Free The Butcher by Philip Carlo

Mafia ties. His father, SonnyRed Indelicato, was a respected capo in the Bonanno family, while his uncle, Joseph, was also a capo in the Bonanno family. As a result, people looked out for Bruno and constantly warned him to stay away from drugs. He kept promising he would; he dutifully went to rehab. Upon release from rehab, he was as handsome as a movie star and as charming as a seasoned car salesman. However, Bruno would go back to his old ways—snorting and smoking cocaine while acting completely out of control.
    Bruno’s drug use did not deter Pitera from pursuing a friendship with this erratic killer. Bruno and Pitera were tight and fond of each other. Together they made for a volatile mixture. One could readily liken it to mixing arsenic and cyanide. Bruno and Tommy were cultural contemporaries, both of them blindly dedicated to the rules and laws and mandates of La Cosa Nostra, not society.
    Fuck society!
    Fuck its rules and regulations. These two lived by a different beat, rhythm, they heard only in their heads.
    With Bruno’s assistance, blessings, and encouragement, Pitera became a Bonanno associate. Pitera was eager to please, and others in the family quickly took a shine to him. He had all the right moves, comported himself perfectly, said all the right things.
    With Bruno’s support, Tommy Pitera earned his bones (committed a murder) and killed for the Bonanno family. Dismemberment, the taking apart of bodies for easier disposal, was one of Bruno’s specialties. Inspired by Bruno, fused with the innate knowledge that Pitera had of bodies—of taking them apart, of where to cut and where to saw and where to separate trunk from limb—victims of the Bonanno crime family were soon being cut into six pieces and buried in desolate places around Brooklyn.

CHAPTER NINE
THE BONANNO VAMPIRE
    T hrough Bruno’s friendship and affection for Tommy Pitera, Tommy met all the luminaries in the Bonanno crime family—Joe Massino, Anthony Spero, and all its capos. Spending time with these men and learning from their ways, Pitera began to fuse the samurai mentality that he had developed in Japan with the Mafia mind-set. The Mafia’s amazingly violent, unique forms of machismo and the samurai’s deadly precision created a highly lethal and dangerous combination, setting the stage well for a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
    As much as Pitera liked Bruno, he saw in him a potential for trouble on a monumental scale. Bruno’s drug abuse had become legendary. Pitera, at all costs, would avoid the trappings that Bruno Indelicato had gotten himself into; he would never, he vowed, become a drug addict; he would never, he vowed, let a chemical steal him away from his goal: becoming a highly respected capo in the Bonanno family.
    At this point, Pitera had come to believe that his future would be with the Bonannos, and he warmed to the idea. He viewed them as a lean, mean fighting machine. He was particularly fond of Bonanno bosses Joe Massino and Anthony Spero, thinking of them as omnipotent, protective, surrogate fathers. Unlike his own father, who was aneasygoing man who was willing to accept his lot in life, they were men who took life by the throat and made it what they wanted it to be. They were bold. They were forthright. They were a success. They were both feared and respected. In that Pitera had been born and raised in Gravesend—was a true neighborhood boy, he had been readily accepted, trusted by the Bonannos. He was one of them, coming from the same mind-set—gene pool.
    Now, when people crossed the Bonannos, when murder was necessary, Pitera was dispatched and he made people disappear with incredible precision, acumen, and expertise. People died. Pitera embraced his role as assassin the way a great actor would embrace playing King Lear or Macbeth, even dressing the part when necessary. To fool his adversaries, to blend in, Pitera took to dressing as an Orthodox rabbi.