Richard Kuklinski

Richard Kuklinski, also known as "The Iceman" was a convicted murderer and contract killer for the Gambino crime family who died in 2006 while awaiting to testify in the murder trial of Sammy Gravano. Kuklinski was the subject of two HBO documentaries and he claimed to have murdered more than 100 people.

Kuklinski claimed that he killed his first victim, the leader of a gang, when he was 14. After that, Kuklinski claimed that he enjoyed giving pain, and began working for the Gambino crime family pirating pornographic videos in the 1960s. Kuklinski claimed he often tortured his victims before killing them, and he surmised that he became depraved by being continually beaten by his father as a child. Kuklinski also claimed that his father beat his younger brother to death but covered up the murder to appear as if his brother had fallen down a flight of stairs.

Kuklinski received his name after a corpse he had stored in a frozen well for two years and dumped was discovered by authorities. In 1988, he was sentenced to two consecutive life sentences. In 2006, Philip Carlo wrote a book about his life entitled The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer.