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

by Peter Lance

  The evidence presented thus far in this book demonstrates that Lin DeVecchio went to extraordinary lengths to keep the Killing Machine out of jail. Now, as 1992 came to a close, even while locked down on house arrest, “34” continued his shooting rampage.

  The Shootout in Bay Ridge

  Despite his prediction in August that he’d be dead by Christmas, by December Greg Scarpa was very much alive. But he was feeling the tension of wearing that ankle bracelet. Until his arrest, Scarpa had roamed the streets of Brooklyn as though he had a license to kill. Every time his family had been threatened—from Donny Somma’s criticism of Greg Jr. during the 1980 bank robbery to the shots fired outside his house that purportedly threatened his daughter and grandson in 1991—Scarpa had reacted violently.

  Now his cloak of invincibility was deteriorating. Even the Feds who’d protected him were now conspiring behind his back—or at least that’s what he came to believe, as AIDS-related dementia began to affect him. His daughter Little Linda later confessed to an interviewer that the prospect of her father’s vulnerability terrified her.

  “Now I know that my father is not invincible and neither are we. We’re open game in that life. Nobody is protected. Even though they’re in the same Family they don’t care. They kill each other.”26

  Four nights after Christmas, her brother Joey came home with a friend, twenty-one-year-old Joseph Randazzo, and told his father that he’d been insulted by a group of local drug dealers. One of them was an alleged crack seller named Ronald “Messy Marvin” Moran.27

  Suddenly, the Grim Reaper erupted. “He was yelling and screaming,” Linda remembered. “‘These people think I’m sleeping?’” she recalled him saying. “‘They think they can pull a gun on my son?’ My father went wild.”

  At that point, despite his ankle bracelet, Scarpa grabbed a gun, bolted from the house, and ordered Joey and Randazzo to get in his car. He drove around the block until his son spotted Moran, and then Scarpa started shooting, chasing them with the car as Moran and another dealer returned shots. It was another open gun battle on the streets of Brooklyn. A total of sixteen rounds were fired by both sides.28 Lin DeVecchio later claimed that Scarpa killed Moran’s partner.

  Messy Marvin later testified that he “had no bullets left in the gun. I was trying to . . . run in the house and he [Scarpa] was waving his gun around, shooting it.” But one of Moran’s shots had struck Randazzo, who was in Scarpa’s backseat. Another shot had struck Scarpa in the face, taking out his left eye. As he pulled the car to the curb, Joey bolted in a panic and took off. Remarkably, Scarpa got out, bleeding, and staggered home.

  Joey Scarpa

  (Polaris)

  “I looked at him and I went ‘Oh my God,’” Little Linda said. “I thought I was going to faint. . . . My father had AIDS and he didn’t want me to touch him. . . . So now I’m saying to myself, ‘Oh my God where’s my brother?’ So I ran out to the car and my brother’s not there. But his friend’s in the back, covered in blood. I was talking to him the whole time, trying to tell him help is on the way. I was in shock.”

  An ambulance was soon called. But before it arrived, Scarpa sat down in the house and patted his eye socket with a towel. He then downed a Scotch and was driven to the hospital by Larry Mazza.29 Randazzo, who was taken in the ambulance, died two days later. Moran pled guilty to the murder in 1997.

  As a measure of his devotion to Scarpa, Lin DeVecchio describes that incident with admiration in his book, claiming that during the gun battle Scarpa had evened the score:

  On December 29, 1992 . . . Scarpa’s son Joey Schiro came home complaining about two rival drug dealers in the neighborhood who were encroaching and showing no respect for the Scarpa name. Greg Scarpa grabbed his gun and found the two dealers. A gun battle ensued. Scarpa killed one of them, but had his own eye shot out. Before he went to the hospital, he returned home and had a glass of Scotch. Come on, loosen up, you’ve got to admire the man.

  That last line speaks volumes about how Lin DeVecchio seemed to regard Scarpa’s death toll. Just a week earlier, in part because of DeVecchio’s expert witness testimony, Vic Orena had been convicted not just of the Tommy Ocera murder but of racketeering and propagating the Colombo war—a conflict that Greg Scarpa, not Orena, fomented and waged. By the time that trial took place, agents like Chris Favo could no longer ignore the role the Bureau’s star informant had played in the violence. Scarpa would soon plead guilty to three of the murders—Fusaro, Grancio, and Lampasi—and Mazza would plead to a fourth (Amato).

  But it would be another year before Favo, Tomlinson, and Leadbetter could muster the courage to blow the whistle on their boss. The central question the OPR investigators would explore was whether Lin DeVecchio had intentionally aided and abetted Scarpa’s rampage. The head of the FBI’s New York Office would exert intense pressure to speed up the investigation, because of the ongoing embarrassment it brought to the office and the threat it posed to the Feds’ many ongoing war cases.30

  But based on the evidence uncovered in this investigation, one thing is clear: Whether or not it was the result of negligence on Lin’s part, from 1980 to 1992 twenty-six people were killed directly by Scarpa, or by members of his crew at Scarpa’s direction. More than half of the homicides Greg admitted to, before telling Larry Mazza he’d “stopped counting,” occurred on the watch of SSA Roy Lindley DeVecchio, the man known in the media as “Mr. Organized Crime.”31

  Eventually, with his own agents coming forward to blow the whistle, the harsh light of scrutiny would be shed on Lin DeVecchio himself. But before that happened, a series of FBI agents and supervisors, working in conjunction with federal prosecutors, would go to extreme lengths to contain the potential damage.

  PART IV

  Chapter 31

  A GRAIN OF SAND ON JONES BEACH

  By March 1997, nearly six years after Carmine Sessa’s murder crew rolled up on Vic Orena—whose ambition, the Feds insisted, had triggered the war—seventy-five members of the Colombo family had been prosecuted.1 As a measure of culpability in the conflict, forty of them were members of the so-called Persico faction. Literally the entire anti-Orena faction, from Greg Scarpa Sr. on down, was indicted, versus about thirty-five from Vic Orena’s side, which had triple the number of members and associates at the time of the hostilities.2 As noted, as late as 2001, Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who presided over many of the top cases, acknowledged that if the Scarpa-DeVecchio scandal continued to fester, many of those “war” prosecutions would “unravel.”3

  Judge Jack B. Weinstein

  In the early fall of 1992, as the Feds were prepping the first Colombo war prosecution—the murder and racketeering trial of Carmine Sessa’s younger brother Michael—a number of FBI agents in the New York Office knew that Greg Scarpa had played a significant role in the violence. At the same time, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn knew that evidence had surfaced as far back as 1987 that “34” had a law enforcement source. By late February 1992, Special Agent Chris Favo suspected that Scarpa was getting intelligence from Favo’s own boss, Lin DeVecchio.4 Later, Favo’s colleague Special Agent Howard Leadbetter II said he “began to believe that it was possible that SSA DeVecchio was attempting to interfere with or otherwise stall the development of the [Scarpa] investigation.”5

  But that fall, as EDNY prosecutors geared up to try the younger Sessa and Vic Orena, no one outside the Justice Department had any inkling of that—particularly the defense lawyers.

  Under the doctrine expressed in the landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision Brady v. Maryland,6 each of the accused had a constitutional right to receive any “material” exculpatory evidence that could help their defense.7 Chief among that evidence would be proof that would allow the defense to impeach the credibility of a prosecution witness, and since Lin DeVecchio would testify for the government in both the Sessa and Orena trials, word of his alleged “unholy alliance” with Scarpa was arguably “material.”

  But when it came to the metastasizing Sc
arpa-DeVecchio scandal, none of that “Brady evidence” was forthcoming from the Feds.

  “The idea that DeVecchio, a senior supervisory special agent in the New York Office who was running two squads, had been feeding intelligence to this killer who had then acted upon it would have been hugely exculpatory,” argues Ellen Resnick, who later defended Vic Orena Jr. and represented his father on appeal. “But at that time, throughout the fall of 1992 and well into 1993, we didn’t even get a whiff of that from the government.”8 Moreover, as Flora Edwards, who represented Vic Orena, insists, “the Feds didn’t just withhold that information. Lin DeVecchio actually got on the stand in the Michael Sessa trial and misrepresented what he had done to protect Scarpa Sr.”9

  On November 2, 1992, DeVecchio testified as an expert witness for the government in United States v. Michael Sessa, the first Colombo war prosecution. Charged with racketeering and the murder of Anthony “Bird” Collucio, a loan shark and member of his crew, the younger Sessa was convicted largely on the testimony of Joseph Ambrosino, who had eagerly become a government witness after flipping in June.10

  As previously noted, during Sessa’s trial, Lin DeVecchio was cross-examined by defense attorney Gavin Scotti, and he pointedly denied having helped a confidential informant like Scarpa.* But five years later, Gerry Shargel got DeVecchio to admit under oath that, in fact, he had intervened so that “34” could be released on bail. When Shargel suggested that DeVecchio had lied during his Sessa testimony, the former SSA shot back that he “resent[ed]” the accusation.11

  Why is the issue of DeVecchio’s veracity so important at this juncture? Because if the jury had concluded that he’d lied, that might have made the difference between a verdict of guilt and one of innocence for Michael Sessa. During his summation, Assistant U.S. Attorney George Stamboulidis told the jurors emphatically: “If you believe any agent testifying lied for a second, if you even entertain that thought, come right back, let [Sessa] go.”12 Since Sessa was convicted and sentenced to life—with his jury clueless about the Scarpa-DeVecchio relationship—it’s relevant to ask whether George Stamboulidis should have known that DeVecchio wasn’t telling the truth when he denied intervening to help a confidential informant like Scarpa.

  Consider the evidence uncovered in this investigation:

  On March 31, 1992, several days before ASAC North ordered Scarpa closed, NYPD detectives Brogan and Willoughly, from the OCID Task Force, spotted Scarpa tossing a loaded handgun out of a moving vehicle. Since “34” was on parole in the credit card case, this was a violation that could have resulted in his immediate arrest. But Chris Favo later admitted under oath that “out of concern that the NYPD would force the FBI to arrest Scarpa for the gun,” he called Stamboulidis at that time “and informed him that Scarpa was a source.”13

  Now, with respect to Stamboulidis’s level of awareness at the time of the Sessa trial, consider this verbatim account of what he later told investigators during DeVecchio’s OPR inquiry. It was written in the third person by FBI investigators:

  STAMBOULIDES [sic] stated that he was told that the police were going to arrest SCARPA on a gun charge. STAMBOULIDIS stated that he told DEVECCHIO to let SCARPA get arrested and that based on the way DEVECCHIO described the situation and the possibility of revealing the identity of SCARPA as a source, that the state had a weak case. . . . STAMBOULIDES [sic] stated that he felt that SCARPA had called in a panic concerning the gun case. . . .14 STAMBOULI DES [sic] stated that he did not trust DEVECCHIO not to tell SCARPA. . . . STAMBOULIDES [sic] stated that he subsequently had contact with DEVECCHIO regarding the indictment of SCARPA, and he was advised by DEVECCHIO that SCARPA was more valuable on the street than in jail and that he had gotten calls from DEVECCHIO attempting to let SCARPA out on bail.15*

  That 302 documenting what Stamboulidis told FBI agents probing DeVecchio during the OPR in September 1994 is prima facie evidence that, before Stamboulidis’s summation to the jury in the 1992 Michael Sessa case, he knew that Lin DeVecchio had misrepresented to attorney Scotti at that trial that he had never intervened to keep a confidential informant on the street. In fact, Stamboulidis knew that DeVecchio had intervened directly—and had even gone so far as to seek the attorney’s advice on how to free Scarpa following his indictment on the NYPD’s gun charge.

  But later, at trial, Stamboulidis told the jury with a straight face that if they believed that any of the agents testifying had “lied for a second,” they should acquit Michael Sessa.

  When the jury came back, not only did they convict Sessa, but Judge Weinstein threw the book at him, sentencing him to two life terms plus an additional sixty years and fining him $2 million.16 Although this was a murder conviction, it was in strong contrast to the wrist-slap Scarpa got in his 1987 credit card case: probation and a $10,000 fine, instead of the maximum seven-year prison term and $250,000 fine provided by law.17

  “By the fall of 1992, the Feds faced a serious dilemma,” says Flora Edwards, echoing an argument she later made before Judge Weinstein. “They had all these war cases to prosecute, and they knew, or had reason to know, that the principal instigator of the violence was their own informant. But they routinely misrepresented the full truth to juries. As a direct result, defendants like Michael Sessa and Vic Orena Sr. were convicted. You have to ask, where was Chris Favo and his band of agents back then? They were so concerned about the leaks in January 1994 that they blew the whistle on Lin, but beginning with the war trials in 1993, despite their misgivings about their boss DeVecchio dating back a year, these same agents began testifying for the government and they never even hinted at the alleged corrupt relationship between Scarpa Sr. and his contacting agent DeVecchio.”18

  “The record before the Court reveals a systematic government effort to bury every detail about Scarpa’s informant status and his corrupt relationship with a supervisory special agent of the FBI.”19 That was the argument made by defense lawyer Gus Newman, in his 1996 motion asking for a new trial for Vic Orena.

  But three years earlier, when he represented Vic Orena at trial, Newman had no idea about that alleged corruption when he cross-examined Lin DeVecchio, even though the Feds were obligated to disclose it under Brady rules. In his appeal brief, filed on January 16, 1996, Newman pointed out that

  DeVecchio well knew prior to the instant [Orena] prosecution all that Scarpa, [Carmine] Sessa and Mazza had done to incite and perpetuate the so-called war and all that he had done, for the previous ten years, to protect, assist and encourage Scarpa in his criminal activities. As the Supervisor for C-10, with the authority (which he exercised) to steer the investigation away from Scarpa, he personally influenced the direction of the investigation and the course of events which were ascribed to the “Colombo War.”20

  Newman also emphasized how much Chris Favo knew about Scarpa’s violence by the start of Vic Orena’s trial:

  He knew that Scarpa was an informant for the FBI whose handler was DeVecchio. He knew from Imbriale and Ambrosino that Scarpa had committed more violence than any other individual associated with the so-called “war.” He knew the content of the 209 reports in Scarpa’s file and had already concluded that the FBI was “duped” by Scarpa’s purported assistance. Finally, he knew by this time that his supervisor, Lindley DeVecchio, had been compromised—so compromised, in fact, that Favo withheld all information about Scarpa from him after May 1992.

  By his own admission, the pieces had fallen together for Favo long before Mr. Orena’s trial. Favo had witnessed: the disclosure to Scarpa of Imbriale’s cooperation; DeVecchio’s assistance to Scarpa in finding his loan shark victims and in protecting Mazza and Del Masto while fugitives during the war; DeVecchio’s glee at learning that Lampasi was killed and his statement that he and Scarpa were “winning”; DeVecchio’s order halting any further arrests after the Point Pleasant (NJ) incident for fear that Scarpa might be apprehended; and his opposition to the federal complaint and arrest of Scarpa on August 31, 1992.

  And Favo admitted t
hat his failure to report DeVecchio was not due to his uncertainty about DeVecchio’s mishandling of Scarpa but, rather, his fear that DeVecchio’s stature within the FBI meant that Favo would not be believed. Yet, Favo was so certain of DeVecchio’s corrupt relationship with Scarpa that he could not report him for fear that Scarpa would be told and would flee. Favo continued to withhold information about what he knew for more than a year after Mr. Orena’s trial had concluded.21

  In his summation at Vic Orena’s trial, Newman had argued to the jury that “there’s no credible, direct evidence of Mr. Orena conspiring with anyone to kill [Tommy] Ocera . . . from any credible, believable source. There’s no direct proof from a credible, believable source that Mr. Orena conspired with anybody to do anything to anybody from this so-called Persico faction.”22

  But the jurors who eyed the table full of guns—most of which came from the missing plastic bag found under the porch—were never told of Greg Scarpa Jr.’s sworn allegation that the six handguns were planted by his brother under the watchful eye of his father and Lin DeVecchio.23 “They weren’t told,” says Newman, “because we didn’t know those facts at the time of trial.”24

  Lin DeVecchio was the lead-off witness at that trial. He drew on his twenty-five years of FBI expertise to detail the war violence for the jury.25 But the jurors had no inkling that Greg Scarpa Sr. had stayed out of jail for years and was literally free to instigate and wage the war from 1991 to 1992 because DeVecchio had gone to bat for him in the 1986 credit card case.26 They had no clue that the address of Orena’s girlfriend’s Queens apartment, which was passed to Scarpa in January 1992, may have come from DeVecchio.27

  For the jury’s edification, the government prepared a huge chart tracking the war violence. Across the bottom of the chart was a series of red boxes, each one marking one of the war deaths. Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gleeson later admitted that Scarpa, “an accomplished killer,” was “responsible for half of the red boxes on the bottom of the war chart.”28