Fictional character biography
Billy Russo was a brutal assassin for the
Maggia crime family, nicknamed "the Beaut" because of his good looks. He was also a favorite assassin for the Costa crime family. After the
execution-style killings that inadvertently led to the deaths of Frank Castle's family, Russo was hired by Bruno Costa to assassinate another assassin who had failed to kill Frank Castle as well. Russo killed all of his targets but Castle, who narrowly avoided death in an explosion. Hours later, Castle returned and tracked down Russo to one of the Maggia's
nightclubs. Several criminals were killed, and Russo was thrown through a
glass pane head-first. He survived with his face torn to shreds;
surgeons stitched it back together like a
jigsaw puzzle. Taking advantage of his now hideous visage, the formerly handsome gangster took on the identity of Jigsaw, and initially attempted to frame the Punisher for murder. However, the plan failed due to the intervention of
Spider-Man and
Nightcrawler; Spider-Man witnessed one of Jigsaw's murders and one of his victims was an old friend of Nightcrawler.
In the first Punisher miniseries, Jigsaw is revealed to have been behind a plan to drug the Punisher, causing his enemy to behave erratically and attack any criminals, even for things as minor as littering. The Punisher confronts him and beats him, and later, stops Jigsaw from escaping in a prison riot. Later on in the series, Jigsaw is shown to be one of the criminals brainwashed by the Trust into serving as a member of a Punisher-styled assassination squad. He manages to remember who he was after encountering Castle once again, and attacks the Punisher, but is once again beaten.
Jigsaw has been a persistent foe of the Punisher's for years. While he still works as an
assassin for
criminal organizations, his pursuit of the Punisher is relentless, as Jigsaw sees Castle's assassination as an unfinished job. The deranged gangster's vendetta once took a bizarre turn when the Punisher faked his death by appearing to be executed in prison. Furious with rage, Jigsaw briefly became a new Punisher, getting revenge on Castle's apparent killers for denying him the kill he believes to be rightfully his.
In Jigsaw's mid-2000s appearances, he was one of many villains trying to break out of the Raft, a floating
prison for supervillains and other high-risk criminals. Jigsaw was among those who were stopped by the
New Avengers and presumably returned to confinement.
Jigsaw is unique in that he is one of the Punisher's few recurring foes, as the Punisher tends to use lethal force on his adversaries. Why Jigsaw is continually spared and imprisoned is unknown; this seems to be due to the fact that Jigsaw is the most notable Punisher villain who is more of a traditional comic book character, instead of the more
naturalistically portrayed villains the Punisher usually faces (mainly it is due to the writers not wanting him to be killed).
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