Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  In Bulger’s case the contacting agent was John Connolly, a twenty-two-year Bureau veteran. But the outcome of that Boston case was decidedly different from what transpired with Lin DeVecchio. In 2008, Connolly was convicted of second-degree murder for passing intelligence to Bulger and his associate Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi. The leaks had led to the 1982 murder in Miami of a potential witness against Bulger and Flemmi.39

  The forty-year sentence Connolly received was the final blow to the once-celebrated agent, who had been sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2002 after being convicted on racketeering counts connected to his handling of Bulger. Released on June 28, 2011, Connolly was transferred to a Massachusetts state prison to serve out the remainder of his sentence.40

  During the Miami trial the parallels to the Scarpa-DeVecchio case became clear. First, a federal judge, who had been a prosecutor at the time Connolly ran Bulger, testified that Connolly had been a star agent whose work had served to “decimate” the Mafia in New England.41 “John Connolly . . . had a certain flair that attracted a confidence and trust with underworld figures,” said Judge Edward F. Harrington, the former Boston U.S. attorney from 1977 to 1981, who was the defense’s first witness at the trial.42

  Former FBI SSA John Connolly

  (Associated Press)

  Like Lin DeVecchio, Connolly had been a highly decorated Bureau comer. He’d received commendations from every FBI director from J. Edgar Hoover to William Sessions. He’d lectured on informant development at Quantico and was even nominated to become Boston’s police commissioner.43 But at his 2008 murder trial, prosecutors charged that John B. Callahan, a World Jai-Alai executive, was murdered on orders from Bulger and Flemmi after Connolly had told them the FBI was investigating Callahan’s ties to the Winter Hill Gang.

  John Martorano was later identified as the hit man who shot Callahan and left his bullet-riddled body in the trunk of a car at Miami International Airport.44 Martorano became a cooperating witness and testified for the government along with Connolly’s former FBI supervisor John Morris, who had previously admitted that he had accepted $7,000 in bribes from Bulger and Flemmi.

  Federal prosecutors told jurors that Connolly knew he was “signing the death warrant” for Callahan when he passed the sensitive FBI information to Bulger and Flemmi.45

  FBI surveillance photo of Flemmi (left) and Bulger (right)

  Congressman Delahunt had actually gone to grammar school with Martorano, and one night in 1976 he ran into him at a restaurant as the killer met with Bulger and Flemmi, who were about to shake down the restaurant owner for $175,000. After opening an investigation into that possible extortion, in his capacity as Norfolk County DA, Delahunt turned the case over to the FBI. But the Winter Hill pair went unpunished.46 Delahunt didn’t fully understand why until the Connolly-Bulger scandal became public.

  In 2004, after his election to Congress and appointment to the House Judiciary Committee, Delahunt started investigating the issue of FBI agents who might have become compromised in relations with their informants.47 On February 7, 2005, Delahunt’s staff sent a prosecution referral to the office of Charles J. Hynes, the district attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn), whose office had been blindsided by the Feds during the third Colombo war. According to Hynes, that initial referral raised questions about Lin DeVecchio’s interaction with Greg Scarpa Sr. around the time of the Nicholas Grancio homicide in January 1992.48

  Meeting at the Brooklyn DA’s Office

  In 2004, I had told much of the Scarpa-DeVecchio story in my book Cover Up.49 A year after its publication and after the Delahunt referral, I met with Kings County Assistant DA Noel Downey, Bureau Chief in the Rackets Division, and George Terra, the investigator who had arrested Carmine Imbriale in 1992.

  Both of them expressed an interest in my findings on Greg Scarpa Sr. It was Terra’s arrest of Imbriale that had prompted Lin DeVecchio in the C-10 squad to contact Scarpa and warn him—using the “Hello” line, according to Chris Favo.50

  As I sat in the DA’s conference room across a table from Terra and Downey, they told me that they’d already started looking into the allegations that DeVecchio may have facilitated Scarpa’s murder spree.

  After the meeting, I returned to California and went back to work on Triple Cross, which focused on al-Qaeda master spy Ali Mohamed. Then, early on the morning of January 4, 2006, I was awakened by a call from Bo Dietl, the well-known former NYPD detective, who had read both 1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up.

  “Peter, you better get up,” he said. “WNBC just broke the story that the Brooklyn DA has a grand jury examining DeVecchio.”

  I went to my computer and accessed the story, first reported by Jonathan Dienst:

  “The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office has opened a criminal investigation into a former FBI agent who may have leaked information to the mob,” the piece began. Citing the Mafia Cops scandal, but describing the DeVecchio matter as “unrelated” to that case, the WNBC piece ended by quoting several unnamed “former federal officials” who “expressed doubts that the investigation would go anywhere.”51

  But three months later, with Noel Downey at his side, DA Hynes announced the indictment of DeVecchio on four counts of murder conspiracy in the deaths of Mary Bari, Joseph “Joe Brewster” DeDomenico, Larry Lampasi, and Patrick Porco. Also charged were Craig Sobel and John Sinagra, described as “Colombo triggermen.”52

  Porco was an eighteen-year-old friend of Joey Scarpa’s who was shot to death over Memorial Day weekend in 1990. Seven months earlier on Halloween night he’d witnessed the murder of seventeen-year-old Dominick Masseria, who was killed on the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Brooklyn after an altercation with Joey, who was Greg Sr.’s son by Linda Schiro.53 The alleged shooter in that killing was Craig Sobel.

  According to a statement from the DA on the day the indictment was announced, “in May of 1990 Porco was questioned by detectives at the 62nd Precinct about Masseria’s murder. DeVecchio contacted Greg Scarpa to tell him that Porco, 18, had been speaking to authorities about Joseph Scarpa’s involvement in the Masseria shooting. Sinagra is charged with carrying out a Scarpa-ordered hit on Porco, to prevent him from speaking about Masseria.”54

  After attributing the origin of the investigation to the referral from Congressman Delahunt, Hynes described the underlying charges against Lin DeVecchio as “the most stunning example of official corruption that I have ever seen.”

  One Million Dollars’ Bail

  Ten years earlier, the thirty-two-month OPR investigation into DeVecchio’s activities had ended with no charges filed. He’d retired to Sarasota, Florida, where he’d led a quiet life, working as a private investigator and serving on the board of his homeowners’ association.55 Now, at the age of sixty-five, DeVecchio was facing four counts of homicide, each one carrying a possible sentence of twenty-five years to life. During the press conference, Hynes had even accused DeVecchio of receiving $66,000 in “payoffs” from Scarpa.56

  Lin DeVecchio (left) surrendering on the night before his arraignment and (right, in the background) surrounded by former FBI agents following his release on $1 million bail the next day

  (Photos, from left to right: Associated Press; Robert Stolark/The New York Times/Redux)

  Allowed to fly up to New York to surrender the night before—thus avoiding one “perp walk” before the press—DeVecchio nonetheless spent the night handcuffed to a metal chair and locked in a room adjacent to the DA’s detective squad.57

  The next day he was arraigned and released on $1 million bail. But even though he walked out of the courthouse a free man, he couldn’t avoid the de facto “perp walk” that followed, with a pack of reporters and camera crews chasing him. As he moved down Jay Street outside the courthouse, DeVecchio was surrounded by a phalanx of nearly fifty retired FBI agents—five of whom had come up with the $1 million bail money.58 Dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and red-and-blue ties, they pushed the media mob back as they p
rotected the onetime star agent, who now faced a fate similar to John Connolly’s.

  The sight of a cadre of former FBI agents swatting aside reporters on a public street created such a stir that Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) mentioned it during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on May 2. “After the [arraignment],” Grassley said, “the agents surrounded DeVecchio ‘in a human blanket’ as he left the courtroom so that he could not be questioned by reporters. One agent wrote, ‘[I]t might even be said that a few reporters received a few body checks out on the sidewalk’ and that he ‘was never prouder to be an FBI agent.’”59

  Noting that DeVecchio was innocent until proven guilty, Grassley nonetheless told the Judiciary Committee members that he was “concerned about the public perception created by such aggressive and broad support of DeVecchio by current and former FBI personnel.”

  “It could leave the impression,” he said, “that the FBI as an institution is circling the wagons to defend itself as well as DeVecchio against the charges.”60

  In an earlier “Gang Land” column, filed after word of the grand jury investigation surfaced, Jerry Capeci predicted that the DeVecchio murder case would have “stunning implications for both law enforcement and some convicted gangsters.”61 And within hours of DeVecchio’s arraignment the indictment of “Mr. Organized Crime” created a tabloid sensation.

  “Mob Fed’s Filthy Lucre—FBI Agent Cashed in As Mafia Slay Mole: DA.” That was the page-one headline in the New York Post over the story by veteran crime reporter Murray Weiss, who wrote that Lin’s alleged motives were “greed and adulation from his bosses.”62 Quoting unnamed sources, the New York Daily News reported that “DeVecchio could face charges in as many as three other gangland murders, two of them on Long Island,”63 a reference to the Minerva-Imbergamo killings.

  The Friends of Lin

  But a series of former Feds, many of whom would have much to lose if DeVecchio was convicted, rallied to his side. In a move virtually unprecedented in the face of pending charges, James Kallstrom, the retired assistant director in charge of the New York Office, issued a statement on the case to the Daily News.

  Then working as a senior counterterrorism adviser to New York Governor George Pataki, Kallstrom actually declared DeVecchio innocent. “Lin DeVecchio is not guilty and did not partake in what he’s charged with,” Kallstrom told the paper. “It’s as simple as that.”64

  Kallstrom also agreed to serve on the advisory board of the Friends of Lin DeVecchio Trust, a website and fund-raising arm for the ex-agent’s defense.65 Another board member was former FBI undercover agent Joseph Pistone, a.k.a. “Donnie Brasco,” who later offered to testify at the trial of John Connolly.

  A Boston Globe story during that trial described Pistone as Connolly’s “longtime friend.”66 Now, with respect to Lin DeVecchio, Pistone told reporter Alan Feuer of the New York Times, “We’ve all worked with Lin since the early 1970s. We’re all veteran street guys. If anyone could smell something bad, it would be us. And with Lin, we never smelled bad.”67

  Another staunch defender of DeVecchio, and Friends of Lin advisory board member, was James M. Kossler, the former chief coordinator of organized crime squads in the New York Office, to whom Lin had once reported.68

  In his book, DeVecchio quotes Kossler as declaring, “This prosecution of Lin DeVecchio is the most outrageous abuse of prosecutorial authority that I have seen in my career.”69 Kossler, whom Lin describes as “the master strategist of our championship season,” was a key player in the Mafia Commission case; he too stood to lose if DeVecchio’s conviction led to new appeals from any imprisoned survivors of that landmark case.

  As an early measure of his disdain for Special Agent Chris Favo, who brought the initial allegations against DeVecchio, Kossler was quoted by Fred Dannen in his 1996 New Yorker piece this way: “The trouble with Chris Favo is that Chris Favo has a very high opinion of himself. He works sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, and you lose all objectivity when that happens. You see things you can’t relate to or understand. This whole thing was a travesty, and Lin’s reputation has been destroyed. Why wasn’t Favo stopped? If I’d been there, I would have cut his nuts off.”70

  One of the principals of the Friends of Lin, who later penned a series of updates on DeVecchio’s trial, was Chris Mattiace, who ran the Colombo Squad before Lin took it over. Mattiace was the former SSA who downplayed Greg Scarpa’s multimillion-dollar-a-year Staten Island drug operation by declaring in DeVecchio’s book that “Greg Scarpa himself was not big enough for our interests at the time, much less his son and the Dead End Kids.”71

  Within months of the indictment, the Friends of Lin DeVecchio had raised $80,000 for Lin’s defense.72 But in a precursor of what was to come, less than two weeks after DeVecchio’s arraignment, his attorney Douglas Grover, himself a former federal prosecutor, filed pleadings seeking to transfer the case to federal court, arguing that the former supervisory special agent was “immune from prosecution.”73

  “It’s important to get some perspective,” says defense attorney Ellen Resnick, “on just how devastating DeVecchio’s conviction could have been, not just to the Colombo war cases, but to the Mafia Commission case on which Rudy Giuliani had based his political career.”74

  Lin DeVecchio had been the contacting agent for Greg Scarpa Sr., the informant who had provided most of the probable cause for the Title III wiretap warrants in that case.75 Now, a battery of current and former Feds were lining up to make sure their man Lin didn’t go down without a fight.

  Chapter 40

  THE COVER UP VIRUS

  The year 2007 started out badly for DeVecchio’s defense. Judge Frederic Block denied DeVecchio’s motion to remove his murder case from Brooklyn to the friendlier turf of federal court. Douglas Grover had made two arguments for the removal: first, that everything Lin had done with respect to “34” had been under “the express authority” conferred on him “by virtue of his position as Supervisory Special agent of the FBI investigative organized crime squads,” and, second, that the “evidentiary basis for this prosecution” included his OPR-compelled statement and his testimony in the 1997 Orena hearing, for which he was granted immunity.1 Neither of those immunized statements contained substantive details on any of the four murders in the DA’s indictment.2 Grover nonetheless argued that DeVecchio was effectively insulated from prosecution.

  But Judge Block rejected the “express authority” argument, noting that Lin was “simply being charged with outright murders that have nothing to do with his federal duties.” He cited the landmark 1932 Supreme Court case Colorado v. Symes,3 which held that, “while homicide that is excusable or justifiable may be committed by an officer in the proper discharge of his duty, murder or other criminal killings may not.”4 So the case went back to state court.

  It was the Brooklyn DA’s case to lose—and, over the next ten months, the office took a series of actions that virtually guaranteed that the case would be dismissed.

  The first hint of trouble actually came in an unrelated case on March 16, 2006, two weeks before the DeVecchio indictment was announced. That was the day New York Times reporter Michael Brick filed a story suggesting that Michael Vecchione, Charles Hynes’s lead prosecutor for Lin’s trial, may have suppressed evidence in the case of Jabber Collins, a former drug addict turned jailhouse lawyer who was serving a thirty-three-year term for the murder of a rabbi—a case Vecchione had prosecuted in 1995.5

  In 2001, Newsday had reported that Vecchione had traveled to Puerto Rico, ostensibly to subpoena a witness in Collins’s case, and had taken with him Stacey Frascogna, a DA’s assistant, with whom Vecchione later had an affair.6

  A red-faced Hynes was subsequently forced to drop the murder charges against Collins, who had already served fifteen years. The dismissal came just one day before potentially embarrassing testimony by Vecchione and Frascogna about alleged misconduct in the case.7

  The next sign of trouble in the DeVecchio prosecution came
in early February 2007, when the New York Post reported that Greg Scarpa Jr., who had spent months cooling his heels in the Metropolitan Correctional Center after Hynes’s office transferred him from the Supermax, might not be called to testify against Lin.8 In an interview with me later that year, former NYPD detective Tommy Dades, who had worked with Vecchione to develop the Mafia Cops case, said that “Greg Jr. was getting impatient” with the assistant DAs in Hynes’s office, who would leave him alone for “a month at a time” in the federal jail without a visit.9 Dades said the problem began when Noel Downey, who had been the lead prosecutor on People v. Lin DeVecchio, left the office to take a job in private practice—another setback for the DA’s team.10

  “When Noel was there,” Dades told me, “we would take Greg out once a week from the MCC. Let him breathe, visit with relatives at the DA’s office. . . . For years, this guy has been living in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell. He was one of our primary witnesses and we needed him to be happy. But when Noel left and [Assistant DAs] Kevin [Williamson] and Monique [Ferrell] took over the case, they’d leave him there for weeks on end.”11

  Dades, who had been chief investigator on the DeVecchio case, had his own problems. On March 15, the New York Post reported that the ex-detective was facing manslaughter charges after an altercation outside his house on December 19, 2006, that left one man dead.12 In defense of Dades, Vecchione reportedly appeared before a Staten Island grand jury looking into the scuffle, in which one James Coletta, who had tried to intervene, fell to the ground with cracked ribs and later died of internal injuries.13 Dades was later cleared of the manslaughter charges,14 but in mid-May 2007 he abruptly resigned from the DA’s staff.15