Deal with the Devil Read online

  Linda Diana Schiro with Greg Scarpa Sr.

  (Polaris)

  Within a matter of weeks, she learned that Scarpa was a “gangster” with “the Colombo crime family.” But that didn’t put her off. If anything, she was intrigued—particularly one night when she saw the bartender get “nasty” with a friend of Scarpa’s. “Greg told him to walk out from behind the bar,” she testified. Then “he took him into the bathroom and . . . flushed his head in the toilet bowl.”8

  Linda soon learned that Scarpa was doing burglaries and hijackings. “I wasn’t upset. I was impressed,” she testified, noting that her father allowed Greg to use his apartment to store stolen television sets.

  Before long, Linda said, Scarpa not only gave her the details of his lesser crimes, he disclosed the murders as well, admitting that by 1962 he’d already committed “about twenty.”9 As a point of comparison, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, John Gotti’s underboss in the Gambino crime family, considered one of the most violent killers the Mafia ever produced, pled guilty in 1991 to a lifetime record of nineteen murders.10 In 1962, with twenty hits under his belt, Greg Scarpa was only twelve years into a career that would last more than four decades.

  Linda Diana Schiro Scarpa

  By the late 1960s, Scarpa was still married to Connie Forrest, the mother of Gregory Jr. and three other children: Deborah, who was two years older than Junior; Bart; and Frankie, who was born in 1963.11 Linda, whose maiden name was Diana, testified that she was still living with her father and wanted to have children by Scarpa Sr., so she married Charlie Schiro, who had no idea “Little Linda” (born in 1969) wasn’t his own daughter. Linda gave birth to Joey, a second child by Greg, in 1972, the year before Senior formally separated from Connie and moved her to a farm in Lakewood, New Jersey.

  Charlie Schiro raised Little Linda and Joey as his own, but after he learned the truth about Linda’s relationship with Scarpa, he divorced her.12 At that point she moved in with Scarpa at the house on Avenue J where Lin DeVecchio started meeting him several years later.

  Then in 1979, after she and Scarpa were living together with their two kids, Linda spotted Mazza, who was then an eighteen-year-old delivery boy for Danza’s market on Fifty-Fifth Street in Brooklyn. She was in her early thirties at the time.

  In her interview with me, Linda insisted that she and Greg Sr. enjoyed “a beautiful sex life.” But as she put it, “you know how sometimes you’ll watch a movie and you’ll see [somebody] who might turn you on? That’s how it was with Larry. He was really so cute. He started delivering groceries to my house.”

  Before she and Mazza began their affair, however, Linda insists that she cleared it with Scarpa: “I just told [him] that there is this really nice delivery boy . . . and I would like to go to bed with [him].”

  Incredibly, the volatile, highly territorial Scarpa, who had killed a man for insulting his son, gave her his blessing. “He said, ‘Sweetheart, whatever makes you happy, that’s what you do,’” she told me. “So we started and Greg knew.”

  And it wasn’t just that Scarpa knew. According to Schiro, he was often at home when she and Mazza had sex. “Larry would come and we would make love and either Greg was in another room or he was down in the basement and that’s how it went, but Larry didn’t know that Greg was in the house. . . . In Larry’s mind he was away.”13

  Mazza was also unaware, at the time, that Linda’s common-law husband was a senior capo in the Colombo crime family.

  In a detailed 2012 interview with Brad Hamilton for the New York Post, Mazza revealed the details of his first encounter with Schiro. One day as he was dropping off groceries, Mazza said, Linda asked him, “Do you fool around?”14 According to Mazza, he shot back, “Of course . . . what do you think, I’m gay?” She then reportedly invited him to stop by the house later. When he arrived, according to Hamilton, she was dressed in a sexy black jumpsuit. Schiro served him wine and M&M’s. “The next thing you know we were on the couch getting hot and heavy,” Mazza said.

  Larry Mazza after he started working with Greg Scarpa Sr.

  Mazza told Hamilton that at first he assumed Linda’s husband was a “Jewish doctor.” Then, one night when he came home, Mazza saw Scarpa get out of a brand-new black Cadillac. He was wearing sunglasses and a medallion and flashing an enormous pinky ring. “I knew something was a little off,” Mazza said.15

  Still, the affair escalated, with the buff eighteen-year-old meeting his Mafia Mrs. Robinson in cars and hotel rooms as well as the home on Avenue J. “We had the house four or five nights a week,” he told Hamilton.

  When he found out he’d been carrying on an affair with the common-law wife of a Colombo capo, however, Mazza later testified that he decided to come clean. He asked for a sit-down with Scarpa, knowing full well that in the Mafia having sex with a made man’s wife wasn’t just “taboo,” it was grounds for elimination.16

  By that point, Scarpa had been treating him “like a son,” so Larry figured he might have a chance to survive.17 But his confession was accompanied by some bone-chilling tension after the meeting was set for Scarpa’s office at the Wimpy Boys club—the same spot where Dominick Somma had been executed.

  When Larry walked in, Scarpa was behind his desk. Mazza told Hamilton that there was a particular chair in that office where Greg would have people sit if they were going to get whacked. Another crew member would be hiding in a closet behind it, and if whoever Scarpa was questioning gave the wrong answer, the confederate would spring out and kill him.18 As Scarpa nodded for Larry to sit in that chair, Mazza’s heart was pounding. He could have been hit from behind, or Scarpa might have acted as he had with Big Donny and shot him dead on the spot. By then Larry knew that Greg had the temperament of a pit viper and he was murderously protective of his family.

  The tension rose as the two men eyed each other. Mazza waited for the Killing Machine to pronounce his sentence upon him. But then, finally, Scarpa said, “As long as it stays between the three of us, it [can] continue.”19

  In his 2012 Post interview, Mazza speculated about why Scarpa had been so tolerant. While living with Linda, he realized that the Mafia killer was still carrying on a series of affairs, including his clandestine marriage to former beauty queen Lili Dajani.

  “Maybe it was selfish,” said Mazza. “[Greg] was seeing all these other girls and those . . . nights I would be with Linda.”20

  But it’s clear that Greg Scarpa Sr. saw Mazza as more than a sexual stand-in. He developed a real affection for the younger man, and after that conversation at the club, Scarpa embraced the delivery boy as one of his own. In fact, Scarpa even got Mazza a job at Hewlett Supply, a legitimate fire-extinguisher company he reportedly controlled, and later he set up him up in a body and fender shop called Love Collision.21

  “The Last Time I Saw Eli”

  According to Mazza’s sworn testimony in the DeVecchio trial, the owner of the small garage was a man named Eli Ackley. At one point, Scarpa loaned Mazza $10,000 to buy a 50 percent interest in the business. Before long, with vigorish, or interest, the debt had grown to $23,500, and Love Collision was losing money. Mazza knew nothing about repairing cars, and he testified that Ackley had a “cocaine problem,” so Scarpa called Eli in for what Larry called a “riot,” or reprimand. He used “hard words,” Mazza testified, “because of the coke and destroying cars and ruining the business.” When asked what happened to Ackley, Mazza replied: “That was the last time I saw Eli.”

  After the failure of Love Collision, Mazza says he tried other legitimate jobs. He got his insurance broker’s license and enrolled in John Jay College. He even drove a school bus for a time. But pretty soon the lure of mob money became too tempting. He began as a courier running numbers; then, with Greg’s backing, he started “putting money on the street,” running his own loan-shark business. He also helped run a daily numbers racket. In return for dollar bets, the payoff could be $500. But Scarpa’s illegal operation was in competition with the New York State Lottery, so
Senior went to extremes to keep merchants from installing the state-operated machines. “One [business] got a truck driven through their storefront,” Mazza told Post reporter Hamilton.22

  Eventually, Mazza and an associate, Jimmy Del Masto, took over a sports-betting operation that serviced professional gamblers who risked five to ten thousand dollars a game. They became so successful, according to John Kroger, the former Eastern District prosecutor, that by the late 1980s they were “producing some fifty thousand dollars in weekly profit—two and a half million dollars a year.”23

  In any deal with the devil, though, there’s a price to pay. And after Greg Scarpa started treating Larry like a second son, he also started schooling him in more violent crimes. “Little by little,” Mazza testified, “I started getting involved in other things.” Mazza started working with “Joe Brewster” DeDomenico in the bank burglary Bypass crew, which looted safe-deposit boxes.24 Later he became a driver, taking Scarpa to various “scores.”

  In time he graduated to driving a “crash car”—a backup vehicle used to interdict the police during getaways. Finally, after a long period of what he called “grooming,” Scarpa started sending him to murder scenes.

  “He would ask me to [arrive] after [the killing] and check for witnesses and [the] police response,” Mazza testified. “Ultimately I became a shooter.” By the time the third Colombo war broke out in 1991, Larry Mazza, the middle-class son who had enrolled in college to make his father proud, became Greg Scarpa Sr.’s principal killing partner. “I was his right-hand man,” Mazza said under oath. “I was very close to him.” At that point in his testimony, the DA asked how many people Scarpa had confessed to killing. Mazza looked down sheepishly and said, “He told me he stopped counting at fifty.”

  The Costa Rican Job

  According to Linda Schiro, sometime in the early 1980s, Scarpa went on another mission for the FBI. This time it took him out of the country, “down to Costa Rica to bring back Tony Peraino,” she told me in an interview.25 She made a similar statement under oath during the DeVecchio trial.26

  Anthony “Big Tony” Peraino was a three-hundred-pound made member of the Colombo family who had struck it rich with his brother Joseph in 1972 after they invested $25,000 in the production of the legendary pornographic film Deep Throat.27 By the mid-1970s, this extremely explicit film, which the Perainos distributed themselves, had grossed $25 million, allowing the brothers to build what a U.S. attorney general’s report called “a vast financial empire, that included ownership of garment companies in New York and Miami, investment companies, a 65 foot yacht in the Bahamas, ‘adults only’ pornographic theaters in Los Angeles and record and music publishing companies on both coasts.”28

  Anthony Peraino

  “Big Tony” and Joseph were the sons of Giuseppe Peraino, a bootlegger and associate of Salvatore Maranzano. He was the godfather who made Joseph Valachi and Cargo Joe later served as his bodyguard.29 Considered the first real “boss of bosses,” Maranzano had fought for control of U.S. Mafia operations in the early 1930s.

  His principal opponent back then was Joe “the Boss” Masseria, a boorish Sicilian immigrant who rose to power after the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, which banned the sale of alcohol, in 1920. In what became a pattern for betrayal and assassination emulated in the 1950s by Carmine Persico and the Gallo brothers, Masseria was killed on April 15, 1931, at a Coney Island restaurant after being set up by one of his young lieutenants, Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano.

  Maranzano, who had come from a strict Sicilian Mafia tradition, designed the rigid structure of the modern Cosa Nostra around the hierarchy of ancient Roman legions. But after promising Luciano equality, Maranzano reneged, just as Profaci later would with the Gallos, and ordered that Luciano be machine-gunned to death.30

  But Luciano, the man many believe to be the first real criminal genius in the U.S. underworld,31 got word of the plot and beat the boss at his own game, engineering Maranzano’s assassination. In the elaborately planned hit the killers posed as IRS agents who had come to audit Maranzano’s books at his lavish offices in the old New York Central Building atop Grand Central Terminal.* On September 10, 1931, with the help of his Jewish cohorts Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Luciano executed the bloody plot that left Maranzano dead from multiple knife and bullet wounds.

  In the wake of the hit, Luciano divided the spoils and organized what emerged as New York’s current Five Families, with Joseph Profaci as the boss who enjoyed the greatest longevity. The Peraino brothers, whose father had been murdered in 1930, eventually became made members of Profaci’s borgata, and by the early 1970s, with the success of Deep Throat, Anthony Peraino, his brother “Joe the Whale,” and Joe’s sons Louis “Butchie” Peraino and Joseph Jr. were generating millions of dollars via their national network of adult theaters, peep shows, and bookstores—with a portion of the proceeds being “kicked up” to Carmine Persico.32

  MIPORN and the FBI

  In 1975, the senior Peraino brothers were convicted of conspiracy to distribute Deep Throat. The following year, Big Tony was convicted of shipping videotapes of the film across state lines. By 1977, the FBI commenced a sophisticated undercover operation dubbed MIPORN, in which two agents posing as sex-film producers and distributors set up a warehouse equipped with hidden mikes and cameras that recorded dozens of adult-film traffickers.33

  With the Feds after him, and facing prison, Anthony jumped bail and disappeared for the next five years. Though many assumed he had gone on the lam to Italy, for at least part of the time he was hiding in Costa Rica.

  By 1980, the porn industry had become a $4 billion annual enterprise and “a major income maker for La Cosa Nostra, after gambling and narcotics.”34 Soon the staggering profits from Deep Throat set off an independent turf war within the Colombo family.

  Initially, the Perainos bought out the film’s director, Gerard Damiano, for a mere $25,000 (the cost of production), depriving him of millions. In 1976, Robert J. DeSalvo, an ex-con who had acted as a front for Anthony and Joseph,35 disappeared and was presumed murdered.36 A year later, while their uncle Anthony was still at large, Joseph Peraino Sr.’s sons Louis and Joe Jr. were each sentenced to a year in prison and fined $10,000 at an obscenity trial in Memphis that focused on Deep Throat.37

  The original movie poster

  With mounting pressure from the Reagan administration to bring Anthony to justice, the FBI once again sent Greg Scarpa on a secret mission. According to Linda Schiro, they furnished him with a fake passport and a phony Nevada driver’s license.38 He was then flown to Costa Rica, where he located Big Tony Peraino and rendered him back to the United States. Sentenced to ten months and fined $15,000, Peraino ultimately died of natural causes in 1996. His brother and nephew weren’t so lucky.

  Murder of a Former Nun

  Ultimately Deep Throat would go on to gross an estimated $600 million.39 The huge profits from the film, and the Peraino porn network it created, spawned another internecine war within the embattled Colombo family. Anthony claimed that not only had he been robbed by his brother, but by implication the family had been cheated as well, with insufficient profits finding their way up the food chain to Carmine Persico.

  On January 4, 1982, a hit team, reportedly dispatched on Persico’s orders, cornered Joe Peraino and his son Joe Jr. in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. In a desperate effort to escape, the Perainos burst into a house at 431 Lake Street. At that moment, Louis Zuraw, an innocent accountant, was watching TV in the living room; his wife, Veronica, was folding laundry on the second floor. Suddenly, they heard what sounded like “fireworks” outside, and the front door flew open. The Perainos ran inside, followed by men firing shotguns. As they rushed up the stairs, stray pellets from one blast struck Veronica Zuraw in the head, killing her instantly. Joe Peraino Jr. was also killed in the attack; his father was hit but survived, paralyzed by his injuries.

  The incident made headlines because Veronica had been a former nun
for the Diocese of Brooklyn before leaving her order and marrying Louis. At the time of the shooting, a police officer told a reporter for the New York Post, “One minute he’s watching TV and the next minute he gets up and his wife’s head is blown off.”40 Given the mob connection, witnesses were reluctant to come forward, and the double murder soon became a cold case. Louis died four years later, never knowing the true reasons behind his wife’s death.

  The day after the shooting, Lin DeVecchio wrote the following 209 report, which was addressed to FBI Director William Webster:

  ON JANUARY 5, 1982, SOURCE ADVISED THAT THE “HIT” ON JOSEPH PERAINO, JR., AND THE ATTEMPTED “HIT” ON PERAINO’S FATHER, JOSEPH PERAINO, SR., THE PREVIOUS EVENING IN BROOKLYN, WAS DONE BY MEMBERS OF ANDREW RUSSO’S CREW AND NOTED THAT CARMINE PERSICO AUTHORIZED THE CONTRACT ON THE PERAINO’S [sic].

  THE SOURCE PROVIDED FURTHER REASONS AS TO THE HIT OF THE TWO PERAINOS NOTING THAT THEY WERE DEALING IN NARCOTICS AS WELL AS PORNOGRAPHY AND ALSO NOTING THAT JOE PERAINO, JR., HAD FAILED TO CARRY OUT A “HIT” GIVEN TO HIM. . . . THE SOURCE ALSO ADVISED THAT [AMONG] THREE INDIVIDUALS . . . PRESENT AT THE SHOOTING OF THE PERAINO’S [sic] WAS ANTHONY RUSSO, THE SON OF ANDREW RUSSO.41

  We don’t know how much Greg Scarpa told Lin DeVecchio about the incident. But given Linda Schiro’s sworn account of Scarpa’s involvement in Anthony Peraino’s extradition from Costa Rica, the report appears to be vastly incomplete.

  We’ve included the details of the violent attack on father and son in this section of the book because the 209 above offers a new insight into Lin DeVecchio’s reporting on “34.” Also, we now have additional evidence on the Peraino attack, related to federal prosecutors by a notorious capo who surfaced again as the third war unfolded a decade later. Those details also shed light on the quality of DeVecchio’s reports on Scarpa Sr., which went to the FBI director.