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

by Peter Lance

  It would take another full year, but on June 13, 2008, Craig Sobel was finally found not guilty in the shooting of Dominick Masseria. Calling it “the last of the DeVecchio debacle,” Sobel’s lawyer Bruce Barket commented on all three of the cases in the Brooklyn DA’s March 2006 indictment: “They were all flawed and this one was the weakest,” he said.36

  By June 2007, with Hynes’s office on the ropes, Greg Scarpa Jr. was shaping up as the DA’s best hope to bolster the testimony of central witness Linda Schiro in the upcoming main event: Lin DeVecchio’s prosecution, which was now set for early fall. In a “Gang Land” column published in the New York Sun, Jerry Capeci reported that “prosecutors plan to use . . . Scarpa Jr., to back up their key prosecution witness . . . Linda Schiro—regarding two mob rubouts the son was involved in before he was incarcerated in 1988.”

  Predicting that Greg Jr. would come clean on his alleged involvement in the murders of Mary Bari and Joe Brewster, Capeci wrote that “prosecutors have decided that [Junior’s] intimate knowledge of his father’s dealings with Mr. DeVecchio far outweighs the heavy baggage that he will carry with him to the witness stand.”37

  The Feds Move a Terrorist

  As if the Kings County DA’s office wasn’t facing enough problems, the judicial scales seemed to tip even further against it when the U.S. Department of Justice made two moves that seemed to benefit DeVecchio’s defense.

  In March 2007, I discovered that Abdul Hakim Murad, sentenced to life for the 1995 Bojinka plot to smuggle bombs onto U.S. airliners, was moved by the Bureau of Prisons (a division of Justice) to a jail cell in Lower Manhattan next to Greg Scarpa Jr., who was awaiting his chance to testify against DeVecchio. Family members and lawyers close to the case feared that the move may have endangered Junior, since he’d helped the FBI get so much evidence on Murad and Ramzi Yousef in his mid-1990s sting.

  Convicted al-Qaeda terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad

  At the Brooklyn DA’s request, Greg Jr. was flown to the MCC on December 6, 2006. Then, four months later, for unexplained reasons, the Bureau of Prisons inmate locator showed Murad also in residence there.38 What would be the possible motive for the Federal government to move a convicted terrorist like Abdul Hakim Murad out of the security of the Supermax and put him in close proximity to Greg Scarpa Jr., the very informant who had “ratted” him out in 1996 during the Yousef sting? Could it be to intimidate Scarpa Jr. prior to his testimony at the DeVecchio trial? Since the trial was cut short before Greg Jr. could get on the stand, we may never know.

  But around the time I made the discovery about Murad’s trip to the MCC, I uncovered an even more surprising fact suggesting that forces within the Department of Justice were working against the DA’s prosecution.

  The Feds Pay Part of DeVecchio’s Defense

  On March 5, 2007, I intercepted a fund-raising e-mail from Chris Mattiace, who had run the C-10 Colombo Squad and who was now working as a principal behind the Friends of Lin DeVecchio Trust. Mattiace had sent the e-mail soliciting contributions for Lin’s legal defense to the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI. In it, he called the DA’s case “an unfounded and . . . politically motivated prosecution.”

  “Any one of us could be in the same position Lin faces now,” wrote Mattiace. “There but for the grace of God go any one of us.”39

  “The subtext of that message seemed to be, ‘If Lin goes down, more of us might go down,’” said retired agent James Whalen, who worked in the New York Office.40 In the e-mail* Mattiace revealed that at that point, roughly a year after Lin’s indictment, $80,000 had been raised for his defense but that legal fees had “already exceeded $450,000 with the trial still looming.”

  Then Mattiace made a surprising admission: “The Justice Department has already paid and agreed to continue to pay a portion of the fees and costs, but that is nowhere near enough to pay the total cost of defense.” Considering that with respect to the four homicide charges, Judge Block had effectively ruled that Lin was not acting in the course and furtherance of his duties, getting the U.S. taxpayer to foot the bill for any part of his defense seemed unusual, if not illegal.

  I forwarded copies of the e-mail to the New York Times and both of the major New York tabloids: the New York Post and the Daily News. Bill Sherman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for the News, was the only one to pick up on my discovery.41

  In a May 6, 2007, piece he quoted then FBI spokesman John Miller, who confirmed that the Justice Department was paying some of the legal fees for DeVecchio’s defense.42 Meanwhile, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) began an investigation for the Senate Judiciary Committee. When asked about the payments by the committee, the Justice Department cited two sections of the Code of Federal Regulations43 that provide for the payment of legal fees for accused government employees whose actions on the job fall within the “scope” of their employment.44

  But in approving such fees the U.S. attorney general must determine that the legal representation paid for is “in the interest of the United States.” At that time in 2007 the Bush administration AG was Alberto Gonzales, who later resigned under fire after a tenure marred by allegations he committed perjury,45 mishandled top-secret documents,46 violated the Patriot Act in approving a series of national security letters,47 and fired eight U.S. attorneys for political reasons.48

  When pressed by Senator Grassley, who submitted a series of questions relating to the DeVecchio case to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, Brian A. Benczkowski, the principal deputy assistant attorney general, responded in a letter to committee chairman Patrick Leahy by stating that “the FBI submitted to DOJ a statement containing its findings as to whether DeVecchio was acting within the scope of his employment and whether such representation would be in the best interests of the United States.” Then, without elaborating on the details of that finding or describing AG Gonzales’s motivation in approving the legal fee payment, Benczkowski asserted the attorney-client and attorney–work product privileges.49

  “So we have a conflict,” says Flora Edwards, “between the finding of a federal judge, Frederic Block, who declares that Lin was not acting within the scope of his duties with regard to the four murders in the indictment, and the FBI, which seems to suggest that he was, and the U.S. attorney general finds, based on that conclusion, that it’s in the interests of the country to help pay his legal bills. However, we can’t know the details of the payment or the Bureau’s reasoning because Justice claims that’s protected under attorney-client privilege. But one has to ask, who’s the client? Lin isn’t a government employee in 2006. He’s being represented by private counsel. So how does the privilege attach?”50

  The Mafia Cops Conflict

  On the same day that Lin DeVecchio pleaded not guilty to the murder conspiracy charges in Brooklyn Supreme Court, an important conference call relating to the Mafia Cops case took place a few blocks away in the office of the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District. The sensational trial of ex-detectives Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa had begun March 13 amid banner headlines.51

  An AP story reporting on the start of the trial noted that the two men were “charged with racketeering, conspiracy and other charges for allegedly going on the payroll of Lucchese family underboss Anthony ‘Gaspipe’ Casso.” But the man who should have been the star witness for the Feds—Casso himself—was denied an opportunity to testify for the government. So now, at one fifteen P.M., just before Lin DeVecchio walked into Brooklyn Supreme Court for his arraignment, a conference call began between Casso, who was serving multiple life terms at the Supermax prison in Colorado, and lawyers for Eppolito and Caracappa, who were also present.52

  Arrest photos of Lou Eppolito (left) and Stephen Caracappa (right)

  The call had been prompted in part by a letter that Casso had sent to U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf in July 2005, three months after the ex-detectives had been arrested in Las Vegas. In that letter Casso wrote that “from day one and for 3½ years to follow, my FBI handlers have,
at times, ordered me to be misleading.” He was talking about the source of his law enforcement “crystal ball,” which the Feds had attributed exclusively to the Mafia Cops.

  Now, in that conference call, which Casso hoped would prompt the Eppolito-Caracappa defense to call him as a witness, he reiterated what he told FBI agents Rudolph and Brennan at La Tuna in 1994: that “most of the information” he got from law enforcement sources “came from an FBI agent.” Without identifying Rudolph by name, he also stated what he’d told author Phil Carlo and later told me: that during his La Tuna debriefing, “the case agent,” who was debriefing him, blew “his top” and told him not to mention the FBI agent’s name.53

  After that conference call, the defense decided not to put Casso on the witness stand, so the jury in the Mafia Cops case never heard a thing about any “crooked” FBI agent or agents who may have supplied intel to Gaspipe. A week later Eppolito and Caracappa were convicted.54

  Earlier that year, when WNBC broke the story of the grand jury probe of Lin DeVecchio, reporter Jonathan Dienst insisted it was “unrelated” to the Mafia Cops case.55 But in the media storm that engulfed Eppolito and Caracappa, it soon became clear that there was a connection and it now threatened to impact the DeVecchio prosecution.

  In New York, as in few other places, real-life events are sometimes impacted by the very books and movies that chronicle them, and the Mafia Cops case was no exception. As noted, the investigation into the two detectives had originated in the office of the Brooklyn DA. In fact, a year before DA Hynes called the DeVecchio case “the most stunning example of official corruption that [he had] ever seen,”56 he stood at a press conference next to U.S. Attorney Mauskopf and described that case in almost identical terms. It was “one of the most shocking examples of criminal activity [he’d] ever witnessed,” said Hynes.57

  But the single news story that brought the most attention to the Mafia Cops case was the 60 Minutes piece by the late Ed Bradley in which Casso described how he’d used the cops to “moonlight” as “hit men.”58 Following the broadcast of that piece in April 2005, the story exploded, spawning no less than three movie deals59 and four books.60 The CBS News story featured Dades, who Bradley told viewers “came out of retirement . . . and went to work in the office of the Brooklyn district attorney, digging through old Mafia case files.”

  After that exposure on 60 Minutes, Dades was “inundated with offers and pitches to handle his rights,” according to the show business daily Variety.61 He reportedly signed with the William Morris Agency and made a deal with a producer at Warner Bros. estimated to be worth between $75,000 and $600,000.62

  Dades then entered into a separate contract with HarperCollins to write a book with Mike Vecchione and ghost writer David Fisher on the development of the “Cops.” That collaboration, ultimately titled Friends of the Family, didn’t get published until 2009.63 But the book and Dades’s separate movie deal prompted DeVecchio’s supporters to attack the Brooklyn DA’s “motive(s)” in developing Lin’s case.

  The Friends of Lin website went so far as to reproduce a July 2005 piece by Daily News reporter Hugh Son in which Vecchione was accused of having “talked to Hollywood agents about selling the story of [the] two former cops . . . before their trial has even begun.”64

  The story quoted Hynes’s opponent in the upcoming election as calling such discussions “unconscionable.”

  DA spokesman Jerry Schmetterer shot back that “Vecchione was asked to sign a deal and he said, ‘no.’”65 But that was back in 2005, before the Dades-Vecchione-Fisher book was sold. Then, a year later, John Marzulli filed a story in the Daily News headlined “Tell-All Risks Mob Cop Case: Assistant DA’s Book May Cut Trial Options.”66 In that piece, Hofstra University law professor Monroe Freedman cited the American Bar Association’s code of standards, which he said “forbids prosecutors from entering into any media deal before a case is completely done.” But since the Mafia Cops case had been removed to federal court, Hynes’s office saw no conflict.67

  The problem was that, by July 2006, there was a chance that the Eppolito-Caracappa case might well return to the Brooklyn DA. On July 1, Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who had presided over the trial of the two ex-detectives, shocked the New York legal community by tossing out their convictions on the legal grounds that the five-year statute of limitations for RICO conspiracy charges had run out.68 The New York Times piece on that stunning reversal of fortune noted that Weinstein’s ruling “threatened to disrupt the careers—and the book deals—of some investigators in the case.”

  Since there is no statute of limitations on murder, which is a state crime, at that moment, barring a reversal by a federal appeals court, there was the very real prospect that the Mafia Cops case would go back to Brooklyn Supreme Court, where the lead prosecutor was Michael Vecchione, and that raised the possibility that a conflict of interest might force Vecchione to either disgorge his book advance or resign.

  The Oliver North Defense

  Now, a year later, as he geared up for the biggest trial of his career, Vecchione was under pressure from multiple sides. Not only was he facing those conflict issues, he was also dogged by severe staff and evidence problems. To make matters worse, his opponents Douglas Grover and Mark Bederow were getting their legal fees underwritten—in part—by the U.S. government.

  On the other hand, the prospect of a DeVecchio conviction would have dire consequences, not just for Lin himself, but for the FBI supervisors and DC brass who had supported him for years. It could also negatively impact the long succession of Mafia cases he’d helped to make. This may have been a murder prosecution in Brooklyn Supreme Court, but it had implications for the Justice Department that were farther-reaching than anything the John Connolly–Whitey Bulger scandal in Boston had produced. So as the trial approached, team DeVecchio decided to play some very hard ball.

  Andy Kurins was a former Gambino Squad agent working with Thompson Hine, the law firm of Grover and Bederow that represented Lin DeVecchio. Two and a half months after Lin’s indictment was announced by the DA, Kurins sent me an e-mail that ended this way:

  I hope that you have not been sucked into this vortex of lies and self serving agendas against Lin and have time to extricate yourself from a pit which will only get deeper and darker.69

  In a videotaped interview following the press conference the day Lin DeVecchio was indicted, I asked Noel Downey, then the assistant DA heading the case, if my book Cover Up had been of any “value” in the DA’s investigation. This is how he responded:

  Oh, absolutely, because stage one of any murder investigation is to figure out who’s who and what’s what and where things occurred, and your book certainly was a wonderful springboard to understand who the parties were and what direction the investigation should go.70

  It was a statement that he’d be questioned on later, because Thompson Hine had decided to make my reporting on the Scarpa scandal one of the components of their motion for a pretrial dismissal. Their argument was that if the DA’s investigators had read Cover Up, which contained a few references to DeVecchio’s compelled statement and the 1997 Orena hearing, then their official investigation had become “infected with the Kastigar virus . . . contracted through Peter Lance.”71

  In an affidavit filed within weeks of Kurins’ e-mail, Douglas Grover wrote that on April 10, 2006, his colleague Mark Bederow met with Noel Downey. According to Grover, “Mr. Bederow observed Cover Up by Peter Lance in Mr. Downey’s office, standing upright, directly in front of his office’s window.”72

  Grover argued that “Cover Up utilized the substance of SSA DeVecchio’s immunized testimony as a basis for its conclusions.”73

  A year later, I was served with a subpoena from Thompson Hine.74 Under threat of fine and imprisonment for contempt if I refused to comply, the subpoena “command[ed]” me to turn over “any and all correspondence and documents,” including “meeting notes, email messages, facsimile transmissions . . . digital recordings, computerized data
compilations or notes” relating to my September 2005 meeting in the DA’s office with Noel Downey and George Terra.

  At a pretrial hearing on April 20, arguing that I should be called as a witness at the Kastigar hearing, Grover noted the “long history of . . . investigative journalism . . . into this case. It could be—this is a critical part of what led to this prosecution.”75 He concluded that if “the District Attorney’s Office was in any way affected directly or indirectly by the immunized testimony,” it “may lead to this prosecution never taking place at all.”76 The legal theory seemed to be that regardless of whether DeVecchio was guilty or innocent, he was immune from the charges filed.

  In that earlier pleading, Grover alleged that my work had provided the DA with a “roadmap” on which to base its investigation and that “the road [Lance] traveled was littered with landmines of immunized testimony.”77 What were those land mines that had supposedly “tainted” the prosecution? In a related pleading he cited my reference in Cover Up to a series of alleged presents given to DeVecchio by Greg Scarpa Sr.:

  In defiance of FBI rules, which require two agents to run an informant (to help prevent just such corruption), “Del,” as Scarpa called him, ran the Colombo captain by himself. The two men met two or three times a week, with DeVecchio often visiting Scarpa at home. At length they grew so close that they even vacationed together. When Cabbage Patch Kids dolls were scarcer than bags of heroin, Scarpa reportedly furnished one to DeVecchio for his daughter. Plying his control agent with fine wine and pasta, he made sure that Greg Jr. had the champagne on ice when he paid for call girls to entertain the supervisory special agent at a Staten Island hotel.78

  Claiming that the wine-and-pasta detail had come from his compelled statement, DeVecchio’s lawyer cited my reference in Cover Up to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story that had mentioned the gift.79