Richard Kuklinski in Jail

In 1991, HBO's America Undercover decided to do a documentary on the Iceman.  They went to the prison and filmed him as he discussed the kinds of murders he would do.  He told the story dispassionately and without apology.  The only time he broke was when the subject of his family was raised.  He admitted he had a weakness.  He had loved his wife and three children.

What he dislikes is having his routine ordered for him, where others tell him what to do and he has to comply.  He makes no friends in prison, and wants none.  According to Anthony Bruno's book, family killer John List had once approached him, but Kuklinski had nothing but contempt for someone who would harm his own family.

Then he cooperated with Bruno for the book, The Iceman, and in 2001, HBO brought out yet a second documentary about him, The Iceman Tapes: Conversations With a Killer.  In this he discussed a few more crimes, including a 1980 hit on a crooked cop in Saddle River, New Jersey, and a special Christmas Eve surprise for Bruno Lattini, who owed him $1600.  He talked about how this debt had gotten under his skin, so he just left home that evening after everyone was in bed, went into Manhattan, and found Lattini in his snow-covered car.  The man claimed he didn't have the money, so Kuklinski shot him right there in the car.  The blast blinded him and it was so loud that he couldn't hear anything else for a few minutes.  However, he found a wad of rolled-up bills in the dead man's pocket.  The next day the newspapers indicated that it was a mob hit.

Yet how does a man who kills his cohorts, traps business partners in fatal deals, and murders strangers merely to experiment manage to have a real family life?  How is it possible to have no feelings in one area and such strong ones in another?

Kuklinski himself has offered an explanation.  He grew up hating his father for the inexplicable abuse and humiliation he suffered at the man's hands. To endure being beaten, he distanced himself and thought about other things.  He points to his violent brother as proof that such an upbringing warps children. 

What he says about his emotional distancing is consistent with the stories told by people who develop dissociative identity disorder, in which they have more than a single personality existing in the same body.  Each personality type can manage some specific life arena and the dissociation typically occurs under stress, as it did during the childhood abuse. While Kuklinski does not exhibit multiple personalities, his wife did see him as a man with two distinct sides: the Good Richard and the Bad Richard.  These were defined by his moods and behavior.  If he were in a good mood, he could be loving, generous and protective.  However, the black mood meant such things as beating her up, threatening her, chasing her in a car, and even beating up on himself when he couldn't get to her.  There was no way to predict when the Bad Richard would emerge, and no way to know what he might do.

What this may mean is that Kuklinski had learned to compartmentalize: In other words, he could turn his feelings on and off when it suited him, and he could completely separate certain of his behaviors from others.  The killings were business.  His home life was another matter altogether. 

In fact, many people can do this but not many take it to such a pathological extreme.  Kuklinski clearly had stored up enough anger from childhood to act out against others, but as an adult he was also able to replace the home life that he'd had with something different. Even so, there were still times when he unwittingly recreated his father, and that makes for a man with some serious inner turmoil.  His cool façade doesn't hide the truth that he's not as controlled as he may want to believe.  Killing outside the family may have kept him functional within the family.

But that's an analysis from a distance.  Let's see what the author who actually spoke to him has to say about the experience.