Free The Iceman by Anthony Bruno Page A

Provenzano ran numbers when he was a kid. So had Dominick Polifrone.
    Dominick Polifrone might have ended up being just like Michael Dominick Provenzano if he hadn’t gotten a football scholarship to the University of Nebraska. Not that football or the Midwest turned his head around. Far from it. Dominick blew into Nebraska like an Italian-American twister. Coming from the East, he was easily the hippest guy on campus. He wore bell-bottoms before the farm kids even knew they were the fashion. Whenever he returned from school vacations, he brought back a suitcase full of the latest albums, stuff that wouldn’t be in the stores in Nebraska for weeks. If Dominick was cocky in Hackensack, he was a wild man in Nebraska. By his sophomore year trashing bars on Friday nights had become his weekly ritual, and spending the night in jail was starting to become part of that ritual. That’s when a sergeant on the Omaha police force took a special interest in this young pain in the ass from New Jersey and hauled him back to campus to have a little talk with Dominick’s coach. It was that meeting with the coach and the sergeant that turned Dominick’s head around. They put it to him straight: Either you calm down and start acting like a civilized human being or go back to Hackensack for good. The sergeant, however, felt that the warning by itself wasn’t enough, so he strongly suggested that Dominick drop his current major, physical education, and take up a new one, law enforcement. The coach concurred. That Saturday afternoonmeeting in the coach’s office set Dominick’s life in a new direction.
    He still raised hell now and then, and he continued to play football and box with a vengeance, winning the Southeast District Heavyweight Golden Gloves Championship in 1969. But in his mind he knew who he was now. The bad guy in training was gone. Dominick Polifrone thought of himself as one of the good guys now.
    And that was what made him so outstanding as an undercover agent. He could talk like a bad guy, look like a bad guy, and act like a bad guy because that was all a part of him, but deep down he knew he was one of the good guys.
    That’s why Dominick wasn’t concerned with his undercover image as he drove across that bridge, heading for the Dunkin’ Donuts. He knew he was convincing. What he was concerned about was meeting Richard Kuklinski by himself without any backups.
    The situation had come down too fast to call in for help. Kuklinski was supposedly waiting for him. It was a five-minute drive to the doughnut shop from “the store.” If he took too long getting there, Kuklinski wouldn’t wait, he was sure of that. The guy was cautious to a fault. If anything made Kuklinski suspicious about Dominick, he would disappear, and Dominick could forget about ever meeting him again. That’s why this first meeting was important. Dominick would know in the first five minutes whether he could pull this off or not. The important thing was control. He was a bad guy, and he wanted something. No matter how much he wanted to get close to Kuklinski, he could not kowtow to him. It would destroy his credibility as a player. And if Kuklinski thought he was bullshit, he’d have nothing to do with him.
    Dominick reached into his pocket and felt the butt of his gun, a Walther PPK 380 automatic. Despite the balmy temperature, Dominick wore the leather jacket. It was part of his undercover uniform and served to conceal the bulge of his weapon. ConsideringKuklinski’s reputation, he planned to keep his hand in his pocket with his finger on the trigger.
    Kuklinski was reputed to have taken part in dozens of murders, but the police had never been able to come up with enough evidence on any one crime to arrest him. Dominick had a gut feeling that the killings they knew about were only a fraction of Kuklinski’s total body count. From all indications he was just too proficient at killing.
    Sometimes Kuklinski killed alone, and sometimes he brought