About Philip
Philip Carlo was born and raised on the mean streets of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, ground zero for the New York Mafia. As a youth, Carlo was quite literally surrounded by mafiosi. He quickly learned their walk and talk, their culture, rhyme and rhythm. When sixteen years old, Carlo was shot in the head in a gang war on Avenue X. That bullet turned Carlo's life around. While recuperating from the severe wound, he began reading voraciously. He discovered the magic of books for the first time.
Carlo's first book, Stolen Flower, was about an abducted eight year old girl used by pornographers, and the efforts of the Neapolitan Mafia to get the child back. Carlo next wrote about Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, who terrorized Los Angeles county for fourteen months, stealing into homes in the middle of the night, taking twenty-nine lives. Carlo was the only author who managed to get the Night Stalker to open up. Carlo spent over two hundred hours with Ramirez on San Quentin's death row and wrote the definitive The Night Stalker: The Life and Crimes of Richard Ramirez, now in its twenty-first printing. Again applying his street acumen, Carlo wrote about the life and crimes of Richard Kuklinski, a two-hundred-twenty pound Mafia hit man. The Ice Man became a New York Times bestseller.
Carlo next entered the world of the Mafia and wrote Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss. This book was about the life and crimes of Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, the head of the Lucchese family, the man who hired the so-called Mafia cops, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, to kill at his behest. Carlo's latest book, The Butcher: Anatomy of a Mafia Psychopath, brought Carlo back to the street from which he came. The Butcher is the definitive look at Tommy "Karate" Pitera, a Bonanno capo who sold large amounts of drugs and was a premier assassin. He killed over fifty people. After killing them, he chopped them up into six neat pieces and buried them on federally protected wildlife sanctuaries.
In 2004, Carlo was diagnosed with the fatal Lou Gehrig's Disease. Rather than let this insidious malady stop him from working, Carlo wrote both Gaspipe and The Butcher while suffering from the disease. He is currently writing Killers, which is an intimate look at how he managed to get all these criminals to talk to him while being stalked by the grim reaper himself. Carlo is also researching a book about Colombian drug lord Juan Carlos Abbadia, aka "Lollipop." Abbadia was called "Lollipop" because he started killing while still sucking on lollipops.
