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

by Peter Lance

  “I certainly wouldn’t call the nine hundred pages in Lin’s OPR suggesting he’d leaked intelligence to Scarpa a ‘house of cards,’” says former FBI agent James Whalen. “With reporters as sharp as Capeci and Robbins who cover the mob, you have to wonder, what took them so long? If they knew how important Linda Schiro was and they could see from the indictment that the DA was charging Lin on Brewster and Lampasi, why wait till the last minute to step forward?”34

  The only major New York journalist to offer a minority report on the dismissal was Daily News columnist Michael Daly, who wrote about how Dominick Masseria’s murder on the church steps had devastated his family. The seventeen-year-old Masseria’s only “crime” was getting involved in an egg-throwing fight with Joey Scarpa and his friends that Halloween night in 1989. The youngest of five children, who hoped to attend college, Masseria had started out the night, according to Daly, watching cartoons and babysitting his two-year-old niece.35 “He was not in any way involved in the bad stuff,” his sister Dorothy Garucchio told Daly. “He was an innocent bystander.”

  But his brush with Joey Scarpa, whose complaint to his father had resulted in that 1992 Bay Ridge gun battle, proved fatal. It was another murder in the roster of victims who had crossed paths with the Grim Reaper. In his column, Daly noted that “the FBI is to blame for allowing Scarpa to strut about as a homicidal role model.” And in acquiescing to the DA’s desire to dismiss the charges, Judge Reichbach agreed, using his decision and order ending the case to issue a scathing indictment of the Bureau and its decades-long relationship with Scarpa. The complete decision is reproduced in Appendix H, but a portion is cited here. Keep in mind that the late Judge Reichbach reached his conclusions without the benefit of viewing the 1,153 pages of Scarpa-related FBI files uncovered for this book:

  Friedrich Nietzsche sagely observed at the end of the nineteenth century “that he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster . . . and if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. . . .”

  What is undeniable was that, in the face of the obvious menace posed by organized crime, the FBI was willing, despite its own formal regulations to the contrary, to make their own deal with the devil. They gave Scarpa virtual criminal immunity for close to fifteen years in return for the information, true and false, he willingly supplied. Indeed, this Court is forced to conclude that Scarpa’s own acknowledgment of criminal activity to the FBI could only be explained by his belief that the agency would protect him from the consequences of his own criminality, which the record suggests is what they did.

  Not only did the FBI shield Scarpa from prosecution for his own crimes, they also actively recruited him to participate in crimes under their direction. That a thug like Scarpa would be employed by the federal government to beat witnesses and threaten them at gunpoint to obtain information regarding the deaths of civil rights workers in the south in the early 1960s is a shocking demonstration of the government’s unacceptable willingness to employ criminality to fight crime.36

  Lin DeVecchio was ecstatic after the case was closed, but he was also bitter. “I will never forgive the Brooklyn DA for irresponsibly pursuing this case,” he told the New York Post after celebrating his victory at the site of Paul Castellano’s rubout.37

  But in the months after the trial ended, he started to spin what happened as if to suggest that the Brooklyn DA never even had enough evidence for an indictment. Here is what he told former Guardian Angels leader Curtis Sliwa in a radio interview:

  The indictment. . . . It was obtained by the Brooklyn DA’s office who were either incredibly stupid or incredibly arrogant, thinking that there was a case there— They had been given information, long before the indictment, that exonerated me in every crime because cooperating witnesses had already come in and testified in Federal Court about all these crimes.38

  But that was patently untrue. The cooperating witnesses who testified in the war trials never exonerated Lin DeVecchio per se; nor was there evidence before the trial that cleared DeVecchio, except for Schiro’s single account regarding Larry Lampasi. Still, Lin DeVecchio went further in his characterization of her testimony:

  And the only witness that came in against me was Linda Schiro, who had absolutely fabricated the entire thing. . . . And we had ample proof that everything she said was completely fabricated. And I couldn’t have been happier when Robbins and Capeci came in with their tapes showing that she not only was a liar but that she had made all this up. . . . She completely exonerated me in the criminal acts for which I was charged.

  DeVecchio’s interview with Sliwa was also revealing for the way Lin characterized his OPR investigation and its aftermath:

  Sometime before I closed [Scarpa] there was an agent assigned to me who felt that I was giving him too much information. . . . And without any proof of any kind, those suspicions were reported and I was put under what’s called an Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) investigation for allegedly leaking information to an organized crime informant. This went on for two and a half years and the investigation, I was exonerated. They found no harm, no foul. . . . Literally no proof that I had ever done that.

  As we’ve seen, however, the DeVecchio OPR generated more than nine hundred pages of FBI 302 memos, trial transcripts, and other communiqués from the Bureau and Department of Justice, including a great deal of troubling content that was far from exculpatory. In the end, DOJ’s Public Integrity Section declared that prosecution of Lin wasn’t “warranted. “ But that conclusion came sixteen months after they’d granted him immunity, making his indictment and trial problematic if not impossible.

  The Unanswered Questions

  The only significant legal postmortem on the case was conducted by Leslie Crocker Snyder, who was commissioned to determine whether Linda Schiro had, in fact, committed perjury. In issuing her twenty-eight-page report, with more than two hundred pages of documentary appendices, Crocker Snyder concluded that Schiro had not perjured herself. And, in an addendum to her report, she raised a series of compelling, unanswered questions.39

  1. Did DeVecchio pass information to Scarpa Sr. regularly, setting aside the four murders charged in the indictment? Witnesses, and possibly records, appear to exist which would be probative of this issue.

  2. Is there probative evidence that the FBI—or at least DeVecchio—knew that Scarpa Sr. was ordering, and committing, numerous murders and, nevertheless, allowed him to continue his status as a Top Echelon FBI informant?

  3. Was there an effort by the FBI to protect Scarpa and DeVecchio in order to protect/insulate/preserve numerous mob prosecutions and some convictions relating to the Colombo crime family?

  4. Was Detective Joseph Simone, of the New York Police Department, a scapegoat for the misconduct of others, as a number of people who came forward have suggested?

  5. Were the FBI agents who reported their suspicions regarding DeVecchio shunned and ostracized? And did they later modify their positions regarding DeVecchio?

  6. Why was DeVecchio allowed to retire with a full pension, despite the Government’s acknowledgment that he leaked information to a murderous informant, and why was he granted immunity after he invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege in post-conviction proceedings related to convictions in the Colombo War?

  7. Have any of the witnesses, potential witnesses, or people who cooperated in the DeVecchio investigation and/or prosecution been harassed by various agencies because of their cooperation, as many of these individuals now claim?

  After spending more than five years investigating Greg Scarpa Sr.’s relationship with Lin DeVecchio, I come away with those identical questions, but I have a few more to add.

  8. Why did the Brooklyn DA devote such an enormous amount of public resources to the indictment and prosecution of Lin DeVecchio—and then so precipitously drop the charges in the face of what we can now clearly say was equivocal evidence contradicting their lead witness, Linda Schiro?

  9. Why di
d the U.S. Justice Department approve the payment of untold thousands in legal fees for Lin DeVecchio’s defense when a federal judge, Frederic Block, had determined before his trial that the crimes alleged in the indictment had “nothing to do with his federal duties”?

  10. Why did the Bureau of Prisons, a division of the Justice Department, move Abdul Hakim Murad out of the Supermax and put him into a cell in close proximity to Greg Scarpa Jr. at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC)? What possible justification could there be for moving a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist across the country, only to put him in a cell near the very CI who had informed on him?

  11. Indeed, why did the district attorney go to the trouble of holding Greg Jr. in the MCC for ten months if they didn’t intend to hear his testimony in open court?

  12. Why didn’t the Brooklyn DA take Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso up on his offer to testify as a prosecution witness at Lin DeVecchio’s trial? As indicated by his interview for this book, his testimony would have included his allegation that he killed Jimmy Hydell, one of the Mafia Cops’ principal murder victims, after getting the intel on him from Lin DeVecchio via Greg Scarpa Sr.

  13. Why hasn’t the NYPD granted Detective Joseph Simone, a decorated officer who with his partner was responsible for a third of the arrests in the Colombo war, a new hearing to reevaluate the decision to take his pension away—especially in consideration of his vindication by a jury in federal court?

  14. In light of the newly disclosed 1,153 pages of FBI files on Gregory Scarpa Sr. and the evidence presented in this book linking Scarpa to the murder of Tommy Ocera, will federal judge Jack B. Weinstein reconsider Vic Orena’s motion for a new trial? And is Judge Weinstein prepared to reconsider the credibility of Greg Scarpa Jr. in light of the evidence produced in this book about the legitimacy of his two intelligence initiatives aimed at thwarting acts of terror, against Ramzi Yousef in 1996–1997 and Terry Nichols in 2005?

  15. Given the evidence we’ve produced that John Napoli was not a witness to any fabrication of the “Scarpa material,” which was documented in dozens of FBI 302s, will the Justice Department reconsider its decision to renege on a promise to grant Greg Scarpa Jr. a reduction in sentence or at least admit to the fact that he provided “substantial” assistance to the FBI in 1996–1997 and 2005?40

  Out of the Supermax

  I had always intended to end this book at this point. But as I was completing the final chapters, I made a surprising discovery: After spending twenty-three years in federal prison, the last fourteen of which he served in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell at ADX Florence—the Supermax prison where Yousef, Murad, and Nichols are housed—Greg Scarpa Jr. was moved to a maximum-security prison in the Midwest.

  Back in 2004, I got some insight into just how impregnable the Supermax was when I sought to interview Greg Jr. there. At first my request was turned down by Warden Robert Hood, who claimed that my interview of Junior “could pose a risk to the internal security” of the Supermax and “to the safety of staff, inmates and members of the public.”41 He later rejected my appeal on the grounds that such an interview would “disrupt the good order and security of the institution.”42

  Just how a journalist with a reporter’s notebook, a pen, and a tiny digital recorder might disrupt the order of a hardened federal prison was a puzzle to me, but that was how Warden Hood saw it.

  Then, in late March 2012, as I was writing the final chapters of this book, I noticed on the Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator website that Greg Scarpa Jr. was now in residence at a less restrictive facility. So I reached out to him through his younger brother Frank, a former sulky driver who had grown up on Greg Sr.’s horse farm in New Jersey. Frank put me in touch with Greg Jr.—and soon I began a series of interviews with him.

  Scarpa Jr.

  (Associated Press)

  Though author Sandra Harmon had purported to tell Junior’s story in her 2009 book Mafia Son,43 Greg Jr. told me that her book was an inaccurate and “sensationalized” account.44 Now, for the first time, we have a hint of what it was like to grow up under the Killing Machine.

  Scripture tells us that “the sins of the father shall not be visited upon the son.” So I approached Greg Jr. without judgment. He’s the one living person who arguably knew his father best. A Mafia captain himself, he committed many crimes on his father’s orders, but later twice risked his life to provide the FBI with intelligence on a pair of world-class terrorists. In the hundreds of pages of FBI airtels, memos, and 209s documenting DeVecchio’s debriefings of Greg Scarpa Sr., nothing comes close to hearing the story as Greg Jr. tells it. And while there isn’t sufficient time or space in this book to tell it all, Junior’s account suggests that we’ve only begun to uncover the full truth.

  Chapter 43

  THE SON ALSO RISES

  The first thing I wanted to confirm with Greg Jr. was whether he stood by the various statements he’d previously made under oath—including the testimony he gave at his own trial in October 1998, his multiple sworn affidavits or affirmations, and the allegations he had made on January 7, 2004, when he appeared via video from the Supermax at the hearing for Vic Orena.1

  In those statements, sworn to under penalty of perjury, Junior had alleged that Lin DeVecchio not only passed key intelligence to his father, but that he’d been on Greg Sr.’s payroll and that he’d actually appeared on the scene of at least one bank robbery committed by the Scarpa Bypass crew. Greg Jr. had also claimed that DeVecchio was present with his father when his half brother Joey allegedly planted the bag of guns under the deck of Vic Orena’s girlfriend’s house in an effort to frame Little Vic for the Tommy Ocera murder.

  When I pressed him on those claims, Junior confirmed them without hesitation. “Right. Everything I said was right [i.e., correct] in those words.”2

  “So you stand by what you said and you have no reason to change your mind?”

  His reply was immediate. “Right, right, right.”

  I was particularly interested in whether he would confirm his earlier sworn statements that his father was involved in the murder of Tommy Ocera and that the framing of Vic Orena had been done as a “trophy” for Lin DeVecchio.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said emphatically, with the confidence of a street guy who had spent half of his adult life doing crimes and the other half behind bars.

  “What about your allegation that Lin DeVecchio was on your father’s payroll?” I asked him, reminding him that DeVecchio had reopened his father in June 1980 after Senior had been closed for five years. “In the book Lin says he met him in June 1980 and then a couple of weeks later he recruited him,” I said, wanting Junior to clear up a discrepancy in the 209s. “But one of the 209s said it took six months,3 and in one of your sworn statements you said it took Senior a long time to agree to work with him. You were out [of prison] during that period. So for how long did Lin woo your father?”

  That’s when Junior made his first stunning revelation to me: the allegation that his father had been associating with DeVecchio from at least the mid-1970s—years before reopening him. “In the seventies he was together with him,” said Greg. “Seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven they were friends. They were goin’ out to restaurants. My father told me everything he did and who he was goin’ with, just in case somethin’ happened, so I would know, you understand?”4

  I asked him if he had a precise memory of when DeVecchio first started connecting with his father. Was there an event he could fix in his mind?

  “It had to be seventy-five, seventy-six,” he said. “Without a doubt, because there was something [between them] that had to do with me getting straightened out”—a reference to Junior’s induction into the Colombo family. I asked him when he’d gotten made and he said, “I was twenty-five.” Junior was born in 1952, so that would have been some time in 1977.

  I asked him where they’d had the ceremony and he said, “Queens Terrace.” That was the same location where Joseph Colombo had celebrated his son’s weddin
g back in 1967. At that time, “34” had even given his FBI contacting agent, Anthony Villano, the details in a 209.5 So it made sense that Greg Sr., who was very close to Colombo, would use that location as the site where his eldest son and namesake would “get his button.”

  But the implication that Lin DeVecchio had been auditioned by Greg Sr. for years before he agreed to return to his Top Echelon role was staggering. If Junior was correct, this suggested that DeVecchio had lied to the FBI brass in his 209, as well as to Anderson Cooper when he described the 1980 reopening during his 60 Minutes interview. But that wasn’t the most damning aspect of what Junior told me.

  Junior also fixed the mid-1970s as the time when his father started offering payoffs to DeVecchio.

  In his sworn affidavit of July 30, 2002, Greg Jr. had alleged that “DeVecchio’s cut of the proceeds came out of my father’s numbers racket. Over the years DeVecchio received over $100,000 from my father, including an all-expense trip to Aspen, Colorado, in the 1980s.”6

  I asked him about that now. “So he was paying him as early at the mid-seventies?”

  “Oh yeah, yeah. See, I used to take care of the books—the rackets, the numbers. We’d put our expenses down. It would depend on the numbers—whatever we’d do—and he’d say, ‘Deduct eight hundred, deduct twelve hundred [dollars].’ So I’d put down ‘miscellaneous’ and that was for him [DeVecchio]. I tried to explain that to them [the prosecutors] and they said, ‘He’s lyin’, ’cause he [Senior] didn’t start ’til the nineteen eighties.’”7

  I asked him how the money would be delivered.

  “It was paid in different ways,” he said. “He [Senior] would wrap it in a rubber band. He wouldn’t hand it to him. It was paid in envelopes. There was no set pattern. There were times when he would meet him in New Jersey. We’d be on our way back from the farm, into Brooklyn, and this guy [Lin] would be on a side road, off the Garden State.”