Deal With the Devil: The FBI's Secret Thirty-Year Relationship With a Mafia Killer
Page 52
Schiro: To George Gabriel?
Grover: To anybody?
Schiro: Yes. I believe so.75
Later, after a recess, Grover homed in on a conversation Schiro had had with Gabriel on May 10, 1995. This was two days after Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellen Corcella had given a letter to defense attorneys disclosing eight potential leaks by DeVecchio to “34” in the course of the war—including the whereabouts of Orena loyalist Sal Miciotta.
Grover: Do you recall telling George Gabriel words to the effect that DeVecchio never provided Scarpa with any information about where Colombo Family members were hiding during the war?
Schiro: I might have. I might have said that.76
Grover then refreshed her recollection by showing her Gabriel’s 302 memorializing that May 10 debriefing session and Schiro admitted she’d told him that “DeVecchio never provided Scarpa with any information about where family members were hiding during the war.”77
Vecchione Expresses Confidence in Schiro
During the next recess, I caught Mike Vecchione in the hallway and asked him if he was worried that Grover was successfully impeaching the credibility of his chief witness. Vecchione smiled and looked me straight in the eye.
With great bravado he said, “Peter, the FBI can put whatever it wants into a 302. Back then Linda was scared. Greg had died. She was looking to DeVecchio and the FBI to protect her. She said a lot of things in order to cope. To survive. But I can tell you with certainty, she was telling the truth about Lin in the grand jury and she’s telling the truth about him now on the witness stand. I’m not worried in the least.”78
With that he patted me on the back and went into the courtroom. I was so struck by his tone of certainty that I went into a stall in the men’s room, pulled out a small microcassette recorder, and recorded that conversation verbatim while it was fresh in my mind. Within twenty-four hours, Michael Vecchione would eat those words.
Chapter 42
G-MAN STICKS IT TO DA
On October 30, 2007, the second day of Schiro’s testimony, Tom Robbins, the former Daily News reporter who had years ago published a flawed account of Scarpa’s Mississippi missions, rocked the DeVecchio murder trial with a story in the Village Voice, where he now worked. Entitled “Tall Tales of a Mafia Mistress,” the story revealed that ten years earlier, he and Jerry Capeci, who had cowritten the Mississippi stories, had interviewed Linda Schiro for a book they planned to write.1
As noted, Capeci himself had identified Schiro as a “central figure” in the case as early as January 2006; indeed, after Lin was indicted, Schiro was described in a New York Times piece as “the key witness” in the case against DeVecchio.2 Given the early warning that Schiro would be playing such an important role, it strains belief to think that Capeci and Robbins wouldn’t have sought to examine the audiotapes of their interviews with her long before trial—especially since Capeci’s notes had been subpoenaed months earlier by the defense for the Kastigar hearing.
But according to Capeci, his former partner Robbins, whom he called a “dogged investigative newsman,” didn’t search for the recordings until the first day of trial, just two weeks before Schiro’s testimony.3 Now, in his Voice piece, Robbins wrote, “The story she told us then is dramatically different from the one she has now sworn to as the truth.”
The very next day, Robbins showed up in court with a lawyer and waived his privilege under Section 79 H of the New York Civil Rights Law, which permits reporters to keep their interviews and notes confidential.4
Jerry Capeci
(New York Daily News)
Tom Robbins
(Associated Press)
Mike Vecchione
(Peter Lance)
But before he’d even listened to the tapes, and apparently based solely on Robbins’s description of their contents in the Voice article, a red-faced Mike Vecchione made an astonishing announcement to the court: “I think that if after listening to these tapes we cannot go forward or should not go forward . . . because of what’s on these tapes, then we’re prepared to do what would be necessary, and that would be to dismiss this case if that is the situation.”5
“When I heard about that admission,” says defense attorney Flora Edwards, “I almost fell over. Here was the chief prosecutor on the biggest murder case in recent Kings County memory. They had put years into the preparation. They’d been at trial for two weeks—and without even hearing what was on those tapes Vecchione was prepared to fold the tent and go home. He didn’t say to the judge, ‘We want to weigh our options.’ He didn’t allow himself any wiggle room to finish his case-in-chief and maybe call Greg Scarpa Jr. to bolster Linda. He just painted himself into a corner. . . . It was absolutely unbelievable.”6
“Keep in mind,” says Andrew Orena, “this was a bench trial before a really smart judge—not a jury. Judge Reichbach had already stated that he was in a position to separate out the Kastigar issues. Why couldn’t the DA have waited for a full damage assessment?”7
But within hours, after Vecchione had listened to the tapes, the case was finished.
“Ex-F.B.I. Agent’s Murder Trial Fizzles, as Does Chief Witness,” read the headline in the New York Times.8 The New York Post declared, “DeVecchio Off Hook,”9 followed by “Moll Rat Is a Tape Worm,”10 a pair of stories written by Alex Ginsberg who, just two weeks earlier, had filed a piece about Lin under the headline “‘Crooked Fed’ & ‘Grim Reaper’ Joked.” The banner headline across the double-truck story in the Daily News was “Tapes Show Mob Moll Made It Up.”11 In the New York Sun, Jerry Capeci was ebullient. His “Gang Land” column was headlined: “G-Man Wins. Tapes Foil Mob Moll.”12 The next day, a page-one follow-up story by Ginsberg in the Post showed a smiling DeVecchio and his wife toasting with champagne at Sparks Steak House—the site of Paul Castellano’s murder—under the headline “Up Yours: G-Man Sticks It to DA with Toast at Mob-Slay Site.”13
(New York Post)
Suddenly, in the eyes of the New York media, Lin DeVecchio was the victim and Linda Schiro the perpetrator. Back in 1997, when they interviewed her, Capeci and Robbins had promised Schiro they would keep their interviews secret. But DeVecchio was facing twenty-five years to life on each of the four murder counts, so Robbins justified his last-minute production of the tapes this way:
“Tell me what else I could have done? If you sit silent, then someone could go to jail for life. I chose not to live with that.”14
On the other hand, the Schiro tapes didn’t clear DeVecchio of all the charges in the DA’s indictment—not by a long shot. They never addressed his possible role in the Mary Bari murder. And they actually implicated him in the murder of Patrick Porco, Joey Scarpa’s teenage friend. There’s little doubt that they definitively cleared him in the May 1992 murder of Lorenzo “Larry” Lampasi. But that was one murder out of four. And as we’ll see, a new analysis of the tape transcripts compared to the trial transcript raises serious questions about why the DA precipitously dismissed his entire case.
The Two Transcripts Compared
When the case against Lin DeVecchio collapsed on November 1, no verbatim transcript of Schiro’s trial testimony was available to allow for an independent comparison of her interviews with Capeci and Robbins from 1997. The trial transcript was almost immediately sealed. But I later managed to secure a copy, and what I found when measuring Schiro’s 1997 statements against her sworn testimony in 2007 was eye-opening.
Of particular concern was the suggestion, published widely in the media, that the tapes exonerated DeVecchio in the murder of Joseph “Joe Brewster” DeDomenico.15 Jerry Capeci’s “Gang Land” column was one of many venues reporting that on the tapes, Schiro had “specifically excluded [DeVecchio] from participating in the murder of mobster Joseph (Joe Brewster) DeDomenico.”16 But a careful comparison of the tape transcript against Schiro’s trial transcript suggests otherwise.
On October 29, 2007, under questioning by prosecutor Michael Vecchione, Schiro testified that DeVecchio
had made two trips to meet with Scarpa sometime before March 1986. Both meetings, Schiro insisted, took place in the kitchen of their house with the SSA and his informant sitting in a “breakfast nook,” their usual meeting place, as Schiro stood a few feet away. The direct examination went like this:
Vecchione: What did Greg say to DeVecchio in your presence?
Schiro: He just told Lin that he doesn’t understand what is going on with Joe Brewster. He doesn’t come around anymore. He is doing burglaries with an alarm guy that Greg did work with. . . . And he was becoming this born-again Christian. Drugs, drinking.
Vecchione: What if anything did he say to DeVecchio about that stuff?
Schiro: To see what you could find out about him.
Vecchione: And what, if anything did DeVecchio say at that point?
Schiro: That he would take care of it.17
Schiro then recounted what happened a week or two later, when DeVecchio returned.
Vecchione: What if anything did DeVecchio say and what did Scarpa say?
Schiro: He said he was right about what he was saying about Joe Brewster.
Vecchione: Who is doing the talking now?
Schiro: Lin was doing the talking to Greg.
Vecchione: And what did Lin say to Scarpa?
Schiro: After he said he was right about him drinking, doing drugs, and the burglaries, he says, you know we got to take care of this guy before he starts talking.
Vecchione: Let the record reflect, the witness has used her right hand to make a motion with her fingers and her thumb, moving them together.18
Eighteen months later, Joe Brewster was murdered. Linda testified that the job was done by Greg Scarpa Jr., Mario Parlagreco, and William Meli, another member of Greg Sr.’s Wimpy Boys crew.19
Later, after becoming a government witness, Meli told FBI agents that “it was incredible the way Scarpa Sr. trusted Schiro.” The FBI 302 memo on Meli’s debriefing went on to say that Scarpa “would talk about all kinds of criminal efforts including murders, right in Schiro’s presence.” Meli even recalled Scarpa “talking about the murder of Joseph DeDomenico, aka Joseph Brewster, in front of Schiro after they had killed DeDomenico that same evening.”20
Now, consider what Schiro reportedly told Robbins and Capeci during their interview in 1997. In his initial Voice piece on October 30, 2007, Robbins writes, “That interview took place on March 1, the day after agent DeVecchio had himself been forced to take the witness stand in Brooklyn federal court, where he was grilled by attorneys for a pair of Colombo crime family members seeking to have their convictions overturned.”21
He’s referring to the cross-examination by attorney Gerald Shargel, in which DeVecchio answered, “I don’t recall,” or words to that effect, more than fifty times and denied that he had ever intervened with prosecutors to keep a confidential informant like Scarpa on the street.22 Robbins cited that testimony in his Voice story, noting:
Brewster’s name had been raised by one of the defense attorneys, who asked DeVecchio if he’d ever given Scarpa information about him. DeVecchio angrily denied it. Having heard that exchange, we asked Schiro whether Lin DeVecchio had had anything to do with the death of Joe Brewster. She seemed briefly confused by the question. “No,” she said. “He never met Joe Brewster.”
The following is a portion of the transcript of that interview, published after the release of the tapes in the New York Daily News, Robbins and Capeci’s former newspaper:
Schiro: Greg had him killed. Greg didn’t kill him. It was Billy and Mario. . . . I remember Joe came over one day on Avenue J and he was kind of drooling, he was starting to use coke; ‘cause he was going out with this girl from Manhattan and he had refused Greg something. And Greg told Gregory, Billy, Mario in fact they told him they had to go someplace, they got all dressed up. Joe Brewster, and they killed him.23
Forty-two lines later in that Daily News transcript there is this exchange between Robbins and Schiro:
Robbins: Lin had nothing to do with Joe Brewster?
Schiro: No. Lin never met Joe Brewster.24
In an interview with the Daily News published November 1, 2007, Robbins had this to say about Schiro’s account of the Brewster killing:
Schiro said in our interviews that as far as she knew DeVecchio had nothing to do with the 1987 murder of a long time Scarpa pal, a Colombo soldier named Joe DeDomenico who went by the nickname of Joe Brewster.25
After the dismissal of the DeVecchio case, former New York supreme court judge Leslie Crocker Snyder was appointed as a special district attorney to determine whether Linda Schiro had committed perjury.26
On October 22, 2008, Crocker Snyder issued a report declining to prosecute Schiro. One of the exhibits to the report included twelve pages of heavily redacted typewritten notes from Robbins, which appear to be a verbatim transcript of the interview portions he released to the Brooklyn DA along with the tapes.
As revealed on page twelve of those notes, reproduced on the next page, when Robbins asked Schiro, “Lin had nothing to do with Joe Brewster?” it was during a point in the interview when Schiro was reviewing family pictures with Robbins. The sequence began with Schiro referring to an entirely different murder that took place in Florida.
(Peter Lance)
In that transcript, Robbins asks, “Lin had nothing to do with Joe Brewster?” She responds, “He never met him.” But unlike the transcript republished in the Daily News, the complete transcript turned over to the DA’s office does not include the word “No” preceding Linda’s answer. The Daily News transcript also lacks the reference to “pix . . . pasted in an album.” In fact, Schiro’s response about whether Lin DeVecchio had anything “to do” with Brewster comes several minutes after her earlier discussion of Brewster’s murder (as reflected by the transcript) and that response follows the sequence in which she’s showing Robbins the pictures from the Florida trip.
In saying “He never met him,” Schiro may well have been speaking literally—that Lin DeVecchio had never made Joe Brewster’s acquaintance. But whether DeVecchio “met” DeDomenico is immaterial to the question of whether he twice visited Scarpa’s house and conspired with Scarpa to kill him, as Schiro testified to under oath.
Nonetheless, in the telling of the story after the case’s dismissal, Robbins insisted that the tapes definitively cleared DeVecchio in both the Lampasi and Brewster homicides. Here is an excerpt of an interview he gave Bob Garfield for OntheMedia.org on November 2, 2007:
Three of the four murders that she was putting in Lin DeVecchio’s mouth, she’d never even mentioned to us his involvement. In two of them, when I went back and dug out an old cardboard box and looked at the transcripts I’d made back then and listened to the tapes, I was astonished to see that she had explicitly told us—when we’d asked her whether or not he’d had any involvement with two of the murders, she said, absolutely not. One of the quotes was, “Lin didn’t do that. I know it for a fact.”27
The murder he refers to in that last statement is the rubout of Larry Lampasi, for which Schiro did explicitly clear DeVecchio. But that was the only one of the four murders in the DeVecchio indictment where she exonerated the former SSA on those tapes. When it came to Robbins’s own transcript of his interview with Schiro on the Brewster murder—the same transcript he submitted to the Brooklyn DA—Schiro did not rule out Lin’s connection to the hit.
“At the time of the case’s dismissal,” says Andrew Orena, “these tapes from Robbins and Capeci were portrayed in the media—particularly the Daily News—as the ultimate smoking gun that proved Lin DeVecchio’s innocence and made Linda a liar. But if you look at them now in the cold light of day, when it comes to Joe Brewster, Linda’s words on those tapes don’t go against her words on the stand. The tapes don’t mention Lin one way or another in the Bari murder and they do put him into Porco’s hit. So, out of the four murders, the only one that Linda clears Lin on is Lampasi. But that’s not the impression you got from Vecchione or the media a
fter he dismissed the case.”28
The Deal with the Devil
After the case fell apart, there were a host of postmortems in the media. DA Joe Hynes was quoted in the Daily News as saying that “he never would have brought charges against Lindley DeVecchio if he knew about the tapes.”29 In relation to Linda Schiro, Vecchione told Michael Brick of the New York Times, “We knew what her problems were, and it was important for us to corroborate everything she gave us. And we believed we had.”30
Both comments suggested that the Kings County prosecutor’s office was blindsided by the tapes. But as we’ve pointed out, Vecchione actually questioned Schiro on the stand about her interviews with Capeci for the book. At that time there was no mention of Capeci recording the interviews, but given that the DA’s office knew Schiro had opened up to him, one wonders why they didn’t press to find out if her conversation with the columnist had been taped.
The two reporters were quick to tell the Post that nobody from Hynes’s office had asked them about the recordings. “At no time did the DA’s office ever call me,” said Capeci. Robbins chimed in: “If someone had asked me to give them [Hynes’s prosecutors] a reality check I would have done that.”31
But how believable is the claim made in Capeci’s “Gang Land” column that Robbins hadn’t decided to “look for cassette tape recordings” until just weeks before the dismissal—especially in light of the twenty-one-month notice Capeci had that Schiro would be the DA’s star witness?
Remember that, as far back as 1994, Capeci had been identified by multiple agents in the FBI’s C-10 squad as a recipient of DeVecchio’s alleged leaks. When the Feds decided to frame Detective Joe Simone for the leaks, Robbins and Capeci were merciless in their coverage. Capeci even went so far as to attribute Simone’s federal court vindication to a “bad jury.”32 Further, after the DeVecchio case collapsed, Capeci was quoted in the Daily News as saying, “It seems pretty obvious that this case was built on a house of cards.”33