Born in 1954 and raised in Gravesend, Brooklyn, Tommy Pitera was a thin boy with a high-pitched voice who was bullied because of his feminine voice. As a teenager, he became obsessed with martial arts and with a religious fervor began studying karate to protect himself. After winning a karate tournament, Pitera traveled 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 engaging in 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 sixty 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.