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

  DEDICATION

  To the families of Mary Bari, Patrick Porco, and the dozens

  of other murder victims who were killed by Gregory Scarpa Sr.,

  or killed on his orders, during the three decades he was

  protected by the FBI as a Top Echelon informant

  EPIGRAPHS

  If I don’t have my money by Thursday, I’ll put him right in the fucking hospital. . . . I wanna break his mother’s face and break his fuckin’ legs and arms.

  —Greg Scarpa Sr., recorded on a series of FBI wiretaps1

  He told me he stopped counting at fifty [murders].

  —Larry Mazza, Scarpa’s protégé and co-conspirator2

  In my heart, as Scarpa’s handler, of course I knew he was doing hits. . . .3 A defense lawyer asked me on the stand if I admired Scarpa. I said I admired the way the man was able to conduct himself in such a treacherous environment and survive all the years he had survived without getting killed. That takes a special talent.4

  —Former FBI Supervisory Special Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, Greg Scarpa Sr.’s contacting agent

  A line had been blurred. . . . He was compromised. He had lost track of who he was.

  —FBI Special Agent Chris Favo, DeVecchio’s number two in the FBI’s Colombo Squad, on DeVecchio’s relationship with Scarpa5

  This is the most stunning example of official corruption that I have ever seen.

  —Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes after indicting DeVecchio on four counts of murder in 2006 relating to his alleged leaks to Scarpa6

  I will never forgive the Brooklyn DA for irresponsibly pursuing this case.

  —Lin DeVecchio after the dismissal of murder charges against him in 20077

  What is undeniable was that in the face of the obvious menace posed by organized crime, the FBI was willing . . . to make their own deal with the devil. They gave Scarpa virtual criminal immunity . . . in return for the information, true and false, he willingly supplied. . . . 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 . . . is a shocking demonstration of the government’s unacceptable willingness to employ criminality to fight crime.

  —Judge Gustin Reichbach after the DeVecchio murder case was dismissed8

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Introduction

  PART I

  1 The Kiss of Death

  2 A True Machiavelli

  3 Hitting the Boss

  4 The Special Goes South

  5 Sinatra, Capote, and the Animal

  6 Agent Provocateur

  7 God, the Mob, and the FBI

  8 Thirty Days in Forty-Two Years

  9 The Octopus

  10 Guns and Rabbis

  PART II

  11 The Royal Marriage

  12 Going to Hell for This

  13 Love Collision

  14 Twenty Grand a Week

  15 Enter the Secret Service

  16 Death of a Second Son

  17 The Case of Cases

  18 I Shot Him a Couple of Times

  19 Murder on the Overpass

  20 A Connection by Blood

  PART III

  21 Rumblings of War

  22 Death by Wire

  23 Brains, Butcher, and Bull

  24 Coup d’État

  25 Pearl Harbor

  26 Go Out and Kill Somebody

  27 The Hit on Nicky Black

  28 Closing and Reopening “34”

  29 Who’s Going to Win This Thing?

  30 Scarpa’s War

  PART IV

  31 A Grain of Sand on Jones Beach

  32 Expecting to Go Home

  33 The OPR

  34 The Dying Declaration

  35 Burning a Good Cop

  36 Gaspipe’s Confession

  37 Insane Mad-Dog Killer

  38 Organized Crime and Terrorism

  39 Junior’s Second Sting

  40 The Cover Up Virus

  PART V

  41 Agent of Death

  42 G-Man Sticks It to DA

  43 The Son Also Rises

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix A: The Principal Figures

  Appendix B: The Marriage Certificate of Gregory Scarpa and Lili Dajani

  Appendix C: Gregory Scarpa Sr.’s Arrest Record

  Appendix D: June 18, 1962, Airtel to J. Edgar Hoover Debriefing of Gregory Scarpa Sr.

  Appendix E: The “Girlfriend 302”

  Appendix F: 302 from Scarpa Jr.’s Sting of Ramzi Yousef

  Appendix G: Ramzi Yousef’s “Kite” from the Scarpa Jr.–Yousef Sting

  Appendix H: Judge Reichbach’s Decision and Order Dismissing the DeVecchio Case

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Peter Lance

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  Gregory Scarpa Sr. was a study in complication. A peacock dresser, he carried a wad of $5,000 in cash at all times.1 He wore a seven-carat pinky ring and a diamond-studded watch.2 He made millions from drug dealing, hijackings, loan sharking, high-end jewelry scores, bank heists, and stolen securities. He owned homes in Las Vegas, Brooklyn, Florida, and Staten Island, and a co-op apartment on Manhattan’s exclusive Sutton Place. He was the biggest trafficker in stolen credit cards in New York and ran an international auto theft ring.3 A single bank robbery by his notorious Bypass crew on the July 4 weekend in 1974 netted $15 million in thirteen duffel bags full of cash and jewels.4 His sports betting operation made $2.5 million a year. His crew grossed $70,000 weekly in drug sales.5 And yet, fifteen years after becoming a “made” member of the Colombo crime family, when he was a senior capo, Scarpa was arrested for “pilfering” coins from a pay phone.6 He simply couldn’t resist a chance to steal—even a handful of change from the phone company.

  Five foot ten, two hundred and twenty pounds,7 Scarpa was described by one of his FBI contacting agents as “an ox of a man; like a short piano mover [with a] thick neck and huge biceps.”8 For more than forty-two years, as a made member of the Colombo family (borgata), he roamed the streets of Brooklyn like a feudal lord, earning the nicknames “the Grim Reaper,”9 “the Mad Hatter,”10 “Hannibal Lecter,”11 and “the Killing Machine.”12 He even signed personal letters with the initials “KM.”13

  Greg Scarpa Sr., a.k.a. “the Grim Reaper”

  But Scarpa was also a homebody with three separate families. In 1949 he married Connie Forrest. They had four children, including Gregory Jr.,14 who started doing crimes for his father at the age of sixteen.15 Then, while still married to Connie, whom he shipped off to New Jersey, Scarpa moved in with Linda Diana, a gorgeous brunette nineteen years younger, who had been dating wiseguys since her mid-teens.16 Scarpa had two children with Linda, but in an effort to hide the fact that they were Greg’s, she married a man named Schiro, who believed the kids were his own. Then, in 1975 while still married to Forrest and living as Linda’s common-law husband, Scarpa ran off to Las Vegas and married Lili Dajani, a thirty-five-year-old17 former Miss Israel.18 Years later, Dajani’s lover, an ex–abortion doctor named Eli Shkolnik, was murdered on Scarpa’s orders.19 Yet in 1979 Scarpa agreed to let Linda carry on a torrid sexual relationship with Larry Mazza, a handsome eighteen-year-old delivery boy—and later made Mazza his proté
gé, schooling him in the crimes of loan sharking, bank robbery, and homicide.20

  “I started out one way and ended up with the devil,” Mazza later said.21 The former grocery worker expressed shock when Scarpa once suggested to him that they kill the mother of a mob turncoat in order to demonstrate “what happens to rats.”22

  Still, Scarpa, who bragged that he “loved the smell of gunpowder,”23 had no compunctions about killing women. When he heard that Mary Bari, the beautiful mistress of the family underboss, might talk to authorities, he had her lured to a club, then shot her in the head point-blank and dumped her body in a rolled-up canvas two miles away. Later, when the dog of one of his crew members’ wives found a piece of the dead woman’s ear, Scarpa joked about it over dinner.24 “He was just a vicious, violent animal,” said Mazza. “Unscrupulous and treacherous . . . just a horrible human being.”25

  And yet Scarpa’s daughter, “Little Linda” Schiro, described him as “incredibly loving—the kind of dad who was there for us every night for dinner at five o’clock. Whatever he was on the outside, he was really gentle at home.”26 Like a true sociopath, Scarpa was apparently capable of shifting at will from brutal murderer to loyal dad. After one bloody rubout, when Mazza and Scarpa shot a rival in the head, they went home to play with Greg’s infant grandson, drink wine, and watch Seinfeld on TV.27

  “He could transform himself,” said Little Linda. “He could go kill someone and five minutes later he’d be home watching Wheel of Fortune with my brother and me.”28

  The Grim Reaper ruled Thirteenth Avenue in Bensonhurst with an iron fist. He was responsible for more than twenty-five separate homicides between 1980 and 1992. With Mazza’s help, Scarpa killed three people in one four-week period. He shot one of his victims with a rifle while the man was stringing Christmas lights with his wife.29 He killed a seventy-eight-year-old member of the Genovese family because the old man happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.30 Then, a few weeks later, after FBI and NYPD surveillance had been pulled away from a Mafia social club, he rolled up next to Colombo capo Nicholas Grancio, and when his own rifle jammed,31 he ordered Grancio shot.32 Grancio’s nose was blown off and one of his teeth was later found in a nearby building. At another point, tipped that Cosmo Catanzano, one of his crew members, might talk to the Feds, Scarpa ordered Catanzano’s grave dug in advance of the murder, but Catanzano escaped when DEA agents arrested him before the execution could take place.33

  “The man was the master of the unpredictable and he knew absolutely no bounds of fear,” said Joseph Benfante, one of Scarpa’s former lawyers.34 “If he’d lived four hundred years ago, he would have been a pirate.”35 The brazen Scarpa even gave himself a reason to wear an eye patch. In 1992, after being diagnosed with HIV and given only months to live, he broke house arrest and went after a pair of local drug dealers who had threatened his younger son.36 In the ensuing gun battle, Scarpa got his right eye shot out, but he walked home and downed a glass of scotch before Larry Mazza was summoned and drove him to the hospital.37

  “Scarpa had an action jones,” one former assistant district attorney recalled.38 Another investigator described the killer’s need to stay on the edge: “Capos ain’t supposed to be out on the street hijacking trucks, doing drug deals,” he said. “I mean, that’s why you have a crew. But Greg was there. He always had to walk point.”39

  And yet, even as he openly disparaged “rats,” Scarpa devoted more than three decades off and on to betraying his larger “family,” the Colombos.

  The Secret Files

  The 1,153 pages of files uncovered in this investigation reveal that more than two years before celebrated Mafia turncoat Joseph Valachi “sang” to the McClellan rackets committee in a historic series of hearings televised from coast to coast, Scarpa was already coughing up the family’s most intimate secrets to the FBI.

  The detailed multipage memos called airtels (later designated as FBI 209 reports) show that Scarpa, whose code designation was NY 3461-C-TE, met two or three times a month with agents from the FBI’s New York Office. During these secret sessions, conducted in hotel rooms, automobiles, and Scarpa’s various homes in Brooklyn, he fed them the kind of inside-the-family dirt that J. Edgar Hoover craved. Every one of those airtels went straight to the Director himself, and as we’ll see, while many of the debriefings contained detailed intelligence on the organizational structure of the Mafia,40 “34,” as Scarpa was known, also gave the Bureau reams of disinformation.41

  A brilliant Machiavellian strategist, Scarpa not only stayed on the street for forty-two years, avoiding prison after twenty separate arrests or indictments for his crimes,* but he repeatedly “ratted out” his competition in the family—literally eliminating many of the capos above him along with the two family bosses: Joseph Colombo42 and Carmine Persico.43 He also succeeded in fomenting a series of internal conflicts or wars that tore the borgata apart.

  It was Scarpa whose duplicity paved the way for the notorious assassination attempt on Joseph Colombo at an Italian-American Civil Rights League rally in front of fifty thousand people in 1971.44 It was Scarpa whose backdoor machinations ignited the second Colombo war between wiseguys loyal to Persico and the violent Gallo brothers in the early 1970s, and it was Scarpa who fueled the battle that led to the infamous rubout of Crazy Joe Gallo in 1972.45 Most important to the Feds, it was Scarpa who provided the probable cause that led to the Title III wiretaps in the historic Mafia Commission case in the mid-1980s, sending Persico and two other New York bosses to prison for life.46

  In 1989, Everett Hatcher, a decorated DEA agent, was gunned down by Scarpa’s nephew Gus Farace, who was a member of Greg’s Wimpy Boys crew.47 That cold-blooded shooting led to the formation of a five-hundred-man FBI/DEA task force and an international manhunt that lasted more than nine months. New evidence now suggests that it was Scarpa who later set up his own nephew’s murder to take the heat off the other New York families.48

  Scarpa was such a master chess player that he used his position as a Top Echelon informant to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars, beyond the millions he made from racketeering. Not only did the FBI pay him more than $158,000 in fees and bonuses for his services,49 but his control agent from the mid-1960s to the early ’70s, Anthony Villano, brokered kickbacks from insurance companies for some of the high-end hijackings Scarpa was executing.50 Those “rewards,” amounting to tens of thousands of dollars, went back to Scarpa for his own thefts of “swag” ranging from liquor to negotiable stocks to gold bullion, jewelry, and mercury. Scarpa even got a cut of a reward for the return of the famous Regina Pacis jewels after a gang of junkies stole the coveted items from a Brooklyn church. That led to national headlines for the Bureau after Villano negotiated the recovery.51

  The Killing Machine also worked for the government in a series of “black bag jobs” that he performed off the books. The first was his well-known trip to Mississippi in the summer of 1964, when he tortured a Ku Klux Klan member in order to solve the mystery of the MISSBURN case—locating the bodies of slain civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney when FBI agents assigned to the probe came up empty.52

  After breaking a second civil rights murder in 1966 as an FBI “special” asset,53 Scarpa traveled to Costa Rica in the early 1980s to extradite fugitive Colombo capo Anthony Peraino, the notorious porn king who had made millions from the production of the film Deep Throat.54

  In return for his assistance to the Feds, Scarpa collected in spades, using his influence with the FBI to avoid prosecution on three separate indictments by organized crime strike forces over the years. Not only did he beat a 1974 indictment for stealing $520,000 in securities and conspiring to counterfeit, transport, and sell $4 million in IBM stock,55 but when Secret Service agents arrested him in 1986 for credit card fraud, on charges that could have led to seven years in prison and a $250,000 fine, the FBI intervened and helped him get his sentence reduced to probation and a $10,000 fine.56

  By that time, Scarpa h
ad been infected with HIV after a tainted blood transfusion and was given only months to live.57 At least that’s what the government told the sentencing judge. If he’d gone to prison then, Scarpa would never have been on the street to foment his last great conspiracy: the third Colombo war. But he lived for another six years.

  The man who vouched for him at the time was Roy Lindley DeVecchio, known in the Bureau as “Mr. Organized Crime” for his purported success putting wiseguys away. After officially reopening Scarpa in 1980 after a five-year hiatus, Lin, as he was known, quickly rose through the Bureau ranks, commanding two organized crime squads. He also taught informant development at the FBI Academy and became supervising case agent on the Mafia Commission case, due in large part to his “management” of Informant NY 3461-C-TE, a.k.a. “34.”

  But defense attorneys would later allege that Lin’s relationship with Scarpa was an “unholy alliance.” In 1994, the FBI opened an Office of Professional Responsibility internal affairs investigation after four agents under DeVecchio effectively accused him of leaking key intelligence to the Mafia killer.58 DeVecchio, who refused to take a polygraph test, was nevertheless granted immunity during the probe, making it virtually impossible for the Justice Department to indict him. In 1996, he retired with a full pension. Later, he was granted immunity a second time, but he answered, “I don’t recall,” or words to that effect, more than fifty times at a 1997 hearing as defense lawyers tried to peel back the layers obscuring his clandestine dealings with Scarpa.59

  In March 2006, the Brooklyn district attorney unsealed an indictment charging Lin DeVecchio with four counts of murder stemming from his twelve-year relationship with Gregory Scarpa Sr.60 The following year, after an aborted two-week trial, those charges were dismissed. But not before Scarpa’s protégé Larry Mazza testified that his homicidal mentor had “stopped counting” after fifty executions.61 Said Scarpa’s own daughter, Little Linda Schiro, “It was like growing up with a serial killer.”62