joel rifkin

Joel David Rifkin (born January 20, 1959) is an American serial killer who murdered 18 women, mostly drug addicts or prostitutes, between 1989 and 1993 in New York City. Although Rifkin often hired prostitutes in Brooklyn and Manhattan, he lived in East Meadow, a suburban town on Long Island. During his trial, Rifkin was represented by Mineola-based attorney John Lawrence.

The son of unwed teenage parents, he was adopted by Ben and Jeanne Rifkin when he was three weeks old. [1] (The couple adopted another child, a daughter, three years later.) In 1965, the family settled in East Meadow, New York, where Rifkin would spend most of his remaining years. A shy, awkward child, he was a target for bullies, and he did poorly in school despite having a tested IQ of 128. After graduating from high school, Rifkin, who was particularly interested in horticulture and photojournalism, made several attempts at community college. He held down various odd jobs, spending much of the little money he made on prostitutes.

In February 1987, Rifkin's adopted father committed suicide to end the pain of cancer, thereby increasing Rifkin's depression. At this time he became increasingly obsessed with violence, murder, and prostitution. Rifkin was arrested for soliciting a prostitute on August 22, 1987 in Hempstead, Long Island. He concealed this arrest from his family.

Rifkin committed his first murder in 1989, killing a prostitute, dismembering her body and tossing it into the East River. Over the next four years, he killed 17 more prostitutes. Sometimes he would take his victims back to East Meadow, to the house where he lived with his sister and elderly mother. Other times he killed them in his car. One of the women he killed was alleged to be the girlfriend of Dave Rubinstein (a.k.a. Dave Insurgent), a member of the 1980s punk band Reagan Youth.

Police finally caught up to Rifkin in June 1993, when state troopers spotted his pickup truck without license plates on the Southern State Parkway. A high-speed chase ended in Mineola, where he crashed into a utility pole which was located directly in front of the courthouse in which he would eventually stand trial. Troopers detected an odor from the back of the truck. It came from the dead body of Tiffany Bresciani, 22, his final victim. Rifkin was found guilty of nine murders in 1994 and sentenced to 203 years to life. He will be eligible for parole in 2197.


[edit] Rifkin's prison life
In early 1994, it was reported that Rifkin had engaged in a jailhouse scuffle with mass murderer Colin Ferguson over the use of a public telephone. Prison officials decided in 1996 that Rifkin was so notorious that his presence in the general prison population could be disruptive. He was confined to his cell at the Attica Correctional Facility for 23 hours a day. He spent more than four years in solitary confinement before being transferred to the Clinton Correctional Facility in Clinton County. In 2000, a state appellate court determined that prison officials had not violated Rifkin's constitutional rights by housing him in isolation. Rifkin's lawsuit seeks $50,000 for each of his 1,540 days in solitary confinement (totaling $77 million). If he were to receive any money, it would be subject to state laws that earmark most of the award for the families of his victims. Corrections officials say that Rifkin is now imprisoned with more than 200 other inmates at Clinton who are not allowed into the general prison population.


[edit] In popular culture
In the Seinfeld, episode The Masseuse, Elaine Benes dates a man (played by Anthony Cistaro) who is coincidentally named Joel Rifkin. After a few humorous mishaps, she suggests he change his name to something less frightening like Dion, Ned or Remy. One of the names she proposes is ironically O.J. (in this case after NY Giants running back Otis "OJ" Anderson as she is looking at a NY Giants football program)[2]; the episode aired November 18, 1993, seven months before the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman for which O.J. Simpson was later tried and acquitted. In the episode of Seinfeld, Kramer proposes that Rifkin was a serial killer because he was adopted, similar to Son of Sam.

Because of his crimes, Rifkin was referred to by the tabloids as 'Joel the Ripper', an obvious reference to Jack the Ripper.

The account (from both crime reports and interviews with Rifkin himself) From The Mouth of The Monster: The Joel Rifkin Story was written by one of Rifkin's former classmates and friends, Robert Mladinich.

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) _ The man who admitted killing three women and raping many others over nearly 30 years in western New York has been sent to a maximum-security prison in the Adirondacks.

Altemio Sanchez, 49, dubbed the "Bike Path Rapist" was sent over the weekend to the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora to its Assessment and Program Preparation Unit, which houses prisoners who are considered a risk to be in the general prison population, said Linda Foglia, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Corrections. Authorities deemed it the best permanent home for him, she said.

The factory worker and father of two pleaded guilty in May to second-degree murder in the strangulation deaths of three women since 1990, including two whose bodies were found on bike paths. He has since admitted raping between 13 and 20 women since the early 1980s, his lawyer said.



He was sentenced Aug. 14 to 75 years to life in prison.

In June, Sanchez was attacked by another inmate in the Erie County Holding Center when the other inmate realized who he was. Sanchez was struck in the head, causing facial cuts, and suffered aggravation of a previous shoulder injury.

Among Sanchez's 249 other new neighbors in the unit is Joel Rifkin, who killed as many as 19 women, many of them prostitutes, in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Also there is Vincent Johnson, a homeless crack addict who murdered five women in the late 1990s.

Also housed at Clinton, but under 23-hour-a-day lockdown, is Ralph "Bucky" Phillips, who shot three state troopers, one fatally, during his lengthy run from the law following his escape last year from the Erie County Correctional Facility. "He's in administrative segregation. He's been deemed a threat either to the facility or himself," Foglia said

Dannemora is 142 miles north of Albany. The prison houses almost 3,000 inmates
September is a tough month for Wyclef Jean. On the Sept. 11, 2001, he could see, from where he was in Jersey, the smoke billowing from what remained of the World Trade Center twin towers. Just four days before, his father, a reverend, died in a car accident. ''It was the most painful era for me,'' he says. While the 34-year-old has persevered, others from his past have not, namely a certain former Fugee collaborator. Clef, as he sometimes refers to himself, lives in between Miami and Haiti, but was in New York on Sept. 12, following a rainy and somber 9/11 anniversary. He met with EW to discuss his new album, titled The Carnival II: Memoirs from an Immigrant, his humanitarian efforts as an ambassador of Haiti, and explains why Lauryn Hill ''needs to see a psychiatrist.''

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So your new album is slated to come out.
WYCLEF JEAN: Yeah, did you hear it? I'm going to start quizzing you.

I'm the one that's supposed to be asking the questions.
On No. 9...

Actually I do like No. 9, the track with Chamillionaire.
Ah yeah, No. 9, ''Immigracion.'' Did you hear the Selena joint?

Yep. What inspired you to write about her now?
The way I came up with the Selena joint is the way Elton John wrote to Marilyn Monroe. Like, I wish I would had gotten to know her. I would tell her, ''Yo, I'm from Haiti and the way my people look at me and the pride that I instill in them, you instill the same pride in your Mexicans.''

And there's some of her in it, right?
Yeah, I sampled her voice. And then the singer who's singing is a Mexican girl by the name of Melissa, which Steve Rifkin signed and she sings R&B ― incredible singer. But the deep thing about that song is her father never cleared that sample. But when he heard my version, he was like, ''This don't sound like somebody's trying to make money off of Selena.'' So he was really excited about the whole movement and cleared the record.

I also liked ''Heaven's in New York,'' loved ''Slow Down,'' and the Serj [of System of the Down] track was good too.
''Heaven's in New York'' ― basically I feel like there's no place like America. Despite what we're going through in the United States... it's still a good place. I think we lack leadership. So ''Heaven's in New York'' is my tribute to those that lost their lives. The first thing [you hear]: ''Take the twin towers/Put them back in the skyline.'' I let things pass for a few years. Here's a song of inspiration out of somberness.

Yesterday was kind of a crazy day. The rain, and it being the first Tuesday [the day of the week on Sept. 11, 2001] to fall on the 11th.
Yeah, it was a weird day. That's the year my dad died, four days before 9/11. I mean, that was the most devastating time of my life. I can't really even talk about it. I think that era just shook me so much emotionally, I slowly had to find my way back.

It's been six years. Do you feel like you've persevered?
Man, I've grown. I'm comfortable with myself as an individual. I don't need hype no more. Sometimes people just thrive off the hype. It's like I don't know when my last album came out, but I know this one's going to do good. Seeing my dad pass, he always said, the truth is always going to prevail no matter what. This album to me is like when Bob Marley did his Exodus and Marvin Gaye did What's Going On. This is my version of the CNN or the BBC ― hate, passion ― going through my eyes.

What about the track with T.I., ''Slow Down''?
I'm fighting with the label because that's my favorite record. I would love for that to be my next single. For me, that's like when Billy Joel did ''We Didn't Start the Fire,'' da-da-duh-da-da-duh. It's the emotion of it. To hear my voice singing and then T.I. rhyming, answering line by line. That's some, like, real Pink Floyd meets hip-hop s---. As much of a hip-hop head as I am, I'm a rock head, you know what I'm saying. When I was growing up, I'd be listening to the Police and cats would be like, ''What the hell is The Police? You got love for the police?'' It was like, ''Nah, homey, it's a band.''

One of our writers interviewed T.I. earlier this year and he was saying that until you started working with him, you weren't feeling as inspired. Is that true?
I was just not inspired in the rap world ― at all. I was inspired [by] world music. I was just like, I'm going to go into the scoring side of it. Like Hotel Rwanda, I got nominated for a Golden Globe [for the song ''Million Voices'']. Maybe my time is over for that world, [I thought], the mainstream, the boom, boom, boom. But when I'd seen T.I. on the carpet and he was like, ''Homey, we gotta get together, we gotta do something, you know what I'm saying.'' I was like, Yo, this is a young blood who was like really doing it right now. If he's checking for me like that, maybe I should just try a few more records. So I went to go see him in Atlanta and I brought all of these new crazy beats that me and my cousin and brother were working on. We start vibing ... I think we did seven or eight songs in like two or three days. And I was like, Oh, you know what, maybe I'll just start producing rappers again. Cats, I tell them, T.I.P. gave me the swagger for the new generation. And now I'm going to run with it.

I was sort of intrigued by the split personality theme of his new album: There's T.I., the social commentator, and T.I.P. who's more of a thug. Do you think there's a parallel there with the hip-hop community where on the one hand you have to be hard, but on the other you want to be the humanitarian?
You know, Clef was born in the hut. I used to go to school on a donkey. I'm from Haiti. Check the news. I'm from a place that's beyond thug, so like, I never had to pose nothing. You never hear, Oh Clef had his jewelry taken [or] Clef was on the block, he got smacked. Clef got jumped in the club. That don't exist because I'm a man.

But do you think that pressure exists in the hip-hop community?
I think that there used to be that pressure. It's not as much now because now you mostly got party records. Even the fool with the gold teeth who's telling you he's a thug, shaking his ass. He's just in the club, having some champagne: ''Ah-ha, everything is good now.'' [At the same time] I think we live the reality of the streets.

There are so many guests on this album: T.I., Paul Simon, Serj from System of the Down, Chamillionaire, Norah Jones. Why do you work with so many people?
I'm a producer first. That's my passion. And then the rhyming and the singing.... I like to bring a bulk of work to you, like Amadeus, you know. So when you get a Clef CD, you're getting an event for real. If you get Wyclef and Paul Simon or Clef with Norah Jones or Chamillionaire over a Bollywood Bhangra beat, rhyming about Texas, you getting a movie for real. And for me, those are the kind of movies I like to put together. Fourteen months after playing the shackled court jester in the media spectacle that enthralled Queens and the city, Nicholas "Fat Nick" Minucci remains at once a picture of gaiety and tribulation.
He readily acknowledges that his own buffoonery, in large part, landed him in the Clinton Correctional Facility, the maximum-security prison 70 miles from the New York state-Canadian border. There he is serving a 15-year sentence for the softball bat attack of a black man on June 29, 2005. The smiles, he says, allow him to take one day at a time in a facility surrounded by 60-foot-high concrete walls on top of which gun-toting guards loom in crow's nests.


But he still insists that almost everyone involved in his trial misunderstood him and that self-serving elected officials and the specter of a Howard Beach hate crime committed 21 years ago sealed his fate long before a jury ever returned a verdict.
Although jurors never heard discussion of the 1986 incident in the courtroom, they did hear from Glenn Moore, Minucci's victim, and Frank Agostini, Minucci's boyhood friend who participated in the attack. Both testified that Minucci called Moore a "n-----" and that he struck Moore in the head with the bat. Agostini was granted immunity for his testimony.
Minucci conceded that he called Moore a "n-----," but maintained that he struck the would-be car thief only in the back and legs. On June 9, 2006, a jury found Minucci guilty of crimes including second-degree assault as a hate crime, first-degree robbery as a hate crime and criminal possession of a weapon.
His fellow inmates in the prison's secluded Assessment Preparation Program Unit ― roughly 250 of the 2,263 total convicts at the facility ― include child molesters, dirty cops, serial killers, celebrity criminals and others who may face attacks in general population. His workout partners, the members of his card game and his fellow diners include Joel Rifkin, who killed 18 women in the late 1980s and early 1990s; Joey Fama, who shot and killed Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst in 1989; and Daniel Pelosi, who beat financier Ted Ammon to death in East Hampton.
But instead of joining them last Friday morning, he walked with an escort the quarter of a mile from his cell to the prison's interview room, passing through 11 gated security checks on the way. There he talked to the Queens Chronicle about, among other things, Howard Beach, friends and enemies, his "railroading" and the life of "Fat Nick" today.
Queens Chronicle: How are you holding up in here?
Nicholas Minucci: I'm doing the best I can. I work out. I play cards. I go to school for three hours a day. I eat good.
QC: Yeah? What are they feeding you?
NM: No. I don't eat their food. You get packages from home. … Thirty-five pounds of food a month from the outside.
QC: Your mom sends you that?
NM: Yeah.
QC: You don't look like the "Fat Nick" that everyone saw pictures of from a few years ago. How much weight have you lost?
NM: I came in 260. I'm 185. I work out every day. … I had a 46 waist. Now I'm down to a 34.
QC: What are you benching?
NM: About 365.
QC: It might not fit anymore, but do you, did you, mind being called "Fat Nick"?
NM: Everybody calls me "Fat Nick." I'm "Fat Nick" here. I could be 120 pounds and I'll be "Fat Nick" (laughs).
QC: When did you become "Fat Nick"?
NM: When I was about nine (laughs). 9-years-old.
QC: You're in school now you said?
NM: Yeah, GED. That's what they got me for. … Three hours a day.
QC: Do you enjoy that?
NM: No. … I would rather take some college courses, but everything is steps. Like anything in life, you gotta do this to get to this. I'm doing that now. Take the test in November.
QC: Besides school, working out and cards, how do you pass time?
NM: Watch TV. We have TVs in our cell, which is, I'd say, excellent, because not a lot of facilities have that. You got Showtime, so I watch boxing, things like that. Get all the new programs that come on. There's this new show, a really good show. It's called Californication. Did you hear about it?
QC: David Duchovny?
NM: Yeah. Excellent show. A new season of Weeds. They got Dexter. All them shows. I was just watching Rachael Ray (laughs). … (Oprah Winfrey confidant) Gayle King was on.
QC: Are you in touch with what's going on down in the city?
NM: Yeah.
QC: Can you use the Internet up here?
NM: No. No. Could you imagine? Some of the people up here with the Internet? (laughs). But I watch the news. CW11. Every night.
QC: Do you get a lot of visitors?
NM: My mother comes, my family comes, but they don't get to come that often.
QC: Anyone else from Howard Beach make it up this way?
NM: Yeah. A couple of my friends come up. I'm allowed a visit every day, but it's a six-hour trip. (My family members) come up once a month. They come for a couple of days. … Why they got me all the way up here for? … I've asked numerous, numerous, numerous times. They could put me anywhere. I'll sign any paper they want. They could put me anywhere. They said that if something was to happen to me, the state would be in trouble, but if I'm willing. Me. I'm willing to sign any paper you want to say it's on me. What's the problem? They got a prison that's about 45 minutes from the house. They got Sing Sing over there. It's not the best. It's probably one of the worst, to be honest with you. But it's closer to my family.
QC: They have concerns that something is going to happen to you. Do they mean, specifically, an attack from another inmate?
NM: Yeah. Because they think it's a hate crime. … The majority of the population is a minority.
QC: What percent, do you think?
NM: That's a joke, right? 95 percent? They think that somebody would do something to me because they think I'm racist against black people. When I got in here (in the APPU program), there's black inmates in here. Everybody knew that this was politics.
(As of August 4, 1,145 of Clinton Correctional Facility's inmates were black and 539 were white.)
QC: When you got up here, did other inmates know who you were?
NM: I don't think anybody didn't know who I was. It's a joke. I got 15 years for an assault. You know what I mean? When I first got arrested, I felt sorry for myself. Why this, why that. When you come to a place like this, look around at some of the other inmates. Most of these guys are never going home. They would do anything in the world for a sentence like mine. So, you know, I don't even talk about it with them no more.
QC: When you got up here and realized how many people knew you, were you concerned that you might be attacked?
NM: I been through a lot in my life. If it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen no matter where I go. I take one day at a time. That's how I take. I'm not worried about anything. ... We all breathe the same air. You understand what I'm saying? We all bleed the same blood. So nobody out there (in general population) is any more human than anybody in here. … If nothing happened here, nothing's gonna happen out there. I go outside, I got no problems. I stay with a select few people. I don't bother with the whole jail.
(Prison officials said that APPU placements are temporary, but would not speculate on how long Minucci would remain there.)
QC: How big is your select few?
NM: I'd say five or six guys. … We play cards, we work out together. My workout partner, he just left. … Haitian guy. I'm a racist though, right? … I can't imagine, out of everything in life, they had to call me a racist.
QC: Could you see why people thought that you were a racist though?
NM: No. To this day, I just can't get it.
QC: Even after jurors saw and heard the conversation that you had with police officers after you were brought to the station when you acknowledged that you called Glenn Moore (the victim) a n-----?
NM: Yeah. I said: "What up, n---a?" I didn't say "You n----r." That's the way I talk. I talk like that all day and all night. Everybody I'm around. I talk like that here.
QC: You still use the word now?
NM: I still use the word here. I'm in jail and I use the word here, cause that's me. And I'm not changing because of Al Sharpton. I'm not changing because of Mayor Bloomberg. They're not changing me. They're not going to break who I am.
QC: Do you still listen to rap music?
NM: Of course. That's all I listen to. I got 20 (cassette) tapes (in my cell).
QC: You're not allowed to have CDs?
NM: No. ... You know, I've been using the word (n---a) since junior high school. If you were to leave here and go by my grandfather's house in East New York (Brooklyn) and you go around that neighborhood you'd say, if this kid played handball in this park and used the word n---a and didn't have a problem, how could he be a racist? The big racist in East New York (laughs). ... If the word's gonna be banned, it's gotta be banned from everyone. It can't just be banned for Nick Minucci. They want to ban it, what, from just white people saying it? But every other culture can say it? You got Chinese saying it. You got Indians saying it. But whites are not allowed to say it because of what happened 100 years ago? Come on.
QC: What about what happened 21 years ago?
NM: I was born in '86. That happened in '86.
(In 1986, a black man was chased onto the Belt Parkway in Howard Beach by a group of white teenagers. His death prompted a massive protest, which brought the Rev. Al Sharpton national prominence.)
QC: Before the Glenn Moore happening, were you aware of the 1986 incident?
NM: I knew what happened. I knew of the people and everything, but it had no relevance to me. But then I get arrested and they're comparing my case to it?
QC: Your lawyer said that Howard Beach's reputation had a disastrous effect on your case.
NM: It did. I didn't get convicted. They convicted Howard Beach. They didn't convict Nick Minucci, they convicted Howard Beach. Because Howard Beach, if you ask anybody in Queens, is known as a racist neighborhood because of 1986. Perfect case, another case happened in Flushing. A detective's son.
QC: Do you mean Douglaston?
NM: Yeah, he broke the kid's jaw bone, his eye socket. He was out on bail ... he got three years. Everyone gets one to three, maybe three or four (years). What are they doing giving me 15 years for this? I didn't hurt nobody.
(On August 12, 2006, two white men attacked a group of Chinese-Americans, after ramming their car. One victim's skull was fractured and the other received stitches. After pleading guilty, one attacker received a sentence of five years probation and the other received a prison sentence of three and a half years.)
QC: But they pleaded (guilty).
NM: They offered me a plea deal.
QC: How many years would you have served?
NM: I don't want to say, but it was low. I could have been walking out soon. Okay? And the plea was just for me to say that I was a racist. I had to cop out to a hate crime. The day they told me that, I said: "Let's hear the verdict."
Next week's Queens Chronicle will feature Part 2 of the interview.