Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  He’s referring to the cross-examination by attorney Gerald Shargel, in which DeVecchio answered, “I don’t recall,” or words to that effect, more than fifty times and denied that he had ever intervened with prosecutors to keep a confidential informant like Scarpa on the street.22 Robbins cited that testimony in his Voice story, noting:

  Brewster’s name had been raised by one of the defense attorneys, who asked DeVecchio if he’d ever given Scarpa information about him. DeVecchio angrily denied it. Having heard that exchange, we asked Schiro whether Lin DeVecchio had had anything to do with the death of Joe Brewster. She seemed briefly confused by the question. “No,” she said. “He never met Joe Brewster.”

  The following is a portion of the transcript of that interview, published after the release of the tapes in the New York Daily News, Robbins and Capeci’s former newspaper:

  Schiro: Greg had him killed. Greg didn’t kill him. It was Billy and Mario. . . . I remember Joe came over one day on Avenue J and he was kind of drooling, he was starting to use coke; ‘cause he was going out with this girl from Manhattan and he had refused Greg something. And Greg told Gregory, Billy, Mario in fact they told him they had to go someplace, they got all dressed up. Joe Brewster, and they killed him.23

  Forty-two lines later in that Daily News transcript there is this exchange between Robbins and Schiro:

  Robbins: Lin had nothing to do with Joe Brewster?

  Schiro: No. Lin never met Joe Brewster.24

  In an interview with the Daily News published November 1, 2007, Robbins had this to say about Schiro’s account of the Brewster killing:

  Schiro said in our interviews that as far as she knew DeVecchio had nothing to do with the 1987 murder of a long time Scarpa pal, a Colombo soldier named Joe DeDomenico who went by the nickname of Joe Brewster.25

  After the dismissal of the DeVecchio case, former New York supreme court judge Leslie Crocker Snyder was appointed as a special district attorney to determine whether Linda Schiro had committed perjury.26

  On October 22, 2008, Crocker Snyder issued a report declining to prosecute Schiro. One of the exhibits to the report included twelve pages of heavily redacted typewritten notes from Robbins, which appear to be a verbatim transcript of the interview portions he released to the Brooklyn DA along with the tapes.

  As revealed on page twelve of those notes, reproduced on the next page, when Robbins asked Schiro, “Lin had nothing to do with Joe Brewster?” it was during a point in the interview when Schiro was reviewing family pictures with Robbins. The sequence began with Schiro referring to an entirely different murder that took place in Florida.

  (Peter Lance)

  In that transcript, Robbins asks, “Lin had nothing to do with Joe Brewster?” She responds, “He never met him.” But unlike the transcript republished in the Daily News, the complete transcript turned over to the DA’s office does not include the word “No” preceding Linda’s answer. The Daily News transcript also lacks the reference to “pix . . . pasted in an album.” In fact, Schiro’s response about whether Lin DeVecchio had anything “to do” with Brewster comes several minutes after her earlier discussion of Brewster’s murder (as reflected by the transcript) and that response follows the sequence in which she’s showing Robbins the pictures from the Florida trip.

  In saying “He never met him,” Schiro may well have been speaking literally—that Lin DeVecchio had never made Joe Brewster’s acquaintance. But whether DeVecchio “met” DeDomenico is immaterial to the question of whether he twice visited Scarpa’s house and conspired with Scarpa to kill him, as Schiro testified to under oath.

  Nonetheless, in the telling of the story after the case’s dismissal, Robbins insisted that the tapes definitively cleared DeVecchio in both the Lampasi and Brewster homicides. Here is an excerpt of an interview he gave Bob Garfield for OntheMedia.org on November 2, 2007:

  Three of the four murders that she was putting in Lin DeVecchio’s mouth, she’d never even mentioned to us his involvement. In two of them, when I went back and dug out an old cardboard box and looked at the transcripts I’d made back then and listened to the tapes, I was astonished to see that she had explicitly told us—when we’d asked her whether or not he’d had any involvement with two of the murders, she said, absolutely not. One of the quotes was, “Lin didn’t do that. I know it for a fact.”27

  The murder he refers to in that last statement is the rubout of Larry Lampasi, for which Schiro did explicitly clear DeVecchio. But that was the only one of the four murders in the DeVecchio indictment where she exonerated the former SSA on those tapes. When it came to Robbins’s own transcript of his interview with Schiro on the Brewster murder—the same transcript he submitted to the Brooklyn DA—Schiro did not rule out Lin’s connection to the hit.

  “At the time of the case’s dismissal,” says Andrew Orena, “these tapes from Robbins and Capeci were portrayed in the media—particularly the Daily News—as the ultimate smoking gun that proved Lin DeVecchio’s innocence and made Linda a liar. But if you look at them now in the cold light of day, when it comes to Joe Brewster, Linda’s words on those tapes don’t go against her words on the stand. The tapes don’t mention Lin one way or another in the Bari murder and they do put him into Porco’s hit. So, out of the four murders, the only one that Linda clears Lin on is Lampasi. But that’s not the impression you got from Vecchione or the media after he dismissed the case.”28

  The Deal with the Devil

  After the case fell apart, there were a host of postmortems in the media. DA Joe Hynes was quoted in the Daily News as saying that “he never would have brought charges against Lindley DeVecchio if he knew about the tapes.”29 In relation to Linda Schiro, Vecchione told Michael Brick of the New York Times, “We knew what her problems were, and it was important for us to corroborate everything she gave us. And we believed we had.”30

  Both comments suggested that the Kings County prosecutor’s office was blindsided by the tapes. But as we’ve pointed out, Vecchione actually questioned Schiro on the stand about her interviews with Capeci for the book. At that time there was no mention of Capeci recording the interviews, but given that the DA’s office knew Schiro had opened up to him, one wonders why they didn’t press to find out if her conversation with the columnist had been taped.

  The two reporters were quick to tell the Post that nobody from Hynes’s office had asked them about the recordings. “At no time did the DA’s office ever call me,” said Capeci. Robbins chimed in: “If someone had asked me to give them [Hynes’s prosecutors] a reality check I would have done that.”31

  But how believable is the claim made in Capeci’s “Gang Land” column that Robbins hadn’t decided to “look for cassette tape recordings” until just weeks before the dismissal—especially in light of the twenty-one-month notice Capeci had that Schiro would be the DA’s star witness?

  Remember that, as far back as 1994, Capeci had been identified by multiple agents in the FBI’s C-10 squad as a recipient of DeVecchio’s alleged leaks. When the Feds decided to frame Detective Joe Simone for the leaks, Robbins and Capeci were merciless in their coverage. Capeci even went so far as to attribute Simone’s federal court vindication to a “bad jury.”32 Further, after the DeVecchio case collapsed, Capeci was quoted in the Daily News as saying, “It seems pretty obvious that this case was built on a house of cards.”33

  “I certainly wouldn’t call the nine hundred pages in Lin’s OPR suggesting he’d leaked intelligence to Scarpa a ‘house of cards,’” says former FBI agent James Whalen. “With reporters as sharp as Capeci and Robbins who cover the mob, you have to wonder, what took them so long? If they knew how important Linda Schiro was and they could see from the indictment that the DA was charging Lin on Brewster and Lampasi, why wait till the last minute to step forward?”34

  The only major New York journalist to offer a minority report on the dismissal was Daily News columnist Michael Daly, who wrote about how Dominick Masseria’s murder on the church steps had
devastated his family. The seventeen-year-old Masseria’s only “crime” was getting involved in an egg-throwing fight with Joey Scarpa and his friends that Halloween night in 1989. The youngest of five children, who hoped to attend college, Masseria had started out the night, according to Daly, watching cartoons and babysitting his two-year-old niece.35 “He was not in any way involved in the bad stuff,” his sister Dorothy Garucchio told Daly. “He was an innocent bystander.”

  But his brush with Joey Scarpa, whose complaint to his father had resulted in that 1992 Bay Ridge gun battle, proved fatal. It was another murder in the roster of victims who had crossed paths with the Grim Reaper. In his column, Daly noted that “the FBI is to blame for allowing Scarpa to strut about as a homicidal role model.” And in acquiescing to the DA’s desire to dismiss the charges, Judge Reichbach agreed, using his decision and order ending the case to issue a scathing indictment of the Bureau and its decades-long relationship with Scarpa. The complete decision is reproduced in Appendix H, but a portion is cited here. Keep in mind that the late Judge Reichbach reached his conclusions without the benefit of viewing the 1,153 pages of Scarpa-related FBI files uncovered for this book:

  Friedrich Nietzsche sagely observed at the end of the nineteenth century “that he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster . . . and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. . . .”

  What is undeniable was that, in the face of the obvious menace posed by organized crime, the FBI was willing, despite its own formal regulations to the contrary, to make their own deal with the devil. They gave Scarpa virtual criminal immunity for close to fifteen years in return for the information, true and false, he willingly supplied. Indeed, this Court is forced to conclude that Scarpa’s own acknowledgment of criminal activity to the FBI could only be explained by his belief that the agency would protect him from the consequences of his own criminality, which the record suggests is what they did.

  Not only did the FBI shield Scarpa from prosecution for his own crimes, they also actively recruited him to participate in crimes under their direction. That a thug like Scarpa would be employed by the federal government to beat witnesses and threaten them at gunpoint to obtain information regarding the deaths of civil rights workers in the south in the early 1960s is a shocking demonstration of the government’s unacceptable willingness to employ criminality to fight crime.36

  Lin DeVecchio was ecstatic after the case was closed, but he was also bitter. “I will never forgive the Brooklyn DA for irresponsibly pursuing this case,” he told the New York Post after celebrating his victory at the site of Paul Castellano’s rubout.37

  But in the months after the trial ended, he started to spin what happened as if to suggest that the Brooklyn DA never even had enough evidence for an indictment. Here is what he told former Guardian Angels leader Curtis Sliwa in a radio interview:

  The indictment. . . . It was obtained by the Brooklyn DA’s office who were either incredibly stupid or incredibly arrogant, thinking that there was a case there— They had been given information, long before the indictment, that exonerated me in every crime because cooperating witnesses had already come in and testified in Federal Court about all these crimes.38

  But that was patently untrue. The cooperating witnesses who testified in the war trials never exonerated Lin DeVecchio per se; nor was there evidence before the trial that cleared DeVecchio, except for Schiro’s single account regarding Larry Lampasi. Still, Lin DeVecchio went further in his characterization of her testimony:

  And the only witness that came in against me was Linda Schiro, who had absolutely fabricated the entire thing. . . . And we had ample proof that everything she said was completely fabricated. And I couldn’t have been happier when Robbins and Capeci came in with their tapes showing that she not only was a liar but that she had made all this up. . . . She completely exonerated me in the criminal acts for which I was charged.

  DeVecchio’s interview with Sliwa was also revealing for the way Lin characterized his OPR investigation and its aftermath:

  Sometime before I closed [Scarpa] there was an agent assigned to me who felt that I was giving him too much information. . . . And without any proof of any kind, those suspicions were reported and I was put under what’s called an Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) investigation for allegedly leaking information to an organized crime informant. This went on for two and a half years and the investigation, I was exonerated. They found no harm, no foul. . . . Literally no proof that I had ever done that.

  As we’ve seen, however, the DeVecchio OPR generated more than nine hundred pages of FBI 302 memos, trial transcripts, and other communiqués from the Bureau and Department of Justice, including a great deal of troubling content that was far from exculpatory. In the end, DOJ’s Public Integrity Section declared that prosecution of Lin wasn’t “warranted. “ But that conclusion came sixteen months after they’d granted him immunity, making his indictment and trial problematic if not impossible.

  The Unanswered Questions

  The only significant legal postmortem on the case was conducted by Leslie Crocker Snyder, who was commissioned to determine whether Linda Schiro had, in fact, committed perjury. In issuing her twenty-eight-page report, with more than two hundred pages of documentary appendices, Crocker Snyder concluded that Schiro had not perjured herself. And, in an addendum to her report, she raised a series of compelling, unanswered questions.39

  1. Did DeVecchio pass information to Scarpa Sr. regularly, setting aside the four murders charged in the indictment? Witnesses, and possibly records, appear to exist which would be probative of this issue.

  2. Is there probative evidence that the FBI—or at least DeVecchio—knew that Scarpa Sr. was ordering, and committing, numerous murders and, nevertheless, allowed him to continue his status as a Top Echelon FBI informant?

  3. Was there an effort by the FBI to protect Scarpa and DeVecchio in order to protect/insulate/preserve numerous mob prosecutions and some convictions relating to the Colombo crime family?

  4. Was Detective Joseph Simone, of the New York Police Department, a scapegoat for the misconduct of others, as a number of people who came forward have suggested?

  5. Were the FBI agents who reported their suspicions regarding DeVecchio shunned and ostracized? And did they later modify their positions regarding DeVecchio?

  6. Why was DeVecchio allowed to retire with a full pension, despite the Government’s acknowledgment that he leaked information to a murderous informant, and why was he granted immunity after he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege in post-conviction proceedings related to convictions in the Colombo War?

  7. Have any of the witnesses, potential witnesses, or people who cooperated in the DeVecchio investigation and/or prosecution been harassed by various agencies because of their cooperation, as many of these individuals now claim?

  After spending more than five years investigating Greg Scarpa Sr.’s relationship with Lin DeVecchio, I come away with those identical questions, but I have a few more to add.

  8. Why did the Brooklyn DA devote such an enormous amount of public resources to the indictment and prosecution of Lin DeVecchio—and then so precipitously drop the charges in the face of what we can now clearly say was equivocal evidence contradicting their lead witness, Linda Schiro?

  9. Why did the U.S. Justice Department approve the payment of untold thousands in legal fees for Lin DeVecchio’s defense when a federal judge, Frederic Block, had determined before his trial that the crimes alleged in the indictment had “nothing to do with his federal duties”?

  10. Why did the Bureau of Prisons, a division of the Justice Department, move Abdul Hakim Murad out of the Supermax and put him into a cell in close proximity to Greg Scarpa Jr. at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC)? What possible justification could there be for moving a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist across the country, only to put him in a cell near the very CI who had informed on him?

 
11. Indeed, why did the district attorney go to the trouble of holding Greg Jr. in the MCC for ten months if they didn’t intend to hear his testimony in open court?

  12. Why didn’t the Brooklyn DA take Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso up on his offer to testify as a prosecution witness at Lin DeVecchio’s trial? As indicated by his interview for this book, his testimony would have included his allegation that he killed Jimmy Hydell, one of the Mafia Cops’ principal murder victims, after getting the intel on him from Lin DeVecchio via Greg Scarpa Sr.

  13. Why hasn’t the NYPD granted Detective Joseph Simone, a decorated officer who with his partner was responsible for a third of the arrests in the Colombo war, a new hearing to reevaluate the decision to take his pension away—especially in consideration of his vindication by a jury in federal court?

  14. In light of the newly disclosed 1,153 pages of FBI files on Gregory Scarpa Sr. and the evidence presented in this book linking Scarpa to the murder of Tommy Ocera, will federal judge Jack B. Weinstein reconsider Vic Orena’s motion for a new trial? And is Judge Weinstein prepared to reconsider the credibility of Greg Scarpa Jr. in light of the evidence produced in this book about the legitimacy of his two intelligence initiatives aimed at thwarting acts of terror, against Ramzi Yousef in 1996–1997 and Terry Nichols in 2005?

  15. Given the evidence we’ve produced that John Napoli was not a witness to any fabrication of the “Scarpa material,” which was documented in dozens of FBI 302s, will the Justice Department reconsider its decision to renege on a promise to grant Greg Scarpa Jr. a reduction in sentence or at least admit to the fact that he provided “substantial” assistance to the FBI in 1996–1997 and 2005?40