by Joe Pistone
I can still hear Rudy Giuliani’s words when he announced the Mafia Commission indictment: “The case should be seen as the apex of the family cases. . . . It is an attempt, if we can prove our charges, to dismantle the structure that has been used since the beginning of organized crime in America.”
And all it took was a little song, a little dance, and a little seltzer down their pants.
In 2005, thirty years after I had gone under, I had the privilege of being interviewed for a documentary on the Mafia in Little Italy. We were in front of CaSa Bella’s restaurant, the place Kid Blast owns and Mike Sabella had owned. It was the place that Lefty and I had guarded the night Carmine Galante came down for a meeting with our capo at the time, Mike Sabella. That night Lefty told me a lot about the Zips and how Mike Sabella had taken the opportunity to smuggle heroin in with the marble he used in his restaurant’s construction.
While I was being prepped for my interview, wearing dark glasses for a little disguise, a wiseguy came out of CaSa Bella’s.
“Donnie,” he said, “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“What does it look like I’m doing,” I said. “We’re shooting a documentary.”
“Haven’t you caused enough damage,” he said. “Haven’t you done enough to us?”
“Obviously, I didn’t do enough,” I said, “or you’d be in jail.”
REST IN PEACE
The following is a list of Mafia men I associated with and hung out with who got whacked, whose business was finished, not necessarily on account of Donnie Brasco. This is a list I’ve managed to stay off:
Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano
Tony Mirra
Jilly Greca
Anthony Tomasulo
Carmine Galante
Alphonse “Sonny Red” Indelicato
Phillip “Phil Lucky” Giaccone
Dominick “Big Trin” Trinchera
Cesare Bonventre
Frank DeCicco
Robert Capasio
Gabe Infanti
Russell Mauro
Collie DiPietro
Johnny “Irish” Matera
EPILOGUE
My retired supervisor sat alone in a well-lit room in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. It was 10 at night, March 28, 2006, almost twenty years after Lin DeVecchio had led us agents under Rudy Giuliani in the Mafia Commission Case. The Commission Case was nothing short of a palace coup. In one head-chopping blow, it began to slowly but surely kill the Mafia from the top down.
As Lin sat in that room, it was ten years after his retirement. Lin had spent three decades fighting the Mafia, but even in victory he retired under a black cloud of suspicion.
Now in 2006, that black cloud opened up and gave rise to a raging storm. The eye of that storm was the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, where Lin sat facing a potential life sentence at Attica.
At least Lin knew in his heart that countless retired agents, including yours truly, were with him all the way. Together we’d gone to war to beat the nation known as the Mafia. Believe me, before the 1986 Mafia Commission Case, it was a sovereign nation.
In any battle, it’s important to know your enemy. Back then we had to learn a lot in a hurry. How did the Mafia control U.S. territory, like our entire waterfront from sea to shining sea and areas as big as Las Vegas and as small as Bensonhurst, Brooklyn? To get to know our enemy, we first needed tons of probable cause from reliable confidential informants that would support search warrants for wiretaps and bugs.
Instead of indicting Lin for murder, if the D.A. gave him the praise he deserved, it would include the job Lin did in persuading Greg Scarpa of the Colombo Family of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, to become a paid informer. The probable cause Lin massaged out of Greg Scarpa went directly from Scarpa’s lips to search warrants that got us taps and bugs. Ironically, these very taps and bugs brought Scarpa himself down and out on murder—to die in jail of AIDS in 1994.
Actually, Lin talked Scarpa into restarting as an informer—despite the fact that Scarpa quit informing in 1975 in a dispute over money with the Bureau. For years Scarpa was a paid informer for Agent Tony Villano. In his book, Brick Agent (1977 Quadrangle),Tony Villano stressed the indispensable role informants and their FBI handlers played in waging war on the Mafia. As Tony Villano saw the strategy, there was only one way to get probable cause and that was through paid informers because there was no way to pull off a Mafia undercover operation.Villano wrote: “Agents could penetrate the so-called subversive organizations without much trouble, but that would not be possible with La Cosa Nostra and it still isn’t. There is no way that an agent can develop over the years the history and the references that will enable him to become a functioning member of organized crime.” Oops!! Nothing for nothing, but that was the thinking—and rightfully so—that made all informers solid gold. Even with the Donnie Brasco operation that we pulled off, Mafia informers to this day are solid gold.
Greg Scarpa wasn’t just an informer; he was what the Bureau calls a Top Echelon informer. In 1986, for example, the day after the whack on Genovese boss, Big Paul Castellano, Scarpa informed Lin that John Gotti did the hit. In 1987, Scarpa informed Lin that before the start of the Mafia Commission trial there was a Commission vote on whether to whack Rudy Giuliani. Rudy later joked, that’s one vote he won, 3 to 2.
Handcuffed to a chair, Lin had twelve hours to linger in that well-lit room. Court wouldn’t open until 10 a.m. for his arraignment. What we hoped for with the morning sun was for some light to start shining on the truth and for the black cloud to finally lift. To us the truth was that Linda Schiro—informer Greg Scarpa’s common-law wife—egged on by the Mafia, concocted a poisonous lie to frame Lin for murder.
When we wrote about the Mafia frame-up of Lin in our earlier chapter on the Scarpa Defense, we fingered the jailed-for-life Jo Jo Russo as orchestrating the frame. Jo Jo’s own unlicensed private eye, Angela Clemente, put the “investigation” together and handed it to the Brooklyn D.A. The D.A. praised Jo Jo’s little Angela in the paper.
Linda Schiro, for years before Angela’s “investigation,” denied any knowledge of Lin feeding information to Scarpa so Scarpa could kill his rivals and rats. Suddenly in 2006 Schiro reported four instances of Lin and Scarpa planning hits at her kitchen table with her there. Schiro’s personal motive in this “investigation” was to spice up her biography with blood and guts so that finally she could get a book deal about her Mafia life with capo Greg Scarpa—known as “The Grim Reaper.”
In our chapter on the lure of Hollywood, we said that D.A. prosecutor Michael Vecchione eagerly swallowed Schiro’s poisonous concoction. Vecchione had already tried to profit with a Mafia Cops book of his own.
After Lin spent a long night in the office of the powerful Brooklyn Democrat D.A. Charles J. Hynes, his detectives took my 67-year-old friend to court where a pain-in-the-ass ankle bracelet was put on him—to wear 24/7—as a condition of bail on four counts of conspiracy to murder, each count carrying its own life sentence.
The indictment charged that while Scarpa posed as Lin’s paid informer, it was actually the other way around. Linda Schiro claimed that from one to three times a week Lin visited Scarpa in her Bensonhurst home. Each week she saw Scarpa hand Lin a stack of cash. At times Lin gave Scarpa the intelligence he needed in order for Scarpa to know which rivals and rats to whack. With some, Lin actually ordered Scarpa to hit so-and-so.
“Whoa, haven’t you gone a little too far there, Linda?” I could hear a sincere prosecutor ask her. “Lin actually ordering the hits, like a made man?”
Lin ordering the local capo to whack a guy makes no sense. The Mafia Cops never ordered anybody to whack anybody. But oh yeah, what am I thinking. Jo Jo needs to paint the FBI agent as actually ordering hits for his self-defense angle.
If the glow of glitz and glamour seduced Vecchione, what seduced his boss? To borrow from my second career as a film producer, how could Brooklyn DA Charles J. Hynes have “green-lighted” Vecchione? Hynes ac
tually called the case “the most stunning example of official corruption I have ever seen.”
On its way to trial, Lin’s case gave birth to a little internal corruption. Assistant D.A. Maria Biagini, the handler for one of Vecchione’s jailhouse Mafia witnesses, got caught smuggling the man’s semen out of prison so she could get artificially inseminated and have his little Mafia bambino.
Eighteen months after the D.A. slapped the bracelet around Lin’s ankle, on the advice of his excellent trial lawyers Lin elected to be tried by the judge without a jury. It was done to neutralize Vecchione’s Hollywood style in front of a jury, and to avoid the possibility of an anti-FBI Bensonhurst juror or two. The judge, Gustin Reichbach, urged Lin to reconsider in light of the fact that Reichbach was anti-FBI. The judge had been a campus radical in the sixties and had an FBI file, which labeled him a dangerous subversive. For many good reasons, including Reichbach’s smarts and his fairness in pre-trial rulings, Lin stuck to his investigator’s instincts.
At 10 a.m. on October 15, 2007, Lin DeVecchio sat at the defense table with his two trial lawyers Doug Grover and Mark Bederow. Sitting nearby was retired agent Andris Kurins who volunteered as an investigator. Lin’s defense team had just filed papers with the court enclosing a newly obtained FBI informant report. It revealed that in 1997 Jo Jo Russo and his cousin bragged in jail to an informer that they were going to frame Lin to win their appeal: “With [Scarpa] dead we are going to win our appeal, we are going to make [DeVecchio] the bad guy and say he told [Scarpa] to do it.” Further: “The Russos plan to say the FBI agent started the Colombo War by telling Greg Scarpa who to kill. The Russos were going to say they were only defending themselves against individuals the FBI agent was sending against them.” Bingo.
A second jailhouse informer said the Russos told him they were thinking of putting a whack on Lin. When you think like these people you can see the logic. Whack him first, then go frame him in your appeal procedures. That way he can’t defend it.
All this scheming was why Schiro went over the top to say Lin actually ordered hits. By trial time, she didn’t need to go that far any more. Jo Jo died in jail two months before. But she was stuck with her story.
Vecchione sat like a short crew-cut bull at his table, in command of three prosecutors. The D.A. took the position that these 1997 jailhouse informer tips about Jo Jo Russo framing Lin had “no import on the case.”Yet these people knew that Angela Clemente, who gave them the case, worked for Jo Jo Russo.
Judge Gustin Reichbach sat above all this between a pot of purple flowers growing on his right and a blue and red neon sign representing the scales of justice glowing on his left—each a show biz touch.
A camera crew filmed the opening statements. In the reporters’ section sat three of the five writers who interviewed Schiro over the years for Mafia book proposals that had too little blood and guts to pan out: former Geraldo Rivera producer Don Goldfarb; award-winning Village Voice reporter Tom Robbins; and the foremost writer on the Mafia, Jerry Capeci. Conspicuously absent was Linda Schiro’s most recent writer of choice, the sex and love adviser, Sandra Harmon. Harmon already had a publishing deal to write the biography of Scarpa’s incarcerated son, Gregory Jr., another jailbird trying to use the Scarpa Defense to get out.
As for Hynes, even though his fellow Democrat, the Massachusetts Congressman Bill Delahunt, referred Angela Clemente to his office, Hynes did not personally attend. Coincidentally, Hynes had a new book out, Triple Homicide. On day two of Lin’s trial Hynes was signing books at the Barnes and Noble in Bethesda, Maryland.
Two federal lawyers, without book deals, sat in court to solve any legal disputes on the confidentiality of FBI matters.
My co-author Charles Brandt was also there. I was under contract to be in Toronto to shoot a TV movie about the Mafia, so we agreed that Charlie would attend the trial, both to show our support for Lin and to take notes for this Epilogue.
Each night Charlie called me in Toronto to report on Vecchione’s witnesses. Early on, Vecchione called the three FBI agents who created the black cloud of suspicion that gave rise to this storm. These three were under Lin’s command in the early 1990’s. When they got assigned to Lin they were young and inexperienced, with no understanding of how to handle a Top Echelon informant. Without any evidence, and way over their heads, they fed each other the spooky notion that Lin was too cozy with Scarpa.
So they decided not to inform Lin of material information. What they did in failing to inform their supervisor was insubordination—a firing offense. But in this age of political correctness, instead of charging them with insubordination, the FBI investigated their suspicions. Agents interviewed Linda Schiro and others, and found absolutely no evidence to support the three agents’ conspiracy theory. Nevertheless, a black cloud had now formed.
Agents Number One and Two testified about their suspicions, but admitted they had no concrete information that Lin had ever done a single thing wrong.
Agent Number Three was Chris Favo, the ringleader of the mutiny of the inexperienced. Vecchione asked Favo a question. Favo refused to answer, citing FBI confidentiality. The judge called on the two federal lawyers. They conferred and said Favo could answer the question. Favo then turned to the judge, giggled and said, “I don’t feel comfortable answering that question.” There it was for all to see. Agent Favo had just overruled his own FBI lawyers. The judge wisely took the easy path and ordered the spectators cleared; then made Favo answer the question.
The centerpiece of Favo’s testimony was his famous desk-slapping quote of Lin after he’d told Lin that old-timer, Lorenzo Lampasi, had been whacked and another guy wounded.
“‘We’re going to win this thing,’” Lin said, according to Favo.
Then: “He slapped his hand on the desk. He was chuckling. I said, ‘We’re the FBI. We’re not on either side.’ He said, ‘That’s what I meant.’”
To Favo this showed a bias on his supervisor’s part in favor of the Persico faction in the Colombo Family War. At the end, the judge jumped in and asked Favo to expand something Favo said on cross. The judge asked Favo whether he or any other agents—besides Lin—ever voiced a bias in favor of one faction or the other in the Colombo Family War. Favo admitted that there had been such discussions in the squad during the war. When pressed by the judge Favo admitted that he personally had favored the Persico faction.
After cross and the judge’s follow-up questions, Favo’s meaningless opinion testimony was now totally useless, except for show business. The line “We’re going to win this thing” was lifted by David Chase and put in the mouth of a misguided FBI handler for the final ever episode of The Sopranos.
Nothing for nothing, but at least in Favo, they now had a witness talking about a relevant murder. Schiro had accused Lin of handing Scarpa the home address of old-timer Lorenzo Lampasi so Scarpa could find him for the whack.
Enter Carmine Sessa, the 5’ 4” former Colombo consigliere and a Persico faction leader in the war. Sessa long ago flipped and now was called to support Vecchione’s claim that Greg Scarpa often discussed his criminal activity in front of Linda Schiro.
On cross, Sessa was put to work for the defense. Sessa testified in prior Mafia trials known to Vecchione that he was the one who handed Scarpa the home address of Lorenzo for the whack. Persico faction Acting Boss Joe “T” Tomasello was a partner of Lorenzo’s in a school bus company, and did not want Lorenzo whacked at work.
Then Sessa corrected a Colombo Family chart—a big trial exhibit prepared by the D.A. The chart had Lorenzo listed as a member of rebel Wild Bill Cutolo’s hit team against the Persico faction. Sessa said Lorenzo was an old inactive member of the Colombos. He was not a member of any hit team on any side.
No doubt Jo Jo Russo wanted Lorenzo listed on the chart as a Cutolo hit team combat soldier against Persico to support his Scarpa defense that Lin fomented the war. Disgracefully, the D.A. had a motive to list Lorenzo as a hit team soldier to bolster Favo—that when Lin heard
Lorenzo got whacked he gave the desk a Persico victory slap.
Soon it was obvious that Vecchione’s own witnesses—with testimony Vecchione was aware of in advance—supported the defense and offered nothing to corroborate Linda Schiro. As the days wore on we could see a shift in tone in the New York newspapers. On day one the New York Post had a front page head shot of Lin with the headline: “Agent of Death—FBI Rogue on Trial.” An interior headline read: “Dirt Bag Is Grime of the Century.” By the second week, like the old hamburger commercial, the newspapers all but hollered at Vecchione: “Where’s the beef?”
The “beef ” had been advertised to be Linda Schiro; even though the witnesses called to corroborate her were shooting her down one by one in advance. The New York Daily News, on the day before Linda Schiro took the stand, did an article headlined: “Mobsters Fickle Girlfriend Has History of Changing Her Tales.” And there was a sidebar: “Shifting Stories.”
On Monday of the third week of trial, Linda Schiro took the oath. Charlie described her to me as “a petite and perky brunette. She smiled at the judge a lot and waved her hands around—like a magician saying abracadabra.”
Charlie Brandt was in court to see the rabbit come out of the hat and bite the magician. Here’s what he told me: “As you predicted, Lin’s case got better with Linda Schiro.”
On cross about inconsistent official statements she’d given over the years, she blamed others for copying her words down wrong. Her perkiness wore off. She looked like an overmedicated pill popper. On cross about inconsistent statements she’d given to various book writers, she swore that she told them “the truth.” But the writers mixed “fact and fiction” when they wrote proposals.
At the close of a full day of cross that barely touched the notes on defense attorney Doug Grover’s legal pad, and as the judge left the courtroom and the lawyers packed their briefcases, Linda Schiro, who had been circling the drain, finally went down the drain.
