THUG OF THE DAY:  RICHARD "THE ICEMAN" KUKLINSKI

If you were a target of Richard Kuklinski and he happened to take you out with a bullet or a squirt of cyanide to the face or even a bomb attached to a remote controlled toy car, you were one of the lucky ones.  You were just another casualty in an activity that he came to think of as sport.

He said:

"By now you know what I liked most was the hunt, the challenge of what the thing was. The killing for me was secondary. I got no rise as such out of it… for the most part. But the figuring it out, the challenge -- the stalking and doing it right, successfully -- that excited me a lot. The greater the odds against me, the more juice I got out of it."

Some of Richard's unlucky victims were done away with in a more painful fashion by way of icepick, arrow, or chainsaw.  If he really had it in for you, or if he was ordered to make you suffer by one of the psychotic mob bosses he worked for, the Iceman would feed you to the rats.

Yes, Kuklinski would actually drag some of his victims out into the woods and tie them to a tree near a cave that he knew rats lived in.  Then he would sit back with a video camera and wait for the creatures to come out and devour the victims alive.

He was a remorseless serial killer who turned his sick hobby into a profitable business by going to work for the Gambino family and the other Five Families of the New York mafia as a freelance hitman.

Kuklinski, aka The Polack, aka Big Guy, aka The Iceman, was 6'5" tall and weighed around 300 pounds.  He was tagged with the nickname, "Iceman," because he would sometimes store his victims in a freezer chest for long periods of time and then thaw them out long afterward and dispose of the body to confuse the forensic police as to the time of death.

Richard did most of his killing in NYC and lived a dual life as a husband and father in Dumont, NJ until his arrest and incarceration in 1986.  He claimed to have killed over 250 men from as far back as 1948, committing his first murder when he was just 14 years old.

As a non-Italian outsider, the Iceman was able to kill for all five of the New York mafia families; but he did most of his work for the Gambino family under capo Roy Demeo, a demented psycho thug in his own right.

Kuklinski died in prison at the age of 70, just weeks before he was to testify against former Gambino family underboss, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano in the collaborated murder of NYPD detective Peter Calabro.

Kuklinski believed that he was being poisoned and his death was investigated, but coroners concluded that he died of natural causes.