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

by Peter Lance

  As an indication of how seriously Washington reacted to the murder, President Lyndon Johnson sent a telegram of condolence to the Dahmer family and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach issued a statement vowing to devote “the full resources of the Justice Department to catching the perpetrators.”15

  “Once again, there were no leads,” says Judge Dillard.16 Eleven days after the firebombing, the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division contacted the New York Office and dispatched Scarpa to Jackson, Mississippi, for what was referred to in an airtel as “a special.”17

  Again he abducted a Klan member and used violent means to extract a confession. But this time, according to Judge Dillard, he was directly “aided and abetted” in the kidnapping by an FBI agent. The Bureau memo to the assistant director requesting Scarpa’s help also asked for “enough money to cover [informant’s] expenses for hotel room and transportation for the SA, plus two individuals,” indicating that Scarpa and Schiro were accompanied by an agent from New York.18

  The FBI’s preliminary investigation led to a Klan captain named Lawrence Byrd, who owned an appliance store called Byrd’s Radio and TV Service in nearby Laurel, Mississippi. As Judge Dillard recounts in his book Clear Burning: Civil Rights, Civil Wrongs, Scarpa and another man, “wearing wigs,” arrived at the appliance store just before closing on January 26, 1966.19

  “Scarpa and this agent bought a TV set from Lawrence,” says Dillard. “They said they were going to pull around back and asked if he could bring it out to their car. When he came out they grabbed him, threw a blanket over him, and shoved him in the vehicle.”20 At that point, says Dillard, they drove to Camp Shelby, a military base in nearby Hattiesburg, where the interrogation took place. There, according to Dillard, who later interviewed Byrd in the Jones County Hospital, Scarpa proceeded to “beat him within an inch of his life. . . . They threatened to string him up and leave him out there naked in the winter, where the animals could get at him,” says the judge.21

  “Lawrence was a tough guy—a big, raw-boned country boy—but he was beat up so bad he was never the same after that,” Dillard told writer Fredric Dannen.22 In fact, an FBI 302 memo dated February 2, 1966, suggests that Byrd was so terrified that he refused to reveal the details to the FBI agents who later questioned him, stating only that he had been the victim of “an armed robbery by unknown persons.” The memo insisted that Byrd was “still in a state of semi-shock.”23

  On March 2, 1966, Byrd signed a twenty-two-page confession to his participation in the Dahmer firebombing, implicating himself and seven other Klansmen.24 Linda Schiro later testified that Greg “got the guy from the Ku Klux Klan . . . to admit that he was [the] one who burnt that house down.”25

  Men from Two Secret Societies

  In 1998, Samuel K. Bowers, the imperial wizard of a Mississippi KKK faction, was found guilty in the Dahmer firebombing murder.26 The FBI later attributed nine murders and three hundred beatings, arsons, and bombings to Bowers’s klavern, or local unit, of the Ku Klux Klan’s White Knights. He had previously served six years for the Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney killings, which were executed by the same Klan cell. Edgar Ray Killen, who was the actual ringleader in the MISSBURN murders, escaped conviction in 1967 after an all-white jury deadlocked. But in 2005, when new evidence was developed,27 he was found guilty of manslaughter. At the age of eighty,28 Killen was sentenced to sixty years in prison.29

  Then, in February 2009, Killen filed suit against the FBI, arguing that his civil rights had been violated—because of the Bureau’s use of Gregory Scarpa Sr., a Mafia killer, in solving the Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney kidnap-murders.30

  “The information that Scarpa obtained by use of torture violates Killen’s civil rights . . . [his] right to due process [and] the right to confront witnesses,” his lawyer said.

  One former DEA special agent, Mike Levine, was astonished by Hoover’s decision to enlist a known Mafia strongman to further the cause of justice. “Here the FBI uses a member of a violent secret society—La Cosa Nostra—to travel down to Mississippi on multiple missions to torture confessions out of two guys who were also members of a violent secret society—the Klan. Since when does the federal government have to stoop to levels like that to make cases? This was during the same era when the CIA was trying to get mob guys to kill Castro.” As Levine notes, such behavior on the Feds’ part was roundly denounced during congressional hearings in the 1970s,31 and the popular assumption was that it stopped. “But the fact that the Bureau continued to use a multiple murderer like Scarpa right up into the early 1990s,” says Levine, “just proves that it didn’t.”32

  Anthony Villano, Scarpa’s control agent from 1967 to 1973, also disapproved. In his 1977 memoir, Brick Agent, Villano wrote, “When I heard the story [about Mississippi] and confirmed it was [Scarpa] I was ashamed that the people I worked for had to go outside the Bureau to find someone to perform their dirty work. An agent could have done what [Scarpa] did, but using him, of course, reduced the potential for scandal about the behavior of agents on the job.”33

  Conflicting Accounts

  At least three published descriptions of Scarpa’s work for the FBI in Mississippi commingle the 1964 MISSBURN and 1966 Dahmer interrogations into one mission. In Mafia Son, a 2009 biography of Scarpa’s son Gregory Jr., author Sandra Harmon writes that in 1964, after receiving the gun from the FBI agent in the Mississippi hotel, “Greg Sr. drove a rented car to a small appliance store owned by a Klansman named Byrd.”34 In Harmon’s account, Scarpa drove “south for several hours” tailed by “a second car filled with federal agents”; rather than Camp Shelby, she gives the location of Byrd’s interrogation as “a lonely country cabin tucked deep in the Mississippi woods.”

  Supplying what purports to be actual dialogue from the incident, Harmon then mixes details from Scarpa’s interrogation of the KKK mayor from the MISSBURN case and appliance store owner Byrd from the Dahmer case. She even furnishes details, purportedly from Byrd’s mouth, about the abduction of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney—an incident that took place eighteen months earlier.

  Jerry Capeci, a respected reporter on organized crime whose “Gang Land” column appeared for many years in the New York Daily News and the New York Sun, is credited with being the first reporter to break the Scarpa connection to the MISSBURN story in that June 21, 1994, Daily News article he wrote with Tom Robbins.35 But in a subsequent column published in the Sun on January 12, 2006, Capeci also combines details of Scarpa’s involvement in the Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney investigation with the mobster’s subsequent role in the Vernon Dahmer murder.36

  In that Sun column, Capeci writes that Scarpa was flown to Miami in the 1964 MISSBURN case before he went to Mississippi, then cites details that could only have occurred in 1966 in connection with the Dahmer firebombing investigation, which involved TV and appliance dealer Lawrence Byrd: “Scarpa stopped at his store,” writes Capeci, “said he was new in town, and put down a deposit on a television set. He promised to pick it up by closing time. When he returned, he got the merchant to help him carry the TV to his car, slapped him over the head with a pipe, tied him up, and threw him in the trunk of the car. He drove to a prearranged location, a shanty deep among tall loblolly pines where FBI agents were hidden outside.”

  Like Sandra Harmon in Mafia Son, Capeci includes verbatim dialogue that purports to be from Scarpa’s interrogation of Byrd: “What happened to the three kids?” he has Scarpa saying, adding the line he included in his 1994 story with Robbins: “Tell me the f——ing truth or I’ll blow your f——ing brains out.”

  Similarly, in a January 17, 2006, piece for the Village Voice, where he worked after leaving the Daily News, Robbins writes in reference to the MISSBURN incident that Scarpa “walked into a Philadelphia appliance shop owned by a Klan-tied merchant whom the FBI believed knew the fate of the missing civil rights workers. Scarpa convinced the man he had just come to town and wanted a new TV set. But when he returned to pick it up that evening, he
slugged the merchant, tossed him in the trunk of a car, and drove him to a remote spot where bureau agents were standing guard.”37

  What makes Robbins’s combination of the 1964 and 1966 Scarpa missions interesting is the fact that in his Village Voice piece he actually cites the January 21, 1966, FBI memo on Scarpa’s recruitment in the Dahmer case. “An agent is seeking permission to use Scarpa ‘on a special’ again in Mississippi,” writes Robbins—proof that he knew of two missions, not just the one he and Capeci reported on in 1994—the MISSBURN initiative that they confused with the Dahmer case.

  These mistakes by Robbins and Capeci are worth noting because it was an interview they did with Linda Schiro in 1997 that led to the dramatic dismissal of murder charges against Scarpa’s fourth major FBI contacting agent, Lin DeVecchio, in 2007. We’ll examine the details of that case later.

  But whatever conflicts may exist in published accounts of Scarpa’s story, one thing is clear: He was a ruthless gangster with little regard for human life and we can now say with certainty that J. Edgar Hoover himself understood that. Nonetheless, the Director continued to encourage the Bureau’s use of “34” as an informant.

  Testifying in 1986 before the President’s Commission on Organized Crime, Marty Light, one of Scarpa’s former lawyers, reflected: “Greg was the type of guy who would arrange to have dinner with you. He would laugh, make jokes, ask about your family and then when dessert came, he would just whack you right on the spot.”38 Years later, Scarpa crew member Joseph Ambrosino was asked at trial why they called his boss the Grim Reaper. “He was crazy,” Ambrosino replied. “He killed a lot. He was nuts.”39

  Chapter 5

  SINATRA, CAPOTE, AND THE ANIMAL

  As Greg Scarpa continued receiving those cash payments of $125 a month from the FBI, the special agents who debriefed him continually emphasized his unique benefit and future potential in their airtels to Hoover.

  June 6, 1963: CI has furnished information of great value to the Criminal Intelligence Program and possesses a tremendous potential to fully penetrate the NY Italian underworld.1

  By September 1964, Scarpa was regularly informing Hoover on the movements of Joe Colombo, the boss of his crime family, who operated out of Cantalupo Realty on Eighty-Sixth Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn.2 On September 21, Scarpa told a story that must have intrigued Hoover, who had made frequent use of illegal electronic surveillance over the years:

  September 21, 1964: On 9/17 informant advised that he had gone to Cantalupo Realty to see JOE COLOMBO and that . . . upon entering the office he observed a telephone repairman and two police officers. He stated that he subsequently ascertained that in the early morning hours, a neighbor had observed individuals running wires from the office . . . and reported this to COLOMBO. . . . COLOMBO followed the wire to the telephone poles and down the street to a tool shed on the Dyker Beach Golf Course where they located an unmanned tape recorder.

  The airtel makes no mention of whether the ELSUR was supplied by the Bureau, but at that point President Johnson’s ban on wiretaps was still in effect, and the jerry-rigged nature of the job suggests it was too unsophisticated for Hoover. Besides, with Scarpa on the inside of the family, Hoover had a source capable of giving him much more than any tape recorder in a shed. And, as time passed, the informant did.

  In November 1965, Scarpa reported on a kind of mini-Mafia summit involving the heads of two of New York’s families, Joe Colombo and Carlo Gambino, along with Raymond Patriarca, who controlled the underworld in New England. Scarpa’s presence at the dinner, held at the Bonaparte Restaurant in Brooklyn, underscored his own standing in the family.

  November 3, 1965: Informant . . . advised that on 9/22/65 he met with RAYMOND PATRIARCA, JOSEPH COLOMBO, CARLO GAMBINO and COLOMBO “family” members CHARLE S. MINEO, VINCENT ALOI [and] JOHN FRANZESE.3

  Playing Hard to Get

  By the fall of 1966, the FBI had paid Gregory Scarpa nearly $17,000 since he’d been reopened in 1961, the equivalent of more than $121,000 in 2013 dollars.4 Up to that point he had dealt with only two contacting agents working out of the FBI’s New York Office. The names of the agents are unknown outside the Bureau, redacted even in the newly released airtels chronicling the New York SAC’s reports to Hoover.

  In March 1965, one of those agents was transferred. By April, when the other agent was sent to Chicago, Scarpa refused to meet with anyone else.5

  After the second agent left, the Bureau attempted to contact Scarpa seven times through a secret prearranged method, but he never responded. In a memo to Hoover on July 29, 1967, the New York SAC noted that “after the transfer of the original agents who developed informant, he strongly endeavored to discontinue his relationship with the Bureau.”

  July 29, 1967: Informant point[ed] out the fact that he had lived in constant fear of discovery and considers himself extremely lucky in escaping detection. He said that if he were “found out” not only would he himself have been killed, but more importantly his relatives and family would have had to endure the resulting shame.6

  The NYO went so far as to call back one of the two prior contacting agents7 to reach out to the reluctant CI. At that point, realizing that the Bureau was desperate to get him back, Scarpa played for sympathy, complaining that he owed the IRS $1,400 and New York State another $400, in back taxes.8 For a gangster who carried $5,000 in his pocket while executing jewelry, bullion, and securities thefts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, Scarpa was clearly guilty of tax evasion. But the Bureau, hungry to reestablish him as source, seemed uninterested in informing the IRS.

  “It would have taken one phone call back in 1967 for his contacting agents to pull his tax returns and determine if he really did owe that $1,800,” says former agent Dan Vogel. “But that might have produced confirmation that he was lying to them.”9

  In any case, characterizing Scarpa as “invaluable to [the FBI’s] intelligence operation in New York,” James H. Gale, the Bureau’s assistant director, made a direct appeal to Cartha DeLoach, the deputy director, then the number three man under Hoover.10 In a memo from August 4, 1967, Scarpa is described as having “identified over 200 members of the LCN in [the] New York and New Jersey area.”

  August 4, 1967: His services cannot be duplicated by any other source currently furnishing information to the New York Office. It is believed [to be] in the Bureau’s best interests to make every effort to insure that the informant is an active and productive source regarding LCN activity. Approval of the request of the NYO should enable the Bureau to receive maximum benefit from the services of this source. ACTION: It is recommended that the attached teletype be forwarded to the NYO authorizing the lump-sum payment of .

  Gale’s appeal was sent just after Scarpa was reinstated as a Top Echelon informant. By late July 1967, the Bureau decided that his new contacting agent would be Anthony Villano, also known as Tony or Nino.11

  Villano, a Brooklyn-born Italian American,12 claimed to have “developed more members of organized crime as sources of information than anyone else in the FBI.”13 In his 1977 memoir, Brick Agent, he would describe his relationship with Scarpa as a “marriage.” From 1967 until his retirement in 1973, Villano went to extraordinary lengths to protect Scarpa from arrest or prosecution. But he was constantly aware that interacting with the Mafia killer was like playing with explosives.

  “I had to reassure myself,” he wrote, “that our relationship was not the ultimate perversion of the whole law enforcement idea.”14

  Scarpa had met with his previous handlers once or twice a month, but in an August 25, 1967, airtel, Villano noted, “Arrangements have now been perfected whereby informant will be contacted at a discreet location in various hotels in the NY area on a weekly basis.”15

  Using a kind of carrot-and-stick incentive with the FBI, Scarpa suggested (per the memo) that “if adequately compensated, he would subtly express interest in being elevated to the position of ‘caporegima’ [sic] within the COLOMBO ‘family.’”16 (Apparen
tly Villano hadn’t read the airtels of Scarpa’s initial briefings, which listed him as a capo five years earlier.) But to frost the cake with a little name-dropping, the airtel, quoting Scarpa, noted, “He continues to be well liked by JOSEPH COLOMBO, especially inasmuch as they are presently partners in informant’s numbers operation.”

  “That line right there should have been a warning to Villano,” says former DEA Special Agent Mike Levine. “A wiseguy who’s a mere soldier below the captain level is not going to be in partnership with the boss or even talking to him. Scarpa clearly had access to Joe Colombo, but he was jacking up the Bureau for more funds and they were so glad to have him back that nobody was asking any hard questions at the time.”17

  In Villano’s memoir, he claims that the real reason Scarpa withdrew from the Bureau was over a debt the killer felt the Bureau owed him.18

  Using two composite characters (“Julio” and “Nick Biletti”) to represent Scarpa,19 Villano writes that when he first approached Scarpa, the former CI was miffed that the FBI had welched on paying his expenses for the Lawrence Byrd–Vernon Dahmer mission.20

  “My expenses came to about twenty-three hundred,” said Scarpa to Villano, “and that covers . . . the car rentals, motels and meals for the four days I took off. I beat that creep [Byrd] out of eight hundred, so all I want is the rest of what I laid out, fifteen hundred.” When Villano made that clear to the SAC, Washington was immediately contacted and “a lump sum payment of $1,500” was quickly approved.21