Deal With the Devil: The FBI's Secret Thirty-Year Relationship With a Mafia Killer

by Peter Lance

  The Director’s designation for the program was “Top Echelon.” In the years to come, the FBI would develop up to four hundred of these highly placed sources43 whose identities were so closely guarded that they were known to only three agents in a given Bureau office and only by a code number.44

  As time passed the covers on these Top Echelon Criminal Informants (TECIs) were occasionally blown, causing shockwaves. In 1985, for instance, it was disclosed that former Teamsters president Jackie Presser was a TECI with Bureau permission to commit “ordinary crimes.”45 Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, the Las Vegas odds maker chronicled in Nicholas Pileggi’s book and screenplay Casino,46 was also later outed as a TE Bureau source.47 Rosenthal survived a car bomb, but another TECI in Cleveland wasn’t so lucky: After escaping multiple attempts on his life, Danny “the Irishman” Greene, a former union official and racketeer engaged in a long-running battle with local Mafiosi, was killed when a remote-controlled bomb went off in a car parked next to his.48

  Federal protection could only go so far.

  Until the Gregory Scarpa scandal, the biggest blowup over a Top Echelon informant came with the revelation that Boston FBI agent John Connolly had leaked critical intelligence to James “Whitey” Bulger, boss of the murderous Winter Hill Gang.49 Giving Bulger a pass in return for his purported cooperation against LCN, Connolly was ultimately convicted of racketeering and obstruction of justice. Later charged in nineteen murders, Bulger spent sixteen years on the lam before being captured in California in June 2011.50 Boston Globe reporter Ralph Ranalli filed more than four hundred articles on the Bulger-Connolly scandal, and in Deadly Alliance he writes, “The first reference to something called the ‘Top Echelon Criminal Informant Program’ in FBI memos began appearing during the period between Valachi’s conversion in 1963 and Johnson’s shutdown of the illegal bugs in 1965.”

  New Evidence on Top Echelon

  Ranalli’s conclusion is accurate and based on what was known outside of the Bureau in the historical record until now. But hundreds of pages of newly released secret FBI airtel memos from the New York Office sent directly to “the Director” now reveal that twenty-two months before Joseph Valachi shocked the nation with his revelations, Hoover was receiving direct intelligence from the regular secret debriefings of Greg Scarpa Sr.51

  The extraordinary details in those documents, which we’ll begin to disclose in the next chapter, are proof positive that, even as the McClellan Committee was presenting Valachi as the first insider to reveal the workings of organized crime in America, Hoover himself knew every secret detail that “Cargo Joe” was about to confess. In fact, there’s a compelling case to be made that the FBI actually fed Valachi some of the most damaging details in his testimony long before he took his seat in the Senate Caucus Room.

  The source of that intel wasn’t a wiretap or some low-level Mafia snitch, but the Brooklyn capo who would later be known as the Killing Machine: Gregory Scarpa.

  Chapter 2

  A TRUE MACHIAVELLI

  Undercutting Bobby Kennedy’s assertion that Joe Valachi’s confession represented “the first time” a Mafia member had “broken the . . . code of silence,” twelve days before Valachi’s televised testimony, Parade magazine published an article under J. Edgar Hoover’s byline. In the piece, entitled “The Inside Story on Organized Crime,” Hoover used the term “La Cosa Nostra” for the first time.1 Further, in the September 1963 issue of the Law Enforcement Bulletin, Hoover wrote that Valachi’s revelations “corroborated and embellished the facts developed by the FBI as early as 1961.”2 On October 3, during the second week of hearings, Senator McClellan himself was quoted in a UPI story admitting that much of Valachi’s testimony, heralded by some as groundbreaking, was “not especially new.”3

  As former New York Times organized crime reporter Selwyn Raab writes in his encyclopedic Mafia history, Five Families, “Valachi’s information was limited to his experiences in the New York area as a lowly soldier in the trenches.”4 Ernest Volkman, author of Gangbusters, was more unkind. “Joe Valachi was a low-scale knuckle-dragging hood who was never going to be more than a soldier,” he said in a 2009 documentary.5 In that same program William Hundley, Valachi’s government lawyer during the hearings, admitted that “Valachi had a sixth-grade education” and attributed the witness’s performance before the subcommittee to his “street smarts” and the “adrenaline [that] started to flow” once Valachi “got in front of those klieg lights.”6

  Were those factors sufficient to lend authority to Valachi’s expansive account of the Mafia’s national network? Thomas L. Jones, who files organized crime reports for TruTV.com, thinks not.

  “In many ways, [getting] Valachi’s viewpoint was like asking a gas jockey at a Shell station about the strategy of the board of directors,” he writes. “A barely literate, low-ranking member of the Mafia, Valachi was often obviously talking beyond his personal experience.”7

  Raab notes that “before his public appearance, Valachi had been coached by agents, spoon-fed information about other families that the Bureau had picked up.” But he suggests that this intelligence had come from electronic surveillance. “Hoover had used [Valachi] as a transmitter,” Raab writes, “to publicize facts the FBI wanted Congress and the public to know about the Mob without revealing that the data had been obtained through unconstitutional methods.”8

  Valachi at the hearing, with flow charts prepared by the FBI

  It’s true that, for a bottom-rung “soldato,” Valachi was something of a social climber. He had married the daughter of Gaetano Reina, the former boss of his family, and Vito Genovese himself had been the best man at his wedding.9 That status gave Valachi access beyond his official standing in the borgata. In The Valachi Papers, his biographer, Peter Maas, claimed that the former driver and “button man” had “nearly total recall.”10 But Valachi’s experience, which was limited to the New York families, could never have given him the inside knowledge necessary to fill in the detailed charts displayed at the hearings. In fact, as Raab points out, Valachi was “even unaware that Chicago’s Mob called itself ‘the Outfit,’ New England’s was ‘the Office,’ and Buffalo’s was ‘the Arm.’”11

  So, if Valachi was coached by the FBI, then where did their knowledge come from? Was Hoover’s network of illegal wiretaps the source, as Raab suggests? Or did the FBI acquire the knowledge they fed him in a different way? The files discovered in this investigation prove that Hoover’s awareness of the Mafia’s inner secrets came from at least one human source: confidential informant NY 3461-C-TE.

  A Betrayal “Punishable by Death”

  Gregory Scarpa Sr. was first officially “opened” as a criminal informant in the FBI’s New York Office (NYO) on August 25, 1960, more than three years before Valachi’s public testimony. His original file number was FBI #584217A. But his recruitment came only after he was arrested and charged in connection with the attempted armed hijacking of an Akers Motor Lines tractor trailer in New York City on December 11, 1959.12 At the time of Scarpa’s arrest on March 7, 1960, the authorities found eighty-four cases of liquor at his home on Staten Island—the haul from an earlier truck hijacking of a Marcell’s Motor Express truck on February 27. The Akers hijacking charges were dismissed13 and the files suggest that Scarpa agreed to cooperate with the Feds at that time. But he refused to talk when agents tried to press him on the whereabouts of his older brother, Salvatore “Sal” Scarpa, and a short time later he was closed.14

  By August 1961, however, the first of three wars for control of the Profaci-Colombo crime family had broken out between forces loyal to Joseph Profaci, Scarpa’s boss, and the violent Gallo brothers, Larry, Albert (a.k.a. “Kid Blast”), and Joseph (a.k.a. “Crazy Joe”).15 Concerned about the violence, and eager to reconnect with a live source inside the family, Bureau agents paid three separate visits to Scarpa’s social club. But he repeatedly spurned them, insisting that “people were beginning to ask questions concerning why the [FBI] was contacting him.�
��16 The agents told Scarpa they’d leave him alone but gave him a number to call if he ever changed his mind.17

  We don’t know for sure what ultimately caused him to pick up the phone, but at that point Scarpa was still under indictment in connection with the Marcell’s liquor hijacking. In October 1961, he finally made contact and was formally “reopened.” A 1966 FBI letter describing his re-recruitment states that the “informant . . . indicated that he desired to furnish information . . . only because he had a personal liking for the agents [and] faith in [their] discretion”—an early indication of Scarpa’s talent at manipulating and stroking his handlers.18

  By March 20, 1962, Scarpa was upgraded to the special status of Top Echelon Criminal Informant (TECI).19 By June, the FBI memos indicate that he was supplying information on a “continuous basis regarding the feud between the Profaci and Gallo groups.”20 At that point, the Bureau started paying him on a regular basis. The Marcell’s Motor Express hijacking case also went away: It was dismissed on March 28, 1963.21

  On November 21, 1961, J. Edgar Hoover himself received the first of dozens of multipage briefings from the special agent in charge (SAC) of the FBI’s New York Office. This four-page report identifies the source as “GREGORY SCARPA . . . a current member of the JOSEPH PROFACI group” and calls him “an individual worthy of concentration and attention.”22

  The memo gives Scarpa’s address on Staten Island, his height, weight, and date of birth, and his police record, showing five arrests between 1950 and 1960 on gun possession, menacing, and hijacking charges. It lists his various aliases as “Gregory Scarba” and “Gregory Scarbo,” and cites his “criminal associates,” which included his brother Sal, Profaci consigliere Charles LoCicero, and Carmine J. Persico Jr., who went on to become boss of the family. More than twenty years later, Scarpa would furnish the FBI with probable cause to secure Title III wiretaps that helped send Persico away for life in the landmark “Mafia Commission” case.23 He also spent years undermining LoCicero and may have played a role in his murder.* In the mid-1990s, one of Greg Sr.’s lawyers would underscore that duplicity by calling him “a true Machiavelli.”24

  Though he’d reached the level of caporegime, or captain, by 1961, in talking to the Feds Scarpa routinely downplayed his own importance within the family. One FBI memo listed him as having “an interest in a ravioli business in Brooklyn.”25 Another stated that he “has never really had any legitimate occupation, but has been a silent partner in various restaurants and bars.”26 It would have been impossible, however, for Scarpa to have furnished Hoover with the detailed intelligence he did without having access to meetings at the highest tier of the family. It was access that no mere soldier in the insulated, need-to-know structure of the Mafia could have had. Five years after Scarpa became a TE informant, the FBI’s assistant director called him “the most valuable Top Echelon informant of the New York Office.”27

  And just as Gregory Scarpa delivered for the FBI, the Bureau reciprocated. There’s little doubt that his association with the FBI for more than thirty years was the principal reason that Scarpa avoided prison—beating multiple felony charges and serving only that single month in jail before his final conviction.* In the meantime, as Scarpa “ratted out” his competition, the evidence suggests that he became privy to the kind of intelligence only the Feds could provide. And that access to information, in turn, helped earn him a senior position in the Profaci-Colombo hierarchy. The airtels reflect that he was able to collect intelligence at the boss level through all three administrations, from Joseph Profaci to Joseph Colombo to Carmine Persico. By Scarpa’s own admission, his revelations would have been “punishable by death” if his cover had been blown. But in a criminal enterprise where the life of an informant can be dangerously short, he played both sides of the street with lethal skill—a game of double-cross equaled by few in the annals of organized crime.

  Intelligence Surpassing Valachi’s

  Seven months after Gregory Scarpa became a federal informant, the Bureau’s New York SAC sent Hoover an eleven-page airtel with revelations that made Valachi’s testimony appear superficial in comparison. Dozens of other airtels can be accessed via my website, www.peterlance.com, but we’re producing this June 18, 1962, memo in its entirety† for two reasons. First, it’s an important benchmark to help us measure Hoover’s true knowledge of the Mafia at this point in the early 1960s. Second, though many of the early memos can be corroborated as truthful, the dozens of later airtels and 209 memos also demonstrate Scarpa’s capacity to lie and manipulate his Bureau handlers. As such, they put Lin DeVecchio’s public comments about “34,” the confidential informant he “admired,” in stark new perspective.

  (Peter Lance)

  For example, according to this 1962 airtel, Scarpa had become a made member of LCN in 1950 at the young age of twenty-four. Eleven years later, he had risen to the position of caporegime, or captain, in what was then the Profaci family.28 Yet in his 2011 book We’re Going to Win This Thing, DeVecchio states with confidence that Scarpa was “never a capo.”29 Who was right? The G-man or the hit man?30 Later in this book we’ll quote from DeVecchio’s memoir in order to answer that question.

  Apart from a few depositions from a 1988 civil suit, and the transcripts of his sentencing hearing in 1993, Greg Scarpa Sr. left very little direct testimony on the historical record. He never testified in any of the Colombo War trials, where DeVecchio took the stand as an expert witness.31 Yet these airtels offer a penetrating new look into the mind of a highly gifted criminal who successfully manipulated his fellow Mafiosi while outflanking the best and the brightest in the FBI. Though written by his FBI handlers, the memos resonate with Scarpa’s voice. They show him to be a master chess player, complaining of money trouble as his justification for approaching the Feds, expressing his willingness to be used by them, even flattering them with reassurances that the FBI was “the only police agency” he trusted.

  Still, woven throughout his factual accounts of the structure of LCN are a series of half-truths and lies intended to placate his contacting agents. With some redactions (white boxes blocking out certain names and dates) the airtel looks pretty much as it did when it hit J. Edgar Hoover’s desk in 1962.

  Scarpa’s first extended statement to the Feds was expansive, covering everything from the history of the Mafia (dating back to the days of Sicily’s Black Hand) to the structure of the Commission and each family within it, specifically identifying each rank: representante (boss), underboss, consigliere (counselor), caporegime (captain), and “Good Fellow” or “button man” (soldier). He also confirmed the identities of the bosses of all five New York families and the officials of the Profaci borgata down through the rank of capo, not to mention every detail of the Mafia induction ceremony.

  On page 11 of the airtel, Scarpa’s contacting agent noted, “The full potential of this informant is yet to be realized.” It was the biggest understatement in the entire document.

  Chapter 3

  HITTING THE BOSS

  There’s little doubt, from what we know of Gregory Scarpa Sr.’s trajectory in the Colombo family, that by 1962 his “full potential” was yet to be realized. In return for betraying LCN, he was able to con his FBI handlers into paying off a $3,000 debt he claimed he owed. They also agreed to furnish him with future payments.1 Within a year he was getting a regular stipend of $125 a month, the equivalent of $940.45 in 2013 dollars.2 But his criminal activity in the decades to come proved that his pledge on page 3 of the June 18, 1962, airtel—that he would cease “all [but necessary] activities relating to the organization” was a bold-faced lie. As was his suggestion that he could “more or less retire.” As Valachi said during the hearings, “Once you’re in you can’t get out. You try, but they hunt you down.”3

  The same could be said of a “Good Fellow” who attempted to slough off or dial back on his contributions as an “earner.” Just as sharks have to keep swimming or die, a Mafioso doesn’t have the privilege of downtime. As
a capo who had been “straightened out” for more than a decade, Scarpa knew that once he’d taken the oath, he was in the family for life. Thus, his suggestion that he might “cease all activities” was clearly designed to curry favor with the agents and play down his criminal behavior.

  Further, in light of his murderous track record, the conclusion on page 4 that Scarpa wasn’t just “reliable” but “emotionally stable” underscores the mask Scarpa presented to his Bureau handlers—and their willingness to believe him.

  Retired veteran DEA Special Agent Mike Levine, who dealt with multiple criminal informants (CIs) in his career, warns about the dangers of federal agents getting misled by their informants. “When it comes to CIs,” he says, “you have to be extremely careful that they are not feeding you information that will lead you the wrong way, or that they’re not using you to eliminate their competitors or further their own agenda. This problem is particularly acute when you are dealing with an intelligent CI, and Scarpa was as smart as they come. While he gave the FBI LCN intel at a very high level, he also lied to them, and if his handlers weren’t extremely careful they easily could have been duped.”4

  Between November 21, 1961, and December 6, 1963, the New York SAC sent forty-six separate airtels to the Director with information furnished by Scarpa. Many of them were duplicative. The details on the Commission, its rules, and the induction ceremony were repeated verbatim in multiple memos. Scarpa was always paid “COD.” But he supplied enough tantalizing information over the years to more than justify the cash flow. Hundreds of additional airtels and 209 informant memos would be produced and sent to FBI headquarters from New York, and they continued off and on for twenty years after Hoover’s death in 1972. The airtels stopped only in 1975, when Scarpa was closed for five years, before resuming after he was officially reopened by Lin DeVecchio in the summer of 1980 and continuing until 1992.