Deal with the Devil Page 14
Chapter 12
GOING TO HELL FOR THIS
In 1969, Mary Bari was on the verge of her sixteenth birthday. She was a student at New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and the daughter of a candy store owner. One day, she was standing on a street corner near school when the man who would later rise to the rank of underboss of the Colombo crime family1 rolled up next to her.2 Twenty-four years older and married, Alphonse Persico was the brother of Carmine “the Snake.” They called him “Allie Boy,” but there was nothing boyish about him. He dressed in thousand-dollar suits, drove a white Rolls-Royce, and never went out without an armed bodyguard. To the drop-dead-gorgeous Mary, he was like no one she’d ever met.
“Once they started dating, he started showering her with gifts,” said one of her relatives. “He took her to Vegas, to Hawaii, to Florida. He gave her a fox fur coat. He gave her diamond rings.”3 Even though her mother, Louise, tried to warn her that the Persicos were “bad people,” the headstrong Mary wouldn’t listen. “She had a real crush on him,” the relative said. With her looks and figure, the petite five-foot-two brunette4 had always been sought after by the neighborhood boys, but now they stayed away. Even knowing that Allie Boy would never leave his wife, Dora, Mary pretended he was a normal boyfriend; she introduced him to her family and invited him to her sister’s wedding. To please him, she even got a tattoo of a peach (a pet name) on her derriere. And for eleven years, as the dangerous roller coaster she was riding stayed on its tracks, she lived a life many girls from Bensonhurst only dreamed of.
But the Feds were closing in on the Persico brothers. In May 1980, Allie Boy was convicted of extortion for attempting to collect on a $10,000 loan-sharking debt. With a vigorish (or “vig”) of two points, or two hundred dollars, a week, it was a relatively minor loan, considering that by the mid-1980s Greg Scarpa Sr. had a “bank” with several million dollars “out on the street.”5 But Persico was facing a sentence of sixty years.6 So in June 1980, just before he was to appear before Judge Jack B. Weinstein in Eastern District federal court, Allie Boy disappeared.7 He was so terrified of prison that he forfeited a $250,000 bond and went on the lam, staying out of sight for the next seven years.
Mary discovered how right her mother had been when Persico’s men came to her house and demanded back all the gifts that he’d given her—including diamonds and other jewelry.8 She was out of work for a year before she got a call from Carmine Sessa. He was looking for a cocktail waitress for his club Occasions in Bay Ridge.9
Mary Bari
(New York Daily News)
Being close to “the life” with Allie Boy, and knowing what it meant when the mob turned against you, Mary should have heard the alarm bells. Carmine Sessa would later plead guilty to his involvement in thirteen homicides, most of them committed jointly with Greg Scarpa Sr.10 But by 1984 Mary was desperate for a job. So on the night of September 25, 1984, she got herself dolled up in a black tank top and white stiletto heels with a lizard belt over designer jeans. They sent a car for her driven by Anthony Frezza, a heavyset Colombo associate known as “Tony Muscles.”11
As they headed to the club at 6908 Thirteenth Avenue, Mary had no way of knowing that this was the same location where Greg Scarpa Sr. had murdered that loan-sharking victim a few years earlier. She had no way of knowing that around that time Scarpa had told his protégé Larry Mazza that Mary “was going to give up Allie Boy’s location. She was going to rat on him.”12 She had no way of knowing that earlier that morning Scarpa had called Carmine Sessa and told him he needed to use his club again for a murder.13 Scarpa had said that Bari was dating somebody in “law enforcement”14 and that she “may have [had] information” on Allie Boy’s hideout, which she could let slip.
Considering the way he’d abandoned her, it was unlikely that Mary knew anything about Persico’s whereabouts. But Greg Sr., whom Sessa later admitted was “treacherous,”15 really didn’t need to justify himself to Carmine. He wasn’t even going to bother to clear this hit with anyone above him in the family. He’d committed other homicides on the FBI’s watch and he had reason to be confident that he could get away with this one.
Linda Schiro, Scarpa’s common-law wife, later testified that Bari had been marked for death after Lin DeVecchio came to their house on Avenue J that morning. She said that Lin walked into the kitchen, his usual meeting place with Scarpa, and said, “We have a problem with . . . Mary Bari.”16 Testifying under oath at DeVecchio’s murder trial in 2007, Schiro insisted that DeVecchio had told his informant that Bari was “looking to rat out Allie Boy.”
“You have to take care of this,” Schiro testified that DeVecchio told Scarpa. “She’s going to be a problem.” As he spoke, she said, DeVecchio had “a smirk” on his face.17
Dumping Her on the Street
At that same trial, in which DeVecchio was charged in three other homicides, Carmine Sessa testified that Anthony Frezza showed up at his club with Bari later that night. As they walked in, Scarpa was waiting there with Greg Jr., Joe Brewster DeDomenico, and Bobby Zambardi—the same crew that had reportedly done “the work” in the loan-shark murder.
“Junior put his arm around her,” said Sessa. “She thought it was a friendly gesture.” Then he pushed her to the ground. At that point, “Greg Senior walked over and shot her in the head.”18 After that, Sessa testified that they “wrapped up the body . . . in a blanket or tarp” and put it in the trunk of Senior’s car. Sessa followed in his car. Scarpa stopped near Washington Cemetery around Twentieth Avenue, a few miles away. But at that point Sessa spotted an NYPD squad car and flashed his high beams as a signal for Senior to keep going.
They ended up dropping Mary’s body on McDonald Avenue, under the elevated train a few blocks from Scarpa Sr.’s own house. Sessa lived upstairs from his club at the time, and he testified that later that night he heard a knock at the door. When he opened up, there were six NYPD detectives outside. Apparently Mary had told someone about the location of the job interview, and when she never returned her family got worried. But Sessa insisted that he kept his mouth shut with the cops.
The next day, Sessa cleaned the club with bleach and hosed down the floor. At that point he found what he described as “a piece of flesh” and a shell casing. When he told Greg Sr. about the visit from the police, Scarpa told him, “Don’t worry about it.”19 Schiro testified that after the murder Lin DeVecchio came to the house and joked with Scarpa about where he’d dumped Mary’s corpse. “Lin says, ‘Why didn’t you just bring the body right in front of the house?’” she testified. “And Greg started laughing.”20
Two days later Linda Schiro’s testimony was discredited when the case was dismissed.21 The abrupt end in the trial, after only two weeks, came when Jerry Capeci and Tom Robbins came forward with tapes of a 1997 interview they’d done with Schiro.22 The recordings directly contradicted Schiro’s sworn testimony in one of the four homicides. But there was no mention of DeVecchio’s role, if he had any, in the murder of Mary Bari.23
Schiro later insisted that she had cleared DeVecchio during her interviews with Capeci and Robbins in order to “protect Lin,” who was still helping her, and because she was “nervous and afraid” of possible reprisals from the FBI.24 But she insisted that she was telling the truth at the trial. In 2008, after a special district attorney was appointed to determine whether she had committed perjury, Schiro was not charged.25
At that same 2007 trial, Larry Mazza, who was Scarpa’s self-described “right-hand man,”26 testified under oath that Greg Sr. had told him he’d shot Bari himself because she was a woman and “he was the only one that . . . had the stomach for it.”27
Mazza then went on to recount the details of a dinner that took place not long after the murder at Romano’s, an Italian restaurant on Thirteenth Avenue that Senior frequented. On that night, Mazza testified, Greg Sr. was there with Linda, Carmine Sessa, and Sessa’s wife, Annie. “We were sitting, pretty much joking,” said Mazza. It was a “festive-type of atmosphere.�
�� During the dinner, said Mazza, Scarpa recalled that when he shot Mary in the head one of her ears “went flying.”28 Annie Sessa then told them that her dog had later found the ear in the club. Everybody at the table “laughed,” said Mazza. “It was a joke.”
DeVecchio’s attorneys vehemently denied his possible link to the Bari homicide, along with the other three murder-conspiracy charges brought by the Brooklyn DA. With the dismissal of the case, he can never be tried again for the crime. Later in this book, we’ll examine Linda Schiro’s credibility in depth. But Tommy Dades, a veteran NYPD detective who helped make the case against DeVecchio, has insisted that Schiro was telling the truth.29
At a pretrial hearing in August 2007, Dades testified that Greg Scarpa Jr. had told him that he’d learned of DeVecchio’s alleged connection to the Bari homicide from his father.30 A veteran of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, which focused on organized crime cases, Dades went to work in the DA’s office after he retired in 2004.31 He had multiple meetings with Greg Scarpa Jr., whom the Brooklyn DA had flown to New York from the Supermax prison in Colorado in anticipation of his testimony against DeVecchio.32
Jerry Capeci reported in the months before the trial, “Sources say prosecutors plan to use [the] long-imprisoned mobster, son of the late Scarpa, Gregory Scarpa Jr., to back up their key prosecution witness—Scarpa’s longtime lover, Linda Schiro—regarding two mob rubouts the son was involved in before he was incarcerated in 1988.”
One of those murders was the killing of Mary Bari. But when the case was dismissed, Greg Scarpa Jr. was returned to finish out a forty-year sentence without ever getting a chance to take the stand. One factor in assessing Scarpa Jr.’s credibility would have been his willingness to admit to his alleged participation in the Bari murder.
So in a pretrial hearing, under oath, retired detective Dades described several meetings he had with the younger Scarpa. In one debriefing, said Dades, Junior admitted to his role in Mary’s killing and corroborated Schiro’s contention that DeVecchio had “relayed the information” to his father about Bari’s being “an informant.”33 According to Dades, Greg Jr. told him that when his father demanded the Bari execution, Colombo capo “Scappi” Scarpati warned, “We’re probably going to go to hell for this.”34
“Greg Sr. told Greg Jr. that he was informed by ‘D’ that Mary Bari was being targeted to cooperate,” Dades testified, explaining that “D” stood for DeVecchio. “Greg Sr. told Greg Jr., ‘She’s gotta go,’” said Dades, adding, “Greg Jr. said he was very shocked at that because Mary Bari was a stand-up girl. There was no way she was going to cooperate.”35
For Dades, the killing of Mary Bari was personal. He testified at the hearing that he “kind of grew up with Mary. Her father was Pat, who owned Pat’s Candy Store across the street from my house and I remember how devastated [he] was when she was murdered.”36
According to an account in the New York Post by reporters Jennifer Fermino and Todd Venezia, Bari’s face was so badly disfigured that when her body was recovered, her sister was able to identify her only from the peach tattoo she’d gotten to please Allie Boy Persico. Fermino and Venezia also reported that Bari’s brother became “so obsessed with finding the real killer, that he wound up killing himself with a drug overdose” three years later, in 1987.37 That was the same year that U.S. marshals finally located Persico, who had been hiding under an alias in West Hartford, Connecticut.38 He was ultimately sentenced to twenty-five years and died of cancer at a prison hospital two years later.39
The Job Interview
Even absent any link between Lin DeVecchio and the Bari homicide, the death of this young woman represents another shocking example of how Greg Scarpa Sr. operated with murderous impunity during his tenure as a star informant for the FBI.
At the same time, DeVecchio’s treatment of Bari’s murder in his own memoir is worthy of note. In a kind of introduction to the book entitled “The Job Interview,” DeVecchio and coauthor Charles Brandt deliver what reads like a fictional account of the murder from Bari’s own point of view.
It begins with her putting on makeup at her home before getting picked up for the trip to Occasions and includes detailed dialogue between Bari, the unnamed driver of the car, and the murder crew at Sessa’s club. The account even references Bari’s inner thoughts. In this sequence, she compares herself to Allie Boy’s wife:
I look the youngest of anybody out there. Her and me both gave Allie Boy the best years of our lives. But no way she’s ending up with him. I’ll raise holy hell, Mary thought. You know what? You can push me only so far. It’s about time these people did something for me. They can afford it.
Later, on the ride to the club, DeVecchio and Brandt have Bari talking to the driver about “how Hollywood discriminates against Italian-American women.” In fact they quote Bari word for word expressing displeasure that “they didn’t even use an Italian girl to play the Italian girl in Saturday Night Fever.” After stating—incorrectly—that “the driver dropped Mary Bari off in front of Carmine Sessa’s club and drove off,” DeVecchio and Brandt then describe her murder in explicit detail, complete with statements purportedly made at the time by Greg Sr. and his son.
“Don’t you look foxy?” Greg Jr. says in the account. The coauthors note that “Junior did not have his father’s strong good looks, but he did get respect.”40
Then, moments before Junior’s father shoots Mary in the head, DeVecchio and Brandt describe her inner thoughts: “Greg Scarpa was some sexy-looking man,” they have her thinking, describing Senior as “solid, powerful, dressed sharp, nice mustache, a born leader.” They end the section with a verbatim quotation of the FBI 209 that DeVecchio filed on November 21, 1984, two months after the murder. Not surprisingly, it contains nothing about the homicide.
As to the source, if any, that DeVecchio and Brandt used for this account, one thing seems certain: It wasn’t Greg Jr. The younger Scarpa was willing to testify against Lin DeVecchio, and in his interviews with me he categorically denied that he described the Bari hit for Lin. Nor does the source seem to have been Carmine Sessa, whose only account of the killing is a one-page FBI 302 memo that contains no dialogue. No other FBI files have surfaced of any account by Robert Zambardi. And the other two witnesses to the murder are dead: Anthony Frezza was reportedly killed in October 1985,41 and Joseph “Joe Brewster” DeDomenico, the godfather of Junior’s daughter, was killed in 1987.42 (We’ll take an in-depth look at that rubout—one of the four murders in the Brooklyn DA’s indictment of Lin DeVecchio—in Chapter 16.)
In the fall of 2011, as I was finishing the research on this book, I e-mailed Charles Brandt asking him to document his source for the detailed account of Mary Bari’s homicide. He never responded. I also e-mailed Douglas Grover, Lin DeVecchio’s attorney, requesting an interview with him and his client.
A year later, I sent an Express Mail letter directly to DeVecchio at his address in Sarasota, Florida. U.S. Postal Service records show that he signed for it. But I never received a response from him.
Chapter 13
LOVE COLLISION
Of the many complex relationships in this epic underworld story, few are more complicated than the strange triangle that joined Gregory Scarpa Sr. to his common-law wife, Linda Schiro, and to Larry Mazza, the handsome delivery boy who first became her lover and later became a killer. While he was never formally made, Mazza, who eventually pled guilty to participation in four murders and served nine years in prison,1 racked up a homicide record that would rival the “work” of most hardened wiseguys.
While many of the most violent mob leaders, such as Carmine Persico and Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, started out in Brooklyn street gangs,2 Mazza was a product of the solid middle class. In an interview with me in 2013 he said that he’d been a Roman Catholic altar boy.3 His father was a lieutenant in the New York City Fire Department. Larry aspired at first to be an insurance broker and had a year of college under his belt before his relationship with Greg Scarpa S
r. finally drew him into a web of loan sharking, extortion, robbery, and murder.4 The story of his seduction into “the life,” which began with a sexual encounter and exploded into a murderous rampage, is a cautionary tale that’s never been fully told.
In 2007, when I interviewed Linda Schiro, her answer to my first question sounded like the opening line from Nicholas Pileggi’s screen adaptation of his book Wiseguy, which became the Martin Scorsese film GoodFellas.
“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” exclaims the character played by Ray Liotta, based on the late real-life Lucchese family associate Henry Hill.
When I asked Linda what had so impressed her about the mob she said, “Since I was a kid, I grew up with gangsters in the neighborhood, having card games, having crap games, hanging out in the pool room next door to my grandmother’s, and I was impressed with them, the way they pulled up in their new cars. The way they dressed. I just grew up with them.”5
In her two days of testimony during the DeVecchio trial, Schiro described her early life in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Like Mary Bari, she did a year at New Utrecht High before dropping out for a secretarial job on Wall Street. But she’d been dating wiseguys from the age of fifteen.6 Two years later, in 1962, she was at the bar of the Flamingo Lounge, a mob hangout on Seventy-Second Street and Thirteenth Avenue, when Greg Scarpa Sr. walked in.7
Once he spotted her, Linda said, Scarpa walked over and asked to be introduced. Then they danced. “He told me how beautiful I was and asked for my number. I told him no. I would call him.” Scarpa was thirty-six at the time, nineteen years older than Linda, and he was married.