The Iceman: The True Story of a Cold-Blooded Killer

Richard Kuklinski made a life in two worlds. A dedicated family man, Rich spent his free time with his wife and children. Spur-of-the-moment vacations, expensive jewelry for the girls, and new cars for his teenage son were the norm. When it came to his family, price was no object. But on the street, Kuklinski was the Iceman, a professional hit man and a lethal scam artist, a man so heartless, he kept one of his victims in a freezer for over two years just to see if he could disguise the time of death. For Kuklinski, only money mattered. He would kill for it. In four decades of killing, his personal body count was over one hundred, but the police didn't have a clue. Then the Iceman met Dominick Polifrone. As a Special Agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Polifrone had been trailing Kuklinski for seventeen months, but not from inside a police van or from across the street. Polifrone was in deep cover. Posing as Michael Dominick Provenzano, a connected bad guy, Polifrone got word to Kuklinski that he needed to score a shipment of guns. Polifrone met repeatedly with the Iceman over a three-month period, wearing a wire and learning the tricks of the trade from a master of murder, not knowing that all the while the Iceman was planning to make him his next victim. With a fiction writer's sensibility and a journalist's eye for detail, Anthony Bruno has crafted a taut, true tale of two men on the edge - a mass murderer living the suburban dream and a federal agent playing the wiseguy, intent on bringing him down.