The Penguin Podcast is back! Listen Now
The Butcher

The Butcher

Anatomy of a Mafia Psychopath

Summary

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.

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 will send shivers down the spine of the most hardened reader.

Reviews

  • Mafia 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
    News of the World

About the author

Philip Carlo

Learn More

More from this Author

Sign up to the Penguin Newsletter

For the latest books, recommendations, author interviews and more