by Peter Lance
The source said Teddy PERSICO opened the meeting by asking Benny ALOI if those members backing VIC ORENA recognized CARMINE PERSICO as the COLOMBO Boss. ALOI said PERSICO was regarded as a Boss, but VIC ORENA speaks for the COLOMBO Family. At that point Teddy PERSICO said that CARMINE PERSICO was the official boss, and not ORENA, and demanded all the money that the PERSICO’s [sic] should have gotten over the past several years that had gone to ORENA.29
According to DeVecchio’s 209, “The ORENA faction said that they were there to resolve any differences and that a meeting should take place.” But the memo went on to describe the inflexible stance taken by the “PERSICO faction.”
TEDDY PERSICO said that until that side recognized CARMINE PERSICO as the official boss, and ORENA would no longer be the acting boss, there would be no further discussions.30
Again, this was Scarpa Sr.’s take on the conflict. The FBI was getting most of its intelligence on the war from its principal antagonist, who by now was an expert at playing his Bureau handlers. So now, ever the tactician, “34” added a new element to the equation: John Gotti.
Since 1987, “getting Gotti” had been the “top investigative priority” of the FBI’s New York Office,31 and dozens of Scarpa’s debriefing reports contained dirt on the Gambino boss. Now, on October 9, 1991, a second 209 filed by Lin raised an ominous new prospect: that Vic Orena was really just a Gotti pawn. As noted, the Feds would advance that premise during Vic Sr.’s 1992 trial, arguing that one of the principal motives for the Tommy Ocera hit was Orena’s desire to appease Gotti—a theory that was later entirely discredited.
But now, in the fall of 1991, sourcing Scarpa, DeVecchio filed a report with Washington suggesting that the “Dapper Don” was taking sides in the Colombo war.
On October 9, 1991, advised SSA R. LINDLEY DE VECCHIO that JOHN GOTTI has circulated a list of approximately twenty-five (25) COLOMBO members loyal to CARMINE PERSICO, and advised all GAMBINO members to have no contact in business or otherwise with these individuals. The source said as a result of this list all COLOMBO members so mentioned who have illegal activities together with GAMBINO members, are now keeping the proceeds of these businesses, and not sharing them in their respective counterparts.32
On November 4 DeVecchio went further, suggesting (per Scarpa) that Gotti was actually using Orena in a plot to take over the entire Colombo family—a goal that defies belief, given the long-established five-family structure of the Mafia Commission.
On November 4, 1991 advised SSA R. LINDLEY DE VECCHIO that . . . GAMBINO Boss JOHN GOTTI has been manipulating ORENA for a long time and is anxious to have this dispute resolved in ORENA’s favor so he can assume control of the COLOMBO Family’s activities.33
But that 209 is even more telling for another reason: In it, “34” names himself as a possible Orena target and states that William Cutolo would be a “likely victim” from the Orena faction:
The source noted that JOEY SCOPO and possibly BILLY CUTOLO would be likely victims on the ORENA side, and that CARMINE SESSA and GREG SCARPA, SR. would be the ORENA’s side pick to be hit.
After threatening Cutolo for many weeks, Scarpa seemed to be setting the stage now for the “attack” outside his house on November 18 that DeVecchio later claimed had “fomented” the war. But Scarpa made another allegation in that November 4 report, suggesting that the Cutolo attack wasn’t the first violent outbreak in the conflict. According to Scarpa, the initial bloodshed came two weeks earlier with the murder of Giachino “Jack” Leale, one of the killers of Tommy Ocera. In that same 209, Scarpa blames Vic Orena for Leale’s rubout:
On November 4th, 1991 SOURCE advised that the recent hit on JACK LEALE was done by the Orena Faction of the COLOMBO family. . . . The SOURCE said LEALE was obviously set up by somebody he trusted.34
The question is whether that somebody was Scarpa himself. The evidence we’ve uncovered suggests that Scarpa not only “stalked” Ocera but participated in the murder and later sought to frame Vic Orena for it. If Leale was a conspirator to Scarpa’s garroting of Ocera, then Scarpa would have had a strong motive to want him dead—and killing him in the fall of 1991, during a Commission-ordered truce, would have made it look like the Orenas had broken the peace.
“There is no way that my father would have sanctioned the killing of Jack Leale,” said Andrew Orena. “There was too much to lose. Contrary to what Scarpa was telling Lin, my father had the backing of the Commission and he was desperately trying to broker a resolution before shots were fired. The last thing he would do was get anywhere near a hit like that.”35
Shootout on Eighty-Second Street
On the morning of November 18, 1991, Little Linda Schiro, Greg Scarpa’s daughter by his common-law wife, Linda, was getting her infant son Freddy dressed to go out shopping. Her father reportedly had three crew members with him as he left the house: Joseph “Joe Fish” Marra, Carmine Sessa’s brother Larry, and Dean Capiri. The Lincoln they were driving was parked behind Big Linda’s Mercedes.36
According to the testimony Big Linda gave at Lin DeVecchio’s trial in 2007, Greg Sr. helped his daughter take his grandson out and put him into a baby seat. He then took off with his crew in the Lincoln. Just then, as Little Linda was about to pull into the street behind them, she said she saw a van come out of nowhere, “speeding up the block.”
“I cut the van off,” she told a television interviewer in 2011.37 “My father’s car gets to the stop sign and I’m behind his car and this van is behind me. I leaned down to get the portable radio and I heard popping sounds, and as I looked up I saw a whole bunch of guys dressed in black from head to toe. Black hoods, black ski masks, shooting up my father’s car.” The Lincoln was stopped at the corner of Eighty-Second Street because it had been cut off by a panel truck.38
Big Linda and Little Linda Schiro, 2007
(Peter Lance)
“It was like something out of a Mafia movie,” said Schiro. “I got in the way between the van and my father’s car because if I wasn’t there, nobody in that car would have had a shot [at survival].”
Moments later, Little Linda grabbed her son and ran back into the house. When Big Linda opened the door, she said her daughter was screaming, “Mommy, I think they killed Daddy.” But Scarpa and the three crew members had been able to drive around the panel truck and escape.39 About ten minutes later, Little Linda said her father came back. “We both looked at each other,” she said. Then he told her, “Every single person involved [in this] is going to pay.”
A team of FBI agents quickly arrived on the scene. In short order, they determined that the panel truck had been rented in Queens. Based on a description of the van that came from Scarpa loyalists, they identified two of Cutolo’s crew members, Vincent “Chickie” DeMartino and Frank Ianacci, who were seen earlier that day getting into a similar van. They’d left their car at a social club at Seventy-Seventh Street and Thirteenth Avenue, five blocks away, and were later reportedly spotted returning to it after the hit attempt.
All that information was contained in a 1992 FBI 302 describing the debriefing of Carmine Sessa. Curiously, Sessa told Agents Jeffrey Tomlinson and Howard Leadbetter II that later on the day of the ambush, Scarpa had told him that it was DeMartino and Ianacci who had attacked him—which was suspicious, since the assailants’ faces had been covered.
Special Agent Chris Favo, DeVecchio’s immediate subordinate in the C-10 (Colombo) squad, later told OPR investigators that he was the source of the panel truck rental details and that he’d given that information to DeVecchio.40
Larry Mazza, who would soon embark on a killing spree with Scarpa, later told agents that Senior found out where the panel truck had been rented from “his law enforcement guy.” In his debriefing, Mazza suggested that this source had been “the Girlfriend”—a code name that multiple witnesses have said Scarpa used for Lin.41
Then, the day after the incident, Lin DeVecchio sent this 209 to Washington using Scarpa Sr. as his source. In it, “34” cites
himself as the target of the attack.
An attempt to “hit” GREG SCARPA was made on November 18th, 1991 by members of the ORENA faction of the COLOMBO Family. SOURCE said there were several shooters and SCARPA’s daughter was almost shot in the attempt. The SOURCE did not know which crew attempted the “hit” but noted that this would start the shooting war between the two factions.42
There it was: the official announcement, from the very source who had engineered Carmine Sessa’s first attempt to kill Vic Orena, that the attack on Eighty-Second Street would now trigger “the shooting war.” Since the other families seemed unwilling to challenge Vic Orena, Scarpa was now using the attempted hit as a justification to retaliate—and he would do it with a vengeance. As his daughter later put it, “After that incident, that was the end of anything normal in our family. Once those people did that in front of us, he became an absolute irate maniac.”43
The Killing Machine was about to go into overdrive.
Chapter 26
GO OUT AND KILL SOMEBODY
The next move by the Persico faction was another attempt to kill Vic Orena. On or about November 23, five days after the shootout in front of Scarpa’s house, Wimpy Boys member “Joey Brains” Ambrosino was with Michael Sessa on Staten Island. According to Joey, Michael’s brother Carmine called and told them that Vic Orena had been spotted with Joe Scopo and Orena capo Thomas Petrizzo on the street in front of a funeral parlor at 101st Avenue in Ozone Park, Queens.
Quickly moving into action on Carmine’s orders, Ambrosino beeped John Pate, Bobby Zambardi, and Bobby Zam’s stepson “Jerry Boy” Chiari, the kid Vic Orena had promised to induct into the family if he stopped selling drugs. Now, Chiari was being summoned to kill him. As Ambrosino later testified, the second crew was instructed to bring “all the equipment” and link with Carmine, Michael, and Brains at a Rockaway Parkway diner. The “equipment” consisted of “machine guns, handguns [and] bulletproof vests.”1
But after beeping Zambardi up to eight times with no response, Ambrosino said, Pate’s crew didn’t arrive at the diner until after five P.M. When Carmine Sessa pulled up to meet them, he announced that Orena, Scopo, and Petrizzo were gone. At that point, according to Ambrosino, Carmine yelled at his brother for assembling the murder squad too late.2 The next day, when word of the second murder plot against Orena filtered back to his faction, some of Cutolo’s crew reportedly took action. The victim was Hank Smurra, the same capo who had initially targeted Joe Scopo at Turquoise. Carmine Sessa later related the events leading up to his death to FBI agents.
According to Sessa, after two failed moves on Orena, he was “concerned about Persico loyalists becoming targets.”3 With their faction outnumbered three to one, it was time to find new places to hide. So he instructed Smurra to drive to Staten Island and look for safe houses.4 Sessa later told the agents that Smurra said he’d be accompanied by a man named “Leo” (last name unknown), whom Carmine didn’t know. Sessa said he was “cautious.” But Smurra insisted he’d be “okay . . . with Leo.”
Later that day, when Smurra returned to Brooklyn, he was shot to death. His body was found in his car in the Sheepshead Bay area.5 Masked gunmen had approached the vehicle and pumped three shots into his head while he was still behind the wheel.6 Sessa later told Bureau agents that he’d heard secondhand from Michael “Black Mike” Calla that the shooters included “Chickie” DeMartino, one of Cutolo’s crew members who had allegedly made the move on Greg Scarpa outside his house.7 Ambrosino also testified later that Calla had identified DeMartino as Smurra’s killer.8
Hank Smurra after being shot to death as he sat in his car
(New York Daily News)
The day after Smurra’s murder, Lin DeVecchio filed a 209 in which “34” warned that “the PERSICO faction will doubtless retaliate soon.” Scarpa added that “ski masks are being worn since neither side is sure of the ultimate settlement of this dispute and the actual shooters don’t want to be identified for fear of future reprisals.”9
In this case, Scarpa’s prediction of a retaliation was dead-on. Hank Smurra’s death represented the second murder in the third Colombo war, following the hit on Jack Leale, who was killed on November 4. Whether or not Scarpa was responsible for that hit, the FBI’s star informant was now about to take control of the war away from his surrogate Carmine Sessa, who had blown two attempts on Vic Orena.
During Lin’s 2007 murder trial, Sessa admitted that he had “learned the ways of the Mafia through Mr. Scarpa [his] sponsor.”10 But apparently he hadn’t learned enough. Scarpa’s next move was an elaborate plot that would leave nothing to chance. He wasn’t simply going to wait around for a target of opportunity, as Sessa had done with Vic Orena. This time, the Mad Hatter would drive the action.
The Impossible Mission
On November 28, Thanksgiving morning, ten days after the purported attempt on his life by Cutolo’s shooters, Greg Scarpa was at a safe house on Staten Island.11 He stood watching as the members of his crew disguised themselves as Hasidic Jews, dressing all in black with full beards, frock coats, and the round fur shtreimel hats Hasidim wear over their long curling sideburns, known as payot. Scarpa had gotten word from his two spies in Billy Cutolo’s camp12 that later that morning Cutolo would be celebrating the holiday at the home of his girlfriend’s grandmother in a Hasidic neighborhood of Brooklyn.13 So, in a plot right out of Scarpa’s favorite television series, Mission: Impossible,14 his costumed crew would be walking near the house with TEC-9s and other weapons hidden in their coats. When Cutolo emerged from his car to enter the holiday dinner, he would be assassinated.
Ambrosino later testified that the Hasidic costumes were picked up by Anthony “the Arab” Sayegh, a member of their crew.15 They were reportedly kept at the home of Larry Fiorenza’s girlfriend. On the morning of the plot, as the members of the hit team suited up, Ambrosino testified that he got a call from Fiorenza, who told him to “go buy the New York Post.”
That very morning, the Post had run a story by reporter Murray Weiss alleging that Scarpa had been a government informant. So the plot was canceled.16
The stories within the family about Scarpa’s being a government snitch dated back to the 1960s, and they continued to dog Greg Sr. as he operated with virtual impunity, avoiding federal charge after federal charge.
“This is a guy who seemed to walk between the raindrops,” said one lawyer who represented Scarpa but asked not to be identified.17 Anthony Casso told me that Scarpa’s motive for killing both his own brother Sal and Joe Brewster DeDomenico, whom he thought of as a son, was that he suspected them of spreading rumors that he was a government informant. Now this latest Post story was threatening to derail Scarpa’s plan to eliminate Vic Orena.
Carmine Sessa later testified that he was worried the allegations in the Post story might be true, and he had good reason to feel that way. After he became a cooperating witness in 1993, Sessa told FBI agents of the many indications he’d had over the years that Scarpa had an official source who protected him.
As early as the 1980s, Sessa said, Greg Jr. told him that his father “had someone in law enforcement providing him with information.”18 Not only did Sessa confirm how Scarpa had received the list of Wimpy Boys crew members about to be arrested by the DEA in 1987,19 but a year later, after he and Joe Brewster and Bobby Zam were busted for a bank robbery, he told agents that “Scarpa Sr. had some influence to keep his crew on the street,” and that he had “an angel looking after him.”20 Sessa also said he was “amaze[d]” that Scarpa didn’t “hesitate” to discuss criminal activities inside the Wimpy Boys club, even though he’d warned Sessa that it had been bugged.
“That made Sessa suspicious about Scarpa Sr.’s relationship with law enforcement,” the agents wrote in their 302.21
But now, on Thanksgiving Day 1991, as the crew suited up to take out Cutolo, Sessa had to placate the other family members who were worried that if Greg Sr. was a snitch, they might be in jeopardy. So he sought out “
Joe T” Tomesello, the capo who had been appointed part of a three-man ruling panel by Junior Persico back in 1986. Tomesello, a family elder, had a solution. “To settle everybody’s mind,” he suggested, Sessa should tell Scarpa to “go out and kill somebody on the Orena faction . . . to prove himself.”22 As Sessa later testified during Lin DeVecchio’s trial, the sense among the family members was that the FBI would never allow a confidential informant to commit murder. So to deflect the criticism and prove that he wasn’t “a rat,” Scarpa should “go out and do a piece of work.”23
Now that he had to prove to the Persico loyalists that he wasn’t an informant, Scarpa was even more motivated, so he went off on a rampage, trolling the streets of Brooklyn with Larry Mazza and Jimmy Del Masto in his tricked-out murder wagon and killing or wounding one person per week between early December 1991 and January 1992. “Here we have a paid government informant,” says Flora Edwards, “who is acting more like a secret government agent and to protect his cover he feels compelled to kill. From this point on, the blood he spilled is now on the hands of the FBI as well.”24
Taking Out Tommy Scars
Scarpa’s next victim turned out to be an aging gangster who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On December 3, 1991, at 9:38 A.M., Greg was cruising past the Mother Cabrini social club at 2284 McDonald Avenue in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn,25 when he thought he spotted Nicky Grancio, one of the Orena capos he saw as a threat.
As it happened, the man Scarpa saw was thirty-eight-year-old Joey Tolino, Grancio’s nephew, who resembled his uncle. Tolino was standing talking to Gaetano “Tommy Scars” Amato, a seventy-eight-year-old member of the Genovese family. From his passing van, driven by Jimmy Del Masto, Scarpa gave Mazza the word to fire, and a volley of bullets hit Tolino and Amato, killing the old Genovese soldier where he stood and wounding Tolino in the foot.26
