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

by Peter Lance

  In his May 1995 compelled statement, when he swore under oath that he opened Greg Sr. in 1980, Lin admitted to meeting Senior in New Jersey “on one or two occasions” but insisted that it was on official business and only after the 1980 reopening. Further, he has categorically denied ever taking bribes from “34.” But Junior stressed that some of the alleged payoffs happened in New Jersey, and sometimes the exchanges, he said, were two-way.

  “When we’d go home and he [Scarpa] had to see him for information or to give him cash [DeVecchio] would be on the side road. And we’d stop and my father’d get out of the car. I’d be sitting there and he’d go in the car with him. They’d do what they had to do. And he’d come back. And a couple of times he would come back with notes. He would show me the notes.”

  At this point, Junior dropped another bomb, insisting that one of the “notes” his father received from DeVecchio included the name of one of the four victims in the Brooklyn DA’s indictment.

  “There was Joe Brewster’s name on a note one time,” he said, “and that’s when it all started, with Joe. That’s the conversation with Joe. You understand? It wasn’t like DeVecchio was callin’ any shots or nothin’ like that. He was just giving that information, and the brains of what had to be done was from Senior.”8

  But during our interviews Junior emphasized time and again how his father had felt protected and insulated by DeVecchio—recounting how Senior acted with incredible bravado even when making calls to him while he was doing time in hardened facilities like Leavenworth.

  “These were conversations in general,” he said. “There was no hiding. No ‘Don’t talk now.’ First of all, Senior—this guy really, really believed he had a license to kill, Peter, because he used to tell me when I was on the phone in Leavenworth—he would actually tell me when guys got whacked.”

  The “Big Bang”

  Whether or not Lin DeVecchio was “callin’ any shots” with Greg Scarpa Sr., or directed him in any way, it’s clear from what Junior told me that DeVecchio was capable of trying to manipulate his father to achieve a goal. Until now, the evidence I’d examined from the 302s of cooperating witnesses, trial transcripts, and DeVecchio’s many 209s on Scarpa had convinced me that Senior incited the third war for control of the family. While I’m still confident of that, one thing I hadn’t managed to determine conclusively, before talking with Junior, was what role, if any, the Bureau may have played in provoking the conflict. Greg Jr. added some new insight on that issue as well.

  He told me a story that suggests that two years before Carmine Sessa and his surveillance team rolled up on Vic Orena in June 1991, the FBI had planted a false rumor with Greg Sr. in an effort to provoke a fight between him and the Orena faction.

  “There was an incident when I was in Lewisburg,” Junior said, meaning the federal prison. It involved an alleged threat to him.

  “I spoke to my father about it,” said Greg, “and he told me that Lin told him that this [threat] had come from Ralph Scopo and the other side—the Orena faction.”

  After word of the threat was communicated to Senior, Greg Jr. got stabbed by another inmate at Lewisburg. That sent Senior into a tailspin. Junior insisted to me that the incident that led to the stabbing had nothing to do with any interfamily rivalry. Still, he said, his father “went crazy” after “the FBI” told him that the stabbing had been ordered by Scopo, the elder capo who was convicted during the Mafia Commission case.

  Junior was certain that Scopo had nothing to do with it. In fact, he insisted to me that Scopo had treated him like a son in prison. “He’d been really nice to me,” Greg Jr. said. “But to start the war . . . they [the FBI] were feeding my father information.”

  After the stabbing, Junior said, his father came to see him on a surprise visit. “I say, ‘Dad. Listen to me. I don’t know what’s going on out there. But I’m telling you that [the stabbing] had nothin’ to do with those [Orena] guys.’ But he says, ‘It came from Ralphie Scopo.’ And I says, ‘Dad. You’re wrong.’ And he says, ‘Don’t argue with me, Greg. They [the FBI] told me. They’ve got it down. They know what they’re doin’.’ He was convinced whatever that guy [DeVecchio] told him was concrete.”

  To make the situation worse, Junior said his father kept insisting, based on what he’d been told by the Bureau, that Ralph Scopo had put the word out that he (Senior) “might be a rat.” According to Junior his father told him, “This is what you got to do. You got to go tell Ralphie that if anything happens to your father outside, then you’ve got him in there. And I’m gonna do the same thing out here. I’m gonna go to all those guys and tell them, if anything happens to my son, I’m gonna kill yous all out here.”

  So I asked Greg Jr., point-blank, “Are you saying that the Feds were putting false information into your father’s mind and making him paranoid?”

  “That’s exactly what they were doing,” said Junior. “They were workin’ on him. As smart as my father was, he trusted them. So it got to the point where he was ready to retire, but they wanted a big bang! Do you understand? They wanted a big fuckin’ bang. And that’s how they’re celebratin’ it now.” As Greg Jr. described it to me, that “big bang” the Feds wanted was the third Colombo war.

  The Lookout

  Another allegation Greg Jr. had previously sworn to under oath was that Lin DeVecchio was “present during a bank robbery at which Junior was present.”9 In his interviews with me, he said that DeVecchio was on the scene of “a couple” of heists, but one in particular he remembered was the botched burglary at the Dime Savings Bank in 1980 that had led to the death of Dominick “Donnie” Somma.

  “It was the one where the cleaning guy showed up,” said Greg. I asked him where DeVecchio was and he said, “He was on the street prowlin’ around. He was lookin’ after me. That’s what my father had him there for. For me. My father wasn’t there. I was there and he wanted to make sure—as much damage as he did to me over the years, Senior was lookin’ out when he had to look out.”10

  In light of that, I asked Greg Jr. how he felt about his father.

  “My feelings aren’t good,” he said. “I always thought he was giving me one hundred percent in sincerity, loyalty, and love—which is what I was giving him—and then I find out that it wasn’t the case. And it wasn’t the case really with anybody. That was just him. He just maneuvered everybody. Including the FBI. Including my mom. Including Linda. He played the fuckin’ chess game with everybody. My brothers, my sister. Forget about it. This guy was just out for himself. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he made everybody around him happy, but it was all to make him succeed in what he was lookin’ to do.”

  I asked him what he thought it was that drove his father. Was it money? Was it power? “It was all that,” he said. “It was money. It was power. And it was to stay out of prison. He couldn’t do jail time.”11

  In that single sentence, Greg Scarpa Jr. provided the Rosetta Stone to the complex mystery that was his father. A brilliant, brutal, manipulative strategist who used the FBI and the people around him, including his Mafia family and his blood family, to get what he wanted: the fortune he amassed from drug dealing, hijackings, stock fraud, high-end bank heists, and scores of other violent crimes; the power he derived by operating at the upper echelons of the Colombos; the intel he received from his handlers to eliminate his enemies and rise higher and higher in the borgata; and ultimately the freedom that “time out of jail” bought him. It was the freedom to murder and racketeer—an effective license to kill conferred, or at least allowed to stand, by the FBI.

  Greg Scarpa Sr. had used his eldest son to further his personal ends—literally demanding that Junior kill his “second son,” Joe Brewster, so that Senior could continue walking the knife’s edge between Mafia über-capo and “rat.” Still, Junior was his father’s son, and as bitter as he may be over how his father used him, in our interviews he expressed a lingering admiration for his old man.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “This man ru
ined my life and the lives of my brothers and sisters, and he put a mark on my name that I’ll have to live with forever. He was the Grim Reaper, but he was still my father. Would I follow him again? Never. Would I break the law for him? Absolutely not. Do I pray each day for the people he killed and the bodies he had buried? You bet. He got to renounce this life at his sentencing, and I renounced it a long time ago. I carry around a huge amount of remorse. But Senior wasn’t just a capo. He operated for years at the boss level of the family. He knew things and saw things that few made guys ever did, and he played the FBI for everything he could get. In his book, DeVecchio said he admired him, and I have to say to a small degree I go along with this. I admire him the way you might stand back and look at a tornado or a hurricane—some really powerful force of nature. Do you want it in your life? No. Do you feel bad for the bodies it leaves behind? Damn right. But hating my father would be like hating an earthquake or a tidal wave. When you see something like that coming, you just have to get out of its way.”

  A Chance to Make It Right

  For several years, an attorney for Gregory Scarpa Jr. has been litigating a 2255 motion in Eastern District federal court so that new evidence can be presented that accurately reflects the service Junior rendered in his stings of Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols, two terrorists responsible for the collective loss of thousands of lives. Between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the “planes as missiles” plot spawned by Yousef in 1995 and executed by his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on 9/11, thousands of innocents died—countless more victims than have ever been killed by any figure in the history of American organized crime.

  Even though Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who showed clemency to Greg Sr. in 1993, found Greg Jr. “not credible” in the 2004 hearing for Vic Orena, Judge Edward Korman, the former chief judge of the EDNY, is now considering Junior’s case.12 It was Korman who presided over the trial that acquitted Vic Orena Jr. and John Orena in 1995 after Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellen Corcella was forced to turn over the letter disclosing eight potential leaks that may have come to Senior from Lin DeVecchio.13

  The fact that Korman saw enough merit in Greg Jr.’s petition to continue the case suggests a willingness at least to hear the evidence.

  I asked Greg Jr. what he would do with his freedom if he is granted that hearing and succeeds in getting released after twenty-four years behind bars.

  “All I can tell you is that if I have a chance to get out and live on the outside for the first time in all these years, I will do everything I can to set the record straight on what my father did. I can’t bring back the lives he took or the people he ordered to be whacked, but I can try and make the name Gregory Scarpa stand for something other than ‘killer’ and ‘made guy.’ After all this time inside, one of the things I learned is that it’s how you finish that counts, not how you start out.”14

  AFTERWORD

  Philip L. Graham, the former publisher of the Washington Post, is credited with describing daily deadline journalism as “the first rough draft of history.”1 If that’s the case, investigative journalism gives us the second draft. Unlike beat reporters, who are subject to the tyranny of the ticking clock, an investigative reporter has the luxury of digging into a story in depth over time. As the layers get peeled away, one lead begets another, and eventually, if the reporter is tenacious, a broader understanding of the truth will emerge. That’s just what I found when my initial focus on the FBI’s counterterrorism performance led me to Ramzi Yousef, and in turn that probe, through Greg Scarpa Jr., led me to the questionable relationship between his father and Lin DeVecchio.

  In 2003, when I began the reporting for my second HarperCollins book, Cover Up, I wasn’t setting out to tell a Mafia story. But when I came upon the treasure trove of FBI 302s documenting Greg Jr.’s eleven-month sting of Yousef, I couldn’t look away. Now the detailed pursuit of that organized crime story has put the terrorism story into sharper focus, and I’m happy to report that the central allegation in my first book on Yousef—denied for years by the Justice Department and the 9/11 Commission—has been confirmed by the Feds.

  In 1000 Years for Revenge, I offered prima facie evidence from the Philippine National Police of a direct connection between Yousef’s bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and the “planes as missiles” plot realized on September 11, 2001—a plot that Yousef designed and set into motion in Manila in the fall of 1994.

  It was ultimately carried out by his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the al-Qaeda terrorist identified by the FBI in 2002 as 9/11’s “mastermind.”2 In 1000 Years for Revenge, I reported that as early as 1995 federal prosecutors in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) became aware of the link between Yousef and KSM, who had been operating out of the Philippines in a cell that also included Abdul Hakim Murad, a commercial pilot trained in four U.S. flight schools who had been the intended lead pilot in the first configuration of “the planes operation.”3 But for years prominent DOJ officials and the 9/11 Commission staff refused to accept that the two attacks on the Twin Towers were executed by the same terrorists, or that they were directly funded by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

  Staff Statement No. 15 from the 9/11 Commission, published in August 2004, stated that “whether [Ramzi Yousef] became a member of al Qaeda remains a matter of debate,” calling him “part of a loose network of extremist Sunni Islamists.”4

  In a 2005 interview, Patrick Fitzgerald, the former head of the Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit in the SDNY, said, “People assume that the World Trade Center bombing was an al Qaeda operation. . . . I’ve never assumed that. . . . What I would say is, we learned that the World Trade Center bombing and the Day of Terror plots were part of a jihad network. I wouldn’t necessarily conclude that that was al Qaeda.”5 But in 2010, positive confirmation that the two attacks were linked came when the SDNY unsealed the fourteenth superseding indictment against Yousef for the 1993 bombing. That indictment included his uncle KSM, who was now charged for the 9/11 attacks.

  A New York Times piece dated April 10, 2010, confirmed that this latest indictment affirmatively linked the Trade Center bombing to the attacks of September 11, 2001.6 “It runs 80 pages,” the story said, “with almost half devoted to a list of 2,976 [9/11] victims.”7 All fourteen indictments can be accessed via the Times website.8 The cover pages on the two key indictments hare the same docket number: 93 Cr. 180 (KTD). The last three letters are the initials of Kevin T. Duffy, the federal judge who has presided over the case from the first World Trade Center bombing trial in 1994.

  The original WTC indictment, March 31, 1993, and the fourteenth superseding indictment, April 2010

  The decision by federal prosecutors to include KSM in the ongoing series of terrorism cases spawned by the 1993 Twin Towers bombing is proof positive that the plots and cell members were inextricably bound. They were not, as the 9/11 Commission staff characterized them, “part of a loose network.” Further, the fact that the two attacks on the WTC were part of an ongoing conspiracy, funded by bin Laden and al-Qaeda, underscores the case I made in my third book on terrorism, Triple Cross, that various officials in the FBI and the SDNY who had knowledge of the Yousef-KSM Manila connection in 1995 were negligent in failing to connect the dots years before Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sent American Airlines Flight 11 crashing into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

  New Proof the FBI Could Have Stopped the 1993 Bombing

  Another central allegation in 1000 Years for Revenge was that the FBI had sufficient warning to have prevented the 1993 bombing by Ramzi Yousef, which claimed six lives and left a thousand people injured. In that book I chronicled a series of events leading up to Yousef’s planting of a 1,500-pound urea-nitrate fuel-oil device on the B-2 level beneath the North Tower around noon on February 26, 1993.

  The first evidence came three and a half years earlier, in July 1989, when FBI agents followed a group of “MEs”—a Bureau term for
“Middle Eastern men”—from the al-Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to the Calverton shooting range at the end of Long Island.9 Firing a series of weapons, including AK-47s and handguns, the group included Mahmoud Abouhalima, a.k.a. “the Red,” a six-foot-two-inch Egyptian cabdriver; Mohammed Salameh, a diminutive Palestinian; Nidal Ayyad, a Kuwaiti who had graduated from Rutgers University; and El Sayyid Nosair, a janitor from Port Said, Egypt, who worked in the basement of the civil courthouse in Manhattan.10

  FBI Calverton surveillance photo (Abouhalima is third from left)

  Each of those terrorists-in-training was instructed by Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed, the central figure in Triple Cross.11 The details of Mohamed’s extraordinary terror spree can be found at http://www.peterlance.com/wordpress/?p=1703.

  A former Egyptian army commando from the very unit that killed Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981,12 Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA briefly in Hamburg in 1984, slipped past a watch list to enter the United States a year later, enlisted in the U.S. Army, and got posted to the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, where elite Green Beret officers train. From there, he traveled on weekends to New York City to school the Calverton shooters in paramilitary techniques.13

  Ali Mohamed was so trusted by Osama bin Laden that he was dispatched to move the Saudi billionaire’s entire entourage from Afghanistan to Khartoum in 1991, set up al-Qaeda’s training camps in the Sudan, and train bin Laden’s personal bodyguards. He was also one of the principal planners in the simultaneous truck bomb attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that killed 223 and injured thousands.14

  As a further testament to his skills, Abouhalima, Salameh, and Ayyad, three of his Calverton trainees, were later convicted in the World Trade Center bombing plot, while Clement Hampton-El, a U.S.-born Black Muslim, was convicted with Nosair in the 1993 “Day of Terror” plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, along with the United Nations building and the skyscraper that houses the FBI’s New York Office.15