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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 with a high-pitched voice 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 karate tournament, he travelled to Japan, where he was trained by a martial arts expert for three years.
Upon returning home in 1974, Pitera was a very different human being. 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.
Author ProfilePhilip Carlo is the bestselling author of
The Ice Man,
The Night Stalker and
Gaspipe. He lives in New York.
ReviewsMafia master Carlo is the unrivalled king of true crime writing. He examines Pitera's psyche with forensic scrutiny but stops short of glamorising his subject. Grisly and gruesome, Scorcese should definitely buy up the movie rights,Engrossing and chilling . . . a fast-moving and morbidly fascinating story,With brutal honesty, Philip Carlo writes from the heart
