The Butcher: Anatomy of a Mafia Psychopath

by PhilipCarlo (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2009

  $31.78

  Tommy 'Karate' Pitera was not like other men in the mob. Sure he was a made man for the Bonanno crime family. Sure he killed people. But there was something different about him, something unhinged. There were stories, rumors really, that floated around about Pitera. The rumors talked about the strange ways that he killed people and the things he did when he was angry. The rumors discussed how people had a way of disappearing when Pitera was around, and a secret cemetery he had somewhere in the five boroughs, a place where the bodies of his victims would remain forever nameless. Philip Carlo explores the man behind some of the most horrific murders in the mob's history and the multi-year DEA investigation that brought him down. A dual tale of murder, drugs, money, and ultimately justice, The Butcher gives us Carlo's most frightening portrayal yet of the depraved depths of the psychopath's mind.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $4.30

  Written by the bestselling author of The Ice Man, The Butcher is a gripping and disturbing fly-on-the-wall account of the US Drug Enforcement Administration's four-year hunt to bring down Tommy 'Karate' Pitera, a drug-dealing, murderous capo in the Bonanno crime family. Born in 1954 and raised in Gravesend, Brooklyn, Pitera was a thin boy who was bullied as a result of his feminine voice. As a teenager, he became obsessed with martial arts and with a religious fervour began studying karate to protect himself. After winning a tournament, he travelled to Japan, where he trained for three years under one of the country's foremost martial arts experts. When he returned home in 1974, Pitera was a very different man. Quiet and introspective, sullen and aloof, he had developed his body into a fighting machine. He began associating with gangsters from the Bonanno family and was soon dealing drugs on a huge scale, while simultaneously embarking on a killing spree that spanned almost two decades. In 1992, Pitera was sentenced to life in prison for murdering six people and supporting a massive drug-dealing operation, yet this covered only a fraction of the crimes he committed. Pitera is thought to have murdered more than 60 people, cutting many of his victims into pieces before burying them on Staten Island. Exhaustively researched and written with the cooperation of the DEA agents who hunted Pitera down, The Butcher is the perfect good-versus-evil story and will send shivers down the spine of even the most hardened true-crime reader.