Thomas Pitera

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right|250px|thumb|FBI mugshot of Thomas Pitera]

Thomas "Tommy Karate" Pitera (b. December 2, 1954) was a New York mobster who served as a hitman and drug trafficker for the Bonanno crime family.

Biography

Early years

Born in New York City, Pitera grew up in the Sheepshead Bay section of Brooklyn. During the 1980s Pitera became a made man, or full member, of the Bonanno family. According to two New York DEA agents, Pitera's voice and manner resembled the Tommy Udo character played by Richard Windmark in Kiss of Death, except Pitera was more scary. Pitera was highly skilled in martial arts, and had spent three years training in Japan. This led him to accquire the nickname "Tommy Karate". Pitera quickly earned a reputation for violence, and enjoyed doing hits for the family. At the time, Pitera was one of the more feared soldiers on the streets, amongst the likes of Anthony "Tony" Mirra and Roy DeMeo, who were two brutal underworld killers. Pitera belonged to a family faction headed by captains Alphonse Indelicato, Dominick Trinchera, and Philip Giaccone. This group opposed the current leadership under boss Philip Rastelli and his leading captains Joseph Massino and Dominick Napolitano. In 1981, Massino and Napolitano set up the murders of the three rival captains in a Brooklyn club. After their deaths, Massino quickly made peace with the rest of the leaderless faction, including Pitera.

Criminal career

Pitera soon earned a reputation as a vicious and sadistic killer who enjoyed murdering people for the family. He was suspected by law enforcement of as many as 30 murders, some of them mob-related, while most of them were done by his own initiative.

On August 29, 1988, Pitera ambushed Wilfred "Willie Boy" Johnson as he walked to car and shot him to death. Johnson had been a close associate of Gambino crime family boss John Gotti since the two of them had been petty burglars and thieves. Johnson had also had served as a driver to Gotti after Gotti became a made man and captain with the Gambinos. In 1985, Gotti discovered that Johnson had been a government informant since 1966. Pitera murdered Johnson as a favor to Gotti. The hit had been delegated to Pitera and fellow gunman, Vincent “Kojak” Giattino, by Bonanno Capo, Edward Lino.

Pitera was close to Bonanno consigliere Anthony Spero, who headed the violent Bath Beach crew. This group was involved in extortion, loan sharking, drug dealing, and dozens of murders.

Pitera's crew was notorious for robbing drug dealers and then reselling their drugs. Pitera murdered two Colombian drug kingpins and then resold their 40 pounds of cocaine. Pitera also killed Tala Siksik, an Arab drug supplier in his Brooklyn apartment. Pitera stripped him naked, dismembered Siksik's body in the bathtub by cutting off his head and disposed of it. Six of Pitera's victim's turned up at a mafia graveyard in the borough of Staten Island near a bird sanctuary. Pitera chopped off the victims' heads and buried them elsewhere to avoid identification through dental records.

This area was a favorite spot of Pitera's for body disposal because he believed that the damp soil would accelerate decomposition, and always insisted that the bodies be buried deep enough,so dogs could not sniff them. Pitera's approach to murder, and body disposal was almost clinical. To this end, he studied books on dissection and carried a special tool kit for this purpose. Pitera also liked to keep souvenirs of his work, including a victim's ear whch he had laminated and usually carried around with him. While interrogating a victim, he would throw it into the table and say, "Talk to him!"

On June 4, 1990, Pitera was indicted for heading a drug dealing crew and for his involvement in seven murders, including that of Johnson. Investigators alleged that Pitera had been involved in as many as 30 murders. Pitera's crew sold about 220 pounds of cocaine per year, multiple kilos of heroin, and hundreds of pounds of marijuana. FBI Agents discovered more than 60 automatic weapons, knives and swords, and literature such as "The Hitman's Handbook" and "Kill or Be Killed," which dealt primarily with assassination techniques as well as torturing and dismembering cadavers in Pitera's apartment in the Gravesend, Brooklyn.

Trial

One of Pitera's crew members, Frank Gangi, the nephew of Genovese crime family captain Rosario Gangi, decided to testify against Pitera to avoid the death penalty. Gangi described how Pitera murdered Gangi's girlfriend Pyhllis Burdi after couple went on a drug binge. Pitera and an unidentified shooter showed up at their Manhattan apartment, took Burdi into the bathroom, shot her in the bathtub, and then cut her head off. Gangi also testified that during a fight with a drug dealer named Marek Kucharsky, Pitera pulled a knife and repeatedly stabbed Kucharsky and cut his throat.

In Pitera's trial, the chief prosecutor, David W. Shapiro, demanded death sentence for the "heinous, cruel and depraved" murders, committed by Pitera. He called Pitera a "heartless and ruthless killer" explaining in detail how Pitera tortured one victim by slowly, deliberately shooting him seven times in various parts of the body, in one of a series of murders carried out in a deliberate and brutal way. The prosecution also produced one more witness, a DEA agent who testified about digging up graves containing the dismembered bodies of some victims.

However, his defense lawyer, David A. Ruhnke, urged the jury to reject the death penalty on the grounds that Pitera had no prior criminal record and that other participants in the murders were allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges. Moreover, only two of the murder victims, Richard Leone and Solomon Stern, were killed on March 15, 1989, after the Federal death-penalty law went into effect. The four other murders took place earlier, so those counts carried maximum sentences of life in prison. Pitera's aunt, sister-in-law and two cousins testified on Pitera's defense that he was a loving and caring family member. [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE3D8173BF931A35754C0A964958260&sec=&spon= Federal Jurors Considering Death Penalty for Mobster] ]

Life Sentence

On June 25, 1992, Pitera was convicted of murdering six people and supervising a massive drug dealing operation in Brooklyn. Alluding to evidence that he brutally killed his victims and dismembered their bodies, Judge Reena Raggi sentenced him, saying, "Mr. Pitera, nobody deserves to die as these people died." [ [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE6DF123CF936A15753C1A964958260 Life Prison Term in 6 Drug-Case Murders] ] After the verdict was read, Pitera smiled and gave a thumbs up to reporters sitting in the Brooklyn courtroom. Pitera would avoid the death penalty and be sentenced to life in prison.

In 1995, Pitera reached out to Ganglandnews.com from his maximum-security prison cell to complain that his old pal Frank Gangi had turned out to be a real crybaby. In the statement, Pitera said, "Gangi is a liar and a coward, but beyond that, he's a wimp and a crybaby." Pitera was irritated by the fact that Gangi was looking for a reduction of the 10 years he got from the same federal judge who sentenced Pitera to life.

"Gangi said he was sorry about killing five people and that he became an informer because he wanted to start a new life. He gets 10 years a good deal and he goes whimpering and weeping to the judge looking for a break. If you're really sorry for killing five people, you take your punishment like a man,"." Remarkably, in the same year, to Pitera's glee, Raggi again refused a motion to reduce Gangi's sentence. [ [http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1995/04/04/1995-04-04_fish_mart_rap_s_a_fluke__he_.html FISH MART RAP'S A FLUKE, HE SEZ] ]

As of July, 2008, Pitera was still serving a life sentence at the United States Penitentiary (for high risk inmates) at the Federal Correctional Institute, Allenwood in Pennsylvania.

References

*Reppetto, Thomas "Bringing Down the Mob: The War Against the American Mafia.", Macmillan, 2006. ISBN 0805078029

External links

* [http://www.americanmafia.com/Allan_May_12-13-99.html Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson: Part Two - Source Wahoo – Out Sourced] by Allan May
* [http://www.bop.gov/iloc2/LocateInmate.jsp Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator Website]