by Peter Lance
The Alleged Affair with a Mob Witness
Meanwhile, Hynes’s office was plagued by other staff problems related to the DeVecchio prosecution. A month earlier, Maria Biagini, a fifteen-year veteran of the office who had been assigned to John Napoli—the witness the DA had moved to a jail cell at Fort Dix, New Jersey, to help buttress Greg Jr.’s testimony—was forced to resign amid allegations that she had fallen in love with the former Gambino associate and actually concocted a scheme to bear his child.16
Napoli was important to the DA’s case because he had vouched for Greg Jr.’s credibility in his 1996–1997 sting of Ramzi Yousef. But Larry Celona of the New York Post, who broke the story, reported that “in one letter [Biagini] suggested a bizarre scheme to get [the witness] released to a fertility doctor, who would collect sperm that could be used to impregnate her.”17 According to Celona, Biagini “allegedly loosened her prisoner’s strings and allowed him to contact his family and take money from relatives. He used the cash to throw dinner parties, attended by his family and the investigator—all in violation of DA policies, the sources said.”
A day later, the New York Sun reported that “the FBI [was] now leading an investigation into [Biagini’s] actions, which could result in criminal charges.”18
The next setback for the Brooklyn DA came in mid-March, when Judge Gustin Reichbach, who was presiding over the DeVecchio case,19 ordered the prosecution team to submit sworn statements that they had not read either DeVecchio’s May 1995 compelled statement or his February 1997 testimony in the Vic Orena hearing, when he’d answered, “I don’t recall,” in response to Gerry Shargel’s questions.20
Judge Gustin Reichbach
(Getty)
In both instances, Lin had been granted immunity, and in canvassing the DAs this way, Reichbach was acquiescing to the defense’s invocation of Kastigar v. U.S., another landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.21 The Kastigar holding established that if a criminal defendant has previously been granted immunity, a prosecutor has to build a “firewall” between the defendant’s prior testimony and any new investigation of criminal charges leading to an indictment. The ruling later became known colloquially as the “Oliver North defense” after it was used by Lieutenant Colonel North during the Iran-Contra scandal.22
North, whose attorney had arranged immunity for him during the nationally televised Iran-Contra hearings, was thus protected from conviction in the case built by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, whose memoir of that 1980s scandal was called Firewall.23
Now, Hynes’s chief prosecutors on the case, Monique Ferrell and Kevin Richardson, had to affirm under oath that they had read neither DeVecchio’s compelled statement nor his 1997 testimony as they prepared the prosecution’s case.24
Problems with Sinagra and Sobel
But before the DA’s office even got to a Kastigar hearing in August, Kings County prosecutors experienced two massive setbacks in the parallel cases relating to the Patrick Porco homicide. John Sinagra, a.k.a. “Johnny Loads,” accused in the Porco slaying, had pled not guilty on the day of DeVecchio’s arraignment.25 He was scheduled to go to trial before Lin, in June 2007.
But in early May, a twelve-year-old file came to light that threatened the case. Under New York law, which forces prosecutors to act with “due diligence” in filing murder charges, Sinagra’s lawyer argued that an informant had come forward years earlier who had named Sinagra as a suspect, and the DA hadn’t acted on that information quickly enough.26
In response to that allegation, former NYPD detective Tommy Dades had to file a sworn affidavit. Back in 1995, Dades had investigated the murder of Joey Scarpa, Greg Sr.’s son by Linda Schiro, who was killed by rival drug dealers. In the affidavit, Dades stated that while debriefing John Novoa, an associate of the younger Scarpa, Novoa had effectively fingered Joey for the Porco hit.
“Novoa did not mention defendant Sinagra to me,” Dades testified under oath.27 It was not until he was investigating the DeVecchio case in 1995, Dades stated, that he learned of Sinagra’s possible link to Porco’s death.
But on April 20, 2007, at a Sinagra pretrial hearing, the DA’s office suddenly came forward with a document they said had been “discovered” the night before. It indicated that an informant did, in fact, name Sinagra as a suspect during a debriefing in 1995.28 The question was, why hadn’t Hynes’s office come forward with it earlier?
At another hearing in mid-May, an angry Judge Reichbach said that he was “incredulous” and “flabbergasted” that the Kings County DA’s office “could have information on a mob-related shooting and it just disappears into the ether.”29
The very next day, under the headline “DeVecchio Cop ‘Tryst’ Bombshell,” Sinagra’s lawyer Joseph Giametta charged that investigator Dades, already under fire on the due diligence issue, “had a relationship with Little Linda Schiro in the summer of 2005.” Judge Reichbach quickly sustained a DA’s objection to that allegation, and the New York Post reported that Little Linda denied the charge. In fact, she insisted that she would take the witness stand to say so under oath.30 But at that point, with the multiple staff and evidence problems that had surfaced since the first of the year, Charles Hynes’s office seemed to be back on its heels.
By late May, a flurry of finger-pointing had begun. Assistant DA Kevin Richardson blamed the misplaced document in the Sinagra case on the NYPD, alleging that the Porco murder investigation had been closed by the police department back in 1995 “for statistical purposes”31—in other words, to get an unsolved homicide off the books. Judge Reichbach called the closure “not only inexplicable but inexcusable.”32
On June 3, the lawyer for Craig Sobel, who had been charged in the Dominick Masseria slaying, pursued the Sinagra defense, arguing that the police had information linking Sobel to the church-steps hit ten years earlier but had failed to act.33
A few days later, the DA sheepishly offered to let Sinagra cop a plea to a reduced prison sentence of two to six years—but the defendant passed, feeling confident of his chances at a dismissal.34 Finally, on June 12, Judge Reichbach declared that “negligence [was] not good cause” for the delay in charging Sinagra and threw out the cold-case murder charges, freeing him after fifteen months behind bars.35 Underscoring the setback for Hynes’s office, already plagued by serious personnel issues, the headline in the New York Post said it all: “Slay Rap KO’d in ‘Mob Fed’ Shocker. Judge Blasts ‘Too Late’ Cops and Brooklyn DA.”
It would take another full year, but on June 13, 2008, Craig Sobel was finally found not guilty in the shooting of Dominick Masseria. Calling it “the last of the DeVecchio debacle,” Sobel’s lawyer Bruce Barket commented on all three of the cases in the Brooklyn DA’s March 2006 indictment: “They were all flawed and this one was the weakest,” he said.36
By June 2007, with Hynes’s office on the ropes, Greg Scarpa Jr. was shaping up as the DA’s best hope to bolster the testimony of central witness Linda Schiro in the upcoming main event: Lin DeVecchio’s prosecution, which was now set for early fall. In a “Gang Land” column published in the New York Sun, Jerry Capeci reported that “prosecutors plan to use . . . Scarpa Jr., to back up their key prosecution witness . . . Linda Schiro—regarding two mob rubouts the son was involved in before he was incarcerated in 1988.”
Predicting that Greg Jr. would come clean on his alleged involvement in the murders of Mary Bari and Joe Brewster, Capeci wrote that “prosecutors have decided that [Junior’s] intimate knowledge of his father’s dealings with Mr. DeVecchio far outweighs the heavy baggage that he will carry with him to the witness stand.”37
The Feds Move a Terrorist
As if the Kings County DA’s office wasn’t facing enough problems, the judicial scales seemed to tip even further against it when the U.S. Department of Justice made two moves that seemed to benefit DeVecchio’s defense.
In March 2007, I discovered that Abdul Hakim Murad, sentenced to life for the 1995 Bojinka plot to smuggle bombs onto U.S. airliners,
was moved by the Bureau of Prisons (a division of Justice) to a jail cell in Lower Manhattan next to Greg Scarpa Jr., who was awaiting his chance to testify against DeVecchio. Family members and lawyers close to the case feared that the move may have endangered Junior, since he’d helped the FBI get so much evidence on Murad and Ramzi Yousef in his mid-1990s sting.
Convicted al-Qaeda terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad
At the Brooklyn DA’s request, Greg Jr. was flown to the MCC on December 6, 2006. Then, four months later, for unexplained reasons, the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator showed Murad also in residence there.38 What would be the possible motive for the Federal government to move a convicted terrorist like Abdul Hakim Murad out of the security of the Supermax and put him in close proximity to Greg Scarpa Jr., the very informant who had “ratted” him out in 1996 during the Yousef sting? Could it be to intimidate Scarpa Jr. prior to his testimony at the DeVecchio trial? Since the trial was cut short before Greg Jr. could get on the stand, we may never know.
But around the time I made the discovery about Murad’s trip to the MCC, I uncovered an even more surprising fact suggesting that forces within the Department of Justice were working against the DA’s prosecution.
The Feds Pay Part of DeVecchio’s Defense
On March 5, 2007, I intercepted a fund-raising e-mail from Chris Mattiace, who had run the C-10 Colombo Squad and who was now working as a principal behind the Friends of Lin DeVecchio Trust. Mattiace had sent the e-mail soliciting contributions for Lin’s legal defense to the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI. In it, he called the DA’s case “an unfounded and . . . politically motivated prosecution.”
“Any one of us could be in the same position Lin faces now,” wrote Mattiace. “There but for the grace of God go any one of us.”39
“The subtext of that message seemed to be, ‘If Lin goes down, more of us might go down,’” said retired agent James Whalen, who worked in the New York Office.40 In the e-mail* Mattiace revealed that at that point, roughly a year after Lin’s indictment, $80,000 had been raised for his defense but that legal fees had “already exceeded $450,000 with the trial still looming.”
Then Mattiace made a surprising admission: “The Justice Department has already paid and agreed to continue to pay a portion of the fees and costs, but that is nowhere near enough to pay the total cost of defense.” Considering that with respect to the four homicide charges, Judge Block had effectively ruled that Lin was not acting in the course and furtherance of his duties, getting the U.S. taxpayer to foot the bill for any part of his defense seemed unusual, if not illegal.
I forwarded copies of the e-mail to the New York Times and both of the major New York tabloids: the New York Post and the Daily News. Bill Sherman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the News, was the only one to pick up on my discovery.41
In a May 6, 2007, piece he quoted then FBI spokesman John Miller, who confirmed that the Justice Department was paying some of the legal fees for DeVecchio’s defense.42 Meanwhile, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) began an investigation for the Senate Judiciary Committee. When asked about the payments by the committee, the Justice Department cited two sections of the Code of Federal Regulations43 that provide for the payment of legal fees for accused government employees whose actions on the job fall within the “scope” of their employment.44
But in approving such fees the U.S. attorney general must determine that the legal representation paid for is “in the interest of the United States.” At that time in 2007 the Bush administration AG was Alberto Gonzales, who later resigned under fire after a tenure marred by allegations he committed perjury,45 mishandled top-secret documents,46 violated the Patriot Act in approving a series of national security letters,47 and fired eight U.S. attorneys for political reasons.48
When pressed by Senator Grassley, who submitted a series of questions relating to the DeVecchio case to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Brian A. Benczkowski, the principal deputy assistant attorney general, responded in a letter to committee chairman Patrick Leahy by stating that “the FBI submitted to DOJ a statement containing its findings as to whether DeVecchio was acting within the scope of his employment and whether such representation would be in the best interests of the United States.” Then, without elaborating on the details of that finding or describing AG Gonzales’s motivation in approving the legal fee payment, Benczkowski asserted the attorney-client and attorney–work product privileges.49
“So we have a conflict,” says Flora Edwards, “between the finding of a federal judge, Frederic Block, who declares that Lin was not acting within the scope of his duties with regard to the four murders in the indictment, and the FBI, which seems to suggest that he was, and the U.S. attorney general finds, based on that conclusion, that it’s in the interests of the country to help pay his legal bills. However, we can’t know the details of the payment or the Bureau’s reasoning because Justice claims that’s protected under attorney-client privilege. But one has to ask, who’s the client? Lin isn’t a government employee in 2006. He’s being represented by private counsel. So how does the privilege attach?”50
The Mafia Cops Conflict
On the same day that Lin DeVecchio pleaded not guilty to the murder conspiracy charges in Brooklyn Supreme Court, an important conference call relating to the Mafia Cops case took place a few blocks away in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District. The sensational trial of ex-detectives Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa had begun March 13 amid banner headlines.51
An AP story reporting on the start of the trial noted that the two men were “charged with racketeering, conspiracy and other charges for allegedly going on the payroll of Lucchese family underboss Anthony ‘Gaspipe’ Casso.” But the man who should have been the star witness for the Feds—Casso himself—was denied an opportunity to testify for the government. So now, at one fifteen P.M., just before Lin DeVecchio walked into Brooklyn Supreme Court for his arraignment, a conference call began between Casso, who was serving multiple life terms at the Supermax prison in Colorado, and lawyers for Eppolito and Caracappa, who were also present.52
Arrest photos of Lou Eppolito (left) and Stephen Caracappa (right)
The call had been prompted in part by a letter that Casso had sent to U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf in July 2005, three months after the ex-detectives had been arrested in Las Vegas. In that letter Casso wrote that “from day one and for 3½ years to follow, my FBI handlers have, at times, ordered me to be misleading.” He was talking about the source of his law enforcement “crystal ball,” which the Feds had attributed exclusively to the Mafia Cops.
Now, in that conference call, which Casso hoped would prompt the Eppolito-Caracappa defense to call him as a witness, he reiterated what he told FBI agents Rudolph and Brennan at La Tuna in 1994: that “most of the information” he got from law enforcement sources “came from an FBI agent.” Without identifying Rudolph by name, he also stated what he’d told author Phil Carlo and later told me: that during his La Tuna debriefing, “the case agent,” who was debriefing him, blew “his top” and told him not to mention the FBI agent’s name.53
After that conference call, the defense decided not to put Casso on the witness stand, so the jury in the Mafia Cops case never heard a thing about any “crooked” FBI agent or agents who may have supplied intel to Gaspipe. A week later Eppolito and Caracappa were convicted.54
Earlier that year, when WNBC broke the story of the grand jury probe of Lin DeVecchio, reporter Jonathan Dienst insisted it was “unrelated” to the Mafia Cops case.55 But in the media storm that engulfed Eppolito and Caracappa, it soon became clear that there was a connection and it now threatened to impact the DeVecchio prosecution.
In New York, as in few other places, real-life events are sometimes impacted by the very books and movies that chronicle them, and the Mafia Cops case was no exception. As noted, the investigation into the two detectives had originated in the office of the Brooklyn DA. In fact, a year before DA Hynes c
alled the DeVecchio case “the most stunning example of official corruption that [he had] ever seen,”56 he stood at a press conference next to U.S. Attorney Mauskopf and described that case in almost identical terms. It was “one of the most shocking examples of criminal activity [he’d] ever witnessed,” said Hynes.57
But the single news story that brought the most attention to the Mafia Cops case was the 60 Minutes piece by the late Ed Bradley in which Casso described how he’d used the cops to “moonlight” as “hit men.”58 Following the broadcast of that piece in April 2005, the story exploded, spawning no less than three movie deals59 and four books.60 The CBS News story featured Dades, who Bradley told viewers “came out of retirement . . . and went to work in the office of the Brooklyn district attorney, digging through old Mafia case files.”
After that exposure on 60 Minutes, Dades was “inundated with offers and pitches to handle his rights,” according to the show business daily Variety.61 He reportedly signed with the William Morris Agency and made a deal with a producer at Warner Bros. estimated to be worth between $75,000 and $600,000.62
Dades then entered into a separate contract with HarperCollins to write a book with Mike Vecchione and ghost writer David Fisher on the development of the “Cops.” That collaboration, ultimately titled Friends of the Family, didn’t get published until 2009.63 But the book and Dades’s separate movie deal prompted DeVecchio’s supporters to attack the Brooklyn DA’s “motive(s)” in developing Lin’s case.
