Thomas Pitera, known in the New York underworld as “Tommy Karate,” earned a reputation as one of the Bonanno crime family’s most feared enforcers. Law enforcement believed he may have been involved in as many as 60 murders, though he was ultimately convicted of six. Pitera grew up in the Gravesend neighborhood of Brooklyn. His father was an Italian-American candy salesman of Campanian descent, while his mother had German and Polish roots.
As a teenager, Pitera’s high-pitched voice made him a target for relentless bullying, and his dream of playing professional baseball was dashed when social exclusion kept him off the school team. In frustration, he broke into the school, stole the baseball equipment, and sold it through local fences. He was arrested but, because he was a minor, convicted as a juvenile with a sealed record. Martial arts became his turning point.
He began training at a dojo in Sheepshead Bay after being inspired by Bruce Lee’s appearances in the 1966 series “The Green Hornet” and the 1969 film “Marlowe. ” Pitera adopted a diet of sushi, grew his hair long in homage to Lee, and immersed himself in Eastern philosophy. After winning a grueling kumite competition, he traveled to Tokyo, where he spent 27 months training in Koryu Ninjutsu under Shihan Hiroshi Masumi. He studied combat tactics and traditional weapons, including the tonfa, nunchucks, and katana.
To extend his stay after his scholarship ended, he worked in a chopsticks factory. When he returned to Brooklyn, Pitera joined the Bonanno family and became one of its most lethal hitmen. He initially aligned with a faction led by capos Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato, Frank Lino, Dominic Trinchera, and Philip Giaccone. That faction was locked in a rivalry with the leadership of boss Philip Rastelli and his trusted capos Joseph Massino and Dominick Napolitano.
The conflict culminated in 1981, when Massino and Napolitano orchestrated the murders of the rival capos at a Gravesend club co-owned by Sammy Gravano. With that faction leaderless, Pitera aligned with Massino. In the 1980s, Pitera was formally made into the family and assigned to Frank Lino’s crew under the guidance of consigliere Anthony Spero. His crew in Bath Beach was involved in extortion, loan sharking, drug dealing, murder, and robbing drug dealers before reselling their product.
His associates Lloyd Modell and Frank Martini killed two Colombian dealers and stole 16 kilograms of cocaine. Because the killers could not drive a stick shift, they left the car with the bodies in the trunk in a Brooklyn parking garage. Pitera himself killed a Middle Eastern drug supplier named Talal Siadic in his Brooklyn apartment, shooting him four times in the back, chopping the body into six pieces, and burying it at a secret dumping ground. Pitera chose a secluded area in Staten Island near the William T.
Davis Wildlife Refuge as his preferred burial site. He decapitated his victims and buried their heads separately to impede identification through dental records. He studied dissection manuals and carried a specialized toolkit for dismemberment. He wrapped body parts in plastic or sealed them in suitcases and buried remains deep enough that even trained police dogs could not detect them.
Investigators eventually recovered six of his victims from that graveyard. His fatal flaw was a compulsion to keep trophies from his crimes, including jewelry and personal mementos of his victims. On June 4, 1990, he was indicted for leading a major drug trafficking operation and for involvement in seven murders, including the 1988 killing of Wilfred “Willie Boy” Johnson, a longtime associate and driver for Gambino family boss John Gotti. Investigators suspected Pitera’s violence spanned as many as 30 victims.
His narcotics operation moved about 220 pounds of cocaine annually, along with large quantities of heroin and marijuana. DEA agents found more than 60 automatic weapons, knives, swords, and literature including “The Hitman’s Handbook” and “Killer Be Killed” in his Gravesend apartment. The case broke when Frank Gangi, a member of Pitera’s crew and the nephew of a Genovese family capo, was arrested for driving under the influence. Haunted by the crimes he had witnessed and participated in, Gangi confessed.
He described how Pitera murdered Gangi’s girlfriend, Phyllis Bertie, while she lay unconscious in bed after a night of drugs, then dismembered her body into six pieces in the bathroom. Gangi also described a dispute with drug dealer Marek Kucharski, in which Pitera stabbed him repeatedly before slitting his throat. He told prosecutors Pitera tortured one victim by slowly shooting him seven times in various parts of the body in a deliberately barbaric manner. A DEA agent testified to digging up graves containing the dismembered bodies of some of Pitera’s victims.
At trial, Pitera’s defense lawyer urged the jury to reject the death penalty, noting that Pitera had no prior criminal record and that other participants had been allowed to plead guilty to lesser charges. Only two of the six murder victims, Richard Leone and Solomon Stern, had been killed after the federal death penalty law went into effect on March 15, 1989; the other four murders carried maximum sentences of life in prison. Pitera’s aunt, sister-in-law, and two cousins testified that he was a loving and caring family member. On June 25, 1992, Pitera was convicted of the murders of six people and of masterminding a Brooklyn drug trafficking empire.
He was acquitted, however, in the 1988 Johnson murder case. In October 1992, Judge Reena Raggi, citing the gruesome evidence of dismemberment, sentenced him to life in prison, saying, “Mr. Pitera, nobody deserves to die as these people died. ” Pitera remained calm after the ruling, smiling and giving a thumbs up to reporters in the Brooklyn courtroom.
Later that year, Judge Raggi refused a motion to reduce Gangi’s ten-year sentence, a move that irritated Pitera. On April 3, 2012, the U. S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals denied Pitera’s motion for DNA testing of guns and other evidence in three of the murders.
As of April 2017, Pitera was serving his life sentence at the United States Penitentiary in McCreary, Kentucky.