in jail; while if you kill a hundred thousand, you get an award and a promotion. In fact, forget the lit ghetto of "true crime" for a moment - Kuklinski is in many ways a fairly common type - a professional killer very much of the workaday stripe portrayed by Victor Suvorov in his classic non-fiction memoir of the Soviet GRU clandestine service: "Inside the Aquarium", or the interesting Mossad expose "By Way of Deception" by Victor Ostrovsky. Just another stone-cold killer for hire. USA Marin Lt. Gen. James Mattis has stated: "You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for 5 years because they didn't wear a veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." For better or worse (the general may well be correct in his outlook for all I know), this view is actually not so divergent from the Kuklinski quotes in this book. When I look at the suited, uniformed, and well-tailored homicidal maniacs who have their bloody hands on the levers of legitimate power all over the world, I have to wish that some author would rope the low end and the high end together, and display, in the broadest fullest comparative spotlight, the true nature of humanity. As Krishnamurthi wrote: "Wolves and murderers, every one." If you are like me, in that a little dose of "true crime" goes a long way, this book can fill your quota for the year.
From Publishers Weekly
This stomach-turning account of the multiple atrocities committed over 43 years by Richard "The Ice Man" Kuklinski—as sadistic a killer as most readers would ever want to encounter in print—seems like more of an as-told-to than an independent journalistic narrative, though Carlo says that he verified Kuklinski's accounts where possible. But rather than critically assess Kuklinski's largely self-serving tales of his roles in such major mob killings as those of Jimmy Hoffa and Gambino boss Paul Castellano, Carlo (The Night Stalker) seems to accept them. Instead of applying objective insight into how such a murderer—who researched methods that would prolong his victims' suffering—came to be, the author presents instead chapter after chapter of Kuklinski summarily killing criminals he was hired to eliminate or randomly gunning down someone on the street to test out a new weapon. By disregarding the questions raised by Mafia experts such as Jerry Capeci about Kuklinski's credibility, Carlo has fumbled an opportunity. Sloppy errors (e.g., Rudy Giuliani served as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, not the Eastern District) also detract from the book, which ends with a bizarre invitation to the reader to write to Kuklinski at the Trenton State Prison. (July 11)
Copyright © Reed business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Richard Kuklinski, the Ice Man of the title, has told his story before in a variety of forums, including books and videos. Here Carlo tells Kuklinski's story more or less straight from the killer's mouth, with little verification or questioning. Given Kuklinski's grandiose claims, such as participation in the unsolved murder of Jimmy Hoffa, this produces a narrative of unrelieved horror. Kuklinski reveled not only in killing but also in the suffering of his victims, and here he emphasizes how he compartmentalized his life so that his family was shielded from the nastiness of his trade. Other than fulsome detail, not much new about Kuklinski is relayed. Carlo's presentation of Kuklinski uninterrupted does, however, make for nice comparative reading with the killer's wife's book, Married to the Iceman (1994). Good as an omnibus resource on Kuklinski, this is a fine entry in the burgeoning field of works tracing the decline of the traditional organized crime families and their once impenetrable structures. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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