Profile in crime Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Profile in crime - Essay Example "My mother was cancer. She slowly destroyed everything around her. She produced two killers; me and my brother Joe." – (Richard Kuklinski in an interview on HBO) In fact, in 1940, his father Stanley Kuklinski had beat his elder brother Florian to death and hid this fact stating that he fell to his death down a flight of steps. Richard Kuklinski had witnessed the harsh realities of life ever since his childhood and by the age of ten he was filled with remorse, hate and rage. He followed the footsteps of his father by inflicting torture on animals as well as his friends if he felt offended by them. He committed his first murder by the young age of fourteen (thirteen?) and from then on he began feeling a sense of power when he discovered that he could be in control of the situation. ‘The Ice Man’ was another name given to Richard Kuklinski because he froze some of his victims in an ice-box. "We called him 'the Ice Man' because he froze some of his victims, kept them in an icebox he had for a while, then put them out so we could not tell when the murder actually took place, you see." (Paul Smith, new Jersey Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau investigator.) Though he appears to be a quiet person, yet his looks are quite deceiving when considering the brutal way in which he murdered his victims and had kept the secret away from this family for so many years. In an interview program on HBO, Kuklinski confessed to having worked as a contract killer for many Italian- American families involved in crime and says how he had to travel to places such as Africa, Brazil and Europe on his ‘business trips.’ He also states that he doesn’t particularly enjoy killing his victim, but he gets more pleasure from planning, stalking and hunting down his victim. Facts of the Case I have chosen to write about Richard Kuklinski’s first murder that he committed when he was only thirteen years old. The murder took place in the year 1948 an d was of Charley Lane, a small time leader of a gang of teenagers who call themselves as â€Å"The Project Boys.† Charley and his gang had bullied Richard for some time and following a bad beating, Richard wanted to take his revenge on all of them. Richard attacked Charlie with a solid wooden dowel from his closet, when he was walking home alone, and beat him to death. He then took his body and disambiguated some of its parts by removing his teeth and chopping off the tips of his fingers with a hatchet, in order to prevent identification of the body. (Carlo Phillip, 2006) The above actions he had made use of were taken from a Magazine that he had read. Kuklinski then took his body and dumped it off a bridge in South Jersey. Richard Kuklinski admitted that he had no intentions of killing Charley Lane, but harboring revenge against him proves his intentions to be false. This point is again proved when we find that Kuklinski went further to beat and wipe out the other six boys b elonging to Charley Lane’s gang by making use of a metal pole taken from a thrash can. The first weapon used for the first murder of Charley Lane was a wooden dowel, but as years passed by Kuklinski is found to have used a variety of weapons such as guns, hand-grenades, ice-picks, knives, bats, strangulation and even fire for murdering his victims. This he did in order to remain elusive from the Police and to divert their attention towards other criminals. He never regretted committing any of his murders. As Douglas Martin, New York Times