Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  The “first seat” for the DA was Mike Vecchione. A short, mustached bulldog of a man, he’d been off for some time during the summer after back-to-back prosecutions, so the job of delivering the opening statement fell to Joe Alexis, a big, barrel-chested assistant DA who’d recently been assigned to the case. As he got up to begin, the unspoken question was whether his office could overcome the Kastigar challenge and convict the former supervisory special agent, who had already been twice immunized by the Justice Department. But if he was worried, Alexis didn’t show it:

  During trial we will prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that on September twenty-fifth, nineteen eighty-four, Greg Scarpa killed Mary Bari here in Brooklyn, and the defendant helped him do it. That on September seventeenth, nineteen eighty-seven, Greg Scarpa killed Joseph DeDomenico here in Brooklyn, and the defendant helped him do it. That on May twenty-seventh, nineteen-ninety, Greg Scarpa killed Patrick Porco in Brooklyn, and the defendant helped him do it. And on May twenty-second, nineteen ninety-two, Greg Scarpa killed Lorenzo Lampasi here in Brooklyn, and the defendant helped him do it.11

  Alexis told the court that Scarpa “ran the most bloodthirsty of crews” and that he “lived a double life.” He wasn’t just an informant, said Alexis, but “a special informant. Because rather than working for the FBI, Scarpa had the defendant, FBI agent Roy Lindley DeVecchio, working for him.”12

  That was the essence of the DA’s case: not that Lin had ever pulled the trigger himself but that, by allegedly leaking intel to Scarpa Sr. over the years and keeping him out of prison, DeVecchio had become his enabler—his effective partner in crime.

  At the time of trial, not being privy to the 1,153 pages of secret “Scarpa files” from the Bureau—which proved the killer’s Machiavellian strategy to ignite the third Colombo war—the DA adopted the Feds’ explanation for the conflict: that Vic Orena had moved to “seize . . . control” of the family and that “Greg Scarpa and his men sided with the Persico faction.”13

  Continuing his opening statement, Alexis promised that Larry Mazza would sit on the witness stand to document the war murders in the indictment.14 Later he signaled that Linda Schiro, “the love of Greg Scarpa’s life,” would also testify.15 But he never mentioned the name of the DA’s true “star witness,” Greg Scarpa Jr., who had been waiting patiently in the MCC for more than ten months to reveal what he knew about his father’s relationship with “Dello” or “D,” as he’d known DeVecchio. Detective Tommy Dades, who had resigned from the DA’s office, told me that after Noel Downey’s departure the prosecutor’s office had seemed to neglect Junior; now it seemed that, for unknown reasons, they were abandoning him as a witness.

  When it was Doug Grover’s chance to frame the case for his client, he described Scarpa, DeVecchio’s coveted TE source, as an “ugly” and “miserable human being,” but an “informant with a fuel that made the engine of all these [Mafia] investigations run.”

  Citing the landmark Mafia Commission case, Grover reminded the court that those investigations, driven by Scarpa’s intel, later turned into “prosecutions and convictions” for the government.16 Early in his opening, as if sensing that the case would rise and fall on Scarpa’s gumar, Grover tried to preempt Linda Schiro’s testimony, dismissing it in advance as “a fantasy.”17 For some time, the DA’s office had been paying Schiro a fee—not unlike the FBI’s multiyear stipend to Greg Sr.—and now Grover used that to attack her credibility.

  What you are going to see on this witness stand [in Schiro], is someone who is so desperate and so financially driven, that . . . she will say anything for the two thousand dollars a month the District Attorney has been giving her for the last two years. . . . She is a person who cannot be trusted.18

  Moving on to Chris Favo and the allegations against DeVecchio during the OPR, Grover conceded that “perhaps DeVecchio [became] too careless . . . in his dealings with Scarpa.” But he insisted that, as a result of that OPR probe, “there were no administrative sanctions, there were no criminal sanctions, and life went on.”19

  Still working to undermine Schiro, Grover noted that “the one thing that came out of the [OPR] investigation in 1994 and 1995 and sticks with every witness today with the exception of Linda . . . no one knew who [Scarpa’s] law enforcement source was, no one, not Larry Mazza, not no one.”20

  “As far as the defense was concerned,” says attorney Flora Edwards, “if Schiro’s credibility could be seriously impeached it would be game over.”21 Indeed, in his opening statement—which ran for forty pages of trial transcript—Douglas Grover devoted more than thirty pages to an attack on Schiro, whom he described as

  the foundation of this case [and] someone who you will see is patently untrustworthy, who has her own agendas, and frankly who is capable of concocting any story. She’s not credible. And no human being, Your Honor, Lin DeVecchio or anybody, deserves to be sitting here as a result of the stories that this woman is making up.22

  The Second String

  The trial of Lin DeVecchio, accused by DA Joe Hynes of committing “the most stunning example of official corruption [he’d] ever seen,”23 was about to commence with its first witness.

  But just like the prosecution team itself—the late-term replacements who filled in for Assistant DAs Downey, Ferrell, and Richardson—the lead witness, NYPD detective sergeant Fred Santoro, was a stand-in for Detective Tommy Dades, the chief investigator on the case, who had abruptly quit five months earlier.24

  Worse for the DA’s office, and proof that the Kastigar sword of Damocles still hung over the proceedings, Grover argued that Santoro’s testimony would be “tainted,” since he had sat with Dades through part of DeVecchio’s 1997 immunized testimony during the Vic Orena hearing.25

  Noting that this was a nonjury bench trial and that he could “separate” out the Kastigar issues, Judge Reichbach allowed Santoro to be sworn. But for the next several hours Santoro offered little more than a boilerplate primer on the organization of Cosa Nostra—with zero testimony about DeVecchio’s alleged connections to any of the murders in the indictment. The closest he got was describing the players in the Colombo family, using an organizational chart prepared by the DA. It was the kind of general testimony Lin DeVecchio himself had given in countless LCN trials, including Vic Orena’s.

  The next day, when Grover started cross-examining him, Santoro admitted that during the previous day’s testimony he had confused the Commission case with the “Windows” case, a separate prosecution of Lucchese family members that involved Gaspipe Casso.26 Santoro then admitted that this was the first time he had ever testified as “an organized crime expert” and that his familiarity with the DeVecchio case came “from reading the newspaper.”27

  After developing little or no inculpatory evidence from Santoro, the DA then called FBI agents Ray Andjich and Jeffrey Tomlinson, two of Chris Favo’s colleagues, whose reports about Lin DeVecchio had, in part, prompted the OPR investigation. The Justice Department was apparently concerned enough about what the two agents might say on the stand that it dispatched two attorneys from Washington, Robert S. Tully and Jay F. Kramer, to “observe” them. Tully and Kramer sat in the jury box just a few feet away from the special agents, who were still on active duty.

  As with Favo himself, who was later called as a witness, the two senior DOJ lawyers monitored every word of their testimony.28 “How can you interpret their presence,” says Andrew Orena, who attended the trial, “as anything short of intimidation? They were literally breathing down on these guys.”29

  Under direct examination, Andjich described his three visits to Scarpa’s house, the first on the day of the November 18, 1991, shootout and the other two when DeVecchio “parked” Andjich in front of a TV while he spoke to Scarpa in the kitchen. Andjich testified that he believed it was Lin DeVecchio who had “turned up” the volume on the living room TV, preventing him from hearing the conversation later described in the infamous “Kitchen 302.”30 And, just as he’d sworn in his OPR statement,
Andjich recalled Scarpa using the words “murder” and “hit” but testified that he “couldn’t make out anything more of the conversation.”31

  During the OPR, Andjich had complained that while one of the visits lasted “thirty to forty-five minutes,” DeVecchio’s 209 memorializing the interview contained “less than half a page of content.”32 But he didn’t volunteer any of that now on the stand, nor did the ADA elicit those facts from him—evidence that might have shown that DeVecchio was hiding information about “34” from the agents who worked under him.

  Under cross-examination by Mark Bederow, Andjich did admit that he was “shocked” that he hadn’t been part of DeVecchio’s debriefing of Scarpa.33 The agent conceded that it may have been Scarpa who had turned on the TV but recalled that it was Lin who “raised the volume.”34

  Under direct examination, Andjich had testified that in 1992, when the FBI was about to arrest Scarpa, he’d been concerned that DeVecchio might warn his source. Now, Judge Reichbach asked Andjich “whether or not that assumption was based on something concrete.”

  In his sworn OPR statement, Andjich had stated that, besides Favo, Tomlinson, Leadbetter, and possibly SA Maryann Walker-Goldman, he didn’t know of any other agents on the C-10 squad who “were worried that SSA DeVecchio was divulging information to Scarpa Sr.”35 But the fact that he’d cited those names back then was significant. It underscored the sense that at least three special agent in the C-10 squad were concerned that DeVecchio may have been leaking intel to his source. Now, as DeVecchio stared at him from a few feet away, Andjich testified that he didn’t “have a recollection” of any concrete reason to conclude that DeVecchio might have “tipped off” Scarpa.36

  When Special Agent Jeff Tomlinson took the stand, he testified that he’d participated in the debriefings of both Carmine Imbriale and “Joey Brains” Ambrosino. Then, about half an hour into his testimony, when Judge Reichbach asked Tomlinson whether his duties included “evaluat[ing] the information provided by informants,” Jay Kramer, one of the DOJ lawyers, intervened.

  “Our assessment of the [DOJ] authorization for him to testify today in this proceeding,” he said, “does not include opinion testimony; rather his substantive knowledge regarding the contents of either report, including whether they are consistent; inconsistent. Not his opinion regarding them.”37

  Even the ADA who conducted the direct examination seemed unable to get Tomlinson to repeat his most damning criticism of DeVecchio: the allegation, which he made in his sworn OPR statement, that Imbriale had told him Scarpa admitted killing Nicholas Grancio, and that Tomlinson was “confident [that that information] was provided to SSA DeVecchio.”38 In fact, neither Scarpa’s role in the murder of Nicky Black nor Lin DeVecchio’s knowledge of it ever came up while Tomlinson was on the stand.

  Finally, after questioning by Judge Reichbach himself, Tomlinson admitted that Carmine Sessa had told him “he believed that Lin DeVecchio was Greg Scarpa’s law enforcement source.”39 Tomlinson, a former state police officer, was one of the three agents who’d found DeVecchio’s relationship with Greg Scarpa Sr. so problematic that he’d risked his career by complaining about it. But his testimony at DeVecchio’s trial ended without the DA ever eliciting the full depth of what “bothered” Tomlinson “about SSA DeVecchio’s relationship with Scarpa Sr.,” as expressed in his OPR statement.40

  At this stage of the trial, virtually every round had gone to the defense.

  Favo Takes the Stand

  Early in his testimony, Chris Favo testified that an official FBI investigation into the Colombo war hadn’t been opened until December 9, 1991, three weeks after the shootout on Eighty-Second Street that Scarpa claimed had marked the start of hostilities.41 At that point, DeVecchio still had enough faith in Favo to make him the case agent on the probe and Favo retained that role until June 1996, when the last of the war cases had been litigated at the trial level. That was less than three months before the OPR was concluded and DeVecchio was allowed to retire with a full pension.

  For the next half hour, the direct examination by Senior Assistant DA Mike Vecchione took Favo through a discussion of various war events, starting with the November 18 shootout and moving forward through February 1992. But curiously, the pit-bull-like prosecutor never touched on the murder of Nicholas Grancio—after which Favo was sued in civil court, along with Lin DeVecchio, for allegedly making Nicky Black vulnerable by pulling away the FBI and NYPD surveillance details. Detective Tommy Dades had told me that the Brooklyn DA had originally planned to add the Grancio hit to its indictment of DeVecchio.42 Now, in questioning Favo, who learned that Scarpa had been involved in the homicide four days after the rubout,43 Vecchione inexplicably ignored it.

  “It might have been,” says Andrew Orena, “that Vecchione didn’t want to visit this sensitive subject with Favo, since the civil suit was still pending. But it’s not as if he got anything substantial out of Favo. As it turned out, his testimony was incredibly weak.”44

  Later, Vecchione did get Favo to discuss how he’d overheard his boss talking to his informant “34” over the “Hello” line in the squad after Carmine Imbriale’s arrest in February 1992, and how DeVecchio had told Scarpa, “I don’t know what he’s saying about you. Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office has him.”45 Favo also admitted that he’d suggested to DeVecchio that he tell Scarpa he’d been overheard in a wiretap threatening Imbriale, so that the Grim Reaper would think twice before killing him.46

  Favo then confirmed that part of the teletype DeVecchio had sent to DC in order to get Scarpa reopened after he’d been closed on March 31 wasn’t “truthful.”47 But he’d used much stronger language in his sworn 1995 statement during DeVecchio’s OPR, calling the teletype “false.”48 The best Vecchione got out of Favo was a few more details regarding the infamous “we’re going to win this thing” incident: As DeVecchio uttered those words, Favo recalled now, he “slammed his hands on the desk” and was “chuckling. . . . Not laughing out loud,” added Favo, “but laughing a little.”49

  Later, in a signal that Favo, a Notre Dame graduate with a law degree from Columbia, might be dialing back on his memory of events relating to his boss’s OPR, Vecchione asked him whether he knew the results of the thirty-one-month internal affairs investigation he had prompted.

  “I don’t,” Favo answered with a straight face.50

  “That had to take the cake,” says Andrew Orena. “Here’s Favo, whose career in the FBI almost got derailed over that OPR, and he’s saying he doesn’t remember how it turned out?” After Grover objected, Favo backpedaled. “I was never informed of the results of the investigation, directly,” he said.51

  Later, on cross-examination, Doug Grover asked Favo: “In the winter and spring of 1992, did the FBI make efforts to prevent murders of various members of the two factions?” Favo answered, “Yes.”52 Once again, however, the murder of Nicky Grancio never came up.

  Meanwhile, the presence of DOJ lawyers Tully and Kramer continued to be a factor in the courtroom. They seemed to intimidate even Grover. At one point, while asking Favo whether the C-10 squad dealt with “encryption issues” involving police radios, Grover began by saying, “Without getting into details so I don’t upset the guys in the jury box. . . .”53

  Favo’s testimony ended on the third day of the trial, with little or no new evidence emerging to link Lin DeVecchio to the four murders in the indictment. If, in fact, Vecchione had decided to go easy on Favo and bypass the embarrassment of the Nicholas Grancio homicide, he seemed to get little in return from the testimony of Lin’s chief FBI accuser. The most explosive testimony of the trial, from Larry Mazza, was still to come—including the moment when Mazza broke down on the stand.

  “Mob Killer Becomes a Crybaby”

  That was the headline on the Daily News story by Scott Shifrel the day after Larry Mazza took the stand and recalled the plans he’d made before becoming Greg Scarpa’s murderous protégé.54 Mazza was about half an hour into his direct exam
ination by Mike Vecchione when he referred to his enrollment at John Jay College at the age of eighteen.

  When asked “what was it” that brought him to John Jay, Mazza suddenly burst into tears.55 The proceedings had to be halted while he was given a tissue and a glass of water, but he continued to weep until Judge Reichbach called a break.

  After a five-minute recess, Mazza, who had earlier admitted to participating in the murders of Gaetano Amato, Vincent Fusaro, and Nicky Grancio, pulled himself together enough to describe how his father, an FDNY lieutenant, had inspired him to go to college. By 1993, however, he said he had become the “confidant” and “right hand man” to Greg Scarpa, whom he described as “a vicious, violent animal.”56

  Later, Mazza testified about the events on the night of Halloween 1989, when Joey Scarpa, Greg’s son by Linda Schiro, had gotten into an altercation with Dominick Masseria, who was killed on the steps of a Fifteenth Avenue church in Brooklyn. After the killing, Mazza said, Joey and his good friend eighteen-year-old Patrick Porco, who had witnessed the murder, “went on the lam,”57 shipped off to Scarpa Sr.’s horse farm in Lakewood, New Jersey.

  Vecchione then asked Mazza if he recalled a conversation he’d had with Greg on May 27, 1990. Mazza nodded, recalling that it happened over the Memorial Day weekend. Scarpa was “very concerned,” he said, that Porco “was a rat and he could hurt Joey.” According to Mazza, Scarpa “wanted to kill him.” Later, after Porco was shot to death, Mazza said he went to the Scarpa house and found Joey “extremely upset. Distraught.” Scarpa told Mazza “they killed [Porco,] and Joey was so reclusive he couldn’t even speak.” In fact, he “didn’t want to leave [his] room.”58