by Peter Lance
But the fact that Orena and his sons had visited the Manor after the DA seized the records undercut that theory. “They wouldn’t have shown themselves anywhere near Ocera if he’d been targeted for a hit,” says Flora Edwards, Orena’s former attorney. “It also defies belief that Vic Jr. and John would have asked Diane Montesano to take them to see Tommy if they had even contemplated eliminating him, since she would have been a witness.”9
Indeed, in the separate trial of Pasquale Amato, Diane Montesano testified that she never heard him threaten Ocera “in any way.” She said she never heard Tommy complain about Amato, and though she admitted that they were “business friends,” she insisted that neither owed the other any money—thus undermining the government’s loan-shark theory.10 But the motive to which the Feds devoted the most time at Orena’s trial was the allegation that the Ocera rubout had been executed as a favor to John Gotti Sr.
The Gambino boss was allegedly “ripping mad” that Ocera had killed Greg Reiter, the brother of Michael Reiter, who worked in Tommy’s two gambling clubs. The Reiter brothers’ father, Mark, was a Gambino member who was then serving a life sentence. According to the Feds, Gotti was concerned that Ocera’s alleged murder of Greg Reiter might cause the imprisoned father to cooperate with prosecutors. So they argued that Gotti leaned on Vic Orena to take care of the problem.
Salvatore Gravano, Al D’Arco
In order to sell that theory, the Feds trotted out Gravano, whose testimony against his former friend and boss had finally resulted in the conviction of the “Teflon Don” after three previous attempts had failed.11 The “second seat” prosecutor in Gotti’s 1992 trial12 was John Gleeson, who was one of the three assistant U.S. attorneys prosecuting Vic Orena seven months later. Now, taking the stand against Orena, Gravano claimed that Little Vic had actually visited Gotti at his Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy on the night of January 10, 1990. Alleging that Gotti “seemed agitated” before the meeting, Gravano insisted that Orena spoke to the Gambino boss privately, and that after he left Gotti appeared calmer.13 According to Gravano, Gotti Sr. later told him that “they whacked that Tommy Ocera.”
Similarly, Al D’Arco claimed that at a December 1989 dinner for Lucchese and Colombo family leaders Orena had bragged to him that he’d had Ocera “whacked” as a favor to Gotti because Ocera had killed Reiter. Again, both of these claims represented little more than hearsay by the witnesses. And there was significant evidence to contradict the Reiter motive in the Ocera slaying.
Killed by the Butcher
In his compelling biography The Butcher: Anatomy of a Mafia Psychopath, the late organized crime author Philip Carlo directly attributes Greg Reiter’s murder to vicious Bonanno capo Tommy “Karate” Pitera.14 In June 1992, Pitera was convicted on eighteen of nineteen homicide counts he’d been charged with. But he was never indicted for Reiter’s murder, because the body was never found and the only witness to the murder, Michael Harrigan, had been killed.15
Still, Carlo’s account leaves little doubt that Pitera killed Reiter with a shotgun blast to the head. He then buried his body in a remote wildlife sanctuary in Nassau County, Long Island. Carlo writes that Mark Reiter, mistakenly convinced that his son had been killed by another drug-dealing mob associate named Billy Bright, actually paid $5,000 to a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, who allegedly stabbed Bright to death at the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta.16
In fact, after Orena and Amato were found guilty for Ocera’s murder, Gravano testified in the prosecution of Bright’s alleged killer, Jack Stancell.17 In doing so, Sammy the Bull effectively recanted the testimony he’d given in Vic Orena’s trial, in favor of the Feds’ new theory that Mark Reiter had hired Stancell to kill Bright. At that point in 1996, four years after Orena’s conviction, Gravano actually testified that the Ocera homicide was not connected to Greg Reiter’s disappearance—completely undermining one of the government’s principal theories for Orena’s motive in the Ocera murder: that he’d done it as a favor to John Gotti.
“Tommy Ocera had nothing to do with Greg Reiter’s murder,” Andrew Orena told me. “And as to their story that my father visited Gotti at the Ravenite, all they could produce was three seconds of video which they claimed showed him leaving the club on January tenth. They had multiple bugs inside the club recording conversations that night but didn’t get a word of my father. Nor did that video show Sammy Gravano entering or leaving the club on that date. My father’s conviction for Tommy’s murder was an absolute frame, and in addition to Gravano, the Feds shamelessly used Al D’Arco, who would have said anything to keep his plea deal and escape prison.”18
D’Arco, who was at the same level in the Mafia hierarchy as Vic Orena, had testified in a dozen Mafia trials. He was rewarded by the Justice Department with a one-day jail sentence.19 Meanwhile, as noted, after admitting to nineteen homicides, Gravano served only five years.20 But Sammy the Bull, whose testimony led to thirty convictions and the imprisonment of twenty-three mob leaders and their associates,21 was later exposed as a drug-dealing liar.
The New York Times described Gravano as “the most devastating witness ever used against the mob,”22 but he’d signed a plea deal with the Feds that was predicated on his sworn insistence that he’d never sold narcotics, and he testified to that multiple times under oath. There was also compelling evidence that Gravano had committed many more than the nineteen hits he admitted to—as many as forty-four, according to former Lucchese boss Anthony Casso, who told FBI agents after his defection that he’d sold drugs to Gravano for years. But then, after cutting a plea deal in which Casso agreed to testify against other mob associates, the Feds suddenly reneged on it. In Gaspipe, Philip Carlo wrote about Casso’s prospective testimony:
All the attorneys at the Justice Department knew that if Casso was put on the stand in a court of law and told about how he dealt drugs with Gravano, told that there were more murders than the nineteen Gravano had admitted to . . . this would immediately create fertile ground for all the defense attorneys representing the people Gravano put away to file appeals creating a nightmare for the Justice Department and an embarrassment of monumental proportions.23
In interviews and correspondence with me for this book, Casso insisted that “Gravano lied with impunity on the stand when it came to his murders and drug dealing.” He claimed that Sammy the Bull once offered to sell him $160,000 worth of China White heroin.24 And years after his sworn testimony, following his release from prison, Gravano acted in a way that corroborated Casso’s allegations. In February 2000, Gravano was arrested in Phoenix with his wife, son, and daughter for running a ring that sold up to twenty-five thousand tablets of the illegal drug ecstasy each week.25 Convicted in 2002, Gravano is now serving a nineteen-year sentence at ADX Florence, the same Supermax prison where Casso was initially housed.
But Gravano isn’t the only star federal witness who Casso claims was a fabricator. “Al D’Arco had become known as a chronic liar,” Carlo quotes Casso as saying in his book. D’Arco had testified against Genovese boss Vincent “Chin” Gigante, but Casso insisted that Little Al had “never been to any meetings at which the Chin was present.”26
In his correspondence with me, Casso wrote that “D’Arco had decided to become an informant in 1990, but knowing well that the Lucchese family had a mole in both the Brooklyn and New York Offices of the FBI, D’Arco had taken precautionary measures by turning himself in to Federal agents in the Bureau’s New Rochelle Office.”27 Further, at Orena’s trial D’Arco also gave the impression that he’d never been a serious drug dealer. But new evidence surfaced later that he was heavily involved in the sale of narcotics dating back to 1989.28
Scarpa’s Backup Plan
Given the absence of any direct evidence linking Vic Orena to the crime—and given the suspect nature of the testimony against him by Maffatore, Bonfiglio, Gravano, and D’Arco—the question is, who was behind the death and burial of Tommy Ocera?
In his summation
at Orena’s trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gleeson actually identified Greg Scarpa as “probably” one of those who had followed Ocera and Montesano.29 He also suggested that someone “tried to get Greg Scarpa to kill [Ocera] . . . but it failed.”30 In the Colombo war that followed, Scarpa proved to be the absolute enemy of Vic Orena, so he would never have done Orena’s bidding or executed a murder contract at Orena’s behest.
But if Scarpa killed Ocera, what was his motive? Why did he want him dead? The answer came from his son Greg Jr. in a sworn affidavit on July 30, 2002.
In the late 1980’s my father visited me in Lewisburg [federal prison] and told me that DeVecchio told him that Tommy Ocera was spreading rumors that my father was an informant and that Ocera himself may be a “rat.” My father never received any order from Victor Orena to kill Tommy Ocera. The story that Ocera was killed on Orena’s instruction was invented after-the-fact by my father and DeVecchio to frame Orena when the Colombo Family war began.31
Greg Jr. made a similar statement during live testimony at a hearing for Vic Orena in 2004. Testifying from the Supermax prison via a live video feed, Junior was asked if he knew how Tommy Ocera had died. “My father killed him,” he said.
Scarpa from FBI surveillance video
Repeating what he’d written in his affidavit, the younger Scarpa explained that his father had received the information about Ocera’s being an informant from “his friend ‘D,’” a code name for DeVecchio. At that point, Greg Jr. testified, “he had to do what he had to do with this guy.” When asked what that meant, he replied, “[It] means he had to kill him, otherwise his [Greg Sr.’s] life would be lost.”32
If Greg Scarpa Jr. is to be believed, his father cleverly used the Ocera rubout to kill two birds with one stone. He eliminated a potential “rat” who might have exposed his own informant status, and he implicated the acting boss of the family, who was his principal obstacle to a family takeover. And, according to Greg Jr., he did all this with the help of his FBI contacting agent. In that same sworn affidavit, Junior wrote:
DeVecchio provided my father with the addresses of the men who were loyal to Orena. As a result of the attacks [during the war], Victor Orena went into hiding. DeVecchio and my father had a plan to plant guns at the house where Orena was staying to ensure Orena’s arrest and conviction. Orena’s arrest was supposed to be a “trophy” for DeVecchio. My father told me that he and DeVecchio rode in one car and my half-brother Joey drove another car, which carried the guns in the trunk. They parked some distance from the house and my father and DeVecchio watched while Joey planted the guns under the deck.33
Greg Jr. testified to those same details at the 2004 hearing before Judge Jack B. Weinstein. But eight days after Junior’s video testimony, Weinstein found him to be “not credible.”34 The judge, who had presided over Orena’s trial in 1992, had also refused to grant Vic a new hearing the first time Orena brought up the alleged corruption between Greg Scarpa Sr. and DeVecchio.35 Back in 1997, in rejecting Orena’s petition for a new trial, Judge Weinstein cited his reasoning in that 101-page decision:
Orena and Amato contend that it was not they—the convicted criminals—but ex-F.B.I. Special Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio who conspired with one of the defendants’ associates—the murderer Gregory Scarpa—to cause the killing of their partner, the loan shark, Thomas Ocera, and to instigate an internecine mafia war. The evidence to prove this bizarre, but not entirely implausible, contention, defendants argue, should have been supplied to defense counsel so that they could rely on the jurors’ rationality or befuddlement (they claim either provides a justifiable basis for reasonable doubt) to achieve a verdict of not guilty, or at least disagreement sufficient for a mistrial. . . . Scarpa has died in prison and can provide no help on the facts. DeVecchio, having been allowed to resign from the F.B.I. . . . was granted immunity, all documents relevant to his background were revealed, and he was subjected to fierce examination by defense counsel. Despite the seamy aspects of law enforcement revealed by the record, . . . defendants’ factual assumptions and legal theories are unpersuasive.
But at the time of Orena’s 1992 trial, none of the evidence of Scarpa’s informant status, or DeVecchio’s alleged role in leaking intel to him, was known to the defense. Thus, not all documents “relevant to [DeVecchio’s] background” were revealed. Nor did Orena’s lawyer get a chance to subject Scarpa’s control agent to the kind of “fierce examination” he might have, since DeVecchio merely testified to the structure of the Mafia and the course of the third war.
Even after the shocking evidence of Lin’s questionable relationship with “34” was revealed in the 1994 OPR investigation, Judge Weinstein was not persuaded. A decade later, in 2004, he concluded:
Orena and Amato now present further “evidence” in a renewal of their attack on their convictions. . . . The only relevant support for their contentions of any significance are the alleged confessions of Scarpa to his son, Gregory Scarpa, Jr., a convicted murderer and a made member of a mafia family, that it was the father and DeVecchio, not defendants, who killed a fellow gang member and organized the mob war.36
Earlier, during Orena’s trial, Judge Weinstein had allowed the admission of second- and thirdhand hearsay from low-level Colombo associates Maffatore and Bonfiglio to convict the acting boss. Each witness had a massive motive to lie for the Feds, since they would each receive drastically reduced sentences in exchange for their testimony. On the other hand, Greg Scarpa Jr., the son of Orena’s principal enemy, had no reason to distort the truth and no real hope of reduced jail time. At that 2004 hearing he testified to specific details his father had told him about his plan to frame Orena for the Ocera hit.
If any Mafiosi ever fit the definition of “co-conspirators,” Greg Scarpa Sr. and his son would arguably qualify—thus allowing admission of Junior’s testimony under the exception to the Rule Against Hearsay. But now, seeming to contradict his earlier logic, Judge Weinstein found Greg Jr.’s testimony not credible because he’d learned the details secondhand from his father:
The only substantial information Scarpa, Jr. had was furnished to him orally by his parent. The son, if he is credited at all, was told by his sire what DeVecchio was doing for the mob and what the elder Scarpa was doing for DeVecchio. The son observed nothing that took on significance without the father’s extra-judicial statements. Since both Scarpas were sentenced to federal prison, where the father died, and the son is serving an almost endless sentence, they had good reason to want to further damage the reputation of the F.B.I. and to help their erstwhile friends, and sometimes adversaries, Amato and Orena.37
What’s astonishing about that last statement is Judge Weinstein’s description of Vic Orena as Scarpa’s “erstwhile friend.” At no point during Orena’s trial before him, nor in any evidence furnished by the Feds on appeal, was there ever a hint that Scarpa had been anything but Vic Orena’s mortal enemy.
As we’ll see in the chapters ahead, Scarpa Sr. conspired against Orena with all the guile that Shakespeare’s Iago showed in plotting to destroy Othello. But Jack B. Weinstein, one of the most brilliant legal minds in the federal judiciary, was unwilling to follow the path of his EDNY colleague Judge Charles Sifton, who granted new trials in 1997 for Colombo underboss Joseph Russo, his brother Anthony, and crew member Joseph Monteleone after similar evidence of the allegedly corrupt Scarpa-DeVecchio relationship came to light.38
Weinstein saw the interaction between DeVecchio and Scarpa differently and in 2001, as noted, he declared, “There’s a time to end all of these cases.”
In effect he was saying enough was enough—that further probing into the alleged “unholy alliance” between “34” and Mr. Organized Crime could cause other Colombo war-related cases to “unravel.”39
“The evidence that DeVecchio was providing illegal information to Scarpa was absolutely overwhelming,” says Flora Edwards. “But so was the perception in the New York judiciary that you do not go easy on the mob.”40
Defense attorney Alan Futerfas, who mounted Vic Orena’s initial appeal, agreed. “There was a belief in this city for years,” he says, “that the Mafia controlled construction, the fish industry and the waste industry. People like Rudy Giuliani made their careers by breaking that perceived control. Now, the Colombos constituted a large series of prosecutions. And no matter what we presented in the way of government misconduct—obstruction of justice and withholding of evidence—the appellate courts were not going to let these men out of jail.”41
In his singular drive to dominate the Colombo family, the ingenious Greg Scarpa Sr. had constructed two scenarios to eliminate Vic Orena. Plan A was to remove him by force. Barring that, however, the grisly murder and burial of Tommy Ocera would provide the Feds with another way to remove him for good.
Now, having laid the groundwork for plan B with Ocera’s rubout, the Killing Machine put plan A in motion. The surrogate he would use to pull the trigger was his longtime Wimpy Boys crew member Carmine Sessa, who by 1991 had worked his way into Orena’s good graces. Orena had come to trust Sessa so much, in fact, that he’d made him consigliere of the family. But in the treacherous ways of the Mafia, the “kiss of death” was usually delivered by a friend—and as the summer approached the unsuspecting Orena had no idea that Sessa was putting together a crew to gun him down.
Chapter 24
COUP D’ÉTAT
Since the seventh century B.C., in ancient Athens, criminal law has recognized two principal definitions of homicide: murder, which involves the intent to kill, and manslaughter. The distinction, which was literally carved into stone in the fifth century A.D., concerns degrees of culpability.1 Just how responsible one human being is for causing the death of another is measured by what the law calls “mens rea,” which literally translates as “guilty mind.”2 While the prosecution of murder is typically a state responsibility, federal law defines it as “the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought.”3 The essential element of the crime is intent, and the New York Penal Code is typical of other state statutes. Since “murder in the first” is usually reserved for the killing of a police officer, a person is guilty of “murder in the second degree” when “with intent to cause the death of another person, he causes the death.”4
