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

by Peter Lance

  The fact that these arrests were made by this particular team of detectives is hugely significant in the overall story of the Scarpa-DeVecchio scandal, because, as we’ll see, the Feds later falsely accused Joe Simone of leaking key intelligence to the mob—a ploy some defense attorneys believed was designed to take the heat off Lin DeVecchio. But more immediately, Simone and Maggiore would play major roles in the next significant incident in the war—Greg Scarpa’s murder of Nicholas Grancio. It took place on January 7, the same day SSA DeVecchio filed that 209 on the DeMartino arrest.

  The Cop from Gravesend

  Joe Simone was born in the Italian neighborhood near West Sixth Street and Stillwell Avenue in Brooklyn known as Gravesend—a name that seemed fitting when it became the site of many of the homicides during the third Colombo war. After spending the first part of his childhood there, Simone’s parents moved him to Flatbush at the age of six—another Brooklyn neighborhood where the Mafia was well entrenched.

  “We lived on a block where you were either a cop or a fireman or you got made,” he told me in the first of a series of interviews.7 And it was during his teenage years that Joe was first approached to make that third choice. It came at a time when his family was in dire financial straits. His father had just died, and Joe’s mother was about to lose their house. “There was a guy name Louie who lived across the street,” he remembered. “He says, ‘All you have to do for me is drive and you can make seventeen thousand dollars a year.’ That was real money back then. But when I told my mother, she gave me a crack across the face and said, ‘Don’t get involved with those people.’”

  Joe’s uncle was a first-grade detective with the NYPD. So after passing the entrance exam, Simone became a uniformed patrolman, beginning his career as a beat cop in the Seventieth Precinct. He later distinguished himself in the Seven-O’s Anti-Crime Unit, collaring arsonists, rapists, and murderers.8 After years in Manhattan South Narcotics he finally earned his gold detective’s shield,9 eventually joining the elite OCID unit—an NYPD-FBI task force designed to partner street-hardened cops like Simone and Maggiore with inexperienced FBI agents from around the country.

  Simone’s immediate boss was Chris Favo, DeVecchio’s number two. An Italian American Notre Dame graduate with a law degree, Favo came to New York, according to Simone, with little or no sense of the street.

  “I helped to educate him,” he said. “Chris knew that I knew a lot of wiseguys. One time he came up to me and he had a picture. He says, ‘Do you know this guy?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, that’s Bobby Attanasio.’ He asks me, ‘How do you know him?’ And I say, ‘His kid and mine played touch football together.’ At the time, [Attanasio] was a soldier in the Bonanno family. His brother was a capo. Another time, Favo shows me a picture—‘Who’s this guy?’ I say, ‘Joey Ida. He lives about eight blocks away from me. He’s Jimmy’s brother.’ Then Favo asks me, ‘Is he a made guy?’ I say, ‘Yeah. His brother’s a [Genovese] capo and he ended up being a street boss.’ Now he’s doing three life sentences. I knew these guys and they knew me,” Simone recalled. “They knew what side of the street I walked on. There was an association, but I never crossed the line.”

  Once, when his mother was in the hospital, one of Bill Cutolo’s associates asked if there was anything his captain could do. “I said, ‘Thanks. No. Just prayers,’” said Simone. “The next day this kid from a florist came with a basket maybe four feet wide and three feet high with a card, ‘Best wishes to your mom,’ signed ‘Billy Cutolo and friends.’ And my mother, who was as honest as the Virgin Mary, said, kidding, ‘I hope I don’t find a horse’s head under my bed.’

  “The Colombo people knew I was a cop, but they just felt more comfortable telling me things because I was a neighborhood guy and knew how they operated. There’s no way they would have trusted some agent from the Midwest just ‘cause he was Italian.”

  And it wasn’t simply a matter of trust. Simone and Maggiore had extraordinary operational skills. Once, during a tour of Bensonhurst and Gravesend, Simone showed me the exact spot where he and his partner had followed Vincent DeMartino.

  “Chickie gets out of his car and he walks over to these two guys jimmying the Caddy,” Simone recalled. “So Pat and I jump out, flip out our shields, and say, ‘Stop! Police.’ We order them to bend over, hands on the car. One guy’s kissing the trunk. The other two have their hands on the hood. We catch them in the act, so we search them and right off we find the guns. If it had been the Bureau they wouldn’t even have approached them without a half dozen guys with machine guns and vests.”

  So at the height of the war, as the violence increased, the FBI used OCID detectives like Simone and Maggiore to follow Colombo members with two goals in mind: arrest anybody who was “strapped,” and protect those who weren’t from gunfire. One of the Orena captains they were assigned to follow was Nicky Grancio. Next to Wild Bill Cutolo, Nicky Black, named for the dark circles under his eyes, was the capo who posed the biggest threat to Greg Scarpa.

  On the afternoon of Tuesday, January 7, the two detectives were in a white FBI-issued Nissan Maxima, tailing Grancio, who was behind the wheel of a new Toyota Land Cruiser. Sitting next to Grancio was his nephew Joey Tolino, whom Scarpa had wounded a month earlier in the shootout that killed Tommy Scars Amato. At twelve forty-five P.M., Grancio and Tolino rolled up to a social club run by Alphonse “Funzi” D’Ambrosio, another capo loyal to Vic Orena. The location was near the intersection of McDonald Avenue and Avenue U in Joe’s old neighborhood of Gravesend.10

  “We had him under observation from two angles,” Simone told me. “Pat and I were watching him from our car and up above in an apartment overlooking the club the Bureau had what we called a ‘perch’ known as Plant 26. There was a camera and recording equipment up there manned by a couple of agents. We knew the heat was on Nicky, so we were keeping him under virtual round-the-clock surveillance.”

  Simone’s Daily Activity Report (DAR) from that date confirms that he and Maggiore sat on Grancio until 13:30, or 1:30 P.M. At that point the two detectives got what Simone later described as a “strange call.”11

  Daily Activity Report, Det. Joe Simone, Tuesday, January 7, 1992

  “Out of the clear blue,” said Joe, “Favo calls and tells us all to come back to Federal Plaza for a team meeting. Now, this is unusual, since it’s two in the afternoon and we normally meet at the end of the day.”12 As outlined in Simone’s DAR, reproduced here, he and Maggiore and the FBI surveillance team withdrew and headed back to 26 Federal Plaza for the meeting with Favo, which lasted from 14:00 to 16:00 (2:00 to 4:00 P.M.).

  What happened next would be widely disputed over time. What is certain is that, sometime after the FBI agents and the two detectives had withdrawn, Greg Scarpa Sr., who had been trolling the streets of Brooklyn, passed by in a rented mid-size blue sedan driven by Jimmy Del Masto.13 Scarpa was in the shotgun seat with the M1 carbine he’d used to kill Fusaro. Larry Mazza was in the back with a twelve-gauge double-barrel riot-control shotgun. According to details Mazza gave reporter Brad Hamilton for a New York Post story, the sedan was tricked out like a police surveillance vehicle.

  “We had a big walkie-talkie and coffee cups in the window and a blue police siren,” Mazza recalled.14

  Mazza, who is now fifty-two, later testified that they had been “driving around different areas where we thought we can find some . . . Orena faction people.”15 Driving past the club, they spotted a car belonging to Funzi D’Ambrosio, another Orena capo and thus a potential target. “So we went around the block,” said Mazza, and “parked in a position where we can watch the club [and] see when he would come out.”16

  At some point, Mazza said, he “spotted Nicky Black’s truck.” When he pointed it out, Scarpa said, “Let’s get him.” At that point, said Mazza, “Jimmy started driving. As we got toward the corner, Grancio pulled away.” He made a left on Avenue U, so they followed the Land Cruiser as Grancio drove around a small triangle of land known in the neighborhood as
Billy Grove Square. Just then, Grancio pulled over and Anthony Bianco, a twenty-six-year-old Colombo associate, came out of the club. Bianco walked toward the Toyota, said Mazza, and leaned on the driver’s side to talk with Grancio and Tolino.

  In an interview with me, Mazza said that Scarpa “got one shot off and then the clip fell out [of the M1].”17 So Mazza rolled down the window and brandished the riot gun, which they’d stolen from a police car in Lakewood, New Jersey, near Scarpa’s farm.

  “I was close enough I could have smacked him,” he said. “I aimed right behind his ear.” Mazza says the blast caused Grancio’s nose to hit the windshield.18 Nicky Black was killed instantly. Bianco was wounded and rushed to Coney Island Hospital. Tolino later told Simone that “he ended up with brain matter all over him.” “We even recovered one of Nicky’s teeth from the wall of a house fifteen feet away,” Simone told me. “It was gruesome.”

  Simone and Maggiore were still in their meeting at 26 Federal Plaza when they got word that the man they’d been trying to protect earlier was now dead. They rushed back to the scene and caught up with Tolino at a nearby precinct, where he admonished them for pulling back the surveillance.

  Nicholas Grancio after the murder

  (New York Daily News)

  “He said to me, ‘Man, you guys were following us all this time and all of a sudden you disappear and they whack Nicky,’” said Simone. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him at the time that we got pulled back for a team meeting in the Ivory Tower at 26 Federal.”

  Simone insists that it was “highly unusual to have a meeting like that at midday on a Tuesday. Usually we had them on Fridays,” he said. So why was surveillance withdrawn from Grancio at that particular time? Could the withdrawal have had anything to do with Greg Scarpa’s “law enforcement source”?

  Mazza ended up pleading guilty to the Grancio murder and two other war-related homicides committed with Scarpa. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. In 2002, after getting paroled, Mazza met defense attorney Flora Edwards at a Hilton hotel in Orlando, Florida, near where he was living. According to Edwards, Mazza told her that after Scarpa first spotted Grancio outside the club that day, he became concerned about the police surveillance.

  “They wanted to kill Grancio,” she said, “but they couldn’t get a clear shot at him because the cops were all over him.” Then, said Edwards, “Scarpa Sr. borrowed Mazza’s cell phone and called somebody named ‘Del.’ He said, ‘What the fuck is going on here? The whole world’s here. Do something.’”19

  Mazza’s Conflicting Accounts

  In May 2003, Mazza was interviewed by the late Dr. Stephen Dresch, a Michigan-based PhD who was working at the time with forensic investigator Angela Clemente. The two of them were probing the Scarpa-DeVecchio relationship with the hope of presenting their findings to a congressional committee. In 2004, on the twelfth anniversary of Grancio’s death, Dresch appeared at a hearing for Vic Orena. On the stand under oath, Dresch said that when he met with Mazza in Plantation, Florida, in 2003, Mazza told him that on January 7, 1992, after locating Grancio, whom he and Scarpa intended to “eliminate,” they “observed that he was under surveillance.”

  According to Dresch, Mazza went on to say that “Mr. Scarpa became upset and immediately called . . . his law enforcement source [and] essentially . . . demanded the surveillance team be withdrawn from the location.”20 Mazza and Scarpa then “returned to the scene, discovered that the surveillance had been terminated and they proceeded to terminate Mr. Grancio.” In other words, according to Dresch, Mazza told him that the van made two passes at the Land Cruiser that day: one before the law enforcement surveillance was removed and one after, when the fatal shot was fired.

  But Mazza himself also testified at that same hearing, before Judge Jack B. Weinstein, and his account of the murder conflicted with what Dresch said he’d told him. First, Mazza stated that he “didn’t notice any surveillance on Nicky Grancio that day.”21 Second, while he admitted that Scarpa had made “phone calls,” he agreed with a federal prosecutor that “from the moment [he] first saw Mr. Grancio ’til the moment he was killed, there was no time to make any phone calls.”22

  In 2008, after Nicky Black Grancio’s widow, Maria, filed a wrongful death suit against Lin DeVecchio and Chris Favo, a federal judge dismissed it, largely because of Mazza’s testimony at that 2004 hearing.23 “Mrs. Grancio’s claims hinge on Mazza,” Judge Frederic Block wrote.24 In granting the government’s motion for summary judgment, Block noted that both DeVecchio and Favo “concede that Simone and Maggiore left their post at Favo’s request. They deny however that the request was part of a murder conspiracy with Scarpa.”

  In a sworn affidavit submitted in conjunction with the lawsuit, DeVecchio insisted that he never “receive[d] a telephone call, or any other form of communication from Gregory Scarpa Sr. in which [he was asked] to remove or terminate any surveillance of Nicholas Grancio.”25 Favo submitted a similar affidavit in which he stated that “DeVecchio did not ask [him] at any time to undertake any effort to terminate any surveillance on January 7, 1992.”26

  Interestingly, however, Favo insisted that neither Simone nor Maggiore had told him “that it was important to maintain surveillance on Grancio . . . or that they had Grancio under surveillance to protect him or to prevent his murder.”27

  “If nothing else, that last point suggests gross incompetence,” says Flora Edwards, whose motion seeking a new trial for Vic Orena had prompted that 2004 hearing. “By January 7, 1992, there were five previous homicides and a half dozen casualties in the war,” she said in an interview. “Joey Tolino himself told Detective Simone how he’d expected the Feds to protect him. So it strains belief for Favo to suggest that he didn’t think Nicky was in danger.”28

  Further, in his order dismissing the Grancio case, Judge Block cited a Daily News article by Greg B. Smith and Jerry Capeci from October 30, 1994. Under the headline “Mob, Mole & Murder,” the piece reported:

  On January 7, 1992, Scarpa met again with DeVecchio. Later that day, he [Scarpa] executed Nicholas (Nicky Black) Grancio in Gravesend. “This one’s for Carmine!” Scarpa shouted as he shot off his rival’s face.

  DeVecchio’s 209 of January 7, on the killing of Hank Smurra and Sam Nastasi, proves that DeVecchio met Scarpa that day,29 and the account by Smith and Capeci appears to be credible. How would they know of Lin’s meeting with “34” on that date? Because, according to the account of Chris Favo during DeVecchio’s OPR, Lin regularly discussed Colombo Squad details with Jerry Capeci.30

  “Greg Smith interviewed me in 2003,” said Andrew Orena, “and he told me that during the war Lin spoke to Capeci almost every day. So if Capeci was reporting that Lin DeVecchio had met Scarpa prior to the Grancio hit, how is it possible that Lin, Favo’s supervisor, and Favo himself didn’t sense that Grancio might be in danger?”31

  But the most authoritative evidence that the Feds were fully aware of the danger to Nicky Black surfaced at the trial of William Cutolo in October 1994. During those proceedings, the government actually admitted that, on the day before Grancio was shot, a New York State detective named Matthew Higgins, who was assigned to the joint OCID, “tried to warn . . . Mr. Grancio . . . about information that [he] might be the target of a murder conspiracy.”32

  And that raises the question of why Lin DeVecchio and the agents under him didn’t monitor Greg Scarpa’s movements more closely. In that December 1991 “Kitchen 302,” DeVecchio had recounted the following warning:

  Despite his position, SCARPA was advised that his actions would be closely monitored by law enforcement, and was warned about his potential liability of being on federal probation.

  Since he was still on probation for the 1986 credit card case, the Feds had a lot of leverage with Scarpa—or they should have. Even if they perceived that Grancio, one of his chief rivals, wasn’t in jeopardy, why not keep the Grim Reaper on a shorter leash?

  And there are other questions: Why, in his 2004 hearing
, did Larry Mazza seem to dial back on what he reportedly told Flora Edwards and Dr. Stephen Dresch in May 2003? Edwards insists Mazza was telling the truth the first time, but that he later got worried about the consequences. “I’m afraid of the FBI,” she says he told her later. “They’re gonna trump something up. I’m gonna end up back in jail if I’m lucky, and if I’m not lucky, they’ll kill me.”33 And, in a sworn affidavit submitted for the Grancio lawsuit, Mazza did claim that on the day of Grancio’s murder Scarpa “made multiple calls to a person whom he addressed as Lin.”34

  After initially assuming that “Lin” referred to Linda Schiro, Mazza went on to state that he “now believe[d] that ‘Lin’ could have been Lindley DeVecchio.”35 In petitioning Judge Block not to dismiss the case before he could undertake discovery, Mrs. Grancio’s lawyer, David Schoen, argued that they could get to the truth of what happened by obtaining “all phone records related to Scarpa’s calls to DeVecchio.” Flora Edwards insists, “If we could have gotten a look at the cell records of Larry Mazza’s sister, whose phone Scarpa used to call this person ‘Lin,’ we’d know for sure if the Feds had acted to withdraw that surveillance.”

  But citing that phone record request, among others, Judge Block concluded that “Mrs. Grancio’s counsel has failed to articulate how the discovery sought could be expected to create a genuine issue of material fact, other than a conclusory assertion . . . support[ing] an inference that DeVecchio and Favo acted improperly.”36 He also declared that Dresch’s testimony at the 2004 hearing and a subsequent declaration by Flora Edwards were “inadmissible hearsay.”37

  What Did Lin Know?

  And when did he know it? Those Watergate questions take us back to the issue of foreseeability. By January 7, 1992, given the amount of violence directed at both sides in the war, should DeVecchio’s deputy Chris Favo have pulled the plug on all surveillance covering Nicky Black? Keep in mind that, in addition to Simone and Maggiore, several FBI agents watching from Plant 26 overlooking D’Ambrosio’s social club were also called back to headquarters. Was it really necessary to bring them all back for a team meeting? That one act by Favo had the undeniable consequence of leaving Nicky Black fully exposed. Shouldn’t Favo and his boss, DeVecchio, have foreseen the danger Grancio would face if his entire surveillance detail was removed?