 Tips & shafts By George Fels Consulting Editor George Fels has been writing for Billiards Digest since 1980, and his "Tips & Shafts" column is usually our readers' first stop when they crack open the magazine. For better or worse, pool has been his only mistress for 40-plus years.
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February: Pool with Richard February 2026 [Reprinted from August 2007] I readily admit that I don’t know why I’m so intrigued with the monstrous New Jersey contract killer Richard “The Iceman” Kuklinski, but I’m far from the only one. He’s been the subject of a best-selling book and three separate specials for television. I am, on the other hand, perhaps the only one ever aware of the man and his deeds who would have been drawn toward his pool playing.
And for a closer look at that, we need go no further than a recent column of mine and re-visit “Jersey Frankie” Filerino, like Kuklinski a native of Jersey City, who not only knew the man but gambled with him now and then, won his money, and still speaks of him on a first-name basis. (In the New Jersey and New York subculture, the name “Richard” spoke to a single identity the way “Elvis,” “Shaq,” and “Kobe” did.) “He played good enough to lose, and he gambled on anything,” Frankie recalls. “Pool games, card games, sports, two raindrops on the windowpane, and he bet high. You could get rich off him — if he let you live with your winnings. He admits to killing more than 100 people; it was probably closer to two hundred. I know of at least two pool players who beat him and disappeared, and they weren’t the only ones. His very first killing was over a pool game. He thought he was being hustled, which he was. The guy was giving him ‘last two off’ in 8-ball.”
That says quite a bit right there. “Last two balls off” ranks right up there with “Lookaway,” “Three and stop,” “Your scratches don’t count,” and all the other corny old hustlers’ dodges that mark a melding of shark and shmuck. The only time you give a guy last two balls off in 8-ball is when you are absolutely certain he can’t make the first five (and especially on a bar table, where the balls tend to bunch up anyway). Manage the game well enough, and you can convert your mark to a regular customer; he’ll never know the difference. “It’s not me, it’s you! I have to make seven balls to your five. How can you lose? You’ve had a chance to win every game.” I’ve heard it myself, way back when. So, the killer was probably your prototypical pool chump, capable of pocketing some balls by incapable of understanding the game’s complexities. In short, everything you’d want in a sucker, except that sinking the final ball carried a potential death sentence.
Now, most rational men would shy away from, say, soul-kissing a cobra or twisting a tiger’s family jewels in a phone booth. So, why on Earth would hustlers court action with one of the most dangerous men who ever lived? Because “his money spends,” as the saying goes, and there were ways to win without drawing his ire. After all, the man gambled high just about daily; to go around killing every single time he lost would have queered his action, to say the least. So, a first rule in hustling Richard — and this can be deduced from his TV interviews, if you watch them carefully enough — would have been to abandon the hustlers’ staple, woofing to put your opponent on tilt. It wasn’t just a matter of his temper; if was how deeply he resented being “humiliated,” as he put it. As the man went close to 6-foot-6 and 320 pounds, we can pretty well rule out physical humiliation; he was talking more about being played for a fool. He has already admitted to two early killings of semi-strangers who implied he was less than swift: most of us would escalate something like that no further than a punch in the nose, if that far, but Richard Kuklinski wasn’t like most of us. And anyone who owed him money and fed him more than one set of excuses could prepare to check off the air too. (Just imagine if Richard had joined the IPT!) So, you’d have to beat him in either extreme graciousness (a rarity among hustlers) or total silence (even more rare).
You’d also have to hope that in addition to disguising your skill from Richard, you’d have to fool any poolroom detectives who might be overseeing your action. Any given one might be desperate enough for “consideration money” to let the killer know his action was unfair. But there was a twist to that, too. The smartest of hustlers understood that Richard never, but never, left any loose ends. If he were to act on any snitch’ tip, he’d eventually have to come back for the snitch, too, thus there was a slippery kind of insulation there for the hustlers.
Why are Frankie and his backer (a truant office) Augie Caterra safe in gambling with the man? Because Frankie was just a kid then, and Kuklinski, brutalized by both parents almost daily as a boy, stood on a solemn oath that he would never harm a child, nor accept any contract that ordered him to do so. As for Augie, he and the killer knew enough well-placed mutual acquaintances that Kuklinski could not have move against him without approval from higher up the chain.
When you view Kuklinski’s cable specials, you notice the corner of his mouth twitching ironically, as he tries not to break into an open grin at his own wit, placidly describing one atrocity after the next. It’s not especially hard to imagine him confronting one of his pool conquerors in some hopelessly hidden setting, his mouth again fighting off that wry smile, saying something like, “So, you thought you had the nuts, hey? Well, let’s just talk about the nuts…”
I always thought it was appalling enough that Frankie was regularly yanked out of class by Augie under the guise of punishing him for truancy, and then spirited all over Jersey for action, all before he even reached junior high school. But that was before I heard about pool with Richard. If this isn’t the most harrowing pool hustling story to be told, I guess I’m in for a real treat. |
