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

by Peter Lance

  But the jury was never informed that during that streak of bloodshed, Scarpa was on the FBI’s payroll and had even received cash bonuses for the “intelligence” he provided. In short, the FBI had in its employ the principal perpetrator of the violent crimes now being prosecuted in federal court.

  As noted, Gleeson admitted to the jury in his rebuttal that on October 27, 1989, when Tommy Ocera and Diane Montesano were followed, “it probably” was “Greg Scarpa”29 who was stalking them in the Cadillac. Gleeson went on to say that Vic Orena “tried to get Greg Scarpa to kill [Ocera] . . . assuming it was Greg Scarpa, maybe it was someone else, but it failed.”30

  “So here we have one of the senior EDNY prosecutors admitting that Scarpa Sr. was likely involved in the murder plot,” said Vic Orena’s son Andrew. “What an amazing admission by the Feds.” What Gleeson never explained to the jury was why Vic Orena—Scarpa’s mortal enemy during the war—would ever contract with him to kill Ocera. Why would Little Vic ask Scarpa to stalk Ocera and Montesano the night they left the restaurant? Why would he put himself in the debt of Scarpa, a drug-dealing killer he’d had little to do with before 1989?

  Yet in Gleeson’s rebuttal the government was admitting that it was “probably” Scarpa who took the first pass on Tommy Ocera. And if he tried to kill him once, it’s fair to argue that he would have finished the job—providing the FBI with a perfect excuse for getting Vic Orena off the streets.

  The Isolated Jury

  Given the Feds’ willingness to link Greg Scarpa Sr. to the stalking of Tommy Ocera, one of the most compelling revelations from the Vic Orena trial is how they isolated the jury from any suggestion that the Killing Machine was a Top Echelon source.

  In recounting the war violence, AUSA George Stamboulidis told the jury, “On January seventh of 1992 . . . the Persicos kill Nicky Black.”31 Minutes later, he reiterated, after earlier testimony, that on “February twenty-sixth, Joe Waverly—Joel Cacace—was . . . shot and wounded.” To remind the jury that it was Vic Orena who was on trial, he added that Cacace “was an Orena faction member.”32 But Stamboulidis never let on what he should have known at the time: that both acts of violence were committed by Gregory Scarpa Sr., the man who effectively was the “Persico faction.”

  Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who was on the bench for both the Sessa and Orena trials, issued a number of rulings during Orena’s prosecution and motions for a new trial that seemed to favor the prosecution.33

  In the absence of any physical evidence linking him to Ocera’s murder, Vic Orena was convicted and sentenced to multiple life terms by Judge Weinstein—largely on the weight of hearsay evidence, which also sought to cast Orena as the lead protagonist in the war. The government’s star witnesses, Little Al D’Arco and Sammy the Bull Gravano, also testified about Orena’s alleged admissions regarding Ocera’s death, which were entirely hearsay—and each of them was later proven to be to be a liar. Further, the government’s theory that Orena killed Ocera as a favor to John Gotti was entirely discredited.34

  In 1997, lawyers for Vic Orena and Patty Amato petitioned for new trials in light of these revelations and the evidence that had surfaced since their convictions establishing Greg Scarpa Sr. as the primary instigator of the war. Judge Weinstein issued a 101-page decision rejecting those motions. Calling Orena and Amato “murderous criminals” who’d been convicted on “strong evidence,” he wrote:

  Attempting to transform a troubling cloud of questionable ethics and judgment enveloping an F.B.I. Special Agent into a raging storm of reasonable doubt, petitioner-defendants move for dismissal of their indictments or for new trials. . . . The claim is that the government violated its disclosure obligations under Brady v. Maryland, after engaging in and covering up outrageous government misconduct.35

  In that decision, Judge Weinstein acknowledged Orena’s claim that “Gravano’s testimony in another case, United States v. Stancell, 95 CR 503 (N.D.Ga.1996), constitutes newly discovered evidence that contradicts his and D’Arco’s testimony, as well as the government’s argument, at the Orena trial, that Orena’s primary motive to kill Ocera was to please Gotti by retaliating for Ocera’s murder of Greg Reiter.”

  Then he went further:

  During the Stancell proceedings and outside of the jury’s presence, Gravano testified that the Ocera homicide had no connection to Greg Reiter’s disappearance and murder. . . . Orena then points to another case, United States v. Brennan, 95 CR 941[,] . . . in which the government charged that defendant Robert Scott Brennan murdered Dennis Harrigan in retaliation for Harrigan’s murder of Greg Reiter. Harrigan was murdered on October 1, 1991. . . . Thus, Orena now argues that the facts of Brennan and Gravano’s Stancell testimony contradict the government’s theory of motive for the Ocera murder case against Orena. If the elder Reiter believed, so the argument goes, that Harrigan and Bright were responsible for Greg’s murder, then it makes no sense at all that Gotti believed that Ocera was responsible and communicated that to Orena. Further, Gravano’s testimony in Stancell indicates that a different motive existed.

  But having acknowledged all that, Judge Weinstein nevertheless concluded that “this argument misses the mark . . . the primary motive for the Ocera murder the government advanced at trial was Orena’s concern that Ocera allow his loan shark records to fall into the possession of law enforcement.” Weinstein then concluded that “Orena’s desire to ingratiate himself with Gotti was a subsidiary motive, not the principal one, as Orena now argues.”36

  The Prosecutor’s Emphasis on the Gotti Theory

  However, in that decision, Judge Weinstein, one of the smartest judges in the federal judiciary, seemed to overlook the emphasis that Assistant U.S. Attorneys Stamboulidis and Gleeson had placed on the testimony of D’Arco and Gravano in their closing arguments to the Orena jury. In his summation, which filled 150 pages of transcript, Stamboulidis cited D’Arco and Gravano or the Greg Reiter–Gotti theory on forty-four of those pages (nearly one out of every three), saying emphatically at one point, “Tommy Ocera had been murdered. The contract was fulfilled. Gotti got his favor.”37

  Further, in his rebuttal, AUSA Gleeson cited Gravano, D’Arco, or the Reiter murder motive in eleven out of forty-one pages (one in four)—reminding the jury of the pedigree of the government’s witnesses: “You heard the big shots from the other families, Al D’Arco, Sammy Gravano,” he said. “There are a lot of documents, a lot of physical evidence. I’m not going to go over all of them.”38

  So, while the Gotti “favor” theory may have represented a secondary motive, in Judge Weinstein’s view, it was certainly front and center in the hours before the jury got the case.

  Weinstein also rejected Orena’s argument that “since the completion of the trials, new evidence has emerged that bears upon the credibility of both Gravano and D’Arco.” He acknowledged Orena’s contention that “Gravano lied about the full extent of his prior criminal conduct,” including drug dealing and evidence in published reports that Sammy “the Bull” had engaged in two additional murders. Yet he dismissed this new information as “the evidentiary equivalent of a grain of sand on Jones Beach.”

  And when it came to the real “elephant in the room”—the fact that Lin DeVecchio had testified in detail about the war murders without informing the judge or jury that Greg Scarpa, the lead antagonist, was his asset—Weinstein minimized it, concluding, “On cross-examination, defense counsel offered no impeachment of DeVecchio regarding his truthfulness, bias or motive to obtain a conviction against Orena.”39

  But “how in God’s name,” asks Flora Edwards, “was Gus Newman supposed to attack Lin’s credibility when nobody outside of the Justice Department had a clue at the time of that trial that Lin was conspiring with his own CI?”40

  Now, as 1993 unfolded and more members of the Persico faction were arrested and agreed to cooperate, the details of Greg Scarpa’s extraordinary get-out-of-jail-free card with the Feds became increasingly apparent. It would prove to be a year of confl
ict between the FBI agents at 26 Federal Plaza, who were making the war arrests, and the prosecutors of the Eastern District in Brooklyn, who had to bring them to trial. Chris Favo, a Jesuit-trained Roman Catholic, was perhaps the most conflicted of all. The problem the Feds now faced was how to explain the hemorrhaging leaks that had occurred for years.

  Chapter 32

  EXPECTING TO GO HOME

  On January 19, 1993, after thirty-two months as a fugitive, Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, the acting underboss of the Lucchese family, was arrested in Mount Olive, New Jersey.1 James Fox, the FBI’s assistant director in charge in New York, called Casso “a psychopath whose name should be Mad Dog.” Federal prosecutor Greg O’Connell called him “the most dangerous, cunning, ruthless Mafia leader left on the streets,” and with Greg Scarpa Sr. finally behind bars, that may have been a fair assessment.2 Casso and Scarpa had worked together on countless scores over the years, and Gaspipe himself told me that he used intelligence provided by Greg to hunt down the shooters who had attacked him in 1986.3 Scarpa, he said, had actually handed him a file containing the names of the shooters—a file that he maintained came from Lin DeVecchio.

  On the day of his arrest, by Casso’s own account, he was taking a shower in his New Jersey hideaway when the Feds, clad in flak jackets and carrying machine guns, surrounded the house. They reportedly banged on the front door and shouted, “FBI! Come out with your hands up!”4 In Phil Carlo’s Gaspipe, Casso said that after the Feds kicked in the front door and stormed inside, he nonchalantly proceeded to get dressed in an upstairs bedroom while they shouted, “Anthony, give it up.”

  “I ain’t coming down until I’m dressed,” the hardened mob boss yelled back. So the fugitive arrest team rushed upstairs and cuffed him.

  As a measure of the kind of wealth Casso had amassed over the years, the FBI found $375,000 in that safe house, another $200,000 in a safe-deposit box that Anthony had hidden away to pay for his daughter Jolene’s wedding, and a third safe-deposit box containing half a million dollars in jewelry he’d bought for his wife, Lillian. When she heard that the house he’d been hiding in was owned by Rosemarie Billotti, a childhood girlfriend of Anthony’s, Lillian reportedly wouldn’t talk to him for months.5

  Casso himself was just as stone-faced with the Feds after they locked him up. Initially he refused to cooperate until they offered him the kind of deal he knew they’d given Sammy Gravano—five years for nineteen murders. Gaspipe was also well aware of the decades-long leniency the Justice Department had shown toward his good friend Greg Scarpa, and he expected no less if he was going to betray Cosa Nostra.

  Casso later concluded that it was his honesty about the extent of Gravano’s drug dealing that ultimately caused the Feds to renege on the plea bargain agreement they offered him. But in the hours following his arrest, as he was transported to the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), Gaspipe was confident.

  The first cell they put him in was on Eleven North, the same tier where Scarpa was being held. At that point, Casso had every reason to expect that if he cooperated, the Feds would reciprocate. After all, Scarpa was dying, and his usefulness to the government was diminishing. In fact, he could even become a liability with the Colombo war trials ahead if his special relationship with Lin DeVecchio was exposed. On the other hand, Casso was in bulldoglike health. He had a photographic memory. And the hard drive in his head held a treasure trove of Mafia secrets.

  Hospital Bed vs. Jail Cell

  On February 4, 1993, Greg Scarpa Sr. was indicted for the murders of Fusaro, Grancio, and Lampasi. He was also charged with murder conspiracy stemming from the war and with a probation violation for the tossed gun.6 Two weeks later, after being locked up as a result of his Bay Ridge shooting rampage, sixty-four-year-old Scarpa came before Judge Weinstein. Despite having broken house arrest, killing one person and causing the death of his son’s friend, he audaciously reapplied for bail. At the hearing, Weinstein noted that since returning to the MCC Scarpa had offered credible medical evidence that his condition had “seriously deteriorated.” Thus, despite his “proven dangerous propensities,” Weinstein ruled that Scarpa could spend the rest of his days incarcerated in a hospital bed within a medical ward as opposed to a jail cell.7

  Meanwhile, with its field general out of commission, the FBI started rolling up his various lieutenants. Larry Mazza had gone on the lam in June after Scarpa tipped off him and Jimmy Del Masto to their indictments, but on February 9 he was arrested in Florida. He soon agreed to cooperate with the Feds and convinced Del Masto to surrender.8

  On April 4, Palm Sunday, Carmine Sessa, who’d been at large since July, was arrested while attending a secret meeting outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Chris Favo later told the OPR agents that as soon as the cuffs were placed on Sessa, Lin DeVecchio, who was present for the bust, “stated that he had to give Jerry Capeci a call so he could send a photographer over.”9 Once the arrestees were taken away, Favo was so concerned about DeVecchio’s comment that he called Joe Valiquette, who was then the Bureau’s public information officer in New York.

  Reached at home, according to Favo’s OPR 302, “Valiquette stated that Capeci would be out of town that week and was unlikely to contact him about the arrest.”10 Still, the incident pointed out Lin’s apparent devotion to Capeci, whose weekly “Gang Land” column in the Daily News, according to Favo, benefited from DeVecchio’s leaks.11

  In that same 302, Favo told the investigating agents, “Throughout the course of the war, important investigative information was disclosed in Jerry Capeci’s weekly column. . . . On several occasions SSA DeVecchio approached me or another agent with a specific question about the investigation of the war or the Colombo family and our answer to the question appeared in Capeci’s column the following day with an attribution to a law enforcement source or federal law enforcement source.”12

  During the first three days after his Palm Sunday arrest, as Carmine Sessa was being debriefed by Special Agent Jeffrey Tomlinson, Lin DeVecchio repeatedly came in to speak with the consigliere of the Persico faction. In his sworn statement to OPR investigators, Tomlinson later stated that he found this “rather unusual,” since he was in charge of the debriefings. “Up to that point,” he confessed, “SSA DeVecchio had been somewhat removed from the investigations and did not generally take such a high profile.”13

  Tomlinson stated that Sessa told him “he thought it was unusual that SSA DeVecchio spent so much time in the first three days after he was arrested, talking to him, and that Sessa got suspicious that SSA DeVecchio might be Scarpa Sr.’s law enforcement source.”14

  But in light of what we’ve uncovered in this investigation, DeVecchio’s renewed attention to the war probe makes sense. After all, Carmine Sessa had been Greg Scarpa’s surrogate in the conflict. He was now confessing to Tomlinson that he committed thirteen murders and that “Scarpa Sr. was involved in seven or eight of those homicides.”15 More important, as Tomlinson related in his sworn OPR affidavit, “at least two or three of the killings were done because Scarpa Sr. had told Sessa that the victim was going to cooperate or was cooperating with law enforcement authorities.”16

  Among Sessa’s extraordinary revelations was the story of how, back in the 1980s, he had found what appeared to be a bug in a pay phone inside the Wimpy Boys club, and Scarpa had dismissed the news, telling Sessa, “It was not a bug and don’t worry about it.”* Later, when a private investigator confirmed that it was in fact a listening device, Sessa was “confused” as to why Greg didn’t want to pursue the issue. This, said Carmine, made him “suspicious that Scarpa [might] be cooperating with law enforcement.”17

  Sessa also reported that his wife had picked up phone calls at Scarpa’s house while he was hospitalized, and that the caller had identified himself as “Mr. Dello.”† That caused Sessa to conclude that DeVecchio was Greg’s law enforcement source.18 Another revelation from Sessa during his debriefings was that “Scarpa Sr. had access to tele
phone numbers, subscriber information and license plate registrations which he got from his law enforcement source.”

  Later in that same sworn statement, Special Agent Tomlinson admitted that, after Ambrosino’s June 1992 arrest, when the FBI confirmed Scarpa’s role in the murder of Nicholas Grancio, with corroboration from Carmine Imbriale, “he couldn’t understand why . . . the source [Scarpa Sr.] would continue to be operated.”19

  On April 23, 1993, Greg Scarpa Sr. pled guilty to the weapons charge in Brooklyn Supreme Court. As part of a deal with the DA, in which he agreed to accept a guilty plea to federal racketeering charges, the tossed-gun charge—a felony—was reduced to a misdemeanor, and Scarpa was sentenced to a year in a Rikers Island hospital bed.20

  In an apparent bid to counter critics who might complain about leniency for the killer, a DA’s spokesperson said that Scarpa was “not expected to survive the year.”

  By 1993 Scarpa was down from 220 pounds to 160

  (Associated Press)

  On May 6, Scarpa came before Judge Weinstein, who was on the bench during the Vic Orena trial six months earlier when federal prosecutor John Gleeson admitted that Greg had “probably” been the one stalking Tommy Ocera and Diane Montesano.

  At this point Weinstein had no idea of the depth of Scarpa’s involvement in the war—but he listened as the FBI’s star informant admitted to the murders of Fusaro, Grancio, and Lampasi. AUSA George Stamboulidis, who was present, had a much fuller picture of Scarpa’s role in the war violence, but since homicide was a state crime, “34” was allowed to plead guilty to racketeering charges.