The Butcher by Philip Carlo Read Free Book Online Page B

police jurisdictions and the FBI, put together a monumental, airtight case that would end up with eighteen out of the twenty-two defendants convicted. These were no small, would-be mafiosi. There were major players involved, cunning Mafia superstars, including family heads Gaetano Badalamenti and Domenico Lo Galbo. One of the reasons the prosecutors managed to get so many convictions was that they turned the boss of bosses, the Caruso of the Mafia—Tommaso Buscetta. He was, by far, the most important mafioso to ever become an informer. He knew more about the intimate workings of the Mafia than most five bosses put together. Having someone of his stature and importance, with the amount of knowledge regarding the inner workings of the Mafia, was a groundbreaking event; it would teach prosecutors a very good lesson. They came to know that if they could manage to get the heads and bosses of any given family to talk, they (the prosecutors) could bring down the whole house of cards.
    The case that grew from this, the Pizza II case, opened Jim’s eyes to the workings of the Mafia and how dedicated and diabolical his adversaries were. He came away from it with a sense of satisfaction; that he had accomplished something important. Had the heroin the DEA intercepted made it to the street, thousands of lives would have been marginalized, squandered, lost. Little did Jim Hunt know that he would soon be up against an adversary, a monster of the night, far more evil than any of the mafiosi associated with the Pizza Connection case. There were dark skies, thunder, and lightning just over the horizon swiftly moving toward Jim Hunt.

CHAPTER SIX
CHERRY BLOSSOMS AND SAMURAI
    T ommy Pitera loved Japan. He especially liked how polite the people were to one another, their thoughtful approach to food and art—particularly their mind-set regarding martial arts. Here was a society, a culture, a way of life, that had been founded on the samurai, the ultimate machismo culture. Though the samurai were long gone and forgotten, their way of life was still very much a part of modern Japanese thinking. In a very real sense, the Japanese’s success in business, their world domination of business, had to do with the samurai approach to life, to work. The Japanese thought of themselves as a superior people; they thought of themselves as smarter, wiser, and more resilient. Through the consistent application of intellectual pursuits, higher education, and the samurai way of thinking, they believed they could conquer the world.
    The world, as such, got a foul-bitter taste of the samurai, warlike thinking when the Japanese attacked China’s Manchurian province in 1931. We witnessed a barbarism on an unprecedented scale, unspeakable torture and rape and murder the norm. Arrogantly, in broad daylight, in squares all over Manchuria, shaking, quivering Chinese were beheaded. This was not done in secret, forgotten places or prisons. It was done defiantly, openly, for all the world to see and know. Chinese women were systematically turned into prostitutes to satisfythe Japanese soldiers’ cravings for sex. However, there was no quid pro quo. The women received nothing but brutal rape after brutal rape after brutal rape. The Japanese soldiers felt they had an inherent right, that they were samurai and they could take and do whatever they wanted with whomever they pleased. It became a known fact that the Japanese soldiers turned their libidos on the young; the raping of prepubescent girls and boys, the sodomizing of them, was the norm, brutally real.
    The great expatriate writer Pearl S. Buck documented in her unforgettable novel Dragon Seed the destruction of a Chinese family at the hands of Japanese soldiers, and how a seven-year-old boy in the family was repeatedly raped by a group of soldiers. This young boy grew up to be a fierce partisan fighter.
    There was no rule of law. No country interceded, stepped in, and tried to stop the daily