Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  When Hoover died in 1972, however, Scarpa lost his principal “rabbi” in the Bureau. Villano retired a year later. In that summer of 1973 as the Watergate break-in enveloped Hoover’s successor L. Patrick Grey, the Bureau’s obsession with organized crime seemed to take a backseat to the potential “high crimes and misdemeanors” of the executive branch.

  From the day after Villano’s retirement through Greg’s closing in 1975, Scarpa never gave the FBI a single lead to another high-end theft or hijacking. The best he could offer, in February 1974, was a report that a load of hair dryers had been stolen and that his crew had paid $5 apiece for them.9 With his “broker” Villano gone and no prospect of further reward money, Scarpa had apparently lost his incentive.

  In mid-March 1974, Scarpa made another report to the Feds that could hardly be considered Top Echelon intelligence. The “Persico faction,” he noted, was now in control of the carting contract for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which had been turned over to the City of New York.10 Scarpa didn’t supply any details, perhaps because hundreds of thousands of dollars were being stolen from the shipyard via a scheme for which his brother Sal and Charles LoCicero Jr. were later indicted. More on that later, but one thing is clear: By 1975, Hoover’s onetime star informant was reduced to passing along what amounted to low-level Mafia gossip:

  March 1, 1975: Source stated that ALLIE BOY PERSICO spends quiet drinking evenings in the Regis Room of the St. Regis Hotel in Manhattan where SOURCE claims no one knows him.

  That memo wasn’t even addressed to the Director, or to any official at Headquarters.11 It apparently stayed in the New York Office. On May 5, the Director did get a two-line airtel. With no explanation, it simply said: “Above captioned source is presently being closed by the New York Office.”12

  For the next five years, Gregory Scarpa Sr., the most important Mafia informant in the history of the FBI’s New York Office, went dark. It was during this period, in 1976, when Scarpa, lacking the “insurance” he’d enjoyed with the Bureau, was first arrested for gambling. Two years later he was arrested again, after offering seven hundred dollars to two NYPD cops to protect his numbers racket. That’s the crime that led to his thirty-day jail term.13

  As Fred Dannen reported in the New Yorker, though, Greg Scarpa “hated doing time.”14 So when Lin DeVecchio officially reopened him in 1980, after five years “in the cold,” Scarpa was ready to reassume his Top Echelon status.

  Taking Years to Reopen Scarpa

  After joining the Bureau in 1966, DeVecchio was first assigned to the Albany Office. The following year, at the age of twenty-seven, he made it to New York City. There he became, in his words, the “youngest guy ever assigned to Organized Crime.”15 Curiously, 1967 was the same year Tony Villano took over as Scarpa’s contacting agent after Greg had withdrawn for several months following the transfer of his original handlers. Villano continued to use him as a source until he retired in 1973.

  R. Lindley DeVecchio, mid-1980s

  (Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office)

  In his memoir, We’re Going to Win This Thing, DeVecchio writes that he learned of “34” on his first day in the Organized Crime Section, and that he was later informed of Scarpa’s actual identity by a supervisor. If DeVecchio ever needed any information, he was told, he should “go to Tony.”16 In a 1996 interview with Dannen, DeVecchio insisted that he’d “learned a lot of things by watching Tony.”17 But he didn’t say what he learned about Scarpa or why he didn’t seek to run him himself in 1973 when Villano left the Bureau.

  One of the enduring mysteries that DeVecchio never resolves in his book is why he didn’t try to reopen Scarpa for five years after his closing in 1975. In fact, thirteen years went by from the time DeVecchio first learned about Scarpa in 1967 to the day in 1980 when he says he finally contacted him.18

  As DeVecchio tells it, that turned out to be an auspicious meeting for both of them. “From the day of our first sit-down,” he writes, “and for the ensuing twelve years, Scarpa furnished incredibly valuable information that led to countless RICO convictions and life sentences.”19 It was Scarpa’s “singular” intelligence that gave the government the probable cause it needed to obtain seventeen key Title III wiretaps and fifty reauthorizations that brought down the bosses of three of the Five Families in the Mafia Commission case.20 The inside intel he got from “34” made DeVecchio a rising star in the New York Office, where he was eventually promoted to supervisory special agent in charge of not one but two family squads. Meanwhile, Scarpa remained free to steal millions through murder, drug dealing, hijacking, larceny, and racketeering. By 1991, he felt confident enough to trigger the third and bloodiest war for control of the Colombo crime family.

  The relationship between Greg Scarpa and Lin DeVecchio proved to be double-edged. It was that third conflict fed by FBI intelligence that almost cost DeVecchio his job and later came close to landing him in prison. Was the relationship between the killer and the agent the kind of “ultimate perversion” Tony Villano had worried about? Was it, as Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes once contended, “the most stunning example of official corruption” his office had prosecuted?21 Or, as DeVecchio argues in his book, was he “framed” by ambitious agents and incompetent prosecutors?

  And there are other questions that beg to be answered. Why did People v. DeVecchio—the biggest organized crime case in the New York Supreme Court in recent memory—fall apart two weeks into trial? Was it because of the perjury of Linda Schiro, as alleged, or were there other reasons? Was there any link between the state murder charges leveled against DeVecchio and the federal prosecution of the notorious “Mafia Cops”? And if there was, how might that have affected either case? The answers to those questions lie buried in more than ten thousand pages of court pleadings, wiretap transcripts, and FBI memos, which we’ve examined during the research for this book.

  New Revelations from “Gaspipe”

  Another key to the story may come from the one Mafia boss still alive and in prison who not only committed crimes with Gregory Scarpa, but who insists that he stayed out of jail and furthered his racketeering career by tapping into the same “law enforcement” source as Scarpa. Despite efforts by federal prosecutors and prison officials to silence him, Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, who broke the law with Greg Scarpa Sr. from the early days of their youth, has come forward to make some surprising allegations that are sure to challenge the conventional media assumptions about the G-man and the hit man.

  Veteran organized crime reporter Jerry Capeci, to whom DeVecchio was accused of leaking intelligence back in 1994, once wrote that Greg Scarpa “regarded himself as a James Bond figure.” Mission: Impossible, wrote Capeci, was his “favorite television show.”22 Clearly, the so-called Grim Reaper saw himself as having a license to kill. The question is, how much help, if any, did he get from Lin DeVecchio in furthering his 007 persona? We’ll endeavor to answer that.

  This is a story about homicide, duplicity, and government misconduct, where the rigid line between right and wrong grew tenuous and sometimes broke; where the lofty goal of eradicating organized crime forced federal agents to compromise their integrity in a system that suborned the very criminal behavior they were sworn to stop.

  It’s a system in which different federal judges in the same courthouse sent some Mafiosi to jail for life while releasing others who had committed even more vicious crimes. In the “deal with the devil” made by the FBI in protecting Gregory Scarpa Sr., there are lessons to be learned about the price some FBI agents were willing to pay to defeat “the Mafia enemy.” We’ll explore all of that in the chapters ahead.

  Chapter 10

  GUNS AND RABBIS

  In a chapter of his memoir entitled “The Grim Reaper,” Lin DeVecchio gives a detailed account of his reopening of Greg Scarpa, which he says occurred on “a beautiful day in June in 1980” when he drove a beat-up Bureau-issued 1975 Plymouth over to 216 Avenue J, in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, and parked across from the house Scarpa s
hared with his common-law wife, Linda Schiro, and their two children, “Little Linda” and Joey.

  In the book, DeVecchio says he waited for about half an hour until Scarpa walked out of the house and got into “a big black Lincoln.” DeVecchio pulled in behind him, he writes, blocking his exit. After Scarpa got out, with what DeVecchio describes as a “who-the-fuck-are-you?” look on his face, Lin says he showed his Bureau credentials and told Scarpa that Tony Villano suggested he “look him up someday if [he] needed help.”1

  DeVecchio writes that after he reminded Scarpa what a “great help” he had been to the Bureau in the past and gave him his phone number, Scarpa called him two weeks later and told him to “come alone” to a meeting at the Avenue J house.

  It was at that meeting, according to his book, that DeVecchio first met Schiro, whom he describes as an “attractive woman . . . provocatively dressed” and wearing “a little too much makeup.” Sitting down with Scarpa in their living room, DeVecchio writes, he did most of the talking, “speaking the language used by wiseguys, with a lot of four letter words thrown in.” It was a style that did not come to him naturally.

  Roy Lindley DeVecchio, born in Fresno, California, was the son of a senior army officer. He was well educated, having earned a BA and a master’s degree; his brother Jay was a partner in the Washington office of Jenner & Block, one of the nation’s most distinguished law firms.2 The name Lindley came from his blond, blue-eyed mother’s side of the family.3 When he was growing up, his father was posted to a series of exotic locations, from Bermuda to Tokyo to Rome, where Lin learned to speak fluent Italian while the family lived in what he describes as “a beautiful apartment.”4 During his childhood his parents frequently took him to the opera. He asked to take violin lessons and became an avid stamp collector. In short, he was the antithesis of tough-talking, streetwise “Nino” Villano, the Brooklyn-born son of an Italian immigrant.

  In recruiting a dangerous capo like Scarpa, then, Lin DeVecchio had to assume another personality. After their initial meeting, whenever DeVecchio met with Scarpa, he writes that he “always wore” the “costume of a Brooklyn wiseguy.” That included gold chains and a pinky ring to “emulate” the Mafia style.5 Throughout the book he repeatedly uses profanities to describe his interaction with Scarpa and other informants. “Over time I learned to speak their language, to use their vocabulary, and that made me more effective,” he writes.6

  In one sequence he recalls watching one of his CIs in the Meatpacking District “beat the daylights” out of a robber who had just mugged a gay prostitute. “Gimme the fuckin’ knife,” he quotes the informant as saying. “This cocksucker’s solicitin’ these fags, then he’s grabbin’ their fuckin’ money, the cocksucker. Gimme the fuckin’ knife. I’m gonna cut his nuts off.”

  When he lectured at the FBI Academy, DeVecchio writes, he told the agent trainees, some of whom were Catholic or Mormon, that “even with a post-graduate degree, my speech has been reduced to gutter language. And if that bothers you, go fuck yourselves.”

  In his book, DeVecchio admits that he admired Scarpa, “a man even the wiseguys feared.” To make his point, he describes how Scarpa once “had a beef with two capos” over whether they “were entitled to a split on a certain score.”

  They knew they needed muscle and confronted him, even though Scarpa was merely a soldier. They took about fifty guys with them. Scarpa stood alone, shouting at the capos and telling them to go fuck themselves and get out. He didn’t budge an inch and the capos retreated.

  That reference to Scarpa as “merely a soldier,” when he is repeatedly identified in the FBI airtels as a “caporegime” or “capo,” raises the question of whether DeVecchio had actually read Scarpa’s extensive file in any depth before reopening him.

  In his memoir, DeVecchio writes that he “went through the 209 files of closed informants” and picked “the thickest file,” which turned out to be Scarpa’s.7 DeVecchio testified under oath at a 1997 hearing that he “looked at” Scarpa’s closed files.8 In an interview for a documentary on Greg Scarpa Sr. for the Biography Channel in September 2012, the former supervisory special agent said, “I opened the [Scarpa Sr.] file, read everything I could find out about this man.”9 But there are many conflicts between his account in We’re Going to Win This Thing and the facts as stated in the newly released airtels and memos.

  Valachi vs. Scarpa

  For one thing, DeVecchio refers only to “209 files” in his book, describing them as “usually three or four sentences of pertinent inside information.”10 As we’ve documented, however, some of the airtels run up to thirteen single-spaced pages, revealing volumes of material from Scarpa’s debriefings between 1961 and 1973.

  As noted, seventy-four of DeVecchio’s relatively brief and cryptic 209s were released in the mid-1990s, but those were separate from the hundreds of pages of airtels we’ve used to document Scarpa’s secret relationship with the FBI dating back to 1961.11 One indication that DeVecchio may not have examined that material is his assertion that “Valachi gave us the term Cosa Nostra. . . . He also gave us the names we still use today to identify the Mafia families . . . Colombo, Bonanno, Genovese, Gambino, and Lucchese.”12 No one who had studied the Scarpa airtels from two years before Valachi first started “singing” could overlook the fact that those revelations were first made by Greg Scarpa Sr. in briefings sent directly to Hoover from the NYO. Is it possible that Lin DeVecchio reopened “34” without fully appreciating the mobster’s skill as a cold-blooded manipulator? Did he underestimate Scarpa’s capacity to lie to Bureau agents and use his position as a TE informant for personal gain?

  There is one section in DeVecchio’s book that sheds light on that question and points to a certain lack of precision on his part. In citing Tony Villano’s memoir, Brick Agent, Lin writes that Villano “described an informant to whom he gave the name Rico Conte.”

  Tony wrote that in 1952 Conte had described the secret structure and inner workings of the American Mafia to his then handlers. But they thought it was Conte’s imagination running wild and dismissed it as a tall tale. Tony died a few years ago, so I can’t ask him now, but I always suspected that the character of Rico Conte was based on Greg Scarpa.13

  That statement suggests that DeVecchio, or his collaborator, Charles Brandt, may have paid only cursory attention to the details of Brick Agent, because the composite Villano uses for Greg Scarpa Sr. is not Rico Conte—a mobster who had served considerable prison time—but the aforementioned characters of Julio and Nick Biletti. If Lin had read any of the initial airtels sent to Hoover at the time of Scarpa’s recruitment in 1961, he would have known that Greg’s detailed reports on “the secret structure and inner workings” of the LCN were genuine and certainly didn’t amount to a “tall tale.”

  DeVecchio, who worked in the New York Office in close proximity to Villano for six years, writes that he “learned a lot just by watching” him. So that raises several questions. Did he ask Villano about his star informant back then? If, as Lin writes, he became aware of “34” on his first day on the job, did he familiarize himself with Villano’s Scarpa airtels so that he could judge whether the newly reopened TE informant was lying to him? Or is it possible that Lin DeVecchio, who rose to the rank of supervisory special agent running two squads, didn’t do the homework necessary to educate himself about a dangerous killer before formalizing relations with him?

  He describes Senior’s file as “thick,” but the 902 pages of airtels from 1961 to Greg’s closing in 1975 rival the size of a Manhattan phone directory. Did DeVecchio, whom a defense lawyer once called “Mr. Organized Crime,”14 actually overlook the files that we’re now describing in this book? Or was he being disingenuous and somehow covering for Scarpa?

  One reason to question DeVecchio is his description of how he recruited Scarpa. His account in the book, which mirrors what he said in a 60 Minutes interview after its release,15 conflicts with the very first airtel sent to Washington from the NYO after Scarpa’s
formal reopening in 1980. While Lin now claims that his “initial meeting” with Scarpa took place outside the mobster’s house on that June day16 and he formally connected with him “about two weeks later,” the newly disclosed files suggest that it actually took him half a year to “persuade” Scarpa to start informing on the Colombo family once again.

  JULY 1, 1980: SOURCE WAS CLOSED BY COMMUNICATION DATED MAY 5TH, 1975. IT IS NOTED THAT APPROXIMATELY SIX MONTHS HAVE BEEN REQUIRED TO DISCREETLY RE-CONTACT THE SOURCE AND TO PURSUADE [sic] HIM TO RESUME FURNISHING INFORMATION WHICH IS OF EXTREMELY HIGH QUALITY AND UNOBTAINABLE FROM ANY OTHER CURRENT NYO SOURCE.17

  FBI teletype to the Director saying “six months” required to reopen “source” (Scarpa Sr.)

  (Peter Lance)

  So was it two weeks or six months? The discrepancy is significant when one considers DeVecchio’s sworn testimony during the trial of Scarpa’s son Greg Jr. What follows is an exchange he had under oath with Junior’s attorney Larry Silverman on October 14, 1998.

  Silverman: There came a time that you went out then and met with Mr. Scarpa Sr.?

  DeVecchio: That’s correct.

  Silverman: Do you recall what year it was?

  DeVecchio: I believe it was 1980.

  Silverman: Where did you meet with him, sir?

  DeVecchio: My initial contact was outside his home at the time.

  Silverman: About how long after the first meeting did you get together with him?

  DeVecchio: I would say within a few weeks but I can’t be certain of the precise time, certain.18