Mike DeStefano | Stand-up comedian

Mike DeStefano, a burly, tattooed comedian who turned his recovery from heroin addiction into brutally honest, profanity-laced routines, died Sunday in the Bronx. He was in his 40s, but his lawyer, Josh Sandler, who confirmed the death, could not provide a birth date or a cause.

Besides being a regular at clubs in New York and around the country, Mr. DeStefano appeared on television on Live at Gotham on Comedy Central, Late Night With Conan O'Brien, and Showtime and at popular comedy festivals in Montreal and Aspen, Colo. Last year, he finished among the top five finalists on the NBC show Last Comic Standing. (One judge on that show, Greg Giraldo, died last year.)

"I am a stand-up comic," Mr. DeStefano said on his website, mikedestefano.com, in a statement taken from his comedy act. "Before that, I was a drug counselor. Before that, I was a drug addict. Before that, I was 12."

Mr. DeStefano got his first gig almost unintentionally. Born in the Bronx, he was 15 when he got hooked on heroin. At 31, after years in rehab, he became a drug counselor in Florida. Bored with the standard substance-abuse lecture, he began punctuating his talks with personal asides and off-color language.

At a Narcotics Anonymous convention in Atlanta, after the pool party was rained out and everybody crammed into a tent, he stepped before the microphone. "I went up in front of all these people and started ranting about drugs," he said in an interview for the website ComedyBeat. "It was bizarre how they loved it." He would go on to perform at more than 100 substance-recovery events around the world.

Mr. DeStefano's wife, Fran, who had also been an addict and who contracted AIDS, died several years ago. - N.Y. Times News Service