In today's Post, author Phil Carlo dishes on how Mickey Rourke charmed him and won the role of Richard "The Ice Man" Kuklinski, the mafia hit man immortalized in Carlo's book The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer. We were lucky enough to catch up with Brooklyn-born Carlo to talk about his new book The Butcher:Anatomy of a Mafia Psychopath, coming out next week, as well as gruesome murders and his upcoming collaboration with Soundgarden's Chris Cornell.
The Butcher took 10 years to research and write. How did the story change from what you initially started out with?
I never ever think about the ending of a book. It happens of its own volition, more or less out of thin air. I’m not concerned with the facts and details; I’m concerned with the emotional reality that people undergo. After you have that, you have the lion by the balls and everything else follows suit. It took me 10 years to write this book because nobody was willing to talk to me; everyone was so deathly frightened of the mystique of Tommy Pitera.
Of all of the crimes you’ve investigated, which has been the most surprising? The most upsetting?
By far, hands down, the most upsetting was the Night Stalker. Richard Ramirez entered homes in the middle of the night while people were in deep asleep and at their most vulnerable. If he came across a couple sleeping, he’d shoot the male in the head and repeatedly rape the terrified woman right next to her dead husband. He beat to death a 90-year-old woman with a hammer. He raped an 89-year-old woman and sodomized her. Normally writers don’t have the luxury of feeling, but when I wrote about the 90-year-old woman I cried. Suddenly my tears were mixing with the ink from my pen. I write by hand, or at least back then I did.
In terms of what was most surprising, I would say what an amazing, brilliant sense of humor the Ice Man had. Here he is, a man who killed over 200 people, and I think he was the funniest person I ever met. Maybe that tells you something about my sanity. One day I said to him, 'Listen. You’re a very funny man, I think you're one of the funniest people I ever met. Did you ever think of doing stand-up?' He said, 'Yeah, sure. I’ll come out on the stage—drum roll, lights come up and I say good evening ladies and gentleman, I’ve got 100 jokes that will kill you. If they don’t kill you, I will.'
How does Tommy Pitera, the focus of The Butcher, compare with the other killers that you’ve profiled?
Tommy Pitera’s in a class of his own. Notorious stone-cold killers looked the other way when they saw him coming. When he was free, he was the most feared man in the American and Italian mafia. He regularly killed at will anyone who offended him, who crossed him, who hired him to do a piece of work. He not only murdered as though he had a God-given license but he often put his victims in the bath tub, got naked, got into the tub with them, ran the hot and cold water just so, and preceded to cut their arms, legs and heads off. He cut up people as thought he was slicing London broil.
You wrote The Night Stalker, a book about Richard Ramirez. I hear you’re working with Chris Cornell on a screenplay for the film version.
We’re polishing up a draft of the script that I collaborated with Nick Blast and Chris Cornell on. This movie, The Night Stalker, will be the most insightful, realistic, shocking, stunning world of serial murder. I spent over 200 hours intensely interviewing Ramirez at San Quinton’s death row. And when I came away from those interviews, I knew secrets that nobody in the straight world is privy to. And all of those secrets are going to be in the movie.
They weren’t in the book?
Some were in the book, some where between the lines and some were too complicated to write. But a camera’s going to eat them up.
In working on your books, have you ever feared for your own safety?
The short answer is yes, the long answer is no. Whenever you enter a war zone, whenever you interact with predators, there’s an element of danger. But I was both blessed and cursed by the fact that I was brought up in a jungle, I was brought up in Bensonhurst and I learned the way of the streets at a very early age. In a sense, I’m the dangerous one I think. The no is because I went into this with my eyes open. Anything that could happen, I knew about when I stepped up and rang the bell. What I’m saying is, if you get into the ring to fight and get punched, don’t be surprised. Remember the last thing I’m going to say: the pen is mightier than the sword.
Tommy
