by Peter Lance
The initiative began a month before James Kallstrom sent the memo to Louis Freeh urging that the DOJ reach a conclusion in DeVecchio’s OPR. Kallstrom later sought to explain the memo, denying that he had been pushing for an early termination of the DeVecchio investigation.
“What I was saying,” Kallstrom told an interviewer, “was ‘Look, the investigation has been going on for years. Let’s get it looked at.’ It had nothing to do with a whitewash of the investigation.”21 But a new document, uncovered in this investigation, raises questions about Kallstrom’s insistence that the FBI wasn’t trying to contain the damage to the war cases that would arise from the Scarpa-DeVecchio scandal. On the very same day the memo went out to Louis Freeh, another communiqué was sent to the FBI director that showed up in DeVecchio’s OPR file.
Although the memo is heavily redacted, it’s clear that Kallstrom (the ADIC) was worried that what he called “the DelVecchio [sic]/Scarpa Sr. relationship” might have a negative impact on the prosecution of Greg Jr. and other adjudicated war cases, such as Vic Orena Sr.’s. Further, in his concern that the continued OPR investigation was “unfair to SSA DelVecchio [sic],” Kallstrom appears to demonstrate a bias in favor of Lin. For the first time, this memo documents that the New York Office of the FBI had been “pressing for a resolution” of the DeVecchio OPR “for over a year.”22
(Peter Lance)
The memo, to Director Louis Freeh, was dated just weeks after Junior started the Yousef sting. So now, while one arm of the Justice Department—the Eastern District in Brooklyn, led by Valerie Caproni—was working to convict Greg Jr. on additional charges, the Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit in the Southern District (Manhattan) was using him as an informant to gather intelligence on a world-class terrorist.
It was in that context that Greg Scarpa Jr., like his father before him, became a mole for the FBI.
“How to Blow Up Airplanes”
By mid-May 1996, Ramzi Yousef started passing notes threatening to have his “people” put a bomb on a plane to get “a mistrial.”* One kite was entitled “How to Smuggle Explosives into an Airplane.”23 The Bureau considered Yousef’s threats so alarming that FBI agents met with Larry Silverman and his client at least once a week to debrief Scarpa Sr. Their interviews were memorialized in a series of FBI 302 memos.
In April 2004, while writing Cover Up, my second book on al-Qaeda terrorism prior to 9/11, I received dozens of these 302s and many of Yousef’s kites from Angela Clemente, the forensic investigator whose Freedom of Information lawsuit led to the release of the Greg Scarpa Sr. files. Angela had been looking into Scarpa Jr.’s case pro bono in the winter of 2004 when he passed the documents to her during a visit to ADX Florence, the Supermax prison in Colorado, where he was incarcerated.
When I reviewed the documents—which included details of Yousef’s various Manila plots that had not yet surfaced in the mainstream press by the spring of 1996—it was clear to me that Greg Jr. had opened up a significant pipeline to al-Qaeda’s most deadly bomb maker. Consider the following excerpts from a 302 dated March 5, 1996:
YOUSEF told SCARPA I’ll teach you how to blow up airplanes and how to make bombs and then you can get the information to your people (meaning Scarpa’s people on the outside). YOUSEF told SCARPA I can show you how to get a bomb on an airplane through a metal detector. YOUSEF told SCARPA he would teach him how to make timing devices. . . . YOUSEF told SCARPA that during the trial they had a plan to blow up a plane and hurt a judge or an attorney so a mistrial will be declared.24
In that same 302, FBI agents uncovered evidence of an al-Qaeda cell loyal to Yousef that was then active in New York City.
According to SCARPA, YOUSEF has indicated that he has four people here. SCARPA described these four terrorists already here in the United States. SCARPA advised YOUSEF has not indicated who these four individuals are or if he is in contact with these four people or how he contacts them. SCARPA does not know if YOUSEF receives or sends any messages from contacts overseas.
That revelation about the “four terrorists” should have caused shock waves in the FBI’s New York Office, because after the 1995 conviction of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and nine other terrorists linked to the plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan—the so-called Day of Terror plot—the conventional wisdom was that the FBI had eliminated the Islamic terror threat to New York City.25
By late May 1996, Greg Jr. had also uncovered Yousef’s threats to kill federal judge Kevin Duffy, who was about to preside at the Bojinka trial, and Mike Garcia, the AUSA who would be co-prosecutor along with AUSA Dietrich Snell.26 The Feds took those threats so seriously that they got protection for both targets.
By April, the quality of the Yousef–to–Scarpa Jr. intel was so good that the FBI decided to take the initiative to a new level, setting up Roma Corp., a phony mob front company, allowing the government to monitor Yousef’s calls.
Ostensibly located in the historic Flatiron Building, Roma Corp. was an ingenious sting. “The idea was to create a fictitious company that was supposedly a Mafia-run organization,” says Silverman. “Yousef would make calls to that organization. They would then patch through his telephone calls to parties outside of the United States, and the FBI would be able to listen in to those calls, record them, and, of course, make use of the information.”27
Greg Jr. gave Yousef the Roma office number and conned him into believing that the operation was run by Mafiosi, when in fact FBI agents were manning the phones. Yousef was allowed to make calls to Roma Corp. from the pay phone on the ninth floor of the MCC. The Feds then forwarded the calls through to his “ people”28 in New York and abroad.29 Thanks to the FBI, Greg Jr. even supplied Yousef with a fax number at Roma. Here is a copy of the note Junior passed to Yousef announcing the setup of the patch-through. When the terrorist called the number, he was to identify himself as “Ronnie.”
(Peter Lance)
“It’s difficult to describe what a bonanza of intelligence this was for the Bureau,” says a former agent now retired from the NYO. “This was raw data, coming directly from bin Laden’s chief bomb maker, who we would later learn played a key role in designing the 9/11 plot.”30 The Roma Corp. patch-through would soon hand the New York–based FBI agents a second chance to nab Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Yousef’s uncle, as he hid out in Qatar.31
Once the Feds identified KSM’s presence there, the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team was dispatched to Doha, the capital, for the takedown, but were told to cool their heels in a hotel while the Qataris “put the handcuffs on” KSM. Then, a day later, when the agents finally went to a safe house where KSM had been hiding, he had already fled to the Czech Republic, using the alias Mustafa al Nasir.32
The “Scarpa Materials”
Despite the loss of KSM in Doha, as the Bojinka trial got under way in the Southern District of New York against Yousef and two of his co-conspirators, Greg Scarpa Jr. continued feeding Bureau agents a constant stream of intelligence. Among the many revelations contained in the FBI 302s was a plot disclosed by Yousef in which Osama bin Laden, whom he code-named “Bojinga,” would arrange the hijacking of a series of U.S. airliners in order to free the Blind Sheikh, Yousef, and his Manila cohorts.33
That intelligence alone was considered so important that it turned up in the infamous Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) delivered to George W. Bush in Crawford, Texas, five weeks before the 9/11 attacks.34
The trove of intel contained in the dozens of FBI 302 memos memorializing Scarpa Jr.’s initiative from March 1996 through February 1997 was virtually self-authenticating. For example, in May 1996, Greg Jr. obtained this schematic of Yousef’s Casio-nitro IED from the Philippine Airlines bombing plot and passed it to the FBI.
(Peter Lance)
The drawing contained a detail that only the bomb maker could have known about at that time: the C106D semiconductor that Yousef had soldered into each of his “bomb triggers.” During testimony in the Bojinka trial, the Feds would l
ater describe that as Yousef’s unique “signature.” But that information wasn’t disclosed by the Feds publicly until August 26, 1996, three months after Junior passed it to the FBI.35 Apart from Ramzi Yousef, there was simply no way that Greg Jr. could have come into possession of that singular intelligence.
(Peter Lance)
Any doubt as to the authenticity of the evidence can be dispelled by comparing the schematic to the photograph at left. It was taken from the FBI lab report on items seized in a search of Room 603 at the Doña Josefa apartments in Manila—Yousef’s bomb factory. The systems are virtually identical.36
Discrediting Scarpa Jr.
In his 1998 trial, Greg Scarpa Jr.’s defense would be that the RICO violations he was charged with were the result of crimes that had effectively been sanctioned by Lin DeVecchio.
“At some point, personnel in the EDNY came to understand the significance of Scarpa Junior’s testimony,” says defense attorney Flora Edwards, who later used Greg’s admissions about his father and DeVecchio in her efforts to secure a new trial for Vic Orena Sr. “Greg Junior had to be discredited. Because once he became credible about Ramzi Yousef, then he’d be credible about what he was going to say in my hearing too.”37
There’s no doubt that key officials tied to the prosecution of the war cases had direct knowledge of Greg Jr.’s intelligence initiative with Yousef. The 302 on the next page, from March 7, 1996, shows that Junior and his lawyer, Larry Silverman, discussed the sting with not only AUSAs Valerie Caproni and Ellen Corcella, and SA Howard Leadbetter II from the C-10 squad, but also Dietrich Snell, the Southern District AUSA who was about to prosecute Yousef in the Bojinka case with Mike Garcia.38
Also present was Senior AUSA Patrick Fitzgerald, who was co-head of the SDNY’s Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit and thus straddled both the OC and counterterrorism aspects of the Scarpa Jr.–Yousef initiative.
The reams of detailed intel Greg Scarpa Jr. extracted from the bomb maker over eleven months were not only genuine, they were unique to Yousef, and of such complexity that no Mafia wiseguy with Junior’s tenth-grade education could have fabricated them. On the other hand, Yousef had nothing to gain by leaking secrets if he knew that Greg Jr. was working with the Feds. The details he let slip—like the presence of his cell members in New York, the bin Laden plot to hijack planes, and the two death threats—could only have earned him additional criminal charges if the Feds had learned of them and decided to prosecute.
Then, on August 22, 1996, four months after his DeVecchio memo to Louis Freeh, James Kallstrom attended a high-level meeting in Washington with the FBI director. Another person in the room was Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who went on to become one of the ten 9/11 commissioners.39
(Peter Lance)
Shortly after that meeting, the Feds began to seek another way to explain the Yousef intel without lending credibility to Junior, a witness whose testimony could impact the fifty-nine remaining war prosecutions.
Since the evidence, now contained in dozens of FBI 302s, couldn’t be ignored, the Feds came up with a new story: that it wasn’t really evidence at all. Yousef and Scarpa had concocted it. That was the explanation given in a federal court ruling denying Ramzi Yousef’s appeal of the Bojinka case.
“In late 1996,” wrote the court, “the government learned from two sources that Scarpa was, in fact, colluding with Yousef and others to deceive it.”40
It didn’t seem to matter that those FBI 302s had documented death threats the terrorist made to Greg Jr. and his family, or that the wiseguy had risked his life for eleven months to “rat out” Yousef and his “people” in New York. The Feds were now taking the position that, together with Ramzi, Scarpa Jr. had made it all up.
Undermining the “Hoax and Scam” Story
The most detailed explanation of the fabrication story was contained in a June 25, 1999, sworn affirmation by then AUSA Patrick Fitzgerald. Though the affirmation remained under seal for many years, I was able to obtain a copy and published it in my previous book Triple Cross.* In the affirmation, Fitzgerald wrote that the government initially confirmed that some of Scarpa Jr.’s revelations “appeared to be accurate.”41
However, Fitzgerald continued, “By late summer 1996, the government made an investigative decision that it no longer wished to pursue the investigation of Yousef using the ‘patch through’ telephone.” Fitzgerald then went on to declare that he had “since learned information which convinced [him] that Scarpa’s effort at ‘cooperation’ was a scam in collusion with Yousef and others. . . . In the latter part of 1996, Scarpa . . . told the government that an inmate, John Napoli, had even better access to Yousef and his colleagues than Scarpa himself.”
Napoli, a former Gambino family associate who had been convicted of money laundering, arrived on the ninth floor of the MCC nearby Scarpa Jr. on December 17, 1996, more than nine months after Yousef started slipping kites through the cell wall to Junior. Now the Feds, through Patrick Fitzgerald, were claiming that Greg Jr. had confessed to Napoli that his work informing on Yousef was a fabrication.
That position was accepted by a series of judges. In denying a motion by Yousef’s codefendant Eyad Ismoil in the second World Trade Center bombing case, Judge Kevin Duffy used the words “hoax” and “scam” to describe the 302s, which the Feds called “the Scarpa materials.”
“It is now clear that Scarpa’s claims were actually a hoax concocted by Scarpa and the Defendants,”42 wrote Duffy, who concluded that “Scarpa’s allegations of Yousef’s threats were merely part of a ruse without any substance behind them.”
In a motion opposing a new trial for Yousef, the government insisted that “Napoli understood that Yousef was aware of and a willing participant in [Scarpa’s] fraud on the government.”43
But Larry Silverman, Greg Jr.’s lawyer at the time, argues that “it couldn’t possibly have been a hoax . . . because this information that [Junior] provided came forth in stages. And if at any point in any of the stages, the information that he was providing was inaccurate or a hoax, the government would have pulled the plug at that time. They would not have given him a camera to use in an institution, which is a highly unusual event. They would not have provided monies to put in Yousef’s account on Scarpa’s behalf to give him the credibility. They would not have allowed Scarpa to have Yousef make telephone calls through an FBI source. All of these things . . . occurred in sequence; they all didn’t occur on one day. To say that all those things were a hoax really does injustice to what information he provided.”44
Napoli’s Denial
Because the quality of the Yousef-Scarpa intelligence is a crucial issue in determining whether federal prosecutors discredited potentially probative evidence, I sought out John Napoli. In 2006, the former Gambino associate was serving a term at the Big Spring Federal Correctional Institution, a minimum-security prison located between El Paso and Dallas, Texas. On February 11, 2006, I arranged for Napoli to call me while I was in the office of his attorney, Gerald LaBush, in New York City. With Napoli’s permission, I recorded the conversation—and what he told me was startling.
Napoli said that while Scarpa Jr. had asked him to testify for him in his upcoming RICO case, and offered to cut him in on the Yousef intel in return—as a means of a currying favor with the Feds—the actual intelligence initiative itself was completely genuine.
As a measure of his credibility, Napoli even cited Yousef’s Toshiba laptop, which the Feds knew contained cryptic references to Osama bin Laden, whom Yousef had code-named “Bojinga” in his communiqués to Scarpa Jr.
My interview with Napoli, transcribed verbatim here, reads like dialogue from The Sopranos, complete with references to “Bojangles” (for “Bojinga”) and “Saddam” (for “Osama”). But the content of his account is extremely credible.
Lance: John, when they concluded at Greg’s trial that the material was a hoax and a scam, they claim that you and one other witness corroborated that.
Napoli:
What happened was this: When I got there [to the MCC], Scarpa approached me. We became kind of friends, and he started telling me what he was doing about cooperating with Yousef. And he had this great plan that I could testify for him, and in return that he would give me information to bring to the Southern District about Yousef. I said, “What information would that be?” And he said, “Well, they found a computer with Bojangles and they don’t know the name. I never gave it to the Feds.” And he told me who Bojangles was and it was Saddam bin Laden.
So I called [Assistant U.S. Attorney David] Kelly. I never said anything [to Kelly] about [Greg Jr.] giving false information. I never spoke to Ramzi. I never spoke to Ismoil. I never spoke to none of them. Zero. No conversations. Not one. And they [the Feds] said, after this is all done, that I came to them and I said that I was gonna go along with Scarpa’s plan. At no point did [Greg Jr.] have a deal with Yousef to give false information. Yousef had no clue what Greg was doin’.
As far as my personal[ly] being there, hearing it, seeing it—anything that Yousef gave Greg wasn’t a scam. It wasn’t a hoax. He [Greg Jr.] wasn’t trying to do anything with Ramzi against the government. He was legitimately trying to help them. He was giving them information.
Indeed, a timeline put together by Napoli’s attorney indicates that he met with AUSA David Kelly early in 1997, around the time Scarpa Jr. ended his intelligence initiative with Yousef. Kelly, who was then Fitzgerald’s partner as co-head of the Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit, went on to become the U.S. Attorney for the SDNY—the top federal prosecutor in New York City. In 2011, Fitzgerald became the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (Chicago) and later came to national attention as special prosecutor in the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation.45
