Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  In a strangely prophetic conversation, Sessa told his FBI debriefers that he discussed the murder later with Joe Brewster, who told him that “everybody has to follow orders or be killed themselves.” At some point after that, Brewster himself started disobeying his capo, Greg Scarpa Sr., and once that happened—“son” or no son, best man or not—in Senior’s ice-cold words, “he had to go.”

  DeDomenico’s next bank job with the Scarpa crew was the successful robbery of a bank in Queens, with Zambardi, Granato, Sessa, and a fourth accomplice named Joseph Figueroa. By Sessa’s account, Figueroa had also been in on the Dime Savings job.

  This time the split was $15,000 to $20,000 per man, with the lion’s share of the proceeds getting “kicked up” to Greg Sr. DeDomenico had a contact at ADT, the alarm company, and the crew learned how to bypass alarm systems so they could get into banks during off hours. The system had worked in two of the scores, failing only during the 1980 Dime job. In February 1984, when Greg Sr. decided to hit the same bank again, they used a police scanner to tip them off to any law enforcement presence.

  According to Sessa, the crew this time consisted of DeDomenico, Greg Jr., Zambardi, Figueroa, and Anthony Frezza, who went on later that year to drive Mary Bari to her death, only to get whacked himself. The Bari murder was another homicide where Senior and Junior would trust both Carmine Sessa and Joe Brewster to keep quiet.

  But on February 18, during their second burglary at the Dime, the police scanner went off and the crew fled. Joe Brewster, the seasoned thief, had his car parked behind the bank. He got away clean with Sessa and Bobby Zam. Out of loyalty to Figueroa, though, they doubled back to pick him up—only to get boxed in by NYPD patrol cars. Sessa, Zambardi, and Brewster were pulled from their vehicle, questioned, and arrested.

  What Was Missing

  In the four years since Lin DeVecchio had started sending 209s to Washington based on his debriefings of Greg Sr., there was very little in them about Scarpa’s activities as a bank robber. So, again, the question is, what did DeVecchio know, and when did he know it?

  The first 209 that even hinted at such activity—given Brewster’s links to Scarpa—was in mid-December 1981. It recounted a meeting from the previous March:

  ON MARCH 4TH, 1981 SOURCE ADVISED THAT JOE BREWSTER IS NOT CONNECTED WITH BUT NOTED THAT THE BURGLARY AT THE CHASE BANK ON THE WEEKEND OF JANUARY 17–19TH WAS DONE BY CREW. SOURCE ALSO ADVISED THAT ADT EMPLOYEE IN NASSAU COUNTY WHO HAS BEEN SUPPLYING WITH INFORMATION ON BANK ALARMS.18

  Since most of the key information in that report was redacted, we don’t know what crew Scarpa was referring to or who was getting the information from ADT. The next mention of a bypass robbery came two years later:

  ON MARCH 5TH, 1983 SOURCE ADVISED THAT THE RECENT ROBBERY OF 900 POUNDS OF GOLD IN THE JEWELRY DISTRICT WAS HANDLED BY MEMBERS OF THE COLOMBO FAMILY, FRANK BEANSIE MILLER’S CREW. SOURCE SAID THE BURGLARS HAD TO HAVE INSIDE INFORMATION PARTICULARLY IN BYPASSING THE ALARM SYSTEM.19

  Frank “Beansie” Miller, also known as “Frankie Beans,” was another member of the Colombo family who divided his time, like Joe Brewster, between scores for Anthony Casso and Greg Scarpa. In fact, in Philip Carlo’s book, Gaspipe went into detail about how his “B&E crew” would “meet at Frankie Beans’s finished basement . . . in Bensonhurst where the eight-by-ten black-and-white [surveillance] photos they’d taken . . . were posted on a large blackboard” in preparation for each job. “The gang would actually buy the same alarm system as that in the bank,” wrote Carlo, “so they could practice on the safe in preparation to dismantle the bank’s alarm.”20

  Using crew members from the Colombo borgata, including Miller and DeDomenico, Gaspipe admitted to stealing “millions of dollars” in these heists. In a single robbery of a Chemical Bank on Canal Street in Manhattan, Carlo writes, Casso’s Bypass crew “made $10 million.”

  “That’s the kind of fortune Scarpa and Casso were making,” says defense attorney Flora Edwards, “as they shared these crew members. The solving of bank robberies is at the core of the FBI’s work. So where was the Bureau while all of this was going on, particularly when one of Casso’s partners in crime was a Top Echelon informant?”21

  Nearly a year went by before Lin DeVecchio made another report about a burglary in his Scarpa 209 memos. This time, after the arrest at the Dime Savings Bank, Scarpa was forced to admit that the botched score had taken place. But that 209, which other agents in the Bureau had access to, included two pieces of misleading information:

  On 2/28/84 advised Supervisor R. Lindley DeVecchio that JOE BREWSTER, BOBBY ZAMBARDI, and CARMINE SESSO [sic] are connected with GREG SCARPA but are not members of the Colombo Family. The source said the word on the street is to have no conversation concerning the attempted bank burglary inasmuch as the above individuals have been arrested. The source said that COLOMBO capo ANTHONY SCARPATI would had to have authorized a bank burglary, and SCARPA could not have made this decision on his own.22

  First of all, the source of the report is clearly Scarpa, whose name is redacted. DeVecchio identifies the crew as being “connected” to Scarpa—perhaps as a way of diverting attention away from Greg Sr. as his CI. But the allegation in that 209 that no one was talking about the failed heist was disingenuous. Scarpa knew every detail, since his own crew had attempted the job. The most misleading aspect of that 209, however, involved the two suggestions in the last sentence: that Anthony “Scappi” Scarpati would have had to approve the robbery, and that Scarpa couldn’t have acted on his own.

  Denigrating “Scappi”

  As noted earlier, despite the fact that Greg Scarpa Sr. is referred to repeatedly in the airtels from the early 1960s as a capo, caporegime, or captain, Lin DeVecchio insists in his book that Scarpa “would never agree to be a capo because it would draw too much attention to himself. He remained a soldier under capo Anthony . . . Scarpati.”23

  Scarpati was just four years older than Greg. At sixteen he’d been a member of the notorious South Brooklyn Boys gang, and one night in 1950, after a West Side Story–like rumble with a gang called the Tigers, he was charged with murder in the shooting of an eighteen-year-old. Also arrested in the incident was a young Carmine Persico.24 Persico and Scarpati later joined the Profaci crime family.25 Decades after that, Greg Scarpa Sr. used Scarpati to hide behind as his nominal captain, seeking to divert attention away from himself by posing as a lowly soldier who had to seek Scappi’s permission for any significant crime. Within the family, however, Scarpa was known to routinely humiliate Scarpati in front of other members and associates.

  Vic Orena Jr. and his brother John, the sons of the acting family boss who was Greg Scarpa’s primary target during the third war in the early 1990s, told me in an interview that Scarpa often treated Scarpati brutally.

  “Greg was supposed to answer to Scappi,” said Vic Jr., “but Carmine Sessa [said] that Greg would abuse him.”

  “He would literally yell at him,” said John Orena, “calling him a piece of shit to his face.”26

  Further, Scarpa’s own reports to DeVecchio make clear that he had zero loyalty to Scarpati. In fact, in several 209s, Scarpa actually gave the FBI the information agents needed to set up wiretaps on his so-called capo. In November 1982, DeVecchio filed this memo to Washington based on what Scarpa had told him:

  SCAPPY CAN BE FOUND ON A DAILY BASIS AT THE NESTOR SOCIAL CLUB, FIFTH AVENUE AND PRESIDENT STREET, BROOKLYN, WHICH HE USES AS A LOCATION TO HANDLE HIS NUMBERS OPERATIONS, SPORTS BETTING OPERATION AND LOANSHARKING OPERATION. THE SOURCE ADVISED THAT . . . HE IS VERY CONSCIOUS OF SURVEILLANCE IN THAT AREA AND ALWAYS HAS LOOK-OUTS AT EITHER END OF THE BLOCK.27

  Later, Scarpa went so far as to give DeVecchio the phone number to Scappi’s social club, along with the location of a phone that might be tapped.

  THE SOURCE NOTED THAT ARE CLOSE TO SCARPATTI, AND THAT HANDLES SOME OF SCARPATTI’S ACTION. THE SOURCE ALSO CONFIRMED THAT TELEPHONE NUMBER 638-4418 IS THE TELEPHONE USED AT THE NESTOR SOCIAL CLUB,
ALTHOUGH IT IS LISTED TO AN UPSTAIRS APARTMENT.28

  “If Scarpa Sr. had an ounce of respect for Scappi, or any loyalty to him, he would have never ratted him out like this,” said Andrew Orena, the youngest son of the imprisoned boss, who has spent years working to prove his father’s innocence in a murder he claims was set up by Scarpa.29 We’ll examine that issue more closely in Chapter 22.

  In the meantime, the 209s on Scarpati and the bypass bank burglaries demonstrate that Scarpa’s reports on the cases, which gave FBI officials an inside look at the Colombo crime family, were routinely being distorted by the Grim Reaper to serve his own interests, and his handler, Lin DeVecchio, was reporting those distortions directly to FBI officials in Washington.

  An FBI chart from 1984, which DeVecchio published in his book under the title “Colombo Crime Family 1984,” shows Scarpati as a capo. But it lists both Scarpas, Senior and Junior, as mere soldiers.30

  And it wasn’t just the DC brass who were getting a distorted picture. Other supervisors in New York were similarly deceived. In his memoir Lin DeVecchio quotes Chris Mattiace, the SSA who preceded him as head of the Colombo Squad in the NYO. In Mattiace’s view, Greg Scarpa Sr. was merely a lowly soldier, unworthy of his attention.

  “At that time [1987] we were only interested in capos and above,” says Mattiace. “Our whole effort in every squad was focused on bringing down the hierarchy of each family. Here was a case with a single soldier [Scarpa] and a bunch of associates.”31

  With Scarpa Sr. as the principal source on his own activities, the FBI leadership was getting a twisted view of his actual position in the family. It’s no surprise, then, that when the relationship between Senior and his trusted “son” Joe deteriorated to the point of Brewster’s execution, Lin DeVecchio’s report to Washington didn’t even hint at Scarpa’s role in the murder.

  Getting Dressed Up to Die

  The details of the final hours of Joe DeDomenico’s life are quite similar in the accounts given by Lin DeVecchio in his book and the Brooklyn prosecutor who set out to convict Lin for complicity in the murder in 2007. Sometime on September 17, 1987, Joe Brewster was asked by Greg Scarpa Sr. to put on his best suit. He was going to be driven with Greg Jr. to a special event. Some hours later, Joe waited with Junior at a bar/restaurant to be picked up, and when a white Oldsmobile Cutlass arrived they got in. Unbeknownst to Joe, it was a stolen car, and earlier that day a gun had been hidden beneath its front floor mat. Greg Jr. was in the shotgun seat; Brewster sat behind him—never suspecting that he had only minutes to live.

  At some point, after they pulled away, Junior reportedly retrieved the weapon, spun around, and shot DeDomenico at virtual point-blank range. In an instant, he had killed the man who stood as godfather to his own daughter—the trusted crew member who had been sponsored for membership in the family by his own father. Wiping away the brains and blood, Junior then reportedly turned to face the windshield as the Cutlass drove to Mario Parlagreco’s garage. There it was wiped down of fingerprints and driven to Seventy-Second Street in Bensonhurst, where it was left with the motor running, Joe Brewster’s corpse still slumped in the backseat.32

  In their respective accounts, DeVecchio and the Brooklyn DA seemed to agree on the motives for the slaying: Brewster’s increased used of cocaine, his refusal to do a murder on Greg Sr.’s orders, his newfound interest in religion, and his refusal to cut Senior in on burglary scores he was reportedly doing on his own. As we’ll see from the testimony of those close to DeDomenico, however, those problems had been festering for several years after his February 1984 arrest for the second Dime Savings Bank robbery attempt. The question is, what triggered his murder three years later? What caused Scarpa’s actual son to kill his adopted “son,” Joe?

  The Joe DeDomenico death car

  In his book, DeVecchio hypothesizes that a leak through a Colombo family lawyer led to the brutal murder. But Linda Schiro, the one person Anthony Casso insisted that Scarpa trusted as much as DeDomenico, testified at DeVecchio’s trial that it was Lin’s confirmation of Scarpa’s suspicions that sealed Brewster’s fate.

  The apparent conflict between Schiro’s trial testimony and statements she’d made a decade earlier in a recorded interview led to the summary dismissal of the charges against DeVecchio. The 1997 interview tapes produced by reporter Tom Robbins suggested that Schiro had cleared DeVecchio in the DeDomenico homicide. But as we’ll see in Chapter 42, a more careful comparison between what she said on the stand and what was recorded on those tapes now demonstrates that when it came to Brewster’s homicide, Linda Schiro was consistent in both instances.

  DeVecchio’s Version of Events

  In his book, Lin devotes three pages to the murder of Joe DeDomenico. He provides an italicized account of the death, with heretofore undisclosed details, in a style similar to his dramatized introduction on Mary Bari’s death. In this account, Joe Saponaro, a Scarpa crew member, is driving the stolen Cutlass when it picks up Brewster and Junior.

  According to DeVecchio, after the cleanup of the death car in Parlagreco’s garage, a three-car convoy, including two separate “crash cars” driven by Billy Meli and Kevin Granato, accompanied Saponaro to Seventy-Second Street for the body disposal. After that, they all convened at Romano’s restaurant—the same place where Scarpa had dinner after Mary Bari’s murder.

  But at that point, writes DeVecchio, “Joe Sap had left Kevin Granato’s own personal car keys in the stolen Cutlass with the dead body in the backseat,” so “Billy Meli and another associate, Joe Savarese, ran out of Romano’s and drove to the Cutlass. Luckily, Joe Brewster’s body had not been spotted in the backseat.”

  Whatever the source of those details, it should be noted that DeVecchio’s official report to the Bureau on DeDomenico’s death was considerably shorter:

  ON SEPTEMBER 17TH, 1987, SOURCE ADVISED THAT JOE “BREWSTER” DE DOMENICO WAS HIT . . . DUE TO HIS ASSOCIATION AND NARCOTICS DEALINGS . FURTHER, BREWSTER ALSO MADE A BURGLARY SCORE AND FAILED TO CUT IN HIS CAPO, AND THEN DENIED THAT HE HAD PARTICIPATED IN THE BURGLARY. THE SOURCE SAID THAT JUNIOR PERSICO ORDERED THE HIT AS A RESULT OF THE ABOVE.33

  In his book, Lin claims that Greg Sr. had to clear the murder with Anthony Scarpati, who was then “in jail in the South.” In fact, he writes that on two occasions Mario Parlagreco accompanied Greg Jr. to visit Scappi to get his blessing. He even alleges that, on the second visit, Scarpa Jr. “was given permission for the rubout by Junior Persico by way of Scappi.” Larry Mazza later described Brewster’s alleged religious conversion as a drift that rendered him “a step away from being a rat,”34 and in his book DeVecchio supplies an appropriate quote from Scappi: “If he found God, it is time for him to join God.”35

  But would a murderous capo like Greg Scarpa have taken the time to get the Brewster hit cleared by another capo—especially one like Scappi, whom he reportedly treated like dirt? Would he have let Carmine Persico, the family boss, know just how far off the reservation his own trusted crew member Joe DeDomenico had gone? What did it say about Senior’s ability to control his crew if the man he trusted to be godfather to his own grandchild had become such a liability?

  As we’ve noted repeatedly, the airtels recording Scarpa’s comments during the 1960s and ’70s refer to the enmity and “bad blood” that existed between Scarpa and the Persico faction of the family. Why would Greg Sr. expose such a vulnerability to the Snake when he routinely whacked those around him who got out of line—like Dominick Somma and Bucky DiLeonardi—without Persico’s say-so?

  Furthermore, how credible was it that Carmine Persico, who controlled a family that grossed millions of dollars a year from drug dealing, would order the murder of a valuable earner like Brewster because he was selling narcotics?

  “In order to continue to sell Scarpa Sr. as a truthful and stable CI, DeVecchio had to convince the Director and other FBI officials that Brewster’s death was the result of his drug deals and that the murder was sanctioned at the highest level by the f
amily boss,” says Flora Edwards.36 In his book, while denying that he had anything to do with Brewster’s death, Lin seems to blame it on a leak in the EDNY that found its way to a lawyer for the Colombos.

  In my opinion, most of our leaks came from the Eastern District and I said that loudly and often over the years, and I was not the only agent to say so. There was something about Brooklyn that seemed to crave attention like a spoiled child.37

  Chapter 17

  THE CASE OF CASES

  If the borough of Brooklyn was a “spoiled child,” in Lin DeVecchio’s words, it was also a Mafia killing ground. In 1987 alone there were ten separate gangland-style murders in Kings County, and at least two of them touched Greg Scarpa directly.

  As the New Year commenced, “34” was also directly linked to a triumph for the Feds. On January 13, three of the five New York bosses were sentenced in the Mafia Commission case,1 a prosecution that Rudolph Giuliani, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District, had predicted would “crush” Cosa Nostra.2 Dubbed the “case of cases,” the Commission trial, which had lasted three months in 1986, was based largely on wiretaps connecting the bosses and their underlings to murders and a bid-rigging scheme in the construction industry that netted $1.27 million for the mob.3 Key to that aspect of the RICO “enterprise” was Colombo soldier Ralph “Ralphie” Scopo, president of the New York Concrete Workers District Council, who had demanded a kickback of 2 percent on every concrete bid under $2 million.

  The business of the so-called concrete club was reportedly conducted by Scopo, Colombo underboss Gennaro “Jerry Lang” Langella, and capo Dominick “Donnie Shacks” Montemarano in the back of the Casa Storta restaurant in Bensonhurst. The Feds were able to eavesdrop on the club’s secret conversations as a direct result of intel Scarpa leaked to DeVecchio, which paved the way for the government’s Title III wiretap warrants.