Richard Kuklinski and the Business of Death: America's Most Notorious Contract Killer (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798181992092)

He killed five men that prosecutors could prove. He claimed, on camera, to have killed two hundred.

Richard Kuklinski grew up in a Jersey City tenement where his father beat one son to death and called it an accident. By the time he was arrested in 1986, he was a quiet, unremarkable family man in suburban Dumont, New Jersey - the kind of neighbor nobody looked at twice. His wife thought he ran a wholesale business. His children never knew where the money came from. What investigators eventually proved was bad enough: men killed over cash deals, witnesses silenced with cyanide and a lamp cord, a body kept frozen in storage for over a year before it was finally found, ice still inside it on a warm September day.

What Kuklinski claimed afterward, across eighteen years of prison interviews and three HBO documentaries, was something else entirely - an independent hit man for every family in the mob, a hand in the deaths of Paul Castellano, Carmine Galante, even Jimmy Hoffa.

The agents who built the case against him don't believe most of it. Neither does this book.

Drawing on trial records, investigative files, and the on-camera record Kuklinski left behind, Richard Kuklinski and the Business of Death separates the documented killer from the legend he spent his final years constructing - and asks why a man already facing four life sentences would bother inventing a bigger one.

The real story needed no exaggeration. It still doesn't.