by Peter Lance
The Friends of Lin website went so far as to reproduce a July 2005 piece by Daily News reporter Hugh Son in which Vecchione was accused of having “talked to Hollywood agents about selling the story of [the] two former cops . . . before their trial has even begun.”64
The story quoted Hynes’s opponent in the upcoming election as calling such discussions “unconscionable.”
DA spokesman Jerry Schmetterer shot back that “Vecchione was asked to sign a deal and he said, ‘no.’”65 But that was back in 2005, before the Dades-Vecchione-Fisher book was sold. Then, a year later, John Marzulli filed a story in the Daily News headlined “Tell-All Risks Mob Cop Case: Assistant DA’s Book May Cut Trial Options.”66 In that piece, Hofstra University law professor Monroe Freedman cited the American Bar Association’s code of standards, which he said “forbids prosecutors from entering into any media deal before a case is completely done.” But since the Mafia Cops case had been removed to federal court, Hynes’s office saw no conflict.67
The problem was that, by July 2006, there was a chance that the Eppolito-Caracappa case might well return to the Brooklyn DA. On July 1, Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who had presided over the trial of the two ex-detectives, shocked the New York legal community by tossing out their convictions on the legal grounds that the five-year statute of limitations for RICO conspiracy charges had run out.68 The New York Times piece on that stunning reversal of fortune noted that Weinstein’s ruling “threatened to disrupt the careers—and the book deals—of some investigators in the case.”
Since there is no statute of limitations on murder, which is a state crime, at that moment, barring a reversal by a federal appeals court, there was the very real prospect that the Mafia Cops case would go back to Brooklyn Supreme Court, where the lead prosecutor was Michael Vecchione, and that raised the possibility that a conflict of interest might force Vecchione to either disgorge his book advance or resign.
The Oliver North Defense
Now, a year later, as he geared up for the biggest trial of his career, Vecchione was under pressure from multiple sides. Not only was he facing those conflict issues, he was also dogged by severe staff and evidence problems. To make matters worse, his opponents Douglas Grover and Mark Bederow were getting their legal fees underwritten—in part—by the U.S. government.
On the other hand, the prospect of a DeVecchio conviction would have dire consequences, not just for Lin himself, but for the FBI supervisors and DC brass who had supported him for years. It could also negatively impact the long succession of Mafia cases he’d helped to make. This may have been a murder prosecution in Brooklyn Supreme Court, but it had implications for the Justice Department that were farther-reaching than anything the John Connolly–Whitey Bulger scandal in Boston had produced. So as the trial approached, team DeVecchio decided to play some very hard ball.
Andy Kurins was a former Gambino Squad agent working with Thompson Hine, the law firm of Grover and Bederow that represented Lin DeVecchio. Two and a half months after Lin’s indictment was announced by the DA, Kurins sent me an e-mail that ended this way:
I hope that you have not been sucked into this vortex of lies and self serving agendas against Lin and have time to extricate yourself from a pit which will only get deeper and darker.69
In a videotaped interview following the press conference the day Lin DeVecchio was indicted, I asked Noel Downey, then the assistant DA heading the case, if my book Cover Up had been of any “value” in the DA’s investigation. This is how he responded:
Oh, absolutely, because stage one of any murder investigation is to figure out who’s who and what’s what and where things occurred, and your book certainly was a wonderful springboard to understand who the parties were and what direction the investigation should go.70
It was a statement that he’d be questioned on later, because Thompson Hine had decided to make my reporting on the Scarpa scandal one of the components of their motion for a pretrial dismissal. Their argument was that if the DA’s investigators had read Cover Up, which contained a few references to DeVecchio’s compelled statement and the 1997 Orena hearing, then their official investigation had become “infected with the Kastigar virus . . . contracted through Peter Lance.”71
In an affidavit filed within weeks of Kurins’ e-mail, Douglas Grover wrote that on April 10, 2006, his colleague Mark Bederow met with Noel Downey. According to Grover, “Mr. Bederow observed Cover Up by Peter Lance in Mr. Downey’s office, standing upright, directly in front of his office’s window.”72
Grover argued that “Cover Up utilized the substance of SSA DeVecchio’s immunized testimony as a basis for its conclusions.”73
A year later, I was served with a subpoena from Thompson Hine.74 Under threat of fine and imprisonment for contempt if I refused to comply, the subpoena “command[ed]” me to turn over “any and all correspondence and documents,” including “meeting notes, email messages, facsimile transmissions . . . digital recordings, computerized data compilations or notes” relating to my September 2005 meeting in the DA’s office with Noel Downey and George Terra.
At a pretrial hearing on April 20, arguing that I should be called as a witness at the Kastigar hearing, Grover noted the “long history of . . . investigative journalism . . . into this case. It could be—this is a critical part of what led to this prosecution.”75 He concluded that if “the District Attorney’s Office was in any way affected directly or indirectly by the immunized testimony,” it “may lead to this prosecution never taking place at all.”76 The legal theory seemed to be that regardless of whether DeVecchio was guilty or innocent, he was immune from the charges filed.
In that earlier pleading, Grover alleged that my work had provided the DA with a “roadmap” on which to base its investigation and that “the road [Lance] traveled was littered with landmines of immunized testimony.”77 What were those land mines that had supposedly “tainted” the prosecution? In a related pleading he cited my reference in Cover Up to a series of alleged presents given to DeVecchio by Greg Scarpa Sr.:
In defiance of FBI rules, which require two agents to run an informant (to help prevent just such corruption), “Del,” as Scarpa called him, ran the Colombo captain by himself. The two men met two or three times a week, with DeVecchio often visiting Scarpa at home. At length they grew so close that they even vacationed together. When Cabbage Patch Kids dolls were scarcer than bags of heroin, Scarpa reportedly furnished one to DeVecchio for his daughter. Plying his control agent with fine wine and pasta, he made sure that Greg Jr. had the champagne on ice when he paid for call girls to entertain the supervisory special agent at a Staten Island hotel.78
Claiming that the wine-and-pasta detail had come from his compelled statement, DeVecchio’s lawyer cited my reference in Cover Up to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story that had mentioned the gift.79
But in the ninety-six pages of Cover Up devoted to the Scarpa-DeVecchio scandal, the so-called immunized testimony was referenced only a handful of times and always from court pleadings or open-source news stories.
Only one of the four murders in the DA’s indictment was even mentioned in my book, and in a single paragraph:
On May 22, 1992, Scarpa Sr. killed rival soldier Larry Lampasi with a shotgun; another Orena loyalist was wounded. When Special Agent Chris Favo reported both attacks to DeVecchio, he laughed, slapped his desk with his open hand, and exclaimed “We’re going to win this thing.”80
As noted, that very line turned up in the finale for the HBO mob series The Sopranos; DeVecchio even used it for the title of his book.81
“Ninety-nine percent of Cover Up has nothing to do with DeVecchio’s immunized state or hearing testimony,” says Flora Edwards. “Years after many of these murders were committed, to claim that but for an investigative reporter’s enterprise work, DeVecchio would not have been indicted, or that the Brooklyn DA, with a grand jury, didn’t have sufficient independent means of building the case . . . is patently ridiculous.”82
In late
July 2007, lawyers retained by HarperCollins on my behalf filed a motion to quash the subpoena from Thompson Hine and a second subpoena I’d received from the DA. The motion cited the New York shield law, which protects reporters from having to give up sources or material uncovered in the course of an investigation.*
On August 9, I appeared at the Kastigar hearing. While I came prepared to face jail for contempt rather than give up a single confidential source, my lawyers reached an agreement with Judge Reichbach for me to testify on a limited basis without having to betray a source or turn over a single document. The Kastigar hearing proved to be a precursor to what would soon happen at trial.
Warm-Up to the Main Event
In addition to me and forensic investigator Angela Clemente, reporter Jerry Capeci had been subpoenaed to testify at the hearing. On August 2, an article in the Daily News, where Capeci’s “Gang Land” column had run for many years, reported that he would fight the subpoena, in which the DeVecchio defense team was seeking “conversations between Capeci and Scarpa’s girlfriend Linda Schiro.”
In court pleadings, Capeci reportedly stated that he’d promised Schiro in 1996 to keep conversations about her life with Greg Sr. “strictly confidential.”83 Ultimately Capeci was never compelled to appear, because Judge Reichbach granted his request to quash the subpoena.84
When Noel Downey took the stand at the hearing on August 8, he admitted that he’d read parts of Cover Up. But he denied ever reading DeVecchio’s compelled statement or his immunized court testimony.85
Four days later, I testified that Lin’s immunized statements were never discussed during my 2005 meeting with Downey and Terra. I characterized the meeting as “part of my effort as a reporter to learn as much as I could about what may or may not have been the status of [the DeVecchio] investigation for purposes of journalism.”86 On cross-examination, Mark Bederow asked me if I’d ever discussed with Downey any of the four murders in the indictment and I confirmed that I hadn’t.87
After listening to the testimony of another nine witnesses, including Angela Clemente and Tommy Dades, Judge Reichbach decided to reserve judgment on the Kastigar issue until after the trial. But the hearing proved to be a major success for Thompson Hine, because it ended up costing the DA its second and third “seats”—the two assistant DAs who were scheduled to try the case with lead prosecutor Michael Vecchione.
In the course of the Kastigar proceedings, Monique Ferrell and Kevin Richardson, who had replaced Noel Downey, admitted that in preparing for the hearing they had read Lin’s controversial 1995 compelled statement and 1987 testimony. So rather than face a possible negative ruling on the Kastigar issue at trial’s end, they recused themselves.88 “In order to protect against any problems down the line,” said the DA’s spokesman Jerry Schmetterer, “we volunteered to make some changes in the prosecution team.”89
Turning Down Gaspipe’s Offer?
In a sign of how the Mafia Cops case intersected with the DeVecchio prosecution, and how it might have affected Assistant DA Vecchione’s attitude toward the case, Anthony Casso told me that he’d sent a letter to the Brooklyn DA’s office offering to testify about the intelligence he says he got from Scarpa Sr. via his FBI contacting agent.
“It’s difficult to see how that wouldn’t have been a huge plus for the DA,” says Flora Edwards, “getting corroboration on the leaks from a living family boss. Remember how successfully the Feds had used Al D’Arco, who was an acting Lucchese boss just like Gaspipe.”90 But when I asked Casso what response, if any, he got from Vecchione, he said, “He never answered me.”91 I made several attempts to confirm Casso’s allegation with Vecchione, but he never got back to me.
Casso says that if he had been allowed to testify at Lin’s trial, he was prepared to tie DeVecchio to other leaks. He told me that beyond the identity of Jimmy Hydell—whose murder he confessed to Ed Bradley—“Greg [Scarpa Sr.] got more information from DeVecchio. He got the locations of other people, where they were living.” That revelation corroborated the disclosures Valerie Caproni and Ellen Corcella had made back in 1995 relating to leaks DeVecchio may have made to “34.”
“We’ll never know,” says Andrew Orena, “whether or not Casso would have helped the prosecution of Lin DeVecchio. But you have to wonder whether Mike Vecchione was worried about those charges of a potential conflict with his book deal on the Mafia Cops and he didn’t want to muddy the waters by risking bringing the Cops case into the DeVecchio trial.”92
In the late summer of 2007, as the DA’s office scrambled to prepare for what would soon become the biggest murder trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court in years, Judge Reichbach postponed the trial date to October 1 to give Monique Ferrell and Kevin Richardson’s replacements time to prepare.
But on October 1, the next major shock occurred in the case. Lin DeVecchio waived his right to a jury trial. Now Gustin Reichbach—who’d been a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s—would have sole responsibility for determining the former SSA’s fate. The judge himself even seemed surprised, admitting from the bench that in 1969 the FBI had kept a file on him in which he’d been referred to as “one of the most dangerous people” in SDS.93 He went even further, trying to talk the defense out of their decision.94 But Lin DeVecchio, who appeared at the hearing, told Reichbach he was confident that he would be impartial.
Gaveling down, Judge Reichbach set the new start date for October 15.
PART V
Chapter 41
AGENT OF DEATH
As the trial began, the New York Post’s page-one headline read “Agent of Death: FBI ‘Rogue’ on Trial.” The double-truck story inside focused on the DA’s opening references to the Mary Bari murder and how Greg Scarpa Sr. had allegedly made light of it with Lin DeVecchio. “Mob Mirth at Moll’s Slay” read the banner headline above the piece, which carried the subhead “‘Crooked Fed’ & ‘Grim Reaper’ Joked.”1
The sidebar column, by veteran Post crime reporter Steve Dunleavy, was captioned “Dirt Bag Is Grime of Century.” In the column, Dunleavy quoted retired detective Joe Coffey, who once ran the NYPD’s Organized Crime Task Force:
(New York Post)
“It was no secret in the ’80s that DeVecchio was on the take from [Colombo crime-family mobster Gregory] Scarpa,” Joe Coffey said. “He was a loudmouth walking around with pinky rings and, even in those days, $2,000 suits. I worked on the same cases as he did, and a lot of us and other feds knew about him, too.”2
Coffey is something of an NYPD legend. Among other career benchmarks, he led the successful hunt for David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” serial killer.3 In the course of DeVecchio’s trial, the defense would produce a memo from Lin, dated September 4, 1984, in which Scarpa reportedly called the celebrated Coffey a “bad cop” with Mafia ties.4
That memo was not among the 1,153 Scarpa files released to me by the FBI, and Coffey, who is credited with solving eighty mob murders in his career, called the charge “laughable,” insisting that Scarpa’s allegations were “completely disproved” after an investigation.5 In a subsequent interview with me for this book, Coffey called DeVecchio “one of the dirtiest FBI agents [he’d] ever met.”6 Still, Coffey’s allegations about DeVecchio, cited in Dunleavy’s column, and the defense’s attack on him are some indication of how this murder trial turned into a bare-knuckle proceeding from day one.
The trial opened to a courtroom so packed with observers that members of the press were relegated to the empty jury box. Facing the bench on the left side was Team DeVecchio, consisting of the defendant and three lawyers from Thompson Hine: lead counsel Douglas Grover, Mark Bederow, and Ginnine Fried, a young associate who went on to work as assistant chief counsel at the Department of Homeland Security.7 On the People’s side was Racket Bureau chief Mike Vecchione, along with Assistant DAs Laura Neubauer, Jacqueline Linares, and Joe Alexis—the latter three all recent additions to the prosecution team after Monique Ferrell and Kevin Richardson were forced to withdra
w over the Kastigar issue.
The rows in the galley not filled with reporters were occupied by more than a dozen former agents from the Friends of Lin DeVecchio, as well as a series of Mafia buffs, Brooklyn Supreme Court watchers, and family members related to victims of the third Colombo war. The expansive blond walls of the modern courtroom were decorated with framed pictures from the Civil Rights era, including a photograph of Paul Robeson, the African American singer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy years for his left-leaning political views. Robeson had graduated from Columbia Law School, which was also the alma mater of the man on the bench, Gustin Reichbach. Throughout the proceedings, while he demonstrated a steel-trap legal mind, Reichbach, who died in 2012 from pancreatic cancer,8 brought an unmistakable panache to the trial. Each day he came into court dressed flamboyantly, with striped shirts and bright ties under his judge’s robes. Behind him on the wall, next to the words “In God We Trust,” was a black plastic frame with the scales of justice lit up in red and blue neon lights.
On trial for crimes that carried four sentences of twenty-five years, the sixty-seven-year-old defendant had aged significantly since the 1980s, when he’d reopened Greg Scarpa. In those days, Lin DeVecchio had had a full head of curly hair and a drooping mustache. Known as a dapper dresser, he wore expensive suits with pocket squares and monogrammed shirts,9 and occasionally sported a gold bracelet and a wiseguy-style pinky ring.10 Now he was clean-shaven. His hair had mostly turned to gray and he wore it in a military-style brush cut.
In contrast to the swaggering image he’d projected as a senior organized crime supervisory agent, DeVecchio now maintained the demeanor of an accountant, in conservative suits and understated ties. While he drove a Harley-Davidson back home in Florida, here in Brooklyn, on trial for his life, he came across as a kind of victim.
