Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  DeVecchio: Had he told me I would have recorded it.

  Shargel: There is no record of it there [in the 209s].

  DeVecchio: Obviously he didn’t tell me. . . .

  Shargel: You wouldn’t do anything as absurd as lie, right? . . .

  DeVecchio: Certainly not . . .

  Shargel: So when Gregory Scarpa says to you that it was the Persico faction that did it, we are not talking about some large population right?

  DeVecchio: Yes.

  Shargel: At no time, according to your document there . . . on December 11th do you say to him “I’m not satisfied with ‘the Persico faction,’ I want to know who exactly did it so I can safeguard the streets of New York? . . .”

  DeVecchio: I didn’t ask him directly if he killed somebody, knowing he would not tell me that.

  Shargel: He wouldn’t tell you?

  DeVecchio: Absolutely not. He wouldn’t tell it to me. No informant will tell you.

  Shargel: Did you ever ask him?

  DeVecchio: No.

  Shargel: So at no time, right up until the day he died in June of 1994, at no time did you ask Gregory Scarpa if he, in fact, committed murders?

  DeVecchio: I don’t recall talking to him about that up until that time. We may have had discussions but I don’t recall it.24

  Moments later, Shargel reminded DeVecchio of a sworn statement that he’d given twenty-one months earlier, in May 1995, during the OPR investigation.

  Shargel: On page 20 of the affidavit that you swore to you said, “I do recall asking Scarpa Sr., prior to his incarceration, who did the work, meaning who killed the four victims and wounded Waverly. He said he believed the violence took place as a result of spontaneity and not a plan, and he denied involvement in these killings.” Do you remember saying that under oath?

  DeVecchio: If you have it printed, I have said it under oath obviously.

  So did Lin DeVecchio ask Greg Scarpa about the murders or didn’t he? In both instances, each time under oath, DeVecchio gave two different answers to that question: He didn’t and he did. A few minutes later during that 1997 hearing, after discussing the FBI’s practice of submitting its agents to polygraph tests, Shargel got DeVecchio to admit that the OPR investigators had asked him to take one.

  Six months before that hearing, the Justice Department had concluded that DeVecchio’s prosecution was “unwarranted.” But that was only after he’d been given a grant of immunity that would have made it virtually impossible for him to be convicted for the underlying allegations in the OPR.

  Before agreeing to testify at this subsequent 1997 hearing, DeVecchio had insisted again on a separate grant of immunity and Judge Weinstein had agreed to it. Now, as the hearing wound down, Shargel brought up the issue of the polygraph again:

  Shargel: There is no more prosecution. They are not going to prosecute you, right? Right?

  DeVecchio: Prosecute me for what?

  Shargel: For any of the crimes that they were investigating. You are not going to be prosecuted. You got a letter from the Justice Department.

  DeVecchio: They found out I committed no crimes to be prosecuted for.

  Shargel: You got immunity here today, right?

  DeVecchio: Yes.

  Shargel: My question to you now is, would you take an FBI polygraph test to determine whether or not you are telling the truth? Would you agree right now on the witness stand to take a lie detector test administered by the FBI or any expert on polygraph?

  DeVecchio: Why would I?

  “Think about that response,” says Shargel. “How could a supervisory agent with Lin DeVecchio’s experience—a man who had taught informant development at Quantico—not have been aware at the height of the war that his principal TE informant was killing people on the streets of Brooklyn and not intervene to stop him? Whether or not Justice could have prosecuted him in the face of that immunity, or whether or not he would stand for a polygraph, how is it conceivable that he didn’t know those murders were happening and not take immediate action to stop them?”25

  Fredric Dannen, the author of that groundbreaking 1996 New Yorker piece on Scarpa and DeVecchio, read Lin’s book and sent me this comment:

  On page 166 of We’re Going to Win This Thing, DeVecchio says it was his “sworn duty to prevent violence and stop the war if I could, and I took that duty very seriously.” But starting on page 172, DeVecchio begins digging his own grave on this very point. He admits that Scarpa’s team killed Nicky Grancio on January 7, 1992, and that Scarpa pinned the murder on Richie Fusco’s hit squad. DeVecchio believed this misinformation—or willed himself into believing it—and he still manages to complain that “I got accused of being ‘duped’ by Scarpa over this one.” What else do you call it? Later on the page [DeVecchio writes,] “In my heart, as Scarpa’s handler, of course I knew he was doing hits.” This is an extraordinary admission. DeVecchio told me in one of our 1996 interviews that he did not know Scarpa was a multiple murderer until after the Colombo War had ended.

  The evidence presented thus far in this book demonstrates that Lin DeVecchio went to extraordinary lengths to keep the Killing Machine out of jail. Now, as 1992 came to a close, even while locked down on house arrest, “34” continued his shooting rampage.

  The Shootout in Bay Ridge

  Despite his prediction in August that he’d be dead by Christmas, by December Greg Scarpa was very much alive. But he was feeling the tension of wearing that ankle bracelet. Until his arrest, Scarpa had roamed the streets of Brooklyn as though he had a license to kill. Every time his family had been threatened—from Donny Somma’s criticism of Greg Jr. during the 1980 bank robbery to the shots fired outside his house that purportedly threatened his daughter and grandson in 1991—Scarpa had reacted violently.

  Now his cloak of invincibility was deteriorating. Even the Feds who’d protected him were now conspiring behind his back—or at least that’s what he came to believe, as AIDS-related dementia began to affect him. His daughter Little Linda later confessed to an interviewer that the prospect of her father’s vulnerability terrified her.

  “Now I know that my father is not invincible and neither are we. We’re open game in that life. Nobody is protected. Even though they’re in the same Family they don’t care. They kill each other.”26

  Four nights after Christmas, her brother Joey came home with a friend, twenty-one-year-old Joseph Randazzo, and told his father that he’d been insulted by a group of local drug dealers. One of them was an alleged crack seller named Ronald “Messy Marvin” Moran.27

  Suddenly, the Grim Reaper erupted. “He was yelling and screaming,” Linda remembered. “‘These people think I’m sleeping?’” she recalled him saying. “‘They think they can pull a gun on my son?’ My father went wild.”

  At that point, despite his ankle bracelet, Scarpa grabbed a gun, bolted from the house, and ordered Joey and Randazzo to get in his car. He drove around the block until his son spotted Moran, and then Scarpa started shooting, chasing them with the car as Moran and another dealer returned shots. It was another open gun battle on the streets of Brooklyn. A total of sixteen rounds were fired by both sides.28 Lin DeVecchio later claimed that Scarpa killed Moran’s partner.

  Messy Marvin later testified that he “had no bullets left in the gun. I was trying to . . . run in the house and he [Scarpa] was waving his gun around, shooting it.” But one of Moran’s shots had struck Randazzo, who was in Scarpa’s backseat. Another shot had struck Scarpa in the face, taking out his left eye. As he pulled the car to the curb, Joey bolted in a panic and took off. Remarkably, Scarpa got out, bleeding, and staggered home.

  Joey Scarpa

  (Polaris)

  “I looked at him and I went ‘Oh my God,’” Little Linda said. “I thought I was going to faint. . . . My father had AIDS and he didn’t want me to touch him. . . . So now I’m saying to myself, ‘Oh my God where’s my brother?’ So I ran out to the car and my brother’s not there. But his friend’s in the back, covered in
blood. I was talking to him the whole time, trying to tell him help is on the way. I was in shock.”

  An ambulance was soon called. But before it arrived, Scarpa sat down in the house and patted his eye socket with a towel. He then downed a Scotch and was driven to the hospital by Larry Mazza.29 Randazzo, who was taken in the ambulance, died two days later. Moran pled guilty to the murder in 1997.

  As a measure of his devotion to Scarpa, Lin DeVecchio describes that incident with admiration in his book, claiming that during the gun battle Scarpa had evened the score:

  On December 29, 1992 . . . Scarpa’s son Joey Schiro came home complaining about two rival drug dealers in the neighborhood who were encroaching and showing no respect for the Scarpa name. Greg Scarpa grabbed his gun and found the two dealers. A gun battle ensued. Scarpa killed one of them, but had his own eye shot out. Before he went to the hospital, he returned home and had a glass of Scotch. Come on, loosen up, you’ve got to admire the man.

  That last line speaks volumes about how Lin DeVecchio seemed to regard Scarpa’s death toll. Just a week earlier, in part because of DeVecchio’s expert witness testimony, Vic Orena had been convicted not just of the Tommy Ocera murder but of racketeering and propagating the Colombo war—a conflict that Greg Scarpa, not Orena, fomented and waged. By the time that trial took place, agents like Chris Favo could no longer ignore the role the Bureau’s star informant had played in the violence. Scarpa would soon plead guilty to three of the murders—Fusaro, Grancio, and Lampasi—and Mazza would plead to a fourth (Amato).

  But it would be another year before Favo, Tomlinson, and Leadbetter could muster the courage to blow the whistle on their boss. The central question the OPR investigators would explore was whether Lin DeVecchio had intentionally aided and abetted Scarpa’s rampage. The head of the FBI’s New York Office would exert intense pressure to speed up the investigation, because of the ongoing embarrassment it brought to the office and the threat it posed to the Feds’ many ongoing war cases.30

  But based on the evidence uncovered in this investigation, one thing is clear: Whether or not it was the result of negligence on Lin’s part, from 1980 to 1992 twenty-six people were killed directly by Scarpa, or by members of his crew at Scarpa’s direction. More than half of the homicides Greg admitted to, before telling Larry Mazza he’d “stopped counting,” occurred on the watch of SSA Roy Lindley DeVecchio, the man known in the media as “Mr. Organized Crime.”31

  Eventually, with his own agents coming forward to blow the whistle, the harsh light of scrutiny would be shed on Lin DeVecchio himself. But before that happened, a series of FBI agents and supervisors, working in conjunction with federal prosecutors, would go to extreme lengths to contain the potential damage.

  PART IV

  Chapter 31

  A GRAIN OF SAND ON JONES BEACH

  By March 1997, nearly six years after Carmine Sessa’s murder crew rolled up on Vic Orena—whose ambition, the Feds insisted, had triggered the war—seventy-five members of the Colombo family had been prosecuted.1 As a measure of culpability in the conflict, forty of them were members of the so-called Persico faction. Literally the entire anti-Orena faction, from Greg Scarpa Sr. on down, was indicted, versus about thirty-five from Vic Orena’s side, which had triple the number of members and associates at the time of the hostilities.2 As noted, as late as 2001, Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who presided over many of the top cases, acknowledged that if the Scarpa-DeVecchio scandal continued to fester, many of those “war” prosecutions would “unravel.”3

  Judge Jack B. Weinstein

  In the early fall of 1992, as the Feds were prepping the first Colombo war prosecution—the murder and racketeering trial of Carmine Sessa’s younger brother Michael—a number of FBI agents in the New York Office knew that Greg Scarpa had played a significant role in the violence. At the same time, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn knew that evidence had surfaced as far back as 1987 that “34” had a law enforcement source. By late February 1992, Special Agent Chris Favo suspected that Scarpa was getting intelligence from Favo’s own boss, Lin DeVecchio.4 Later, Favo’s colleague Special Agent Howard Leadbetter II said he “began to believe that it was possible that SSA DeVecchio was attempting to interfere with or otherwise stall the development of the [Scarpa] investigation.”5

  But that fall, as EDNY prosecutors geared up to try the younger Sessa and Vic Orena, no one outside the Justice Department had any inkling of that—particularly the defense lawyers.

  Under the doctrine expressed in the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision Brady v. Maryland,6 each of the accused had a constitutional right to receive any “material” exculpatory evidence that could help their defense.7 Chief among that evidence would be proof that would allow the defense to impeach the credibility of a prosecution witness, and since Lin DeVecchio would testify for the government in both the Sessa and Orena trials, word of his alleged “unholy alliance” with Scarpa was arguably “material.”

  But when it came to the metastasizing Scarpa-DeVecchio scandal, none of that “Brady evidence” was forthcoming from the Feds.

  “The idea that DeVecchio, a senior supervisory special agent in the New York Office who was running two squads, had been feeding intelligence to this killer who had then acted upon it would have been hugely exculpatory,” argues Ellen Resnick, who later defended Vic Orena Jr. and represented his father on appeal. “But at that time, throughout the fall of 1992 and well into 1993, we didn’t even get a whiff of that from the government.”8 Moreover, as Flora Edwards, who represented Vic Orena, insists, “the Feds didn’t just withhold that information. Lin DeVecchio actually got on the stand in the Michael Sessa trial and misrepresented what he had done to protect Scarpa Sr.”9

  On November 2, 1992, DeVecchio testified as an expert witness for the government in United States v. Michael Sessa, the first Colombo war prosecution. Charged with racketeering and the murder of Anthony “Bird” Collucio, a loan shark and member of his crew, the younger Sessa was convicted largely on the testimony of Joseph Ambrosino, who had eagerly become a government witness after flipping in June.10

  As previously noted, during Sessa’s trial, Lin DeVecchio was cross-examined by defense attorney Gavin Scotti, and he pointedly denied having helped a confidential informant like Scarpa.* But five years later, Gerry Shargel got DeVecchio to admit under oath that, in fact, he had intervened so that “34” could be released on bail. When Shargel suggested that DeVecchio had lied during his Sessa testimony, the former SSA shot back that he “resent[ed]” the accusation.11

  Why is the issue of DeVecchio’s veracity so important at this juncture? Because if the jury had concluded that he’d lied, that might have made the difference between a verdict of guilt and one of innocence for Michael Sessa. During his summation, Assistant U.S. Attorney George Stamboulidis told the jurors emphatically: “If you believe any agent testifying lied for a second, if you even entertain that thought, come right back, let [Sessa] go.”12 Since Sessa was convicted and sentenced to life—with his jury clueless about the Scarpa-DeVecchio relationship—it’s relevant to ask whether George Stamboulidis should have known that DeVecchio wasn’t telling the truth when he denied intervening to help a confidential informant like Scarpa.

  Consider the evidence uncovered in this investigation:

  On March 31, 1992, several days before ASAC North ordered Scarpa closed, NYPD detectives Brogan and Willoughly, from the OCID Task Force, spotted Scarpa tossing a loaded handgun out of a moving vehicle. Since “34” was on parole in the credit card case, this was a violation that could have resulted in his immediate arrest. But Chris Favo later admitted under oath that “out of concern that the NYPD would force the FBI to arrest Scarpa for the gun,” he called Stamboulidis at that time “and informed him that Scarpa was a source.”13

  Now, with respect to Stamboulidis’s level of awareness at the time of the Sessa trial, consider this verbatim account of what he later told investigators during DeVecchio’s OPR inquiry. It was written i
n the third person by FBI investigators:

  STAMBOULIDES [sic] stated that he was told that the police were going to arrest SCARPA on a gun charge. STAMBOULIDIS stated that he told DEVECCHIO to let SCARPA get arrested and that based on the way DEVECCHIO described the situation and the possibility of revealing the identity of SCARPA as a source, that the state had a weak case. . . . STAMBOULIDES [sic] stated that he felt that SCARPA had called in a panic concerning the gun case. . . .14 STAMBOULI DES [sic] stated that he did not trust DEVECCHIO not to tell SCARPA. . . . STAMBOULIDES [sic] stated that he subsequently had contact with DEVECCHIO regarding the indictment of SCARPA, and he was advised by DEVECCHIO that SCARPA was more valuable on the street than in jail and that he had gotten calls from DEVECCHIO attempting to let SCARPA out on bail.15*

  That 302 documenting what Stamboulidis told FBI agents probing DeVecchio during the OPR in September 1994 is prima facie evidence that, before Stamboulidis’s summation to the jury in the 1992 Michael Sessa case, he knew that Lin DeVecchio had misrepresented to attorney Scotti at that trial that he had never intervened to keep a confidential informant on the street. In fact, Stamboulidis knew that DeVecchio had intervened directly—and had even gone so far as to seek the attorney’s advice on how to free Scarpa following his indictment on the NYPD’s gun charge.

  But later, at trial, Stamboulidis told the jury with a straight face that if they believed that any of the agents testifying had “lied for a second,” they should acquit Michael Sessa.

  When the jury came back, not only did they convict Sessa, but Judge Weinstein threw the book at him, sentencing him to two life terms plus an additional sixty years and fining him $2 million.16 Although this was a murder conviction, it was in strong contrast to the wrist-slap Scarpa got in his 1987 credit card case: probation and a $10,000 fine, instead of the maximum seven-year prison term and $250,000 fine provided by law.17