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

by Peter Lance

  Later, Farace’s cousin Dominick confessed that Gus had told him, “If the Colonel is bad, I’ll do what I gotta do. Nobody is putting me back in fucking jail.” It’s doubtful that Hatcher would have gone through with the meeting if he’d known he’d been made as a possible informant, and it’s clear that he had no knowledge of Farace’s racially motivated manslaughter conviction. Retired DEA Special Agent Mike Levine, who spoke to Hatcher just hours before the killing, told me that “Everett was completely unaware that Farace had done time for the murder of another black man. If he’d known that, he would have been on hyper-alert.”8

  “A Flurry of Mistakes”

  On the night of the meeting, which Farace set with Hatcher for nine P.M., Gus came armed with a stainless steel, snub-nosed Ruger Security Six .357 Magnum. In order to maintain his cover, Hatcher locked his machine gun, badge, and DEA credentials in the trunk of the Buick Regal he was driving and stashed his Glock in the glove compartment. Farace had selected a deserted overpass above Staten Island’s Route 440 on Bloomingdale Road, an area that gave the three DEA backup units no chance for line-of-sight surveillance.9 Hatcher’s only protection was a T-4 voice transmitter, which had failed during an earlier meeting with Farace.

  After the backup team took up positions near the overpass, the first unit, which included FBI supervisor Miller and DEA supervisor Claudia Pietras, reportedly saw the tan-colored van Farace was driving as it approached the meeting point. But they soon lost sight of the van as it pulled up behind Hatcher’s Buick. Meanwhile, DEA agents Larry Hornstein and Wade Baldwin, a twenty-two-year-old rookie, waited nearby in a Mercury Cougar. A fifth agent, Tom King, was also nearby. But none of them had “eyes on” the rendezvous point. All they could make out on the faulty T-4 were parts of a conversation suggesting that the two vehicles were moving to another location, which sounded like “a diner or a restaurant.” The team caught sight of the van as Hatcher followed but reportedly lost it at an intersection.

  As Stutman tells it, “What had begun as a routine meeting between Hatcher and a drug dealer had now collapsed amid a flurry of mistakes. . . . The backup team was out of position, the equipment had failed and the undercover agent had moved when he was expected to stay in one place. It didn’t help that the meeting had been held against a backdrop of friction between Hatcher and the FBI Supervisor on the case.”10

  An hour later, when the two units finally doubled back to the overpass, they found Hatcher sitting in his car at the original location. The Buick was in drive, but the agent’s left foot was pressed against the brake. He’d been shot dead with four heavy-caliber rounds from Farace’s .357 Magnum. One had struck him in the eye, another in the left ear.

  Within days, a five-hundred-man task force was set up to find Farace, including four hundred agents from the DEA’s New York Office and another hundred FBI agents from 26 Federal Plaza. They fanned out in a manhunt that spread across fifteen states and extended to the Cayman Islands. Hatcher was the first DEA agent killed in New York since 1972, but in the previous six months since the drug war had escalated, three other agents had been wounded.

  The brutal murder of the gentle, bearlike Hatcher was the last straw.

  The Feds launched an immediate crackdown on organized crime, with raids on social clubs and bookie joints that yielded two dozen arrests. President George H. W. Bush even made a special trip to New York to console Hatcher’s widow, and Stutman purportedly visited the home of John Gotti in a failed attempt to enlist his help in the manhunt.11

  It took another nine and a half months to catch Farace, but the “justice” that was done had little to do with anyone in official law enforcement. In fact, Farace was gunned down Mafia style. Although Stutman’s book links Gerry Chilli to the death, the evidence uncovered in this investigation suggests that one prime suspect should have been Greg Scarpa Sr.

  One of the “Bad Boys”

  To appreciate just how close Gus Farace was to Scarpa, you have to consider the family ties that bound them. Gus was the nephew of Connie Forrest, Scarpa’s first and only legal wife. She lived on a horse farm near Lakewood, New Jersey, where two of her sons by Greg trained as sulky drivers.12 That farm was one of the places the joint DEA-FBI task force searched for Farace, but unbeknownst to them, he’d been hidden by Gerry Chilli’s daughter Babe Scarpa, the widow of Alfred Scarpa, another relative on Greg’s side who’d been gunned down a year earlier.13

  The other co-conspirator in Hatcher’s murder, present in the van on the night of the shooting, was Gus’s cousin Dominick, the son of Frank Farace. Even though he was on Connie’s side of the family, Frank was so close to Gregory and his son that he was living with them at 1064 Fifty-Eighth Street in Brooklyn in October 1969 when the three of them got arrested in the J&B whiskey hijacking.14 Interestingly, when he testified about that bust during his second racketeering trial in 1998, Greg Scarpa Jr. mentioned most of those seized during the $70,000 theft, but left his uncle Frank out of it.15 Junior was then facing his second set of federal charges in a decade, and his cousin Gus, the mad-dog killer of a hero drug agent, wasn’t a family member he wanted to claim.

  Still, Farace’s ties to the Scarpas, father and son, were very close.

  By 1979, Gus had become a regular member of the Wimpy Boys Bypass crew. Carmine Sessa included him as one of the burglars in the break-in of the Dime Savings Bank that resulted in the sudden rubout of Big Donny Somma.16 But Gus had even closer ties to the Wimpy Boys crew. His cousin was Mark Granato, the brother of Kevin, who was indicted in the DEA bust with Greg Jr. in 1987. Kevin was one of the Wimpy Boys crew members who had dug the grave for Cosmo Catanzano.

  Billy Meli, another member of the crew, later told FBI agents that, after his release from prison in 1981, he was introduced to Greg Scarpa Jr. by Kevin Granato and Gus Farace, who “used to hang out at a bar called On the Rocks” that Scarpa and his son owned on Staten Island.17

  Two years before that, on October 8, 1979, Gus Farace, Mark Granato, and two other young Italian bullies who called themselves the “Bad Boys” had participated in a notorious gay-bashing rampage. They kidnapped two black teenagers at a club in Greenwich Village, then drove the terrified teens, ages sixteen and seventeen, to Wolfe’s Pond Park on Staten Island, where they spent hours beating them. After reportedly forcing one of the boys to perform oral sex on one of the gang members, Farace clubbed him with a piece of driftwood, then shot him to death. The second victim jumped into the pond and escaped. Based on his testimony, Farace was later convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to seven to twenty-one years.18 He’d been paroled for just over eight months when he fired the fatal shots into Hatcher.

  In two expansive articles on Everett Hatcher’s murder written for New York magazine, journalist Eric Pooley offered extraordinary details on the manhunt for Farace. Gus hid out in various safe houses on Staten Island; in Brewster, New York; and finally in an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. While on the lam, he got money and resources from relatives and friends via a secret system of “mail” drops. Pooley and Stutman each describe the DEA’s efforts to turn Chilli against Gus, but it’s also clear that Farace had been abandoned by his uncle Greg Scarpa Sr. almost from the moment he fired on Hatcher.

  “Like a Jungle Out There”

  On March 4, just days after the shooting, Scarpa did something almost unheard of for a mob capo: He granted an interview to the New York Daily News in which he denounced his fugitive nephew. After first being outed as Farace’s uncle by the Daily News’s David J. Krajicek,19 Scarpa spoke to the crime reporter by phone. He told Krajicek that his family was no longer close to Farace. They hadn’t even attended his recent wedding or his father’s funeral. Calling Gus “a nothing; a nobody,” Scarpa made it clear that, in killing a federal agent, Farace had crossed the line.20

  “I feel that this type of thing shouldn’t be,” he said, likely worried that his own son, recently sentenced in the 1987 DEA case, might be punished further by being sent to a federal pri
son far from New York.21

  “They could put him in Alaska, for Christ’s sake,” Scarpa told Krajicek, who gives an account of the unprecedented interview in his 2012 book, Gotti and Me: A Crime Reporter’s Close Encounters with the New York Mafia.22

  During their brief talk, Scarpa, one of the most bloodthirsty criminals in Cosa Nostra history, came off sounding like a dyed-in-the-wool Republican: “Once you start killing law enforcement people, it’ll be like a jungle out there,” he told Krajicek. “These people [like Hatcher] are there to keep law and order. Once you take law and order away, we become uncivilized people, behaving like animals. We need law and order, bottom line.” Scarpa summarily disowned Farace in the interview. “My son wants nothing to do with him,” he said. “You put the two of them in a room together, only one’s going to walk out.”23

  Within days of Hatcher’s murder, Gus Farace was added to the Bureau’s Ten Most Wanted List. And yet, despite the fact that one hundred agents in the NYO were tracking Farace and their number one TE informant had publicly condemned him, the two references to the Hatcher killing in Lin DeVecchio’s 209s during this period were cryptic and heavily redacted.

  Last Name Unknown

  The first reference came in a 209 dated March 13, 1989, almost two weeks after the bloody shooting. We’re reproducing the relevant section of DeVecchio’s report in the figures here and on the next page to illustrate that the FBI redacted virtually every key name in the document released, making it difficult, if not impossible, for any outside investigator to determine whether Scarpa admitted any of his own direct connections to Farace during his debriefings.

  The designation “LNU” stands for “Last Name Unknown.” The next page of that 209 underscores just how close Scarpa was to Farace at the time, because when the memo was written, Greg had already learned that Farace suspected Hatcher of being a snitch. That was a detail he could have learned only from Farace himself, his cousin Dominick, or someone very close to them.24

  (Peter Lance)

  (Peter Lance)

  In his book, however, DEA chief Stutman downplays the full significance of the Scarpa-Farace connection. He writes that Gus was tied to a “loosely linked network of young thugs who called themselves the Wimpy Boys,” apparently not realizing that the network was tightly controlled by Scarpa Sr.25

  Their drug “business was a shambles,” he writes, “and most of the ring’s members were in prison.”26 But he somehow doesn’t mention the fact that the actual ringleader (Senior) was not only free but prospering, having beaten the Secret Service credit card case with the help of Lin DeVecchio.

  Stutman does note that “for two days after the murder [government] raiders interrogated every Wimpy Boy connected with Farace.” But was Scarpa interviewed by any agent besides DeVecchio? We don’t know. Stutman also writes that “all telephones connected to Farace’s associates were placed under electronic surveillance.” But he never tells us whether anybody at 26 Federal Plaza actually traced Scarpa’s calls, even though the killer regularly phoned the FBI’s NYO via what was known as the “Hello” line located in the C-10 squad on the twenty-second floor.27 That was the Colombo family squad then run by Lin DeVecchio.

  Chapter 20

  A CONNECTION BY BLOOD

  In examining who was actually behind the rubout of Gus Farace, former New York DEA chief Robert Stutman does not name Greg Scarpa Sr. as a suspect and seriously underestimates his capabilities. Dismissing the Scarpas as a threat, he writes, “The father was ailing, his power almost gone; his son’s influence limited by a jail cell.”1 Considering that within two years Senior would be the principal antagonist in the third war for control of the Colombo family, wiping out as many as six rivals himself, the idea that his power had diminished, as Stutman suggests, seems naïve.

  Since he had no idea that Greg Sr. was an informant for the FBI, Stutman fails to appreciate the help “34” might have been in locating Gus. Instead he insists that the break in the case came from Gerry Chilli. “We . . . returned to pressuring a small network of people very close to Gerry Chilli,” Stutman writes. “‘We want Gus,’ we told them.”2 Stutman then claims that one of the Chilli associates who buckled under DEA pressure was Frank Farace, Dominick’s father. But the former DEA chief seems unaware of the fact that Frank was so close to the Scarpas that he’d actually lived in their house and he’d been arrested with Senior and Junior in the J&B hijacking.3 David Krajicek had already revealed that link in his Daily News piece.4

  Still, Stutman insists that Chilli was the precipitating force in Gus Farace’s demise, writing that “Frank Farace reached out for Gus’s mailman Louis Tuzzio,” who “caved in and decided to deliver Farace to the mob.”5

  But the Colombo associate who ferried Gus to Tuzzio was none other than Joseph Scalfani, a childhood friend of Farace’s who ran the Narrows Bar & Grill on Staten Island. On the night of November 18, 1989, Gus, now with a heavy beard, was holed up in his Upper East Side safe house watching The Godfather on video when Tuzzio, twenty-five, called him to a meeting at his mother’s house on Eighteenth Avenue and Eighty-First Street in Brooklyn.6

  Scalfani picked him up, and as they arrived at the house in Bensonhurst, a light blue van rolled up next to them. Not even suspecting he was being set up, Gus rolled down the window. Suddenly a hail of gunfire erupted, striking Farace multiple times. Scalfani was also hit, but he slid out the passenger door and escaped. A total of sixteen rounds from .380 and nine-millimeter pistols were fired. The ox-like Farace, who was struck in the face, neck, abdomen, buttocks, and pelvis, took eleven rounds and died on the way to the hospital.

  Farace after the hit

  In January 1990, Tuzzio was shot to death. Seven years later, two men described by prosecutors as associates of the Lucchese family pled guilty to Farace’s murder. The Feds claimed that at the time of the killing they were working on the orders of Anthony Spero, then a boss in Gerry Chilli’s Bonanno family.7 In 2001, Spero was convicted in Tuzzio’s death.8

  In his book, Stutman celebrates the Mafia “justice” that was done in this case. “Federal agents are not supposed to applaud mob executions,” he writes, “but I was glad he was dead. He didn’t deserve a trial.”9 Many law enforcers might have agreed with him, but despite the links to the Bonanno family in Farace’s rubout, Stutman, the highest-ranking DEA official in New York at the time, ignores the possibility that the puppet master Greg Scarpa Sr. may have been involved.

  The Grim Reaper’s MO

  Not only had Scarpa, a close relative of Farace’s and his boss in the Wimpy Boys crew, taken the unprecedented step of denouncing him publicly, but his son Greg Jr., whom Senior had killed for in the past, was in jeopardy in the prison system as long as Farace remained at large. Shooting from a van was a technique Scarpa used repeatedly during the 1991–1993 war. And there was an even closer link to Greg Sr. that Stutman seemed to miss: In the transcripts of his lawsuit against Victory Hospital, Scarpa had testified that the man who ended up chauffeuring Gus to his death had been one of the few associates he’d trusted to donate blood during his 1986 transfusion: Joseph Scalfani.10

  Scalfani survived the shooting and went on to become an associate of the Gambino family. He ended up carrying on the Wimpy Boys tradition by allegedly running a major marijuana and cocaine distribution ring out of Staten Island. As recently as August 11, 2011, Scalfani was arrested by DEA agents.11

  As to Scarpa’s links to Gus Farace’s murder, it should be noted that Frank Farace demonstrated much more loyalty to Greg Sr. than he showed to Bonanno capo Gerry Chilli. Not only was Frank proposed for membership in the Colombos in June 1991, but during the war he became an active soldier in the Persico faction, run by Scarpa Sr.12

  With respect to Anthony Spero’s involvement in Farace’s murder, that doesn’t rule out Scarpa as a co-conspirator. During Lin DeVecchio’s trial, Carmine Sessa, the former consigliere of the family, admitted that he’d used his contacts in a photo-processing store to provide Spero with
surveillance photos the Brooklyn DA’s office was getting developed.13

  In that instance, the contact was Joey Ambrosino, another member of Scarpa’s Wimpy Boys crew.14 So, just as with Anthony Casso and the Lucchese family, Greg Sr. was willing to facilitate interfamily business when it suited his interests.

  In my communiqués with Casso, he told me that after Hatcher’s murder “Greg told Farace to go into hiding.”15 And there was one other factor that might have motivated the Grim Reaper to take a direct role in Farace’s death. According to what Carmine Sessa told FBI agents after he became a cooperating witness, Gus Farace was an eyewitness to Scarpa’s murder of Dominick Somma in August 1980—the first murder we know of that was committed by “34” after he was reopened by Lin DeVecchio. What would have happened if Gus had been taken alive by DEA agents and flipped? Would he have given up his uncle Greg to save himself?

  I asked Little Linda Schiro if she thought her father had played a role in Farace’s killing. She said it was a distinct possibility. “I wouldn’t put it past my father,” she said, “particularly considering how close Gus was to the Granato brothers and how that murder [of DEA agent Hatcher] could have really hurt Junior in jail.”16

  And what did Greg Sr. himself have to say on the matter? When David Krajicek asked him whether he’d ordered the hit on his nephew, the reporter recalled, “He was quiet for a moment before finally saying, ‘Next question.’”17

  Why Didn’t “34” Do More?

  Lin DeVecchio referred to the Hatcher murder in only one other 209. That report, again heavily redacted, was dated January 30, 1990, ten weeks after Farace’s death: