by Peter Lance
The only part of the statement that seemed entirely disingenuous was his claim that he’d been unaware of the initial move on Vic Orena by Sessa in June 1991. Given Scarpa’s position of power at the time, his ability to control and manipulate Sessa, and his antipathy for Orena—the one family leader who truly stood in his way—it’s simply not believable that Scarpa didn’t engineer that drive-by on Long Island, particularly since it was predicated on Sessa’s false belief that he was about to be murdered by Orena.
On June 8, 1994, the day after he put his hand to that sworn affidavit, Gregory Scarpa Sr. finally died. Nine days later, an FBI 209 report was sent to DC, stating that the war had been waged largely by “the Persico faction.” The 209 admitted nonetheless that “all of his life, COLOMBO LCN Family member GREG SCARPA Sr.—deceased, hated the PERSICO’s [sic], although he was frequently under their control. . . . As an example of this hatred, Scarpa had once supported the ‘GALLO GANG.’”7
But the airtels, memos, and 209s we’ve produced in this book demonstrate that this statement was untrue—and that Scarpa had conspired against the Gallo brothers just as he did against Carmine Persico, the Gallos’ nemesis. That misrepresentation of the family’s history calls into question the final statement in that 209: that the FBI’s trusted source, “34,” was really lying when he exonerated Allie Boy Persico. Citing an unnamed source, the 209 alleged that Scarpa Sr. had signed that affidavit only under duress:
SCARPA, SR. would never have voluntarily given the affidavit he gave to the defense lawyers of ALPHONSE PERSICO aka “LITTLE ALLIE BOY”, wherein SCARPA, SR. claimed that it was SCARPA, SR. alone who started and ran the recent “COLOMBO War” and that A. PERSICO is innocent and had nothing to do with it. The source has been told that the reason SCARPA, SR. submitted this affidavit, to aid in PERSICO’s trial defense, is that [unknown subjects] in PERSICO’s “crew” threatened to murder SCARPA’s wife if SCARPA did not submit the affidavit.8
That may have been the position the government took during Allie Boy’s trial later that summer, but the jury didn’t buy it. Scarpa’s final statement was ruled admissible under the “dying declaration” exception to the hearsay rule, and on August 8 Persico walked out of court a free man.
Although thirty-five other Colombo war defendants had previously been convicted, Allie Boy Persico became the first to be acquitted as a result of the mounting evidence exposing the FBI’s secret relationship with Greg Scarpa Sr.9 Each new trial seemed to undermine the government’s theory that the war was the result of a struggle for control of the family between Vic Orena and the Persicos. To use the metaphor Judge Weinstein uttered years later, the Colombo war prosecutions were starting to “unravel.”
A New Take on the Eighty-Second Street Shootout
Defense lawyers like Gus Newman, who were working to get a new trial for Vic Orena, even went so far as to argue that the alleged attack on Greg Scarpa and Little Linda Schiro on November 18, 1991, was a creation of Scarpa himself. Citing the sworn testimony in a series of war cases, Newman argued in a 1996 memorandum of law that, “despite Scarpa’s ominous predictions to the FBI of a growing conflict, no shooting occurred for five months after Sessa’s attempt to kill Victor J. Orena in June, 1991.”10
The fact that the peace was kept for months after Vic Orena went to the Commission actually reinforced the Commission’s value in avoiding bloodshed. A mob war was always bad for business, and profit was the motivating factor among the family bosses who sat on the Five Families’ ruling body. But Greg Scarpa, the FBI’s in-house Mafioso, decided to do an end run around the Commission and its rules.
On November 4, 1991, in his debriefing to Lin DeVecchio, Scarpa predicted that he and Carmine Sessa “would be the ORENA’S [sic] side pick to be hit.”11 And sure enough, two weeks later, he was seemingly proven right when the shootout took place outside of his house, allegedly at the hands of masked Orena gunmen.
Curiously, despite the fact that their faces were hidden, DeVecchio immediately identified the assailants as “members of the ORENA faction.” Quoting Senior in his 209 that same day, Lin then predicted that “this would start the shooting war between the two factions.”12
At three thirty that afternoon, DeVecchio sent Chris Favo to the house on Eighty-Second Street.13 Favo interviewed Scarpa but later admitted that he didn’t prepare a 302 documenting the meeting, as was customary, because Scarpa was an FBI informant.14 Favo also interviewed Little Linda Schiro, another purported victim of the attack, but no report on that conversation was prepared either. As attorney Gus Newman noted, “while Scarpa’s daughter was obviously an important witness to the events that allegedly occurred, the government has never called her to testify at any of the several ‘Colombo War’ trials in which the purported November 18th shooting was introduced.”15
Newman also alleged that “the physical investigation of the crime scene was plagued with irregularities.” Though Favo himself took photographs of the Mercedes Little Linda was driving,16 he testified later that the bullet holes were all grouped in a narrow section of the fender.17 At the crime scene on November 18, the NYPD collected latent fingerprints on the van that had allegedly blocked Greg Sr.’s escape route.18 But the prints failed to match any of the alleged suspects, including Cutolo crew members “Chickie” DeMartino and Frank Ianacci, who had reportedly been seen earlier that day getting into a similar-looking van.19
Meanwhile, none of the investigators from the NYPD or the FBI took Scarpa’s prints. In his later testimony, Favo said that at the time there had been no reason to suspect Scarpa.20
The pictures taken by law enforcement investigators were lost sometime before the spring of 1995,21 and shell casings found at the scene by the NYPD, which might have been used to identify the guns used by the shooters, mysteriously disappeared from police custody.22
The Shooting Triggers the War
Immediately after that shooting, in meetings with various crew members—including Larry Mazza, Carmine Sessa, and Joseph Ambrosino—Greg Scarpa used the incident to justify retaliation against “the Orena faction.”23 Scarpa and Little Linda were the only witnesses to the incident; the identifications of DeMartino and Ianacci, a.k.a. “Frankie Notch,” came later, secondhand, through Carmine Sessa, who claimed that one of his associates saw the pair switching vehicles in front of a club five blocks away.24
As Scarpa’s surrogate during the war, Sessa helped to sell the shootout story to other family members, later testifying, “Everybody was mad that they broke the truce and they came after us and it was time for us to retaliate.”25 From that point on, according to Sessa, Scarpa decided to attack the “Orena faction.”26
Given “34’s” capacity for treachery, the disappearance of forensic evidence, and the fact that Scarpa and his daughter seemed to be the sole witnesses willing to discuss the “attack,” Newman’s theory—that the shootout was a kind of “Reichstag fire”27 fabricated to justify the shooting war—carries considerable weight.
“Would Gregory Scarpa Sr. have created such an event, with guns firing around his daughter and grandson?” asks Andrew Orena. “If he controlled the situation, he would have. If the so-called members of Billy Cutolo’s crew were really his own guys, and they fired in a controlled pattern so as not to hit Greg or his family, it’s absolutely within the realm of possibility when you consider that so far this war was going nowhere. My father [Vic Orena] was entirely playing defense. The Commission was keeping the peace, and Greg needed something big and loud to set things off.”28
Funeral in an Empty Church
A week after Scarpa’s death, Jerry Capeci, who FBI agents suggested benefited over the years from a close relationship with DeVecchio, wasn’t particularly kind to Lin’s Top Echelon source. “At the end Greg Scarpa went to his grave unrespected,” Capeci wrote in his “Gang Land” column.29
Noting that Scarpa had been “a made man for four decades,” Capeci nonetheless commented that “not a single confederate” came to pay his respe
cts at Scarpa’s funeral, which was held at St. Bernadette’s Roman Catholic Church in Bensonhurst. According to Capeci, the funeral procession consisted of only a hearse and four cars, a sparse congregation limited to Scarpa’s immediate family and a few neighbors.
Scarpa Sr. was laid to rest in what Capeci described as a “polished golden oak coffin.” He quoted the priest, Father Eugene Cole, as reminding the attendees that “none of us live as his own master and none of us dies as his own master.” Humbling words over the coffin of the man who had ruled so mercilessly over the streets of Bensonhurst.
“34” Worth More Than a Thousand Special Agents
On the other hand, at least one agent loyal to Lin DeVecchio seemed to regard “34” as something of a mythic hero. In DeVecchio’s memoir he quotes Special Agent Pat Marshal, who worked on the Mafia Commission case.
Those who accused Lin DeVecchio of being used by Greg Scarpa are people who have no understanding of what Greg Scarpa did for us at the risk of his own life. They lack this understanding either because they are ignorant, arrogant, blind, evil, or all of the above, and that includes some very FNGs in way over their heads way too soon. A thousand of them aren’t worth a hair on the head of “34,” TE Greg Scarpa.30
“Think about that statement for a minute,” says James Whalen, a retired agent from the New York Office, “and you get some sense of the skewed priorities that existed within the Organized Crime Section of the NYO during this period. Here is a veteran agent insisting that a Mafia killer who took more than fifty lives is worth more than a thousand young agents. What does that tell you?”31
Chapter 35
BURNING A GOOD COP
After Allie Boy Persico’s acquittal in August, the next big setback for Valerie Caproni and the Eastern District Feds prosecuting the war cases came in December, when a jury found Wild Bill Cutolo and six other Colombo wiseguys not guilty of murder and racketeering charges. “It’s my best Christmas ever,” Cutolo said as he left the court a free man.1
On October 24, as the trial was under way, veteran Daily News investigative reporter Greg B. Smith broke the story of the FBI’s OPR internal affairs investigation of Lin DeVecchio. Under the headline “G-Man, Fed Atty Eyed in Mob Leaks,” Smith reported that the probe included not just DeVecchio but a possible assistant U.S. attorney in the EDNY who might have passed on sensitive information.2 The piece quoted the Cutolo trial judge, Eugene Nickerson, who seemed to support full disclosure:
“It is best the truth come out,”3 he said, admitting that the allegations were “relevant to the question at the end . . . whether I should dismiss the case.” Smith also quoted defense attorney Alan Futerfas, who (with partner Ellen Resnick) had first discovered the Scarpa-DeVecchio relationship: “Scarpa was knowingly used by the government to further its attempt to create fratricidal warfare,” Futerfas said. It was the first public disclosure of the theory Futerfas and Resnick would later argue in multiple war cases: that “34” was acting not just as a source for the Bureau but as an agent provocateur who took advantage of FBI intelligence to wreak havoc within the crime family.4
Later, New Yorker writer Fredric Dannen characterized that defense as the “‘comrades in arms’ theory of the war.”5
On October 30, in a bylined story shared with Jerry Capeci, Smith reported that “DeVecchio is under criminal investigation for allegedly leaking secrets to Scarpa. The probe threatens to unravel at least five convictions and one ongoing trial.”6
In a column on the day of Cutolo’s acquittal Jerry Capeci wrote that after more than a year in jail “Wild Bill is probably planning a wild Christmas party today.”7
While that piece seemed at least somewhat sympathetic to Cutolo’s point of view, for most of the year Capeci had been merciless in covering another scandal out of 26 Federal Plaza that seemed designed by the Feds to explain the leaks now threatening so many war prosecutions. A year before Cutolo’s acquittal, Detective Joe Simone, who with his partner had been responsible for a third of the collars during the conflict, was shocked to learn that he was the target of FBI charges that he’d sold his badge to the Colombos.
“Detective Stung by Feds”
On December 8, 1993, Simone, who had hurt his back in the line of duty, was due to retire with a “three quarters” tax-free pension—the holy grail for cops and firefighters in the City of New York.* But early that morning, a line of police and FBI vehicles pulled up outside the modest house in Staten Island where he’d lived for thirteen years with his wife, Eileen, a nurse, and their five children. Within hours, Simone was under arrest for bribery, accused by agents from his own NYPD-FBI task force of leaking intel to Colombo wiseguys.
The next day, rather than celebrating at a retirement party, Simone saw his name smeared across tabloids.8 “Detective Stung by Feds” read the banner headline over the Daily News piece by Capeci and Tom Robbins—a reporter who would later play a key role in demolishing DeVecchio’s murder prosecution.
Former Detective Joe Simone, 2004
(Peter Lance)
“Detective Joseph Simone, who worked on the NYPD-FBI Organized Crime Task Force for seven years, was charged with selling information to the Orena faction of the warring Colombo family for two years, earning at least $2,000,” Capeci and Robbins reported in the article that ran December 9, 1993.9 Overnight, Joseph Simone went from a hero in his Staten Island community to a tabloid disgrace. “The roof caved in on my life,” Simone told me. “I never saw it coming.”10
But precisely how Simone became the object of the FBI investigation, and the way it was conducted, raises serious questions about whether Simone was set up to take the fall for Lin DeVecchio—particularly since the government’s principal source for the accusation was Salvatore “Big Sal” Miciotta,11 a notorious Colombo soldier who admitted to his involvement in four murders and was later thrown out of WITSEC, the witness protection program.
For years, Simone had been active with his sons in Little League and the football program at Tottenville High School on Staten Island. Occasionally he visited the home of the school’s coach, Phil Ciadella, whose uncle Alfonso “Chips” DeCostanza was a Colombo capo.
“We had locked him up for guns during the war,” remembers Joe. “He used to inform for us. I’d go over there once in a while ‘cause Phil’s mother cooked old-style Italian.12 So one day I go to Phil’s mother’s house and who’s there but Big Sal and Bobo Malpeso, two Colombo capos.” As noted earlier, Malpeso’s son James had been shot by the “Persico faction” during the war.
Simone told me he was “shocked” to see the two captains. “I didn’t expect them to be there,” he said. “I just went there to pick up plays.”
In any case, Simone says that the three-hundred-fifty-pound Miciotta and Malpeso started talking to him as if they thought he might be willing to sell them information. “Bobo tried to pass me a piece of paper, but I didn’t touch it,” recalls Simone. “I couldn’t tell you to this day if it was a shopping list or an envelope.” Simone, who’d lived by street rules since his days as a kid in Gravesend, Brooklyn, knew a setup when he saw one.
“I told ’em, ‘You guys are probably wired. I don’t want any part of you.’” At that point, according to Simone, Malpeso stripped down to his pants to show he wasn’t wearing a recording device. But as Joe left, he confronted Phil Ciadella. “I told him, ‘You got some fuckin’ pair of balls puttin’ me in a situation like this,’” Simone remembers. “Not long after that, I informed Favo and DeVecchio of what had happened.”
Simone believes it was after his meeting with Favo that the Feds decided to set him up formally. In July 1993 he was called back to the same house by Coach Ciadella. As court records show, in the interim Miciotta had agreed to inform for the Bureau. Two agents later claimed that Big Sal approached them, but there was suspiciously no paperwork on file indicating that he’d made the offer.13
Further, Miciotta alleged that, during their first meeting, the “paper” Bobo Malpeso offered Simone conta
ined $1,500 in bribe money. Big Sal insisted that Simone took it, but the Feds needed corroboration, so a second meeting was arranged.
This time, Miciotta was carrying a tape recorder. A transcript of his conversation with Chips DeCostanza before Simone arrived suggests that Miciotta didn’t believe he could corrupt the veteran cop.14 As the tape begins, Miciotta wonders aloud to DeCostanza whether he might get “help” from Simone because he’d gotten “pinched again.”
Miciotta: I need a little information. I wanna find out what the fuck they’re gonna do with this case here. . . . You know, I’d do the right thing. I’ll take care of him.
Decostanza: He don’t want nothin’.
Miciotta: I’m glad to give him a couple o’ dollars.
Deconstanza: You don’t have to give him nothin’.
Moments later, in a reference to the flowers Wild Bill Cutolo had sent to Simone’s mother, Big Sal says:
Miciotta: Billy’s the guy who burned him out, he sent him flowers. . . . In other words, he reached out for the guy; the guy didn’t respond.
It was an acknowledgment by Miciotta that Joe wasn’t a man who could be bought. Then, for unknown reasons, just before Simone arrived, Miciotta shut off the tape recorder.
During the meeting, according to Simone, Miciotta confessed that his son was “on the lam down in Florida.” The younger Miciotta was wanted by the NYPD’s Sixth Precinct for attacking a young aspiring priest, but it was his father who had broken the seminarian’s arm.
