Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  When it came to what Hoover termed “Black Nationalist” groups like the Panthers and the Nation of Islam, the Director stated in a memo that “the purpose of this new counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” their activities “to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.” Included in the groups Hoover described as “subversive” were the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), headed at the time by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.98

  The program was reportedly closed down by Hoover in April 197199 but only after a burglary of an FBI field office, in which files were stolen, which threatened its exposure.100 Then, after the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, a U.S. Senate select committee headed by Democrat Frank Church of Idaho held extensive hearings that probed COINTELPRO and the illegal domestic spying operations conducted by the CIA, first exposed by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in the New York Times.101

  A fifteen-month investigation by the Church Committee found that FBI headquarters alone had developed more than 500,000 domestic intelligence files on Americans and domestic groups.102 As a direct result of the committee’s investigation, the Justice Department adopted the first set of “Attorney General Guidelines,” to which Lin DeVecchio and other special agents would become subject.103

  Initially established under Attorney General Edward Levi on April 6, 1976,104 the guidelines, which regulated the FBI’s use of confidential informants, were further refined by Benjamin Civiletti in December 1980,105 setting forth strict rules on when the Bureau might sanction the “ordinary” criminal activity of informants.106 As noted, violent crimes like murder by CIs were never authorized.

  A report in September 2005 by the Justice Department’s inspector general, which reviewed the AG’s Guidelines from their inception, concluded that “the partnership between the FBI and DOJ, in making key operational and oversight decisions, has promoted adherence to the Attorney General’s Guidelines and allowed the Department to exercise critical judgments regarding sensitive FBI investigative activities, particularly with respect to its use of confidential informants and undercover operations.”107

  But our analysis of the once-secret files on Gregory Scarpa Sr. (NY 3461-C-TE) demonstrates that, at least until his arrest on September 1, 1992, and for the three decades before that, the FBI conducted what amounted to a COINTELPRO against the Mafia, employing as its central asset a sociopathic killer who acted with utter disregard for human life and the rule of law.

  In November 1974, after releasing a DOJ report on COINTELPRO, then Attorney General William B. Saxbe disclosed that, in addition to the Bureau’s spying on leftists and so-called hate groups, a more secretive category of COINTELPRO targets dubbed “special operations” had never been made public.108 We don’t know if “special operations” was Hoover’s cover name for his secret war against Cosa Nostra, but the memo to the Bureau’s assistant director in January 1966, authorizing Greg Scarpa Sr. to make a second mission to Mississippi for what was termed “a special in the Jackson office,”109 raises the question of whether “34” was part of that undisclosed category of the Bureau’s illegal counter intelligence program.

  The three words on the banner that emblazons the FBI’s seal are “Fidelity,” “Bravery,” and “Integrity.” There’s little doubt that over the decades thousands of special agents have exemplified those first two qualities. It’s time now for the Bureau to reclaim its right to the third. It’s time that the pathology that infected the FBI during its three-decade relationship with Greg Scarpa Sr. is excised and his son shown some mercy. An important first step in that direction would be to grant Greg Jr. a hearing in open court, where all of the evidence of his help to the Bureau can be vetted. The next step would be to offer clemency to Vic Orena, who has paid his price for racketeering after more than eleven years behind bars and, at the age of seventy-eight, deserves to see the light of day.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Deal with the Devil was six years in the making. I first proposed the book in the winter of 2007 to Jane Friedman, who was then the president and CEO of HarperCollins, and as we say in the media business, “she bought it in the room.” After I’d written two investigative books critical of the FBI and one that audited the 9/11 Commission, Jane was intrigued by this story of a senior Bureau supervisory special agent who had been indicted for murder as a result of his clandestine relationship with a Mafia killer.

  From that point on, the trajectory of the book took many twists and turns, which accounts for the years it’s taken to come to press. First, there was the aborted DeVecchio trial, after which the transcript was immediately sealed. Then came the first of thirty-two pages of letters from Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald threatening to sue me and HarperCollins for libel if we didn’t cease publication of the hardcover edition of Triple Cross, which was critical of his performance as head of the SDNY’s Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit.

  Given who the threat was coming from and out of an abundance of caution, we undertook a re-vetting of the entire book, which took twenty months. The trade paperback edition was published in June 2009 to critical acclaim and support by media watchers on the left and the right, and Fitzgerald never made good on his threats. But the reexamination of every fact in a book that ran 604 pages in hardcover was a daunting task, and that caused me to put this book on the back burner for many months.

  In 2008 I was able to get a copy of the DeVecchio trial transcript. I then obtained more than ten thousand pages of court pleadings in a number of the Colombo war cases and got a copy of the file from the DeVecchio OPR investigation, which ran to almost a thousand pages. I spent much of 2009, after the publication of Triple Cross in paperback, trying to get into the Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, to interview Greg Scarpa Jr. and Anthony Casso, but I was repeatedly stymied by the Bureau of Prisons, which is a wing of the Justice Department.

  Finally, in the fall of 2011 I was able to interview “Gaspipe,” and I conducted a number of interviews with Greg Jr. in 2012 after he was moved from ADX Florence to a prison in the Midwest with less restrictive conditions. Over the years I conducted extensive interviews with the Orena brothers and a number of FBI agents, some on active duty who asked not to be identified and some retired. I did many interviews with defense lawyers who had gone to battle with the Feds during the seventy-five Colombo war prosecutions, but I was anxious to know more about the Bureau’s secret dealings with the Grim Reaper, so I approached Angela Clemente, who had filed a federal lawsuit pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act to get what eventually amounted to the 1,153 pages in airtel memos, teletypes, and 209s.

  I’d first encountered Angela in 2004 when I was finishing Cover Up, my book on the 9/11 Commission. She was able to get me dozens of FBI 302s documenting Scarpa Jr.’s Yousef sting, many of which can be accessed at my website, http://www.peterlance.com/wordpress/?p=682.

  With no formal training, this single mother from New Jersey who describes herself as a “forensic investigator” is one of the best researchers of organized crime–related material I’ve ever encountered. After I was able to get the first five hundred pages released via her FOIA suit, there were no more pages forthcoming from the website that allows access to federal court case pleadings. So it wasn’t until the fall of 2011 that I received the remaining 653 pages directly from the Bureau with the help of a Washington, DC, federal judge.

  It was important for me to get Lin DeVecchio’s perspective in all of this. I had been scheduled to talk with him on the day of his indictment, March 30, 2006, but after he left the Brooklyn Supreme Court surrounded by that phalanx of former FBI agents, that didn’t happen. I wrote to his lawyer Douglas Grover requesting an interview and never heard back from him, so I decided to wait for Lin’s book to come out to get his side of the story. We’re Going to Win This Thing, which had been scheduled for publication in December 2009, didn’t come out until February 2011, so that was another cause for my dela
y in delivering Deal with the Devil.

  Now it is done—twice the size of the book that I had contracted for, and much more of an audit of the FBI’s organized crime history than I ever envisioned. I had set out to write a simple “true crime” book on the DeVecchio trial and I’ve finished with a book that I trust will change much of the conventional wisdom about the FBI’s multidecade war with what Lin calls “the Mafia enemy.”

  As it goes to press this book runs more than 210,000 words. It contains more than 2,000 endnote annotations, twenty pages of documentary appendices, and almost 130 illustrations. Getting a book of this magnitude published requires an editor and a production team of immense dedication. Fortunately for me, the man directing that effort is Cal Morgan.

  This is my fourth book with Cal. We started together in the trenches with 1000 Years for Revenge when he was the top executive for ReganBooks, Judith Regan’s extraordinarily successful imprint for HarperCollins. Along the way Cal saw Cover Up and Triple Cross through to publication. He took great care during the re-vetting process of the latter to ensure that the trade paperback, which ran twenty-six additional pages, was a cut above the hardcover edition.

  Because of his talent and tenacity he has now advanced within the company to the point where he is editorial director of Harper Perennial, oversees Harper Design, and was named publisher of his own imprint, It Books. To have a publishing executive with Cal’s immense skill as the editor of a book like Deal with the Devil is a gift for which I’m deeply appreciative.

  There is another man of letters deserving of great thanks in my investigation of the Scarpa-DeVecchio story, and that’s Fredric Dannen, who published the seminal piece on their alleged “unholy alliance” in the New Yorker on December 16, 1996. Even to this day “The G-Man and the Hit Man” remains the gold standard when it comes to reporting on this story, and Fred was incredibly generous to me during my research phase, giving me access to hundreds of pages from his extraordinary Scarpa-DeVecchio files.

  I want to thank my daughter Mallory Lance, who graduated from Barnard College at Columbia University in 2011. That summer, when I faced the challenge of organizing more than twenty thousand pages of disparate files into a coherent series of three-ring binders, she flew to Santa Barbara, where I work, and spent weeks with me putting together a system that allowed me to access any given FBI 209 or 302 in a matter of seconds. If Mallory had not devoted the time she did to helping me, this book would not have come together as it has. I am extremely proud of her, as I am of her brother Christopher and her sister Alison.

  I’d also like to thank Cal Morgan’s two assistants, Brittany Hamblin and Kathleen Baumer, who have shown tireless dedication—Brittany particularly during the publication of the trade paperback of Triple Cross, and Kathleen now on this book.

  I owe a great debt of gratitude to Beth Silfin, the vice president and deputy general counsel for HarperCollins, who has shown great courage and determination over many years in supporting me with these books that have been highly critical of the FBI.

  When it comes to the latest reporting I’ve been able to do on Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, whose position as the spiritual emir of al-Qaeda continues to wreak havoc worldwide, I have to thank the amazing Emad Salem. After I had written about his role in convicting the Blind Sheikh in both 1000 Years for Revenge and Triple Cross, he reached out to me after years in the WITSEC program. When we finally met in New York and I visited him in the state where he lives with his family under an assumed name, I was struck by the fact that he is a man of deep Islamic conviction who is also one of the most tolerant people I’ve ever encountered. Emad has a great love for America, his newfound country, and would be a tremendous asset to the FBI if they hired him formally to advise on the radical jihadist mind-set.

  He’s done a number of lectures for agents at Quantico in the past, but the Bureau has vastly underutilized this patriot and natural born undercover operative. Emad risked his life multiple times to enter what he called the “nest of vipers” surrounding Omar Abdel Rahman back in New York in the early 1990s, and he is willing to put his life on the line again if it means protecting this country. If the violence in the Middle East linked to the Blind Sheikh continues, the top executives in the Bureau should be speed-dialing him. I’m proud to say that Emad and I have become close friends and I am in his debt.

  Further, a particular thank-you goes to Detective James Moss of Brooklyn South Homicide, who is now retired. “Jimmy,” as he calls himself, is a larger-than-life personification of all that we hope an NYPD murder cop will be: clever, resourceful, undaunted by bureaucracy, and dedicated to bringing those who take human life to justice. Without his belief in Emad Salem and his willingness to work with an investigative reporter, the bloody twenty-year-old Shalabi murder would have stayed a cold case.

  I owe another debt to Don Katich, Director of News Operations for the Santa Barbara News-Press, the local paper here in my adopted hometown, who has supervised three separate investigative series I’ve written on local corruption. Don and City Editor Scott Steepleton are two of the gutsiest editors I’ve ever worked with, and they represent the best in local journalism at a time when newspapers are an endangered species.

  In the course of reporting one of those series, relating to an allegedly corrupt police officer, I had the benefit of working with James Blanco, one of the foremost handwriting experts in the nation. He was entirely unselfish in offering months of his time in the pursuit of the truth and I have rarely worked with a more consummate professional.

  Finally, I’d like to thank Darryl Genis, a tenacious lawyer in Santa Barbara who not only “had my back” for many months in 2011 as I investigated the Santa Barbara Police Department, but also helped me get one of the most important interviews for the book. I’ll always be grateful for his sharp legal mind and fearlessness as a litigator.

  Peter Lance

  Santa Barbara, California

  April 23, 2013

  www.peterlance.com

  Appendix A:

  The Principal Figures

  Joseph Profaci

  Joseph Colombo

  Carmine Persico

  Joseph Gallo

  Greg Scarpa Sr., 1976

  (Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office)

  Greg Scarpa Sr., 1992

  Lin DeVecchio, 1980s

  (Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office)

  Lin DeVecchio, 2006

  (Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office)

  Larry Mazza, 2006

  Linda Schiro, 1990

  Linda Schiro, 2007

  (Peter Lance)

  Little Linda, 2007

  (Peter Lance)

  Appendix B:

  The Marriage Certificate of Gregory Scarpa and Lili Dajani

  The 1975 marriage license of Gregory Scarpa and Lili Dajani; her new address in the apartment Scarpa owned on Sutton Place in Manhattan was typed at the top

  (Fred Dannen)

  Appendix C:

  Gregory Scarpa Sr.’s Arrest Record

  No.

  Date

  Charge

  Disposition

  1

  September 1, 1950

  Possession of a firearm

  Case dismissed

  2

  December 5, 1950

  Possession of a firearm

  Case dismissed

  3

  October 7, 1959

  Incitement of a breach of peace

  Acquitted

  4

  March 7, 1960

  Theft of an interstate shipment

  Case dismissed April 3, 1961

  5

  April 28, 1960

  Possession of stolen goods

  Case dismissed March 28, 1963

  6

  January 7, 1961

  Consorting with thieves & criminals

  Unknown

  7

  January 20, 1962

  Bookmaking

  Unknown

  8


  September 18, 1962

  Possession of Policy Slips

  Unknown

  9

  September 25, 1964

  Vagrancy

  Unknown

  10

  November 3, 1965

  Pilfering coins from a pay phone

  Dismissed

  11

  January 31, 1968

  Second-degree assault

  Case dismissed

  12

  February 23, 1968

  Second-degree assault

  Unknown

  3

  October 8, 1969

  Attempted grand larceny; hijacking 870 cases of J&B

  Case dismissed

  14

  November 4, 1971

  Possession of stolen mail, $450,000 in securities

  Case dismissed

  15

  June 7, 1974

  Interstate transport and sale, $4 million in IBM stock certificates

  Case dismissed

  16

  March 11, 1976

  Gambling

  Unknown

  17

  May 9, 1978

  Attempted bribery of police officers

  Guilty plea, served 30 days

  18

  November 5, 1985