by Linda Scarpa
“I want to see you. My sixteenth birthday is coming up in the middle of the week next week. My parents are away this weekend picking up my little brother, Joey, from sleepaway camp.”
I was thinking, Jesus, after a sit-down, her parents are away, and she’s inviting me in the house. Am I that crazy to go over there?
“I’m nervous,” I told her.
“Don’t worry. My friend, Justine, will be there, and her boyfriend. So there will be another couple there.”
“Okay, I’ll come over.”
Of course, I went. We hung out the whole day and night, pretty much into the wee hours of the morning.
Linda’s family moved off Avenue J in August, not long after her Sweet Sixteen, and that pretty much ended things. I saw her one time after that at the Festa di Santa Rosalia, what we called the Eighteenth Avenue Feast. We smiled at each other, and that was it. I didn’t see her again for twenty years.
When I was an adult, I always used to jog past her old house and think of her every time. One day, after I had just passed her house, I heard her voice calling me. I thought I was hearing things. I kept jogging. Then I heard her yell my name. She sounded exactly the same.
I turned around and there she was. She told me she had been in a cab going to an appointment when she saw me. She made the driver stop and let her out.
We hugged and took a walk—we always used to take walks when we were kids—and talked. We went to Coney Island. I just wanted to keep it simple and try and forget about what had happened.
I didn’t want to talk about the bad things, just the good things. It was just like it was when we were kids—as if our lives hadn’t been separated by twenty years. I took her up in the lighthouse at Coney Island. She was petrified of heights. So I kissed her and calmed her down.
“Why don’t you come back to the house and see my mom?” she asked.
“Like your mom would want to see me? Because the last time I remember, she hated my guts.”
“Everything has changed since then, and a lot of stuff has happened.”
I went back to Linda’s house that day. We took my car from Brooklyn to her house in Staten Island. When I walked in, her mother said, “Oh, my God.” I talked to her mom for quite some time. After that day Linda and I started talking again. We still talk on the phone sometimes, and on the Internet. We’re good friends. We had a good friendship when we were kids, and we still do now.
Linda has been through so much in her life. But I’ve always told her to “turn your wounds into wisdom.” I heard Oprah Winfrey say that once.
I live in Virginia now—I’m about an hour from Baltimore and about an hour from D.C.—where I manage a restaurant.
I left Brooklyn in 1990 and went to Maryland. My friends were getting involved in gambling and drugs and a lot of them were getting killed. I had to get the hell out of there.
I saw my life going downward. I started getting involved in gambling, and the drug use had gotten worse and worse. My dad had a job offer in the D.C. area. He asked me to help the family move and then check it out. I went out there one weekend to help them, and then I went back to Brooklyn. About a month later I was on the phone with my father.
“Dad, I have to come out there. I have to get the fuck out of here because I’m dying.”
That beating made me realize that if you screw around with the Mob, you’re going to end up dead. I still partied, but I didn’t get involved in any of that friggin’ bullshit. But it really planted a seed in me. It was something that always haunted me. It never went away.
To this day I don’t handle physical confrontations well, especially if there’s more than one guy approaching me, and when I feel like they’re going to gang up on me. I’ll stay pretty much calm if it’s a one-on-one encounter.
But when I feel like there are three or four guys who might try and come after me, I flip out. I’ll go after them. I’m not going to stand there and take a beating. I’m going down swinging. I also don’t like to be in the backseat of a car with two people, one on each side of me. I don’t like that feeling of being closed in.
Through the years, though, I did hold on to some anger and hatred toward the whole situation, but it was wearing me down. You don’t forget about something like that, but it did make me a better person. Sometimes a good beating will straighten you out.
If I had a chance to say something to Linda’s dad right now, I would say, “Thank you.” First I would thank him for not killing me, because he very easily could have.The fact that he didn’t kill me gave me an opportunity to have the things that I have today. It all stemmed from that. I could’ve been dead, but I was spared—not too many people were spared.
I would also thank him for helping me stay away from Mob-related business. I had opportunities to get involved with other close-to-Mob things, but I stayed away. I learned a lot from that beating.
I don’t get high anymore or do drugs. I’ve been sober since 1991, completely sober—no drinking, nothing, zero. I don’t gamble at all. I don’t get involved with the Mob. A lot of guys in the neighborhood always wanted to be mobsters—little guys always acting like little gangsters. I was never like that—as a matter of fact, I used to like to beat up guys like that.
So, Greg, thank you, number one, for not killing me. Number two, I learned a lot from that. I have a daughter now and she stays clear of all that kind of bullshit. She’s seventeen, and a sweetheart. She’s involved in softball and other sports, and she’s a great girl. Thank you for giving me these opportunities.
Like I told Linda, “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” My wounds have been part of a long journey. They’re part of who I am today.
CHAPTER 5
J. EDGAR HOOVER, THE FBI AND MY FATHER
My father loved James Bond.
For as far back as I could remember, my brother and I used to watch 007 movies with him. We watched every single one of them—twice. I was probably around nine or ten when he started telling us he was James Bond. I never really understood what he meant.
“That’s your father. You don’t know your father. Call me Greg, Greg Bond.”
“Dad, how is that you? You’re an agent? Like James Bond is a secret agent?”
Then I’d look at him and laugh. He always had such a crazy sense of humor. I just figured he was playing with us.
“Okay, Dad. You’re a secret agent.”
It wasn’t until I was older that I learned what he was talking about. When my father told us he was working for the FBI, my interpretation wasn’t the same as other people’s interpretation—that he was a rat.
I didn’t fully understand what he was, but I never knew him to be a rat because he never put anybody in jail. He never took the stand and testified against anybody. So when I heard he was with the FBI, I thought he was with the FBI—meaning he was an agent.
I was impressed by the fact that he worked for the FBI. No wonder he used to call himself “Greg Bond.” I never said to him, “Dad, oh, my God, you can’t do that because you’re a gangster.”
I felt that my father really was above everybody else. I thought he was invincible: He was a gangster, yet he was working with the FBI. It was as if he had an edge on everyone else. I learned later that he really didn’t.
My father first got involved with the FBI back in the 1960s. He was arrested on March 7, 1960, for armed robbery and released on bond. He was thirty-two at the time and a made man in the Profaci crime family, which later became the Colombo crime family. Right after that, the FBI contacted him to get information about his brother, Salvatore Scarpa, who was also a made man in the Profaci family. He told them to get lost.
In August 1961, the FBI contacted him at his Wimpy Boys Social Club because they wanted some information about a feud between two factions in the Profaci family. My father refused again. He also told them to stop contacting him because people were starting to ask questions. The FBI agents agreed, but they told him to call them if he ever wanted to talk.
On October
27, he called the New York office of the FBI and said he wanted to meet with one of the agents. He officially started working for the FBI under the Top Echelon Informant Program on November 21, 1961. But my father wasn’t about to take orders from anyone—not even the FBI. He told the agents that they were not to contact him with any assignments. The agents agreed to “merely accept whatever information he desires to furnish.”
There’s an old saying, “While you’re playing checkers, I’m playing chess.” That pertained to my father. He made them think they had the upper hand, but they really didn’t. He only gave them the information that he wanted them to know.
My father wasn’t just a regular informant. He helped save J. Edgar Hoover’s ass on three separate occasions in the ’60s. During that time Hoover was getting a lot of pressure for not protecting the civil rights of African Americans in the Deep South. Hoover enlisted my father’s help—first to find the killer of Medgar Evers, then to find the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers and finally to find the murderer of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer.
The movie Mississippi Burning was based on the disappearance of those three civil rights workers. Although the movie indicated an African-American FBI agent, who flew down to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to question the town’s mayor, broke the case, it was really my father who cracked it.
My mother went with my father to Mississippi when he was helping Hoover find the bodies of the three civil rights workers. I’ve asked her to tell the story. However, as part of our research we’ve pieced together my father’s involvement in these three civil rights cases. I’ll talk about that after my mother tells you what happened.
Greg shared all his secrets with me. We were out to dinner one night when he said he had to tell me something.
“I’m working with the FBI.”
“Oh, my God. Are you a rat?”
“No, I do work for them. In fact, I have to go to Mississippi and I want you to come with me.”
He told me that J. Edgar Hoover wanted him to go find the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers. Hoover was getting a lot of heat because no one could find the bodies. Hoover wanted Greg to go down to Mississippi to torture one of the Klansmen to find out where the bodies were buried. An FBI agent couldn’t go down there and put a gun in someone’s mouth, but Greg could. The only person Hoover felt could get the job done was Greg Scarpa. I was proud of him.
I was in my late teens at the time. I told him I had never been on a plane before, but he said not to worry. He took me shopping the next day to Harpers Fashions on Kings Highway in Brooklyn. He sat in the chair while I tried on all these outfits with these big hats. He just kept telling me to get that one and that one and that one. I didn’t know how many outfits I bought.
When we finally got on the plane to Mississippi, I started getting sick, but Greg was eating and drinking champagne. When that plane landed, he told me we had to take another plane. We took three planes because he wanted to be sure no one was following him to see where he was going.
When we got to the hotel, I looked up at the balcony and saw some men standing there.
I said, “Wow. Greg, look at that.”
Then I saw him wink at them. They were FBI agents waiting for him to arrive. Once we were inside our room, one of the FBI agents I had already met knocked on the door. As soon as he came in, he gave Greg a gun.
“Okay, sweetheart, if I don’t come back, I left you money up here [on the dresser] and a one-way ticket home.”
I said okay, but I wasn’t worried. He was coming back. I had so much confidence in him. I feared nothing with him. He could do anything. When he came back, he told me what had happened.
The Klansman he had to convince to talk owned a TV store. When Greg got there, he told the guy he was buying a TV and asked him to put it in his trunk. While he was doing that, Greg shoved the guy in the trunk and then drove him to an abandoned house. FBI agents followed in another car.
He tied the guy up and asked him where the bodies were.The man told him. Greg went outside to check the story with the agents, who said he was lying. Greg went back inside, put a gun in the guy’s mouth and said he’d blow his brains out if he didn’t tell him the truth. He did. Then Greg told the FBI agents.
When Greg came back to our room, he was all smiles. He told me they found out where the bodies were. Greg was happy that he had done it—of course, he was getting paid, too. But he was really proud of what he had accomplished. I was so happy. I just felt so safe and secure with him. Nothing was ever going to happen to Greg Scarpa.
When we got back to Brooklyn, I met the first FBI agent Greg worked with—Tony Villano. We met Tony at a restaurant in Manhattan. There we were, sitting at the table right out in the open. I told Greg I was worried that someone was going to come in and see him talking to an FBI agent. He told me not to worry about it, so I didn’t worry.
That was Greg. He just did what he wanted to do. Greg didn’t fear anything or anyone, especially not the FBI. One day some FBI agents came to my house. He put a movie on for some of the agents to watch in the living room while he was in the kitchen talking to one of them.The movie he put on for them: The Godfather. He knew what he was doing.
One time Greg, Tony and I took a ride to my sister’s house in Huntington, Long Island. She had just separated from her husband.Tony was stoned out of his brain. Greg didn’t like the way Tony was acting, so he coldcocked him. He knocked him out so bad that Tony was out for five minutes.
Tony quit the Bureau in 1973. Some time later, the FBI wanted to have Tony killed because he became an alcoholic and was doing all these stupid things. They were afraid he was going to say or do something that would put informants and the informant program in jeopardy. When Tony was Greg’s handler, he’d go to the Flamingo Lounge, where Greg was, putting Greg in danger. Nobody there knew who Tony was, but he still wasn’t supposed to do that. Greg was going to kill him for the FBI, but Tony died before he had the chance.
That was how my mother remembered what happened in Mississippi, but we’ve discovered the facts may be a little different. What’s interesting, though, is the information about my father buying a television set from a suspect who owned or managed an appliance store appeared in each and every story.
However, the account from my father’s first FBI handler, Tony Villano, the agent my mother mentioned, was written in the late 1970s. That seemed to be where the story about the TV first surfaced, leading us to believe that somehow that story was incorporated in the telling—and continued retelling—of my father’s subsequent work in Mississippi. Either that, or maybe more than one of the three suspects—or even all three—really did sell televisions.
In 1977, Villano wrote a book, Brick Agent: Inside the Mafia for the FBI, about his years in the FBI working with Mafia informants. (During Hoover’s time, a street agent for the FBI was said to be “on the bricks.”) Two of the people in the book, who were identified with pseudonyms, were actually my father.
In his book Villano talked about the first time my father had a falling-out with the FBI, which was before the two ever met. Apparently, my father believed that the Bureau owed him $1,500 for the work he did for them in Mississippi.
After Villano found my father’s name in the FBI’s filed on closed informants, he got him the money he was owed. However, he wasn’t able to get my father to cooperate with him. So he challenged my father, who he said was built like “an ox of a man,” to an arm-wrestling contest. The fact that they wrestled to a draw impressed my father, who decided to “make a marriage” with Villano, as the agent called it.
Villano thought of my father as “a friend,” and he bent—as well as broke—the law to help him. He even used my father as his bookie to make illegal sports bets for him. One time a criminal who could have implicated my father in some robberies offered to cooperate with the FBI. Villano got the man to back off by making up a story that the Colombo family planned to kidnap his daughter if he talked. That guy died in prison.
In his book Villano said that all the time he worked with my father, he had to reassure himself that their relationship wasn’t “the ultimate perversion of the whole law-enforcement idea. In my mind, what we did was justified on the grounds of the greatest good.”
But other FBI agents didn’t agree. “I had a discussion with Tony that made me think that Scarpa thought he had a license to kill,” a retired agent recalled. “Around 1970, an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration got blown away, and the DEA heard that Scarpa was the triggerman. They wanted to interrogate Scarpa, and Tony did a tap dance to obstruct their investigation. Scarpa was not arrested or charged with that murder.”
In his book Villano credited my father with finding out the name of the man who executed Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP. Evers was shot in the back by a rifle bullet in the driveway of his Jackson home on June 12, 1963.
Villano said the FBI contacted my father, whom he referred to as “Julio,” to go down to Mississippi to “persuade” a member of the white Citizens’ Council to give up the name of the person who assassinated Evers. The FBI, in return, paid my father for his services, as well as guaranteed him a walk on an armed-robbery charge he was facing.
“If he would assist the investigation in Mississippi, he would be the beneficiary of the best the bureau could do for him,” Villano wrote in his book.
Villano said my father agreed, so my father and his girlfriend flew to Miami Beach to establish an alibi. He checked her into a hotel and then went to Jackson, Mississippi, to a store managed by the white Citizens’ Council member. My father told the guy he had just moved to Jackson from Chicago and needed to buy a television set. After the purchase he told the man to hold it and he would return later that night—although he might be a little late.
Around 9:20 P. M., my father showed back up at the store and asked the manager, who was alone, to put the television in his car. He said he had a bad back and couldn’t lift anything. The manager agreed. When they got to the car, my father told him to put the TV in the backseat because the trunk was filled with clothes.
