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

The Killing Machine’s most violent period came during that third Colombo war, which he incited. The death toll during that conflict was fourteen, and the evidence demonstrates that Scarpa was personally responsible for at least six of the hits. Each time he executed a significant rubout, Scarpa would punch the satanic digits 6-6-6 into the pager of his consigliere to let him know that the job was done.63

  A final murder he committed four days after Christmas in 1992 brought the number of homicides he’d ordered or executed on Lin DeVecchio’s watch to twenty-six. That figure amounted to more than half the murders Mazza says Scarpa committed before he quit keeping track.64 (Mazza later reaffirmed the number in a 2012 interview with the New York Post.65) Those fifty homicides made the Grim Reaper perhaps the most prolific hit man in the history of organized crime and put him in the ranks of the world’s top serial killers.66 The fact that most of those deaths occurred while he was being paid as a virtual agent provocateur by the Feds is a testament to the FBI’s willingness to make “a deal with the devil,” as DeVecchio’s trial judge put it.67

  A Month in Jail over More Than Four Decades

  In more than forty-two years as a hyper-violent gangster, Gregory Scarpa Sr. served only thirty days in jail—and that was during the years when he was “closed” as an FBI source. The rest of that time, a series of FBI agents intervened to keep the so-called Mad Hatter on the street. But that wasn’t the most disturbing aspect of Scarpa’s relationship with the government. In light of the 1,150-plus pages of FBI files on Scarpa we’ve now accessed, it can be fairly argued that the FBI’s very playbook against “La Cosa Nostra” was defined and shaped by what Scarpa fed them—particularly in the years from 1961 to 1972, when J. Edgar Hoover himself was on the receiving end of “34’s” airtels. Given the Bureau’s relationship with Scarpa, it’s no surprise that a senior federal judge sentenced one minor Colombo capo convicted in 1992 to multiple life terms for crimes far less repugnant than Scarpa’s.68

  Even as he was being ravaged by HIV—shrinking from 220 pounds to an emaciated 116 toward the end of his life—Scarpa beat the real grim reaper by many years, staying alive to commit multiple homicides as he schemed to take over the family in the phony war he’d engineered. Few figures in the annals of organized crime have operated with such tenacity, deviousness, and reckless disregard for human life. The fact that he served as the FBI’s secret weapon, against what Lin DeVecchio calls “the Mafia enemy,” only underscores the moral ambiguity that runs through this story.

  Drawing on secret FBI airtels never before seen outside the Bureau, in the pages ahead we’ll reveal how Gregory Scarpa Sr., then a young capo for the Profaci crime family, led J. Edgar Hoover himself into the inner sanctum of the underworld. Once that alliance began, there seemed to be no turning back for the Bureau. “They enlisted a violent killer to stop much less capable murderers,” says defense lawyer Ellen Resnick, whose work helped expose this “unholy alliance.”69 “It was the ultimate ends-justify-the-means relationship.”

  As you turn the pages of this book, there are two crucial questions to keep in mind. Who was in charge: the special agents like Tony Villano and Lin DeVecchio, who were responsible for “controlling” Scarpa, or the killer himself? And who got the most out of this deal with the devil: the FBI or the very “Mafia enemy” they sought to defeat?

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  THE KISS OF DEATH

  The day before his testimony before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Joseph Michael Valachi, a Mafia killer, was escorted out of the District of Columbia jail by a protection detail worthy of a chief of state. A dozen U.S. marshals surrounded him. Ten DC police officers prowled the corridors outside the third-floor caucus room where he was prepped for his groundbreaking confession.1

  For months, Valachi, who was being held in special protective custody, had shocked his FBI handlers with stunning revelations about the inner workings of the secret national criminal organization he called Cosa Nostra, or “Our Thing.”2 Now, for the first time, he would rip back the curtain and confess not just to the McClellan rackets committee, but to a national television and radio audience of millions.

  The security detail was not misplaced. Valachi, or “Joe Cargo,” as he was known in the Genovese crime family,3 had a $100,000 contract on his head. It was issued by Vito Genovese himself. At that moment, although he was doing life in an Atlanta penitentiary on a narcotics conviction, Don Vito was regarded among New York’s Five Families as the capo di tutti capi, the “boss of bosses.” Valachi had been a loyal soldier who had killed for his borgata multiple times. But sixteen months earlier, Genovese had pushed him to the brink of betrayal after grabbing him with both hands and kissing him on the lips.

  It was the bacio della morte, a Mafia fatwa.

  The kiss of death.4

  Now, in Washington on the morning of September 26, 1963, before five hundred people jammed into the Senate Caucus Room, Valachi, dressed in a black suit, white shirt, and silver tie, chain-smoked and rubbed his palms to wipe off the sweat from the hot TV lights. Speaking in a hollow, guttural voice, he proceeded to lay bare the criminal organization he’d joined back in 1930.5

  Over the days that followed, using a series of massive flowcharts created by the government, Valachi unmasked the heads of the New York families. For the first time in public he revealed that the Genovese and Gambino families each had four hundred and fifty members devoted to extortion, loan sharking, gambling, narcotics trafficking, and murder. He detailed the structure of each borgata, starting with the boss, or representante, on top; then an underboss; then a consigliere, or counsel; and then a series of caporegimes, or captains, with soldati, or soldiers, on the bottom. These terms would become part of the American lexicon six years later with the publication of Mario Puzo’s iconic novel The Godfather.

  Valachi testifying before the McClellan Committee and a national TV audience

  (Corbis)

  In fact, Valachi himself is believed to have been the inspiration for the character of Frank Pentangeli in the film The Godfather: Part II, who appears before a Senate committee and then commits suicide.6 Valachi would later try to kill himself in federal custody after the Justice Department blocked his plans to publish an 1,180-page manuscript7 he’d written with the FBI’s encouragement.8 A third-party version of his story, written by author Peter Maas, who had originally been retained by the Justice Department to edit the memoirs, was later published as The Valachi Papers. The book went on to become an international bestseller that was adapted into a motion picture with Charles Bronson in the title role.9

  By September 1963, Valachi had been in the Bureau’s exclusive custody for a year.10 Now, insisting that his goal was to “destroy the Cosa Nostra bosses and leaders,” he betrayed the oath he’d taken upon his induction into the family back in 1930, when it was headed by Salvatore Maranzano.11

  Living by the Gun and the Knife

  As his voice echoed off the marble walls of the Caucus Room, Valachi told of being driven “ninety miles upstate” from Manhattan to a private residence. There he was taken into a large room where thirty-five men were seated around a long table.

  “There was a gun and a knife on the table,” Valachi testified. “I sat at the edge. They sat me down next to Maranzano. I repeated some words in Sicilian after him.”

  Senator McClellan then asked, “What did the words mean?”

  “‘You live by the gun and the knife and die by the gun and the knife,’” Valachi replied. At that point, he said, Maranzano gave him a small “Mass card” with a picture of a saint and set it ablaze in his cupped hands. “I repeated in Sicilian,” said Valachi, showing how he passed the burning paper from hand to hand, “‘This is the way I burn if I betray the organization.’”

  Valachi then testified that the other men around the table “threw out a number,” each one holding up from one to five fingers. Adding up the total and beginning with Maranzano, counting down from the man on his left, t
he number was deducted around the table until the man with the last number was designated as Valachi’s “godfather.” In his case it was Joseph Bonanno, who would go on to head his own family after Maranzano’s death in 1931.

  At that point, said Valachi, staring into the TV cameras, they asked him what finger he shot with. He then identified his trigger finger and it was pricked with a pin. Bonanno did the same and pressed his finger against Valachi’s, symbolizing that they “were united in blood.” Valachi then told the Senate panel he was given two “rules of Cosa Nostra.” One was “a promise” not to covet another member’s wife, sister, or daughter.

  “And the second?” asked one of the senators.

  At that point Valachi grew grim, knowing he had already broken it. “This is the worst thing I can do, to tell about the ceremony,” he said. “This here, what I’m telling you, what I’m exposing to you and the press and everybody . . . this is my doom.”

  Defying Hoover’s Statements on the Mafia

  In virtually every published reference to Valachi’s appearance before the McClellan Committee, he is credited with being the first Mafia figure in history to reveal the secrets of Cosa Nostra.12 Attorney General Robert Kennedy himself made that point. In a piece for the New York Times Magazine published shortly after Valachi’s testimony, Kennedy wrote, “For the first time an insider, a knowledgeable member of the racketeering hierarchy, has broken the underworld’s code of silence.”13

  William Hundley, then head of the Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, who sat behind Valachi at the hearing, went even further. “What he did is beyond measure,” he said afterward. “Before Valachi came along, we had no concrete evidence that anything like this actually existed. . . . But Valachi named names. He revealed what the structure was and how it operated. In a word, he showed us the face of the enemy.”14

  On the surface, Valachi’s coast-to-coast televised confession was seen as an embarrassment to J. Edgar Hoover, the iron-fisted FBI director who for years was famous for denying the very existence of the Mafia. “No single individual or coalition of racketeers dominates organized crime across the country,” Hoover said at one point.15 As Sanford J. Unger wrote in his exhaustively researched history of the Bureau, “Neither the investigation of Murder Incorporated in Brooklyn in the early 1940s, nor the work in the 1950s of New York District Attorney Frank S. Hogan and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, nor the inquiry conducted by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee could persuade the Director to say otherwise.”16

  There were several purported reasons for Hoover’s apparent blindness to what Valachi called “Our Thing.” First, the statistics-driven Hoover preferred the case-clearance rates of easy-to-solve crimes like bank robbery and interstate auto theft to the much more time-consuming prosecution of organized crime. Second, given that the starting salary at the Bureau in the mid-1950s was $5,500, Hoover was terrified that his incorruptible agents would be tempted by the lure of mob money.17

  Many also believed that there were more personal motives behind the Director’s unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of the Sicilian-dominated national crime syndicate. There was the lingering allegation that the Mafia had material on Hoover (purported to be a homosexual) that might have been used to blackmail him.18

  Further, the Director maintained an abiding hatred for Harry J. Anslinger, the former assistant commissioner in the Bureau of Prohibition, who fought bootleggers in the 1920s only to become head of the Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) in 1930.

  As far back as the early 1950s, Anslinger’s FBN agents had been compiling dossiers on Mafiosi from coast to coast. Anslinger even sent a list to the Bureau of more than three hundred crime family members.19 Former agent Neil J. Welch remembers “burning shiny grayish reproductions” of the FBN list “on primitive office copiers and passing [them] secretly from agent to agent like some heretical religious creed—which it was.”20 Later, when he became the special agent in charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Detroit office, Welch remembered finding a copy of the list. “It had the answers,” he wrote. “But no one would listen . . . every LCN [La Cosa Nostra] member we have is on the list without exception.”

  “So,” as Boston Globe reporter Ralph Ranalli writes in his book Deadly Alliance, “while Eliot Ness and his agents from the U.S. Treasury Prohibition Bureau went after Capone in the 1930s, and Anslinger’s FBN targeted the Mafia . . . which poured tons of cheap heroin in the inner cities in the forties and fifties, Hoover stayed out of the fight.”21

  It wasn’t until after November 14, 1957, when more than a hundred Mafiosi from coast to coast were discovered at a secret meeting in Apalachin, New York, that Hoover finally took the blinders off.

  The First Mafia Summit

  A month before that meeting, Lucky Luciano, the first official boss of Valachi’s family, who had been deported from the United States in 1946, convened an international summit of Mafiosi at the Hotel des Palmes in Palermo, Sicily.22 The details of that secret conclave were reported for the first time by investigative reporter Claire Sterling in her extraordinary 1990 study of the Sicilian Mafia, known in Italy as La Piovra, “the Octopus.”23

  Joseph Valachi had actually described Luciano as “the boss of all bosses under the table,”24 and that fall in Palermo he summoned representatives from all the major U.S. borgatas to the hotel to lay out his plan for what would soon become a deadly $1.6 billion narcotics pipeline known as the “French Connection.” Morphine base harvested in the “Golden Triangle” of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam would be smuggled into Marseilles, France, where it would be refined into what was later marketed on the streets of America as No. 4 China White heroin.25 The distribution network would actually include a series of pizzerias, giving rise to what the media called the “Pizza Connection.” After that network was broken by the Feds, the mass indictments that followed led to the longest-running trial in the history of the Southern District of New York.26

  As Sterling noted, the Apalachin meeting, attended by Mafia bosses from Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Detroit, Kansas City, and Philadelphia,27 was principally designed by Luciano to get the American cugines (cousins) to accept his narcotics import plan. They would agree to take a percentage from the Sicilian-based operation while maintaining deniability with the Feds.28

  But the meeting was compromised when a New York State trooper named Edgar D. Croswell stumbled onto the line of black limos parked at the fifty-three-acre estate of mobster Joseph Barbara. After a roadblock was set up, the attendees scattered, many of them into the neighboring woods and farmlands in their silk suits and wingtip shoes, tossing away guns and cash as they ran. Up to fifty Mafiosi escaped, but fifty-eight were arrested.29 One of the escapees was Valachi’s “godfather,” Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno.30

  The Top Hoodlum Program

  Two weeks after the Apalachin arrests, Hoover set up what he called the “Top Hoodlum Program,” in which each FBI SAC was expected to compile a list of ten organized crime, or “OC,” figures within his jurisdiction.31

  Anthony Villano, the veteran New York agent who “ran” Gregory Scarpa Sr. for six years, wrote in his memoir, Brick Agent, that his supervisor warned him that Top Hoodlum “might very well be only a temporary operation designed to satisfy criticism and would be disbanded after the heat died down.”32 As Boston Globe reporter Ralph Ranalli reports, however, the defection of Joseph Valachi “was the second major event (after Apalachin) that forced the FBI into the war on the Mafia for good.” Ranalli notes that “by the early 1980s attacking organized crime had become not only the FBI’s, but the Justice Department’s, first priority.33 It was a far cry from the ‘Mafia doesn’t exist’ days of Hoover.”

  The Director even went so far as to embrace Valachi’s name for the organization—but he added an unnecessary article, labeling it “La Cosa Nostra,” which literally translated as “The Our Thing.”34 That allowed Hoover, who loved abbreviations, to identify the mob
in all future Bureau communiqués as LCN.

  For years, the Director had authorized electronic surveillance, or ELSUR, against suspected members of the Communist Party USA. The tactics included illegal wiretaps, break-ins, and searches,35 all done without warrants. As veteran Chicago agent William Roemer recalled in his memoir, Man Against the Mob, Hoover “believed he had the authority to install bugs since more than one attorney general had authorized him to use wiretaps to preserve the national security.”36 On that basis, Hoover permitted agents to engage in what Roemer calls “black bag jobs,” conducting break-ins to install bugs at mob locations in cities across the country.

  By 1958, within months of the Apalachin incident, Hoover had ordered hundreds of these illegal wiretaps, describing them in memos as “highly confidential sources.” But the tactic soon began yielding some embarrassing revelations. One bug in a Mafia-controlled Chicago tailor shop linked two members of Congress to the mob.37 Another, in a Washington, DC, hotel, ignited an influence-peddling “party-girl” scandal involving President Lyndon Johnson’s former top aide Bobby Baker.38 In the mid-1960s, legendary Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams successfully sued the FBI over ELSUR in Las Vegas.39

  So President Johnson demanded that the FBI cease and desist all illegal surveillance—not just shutting off the tape recorders, but physically removing every bug the special agents had installed. When the Bureau’s listening devices went dark on July 11, 1965, veteran agent Ralph Hill said, “it was like being in a cave and cutting off the lights.”40 Mob-busting Chicago agent Roemer described it as “one of the worst days of [his] life.”41

  Top Echelon

  As the CIA had known for years, the best intelligence often comes from human sources, known in tradecraft as HUMINT. But the house that Hoover built had avoided the Mafia elephant in the room for so long that the FBI was slow to develop informants. At least that was the conventional wisdom. However, the research uncovered in this investigation tells a different story. As early as November 1961, nearly two years before Valachi’s appearance before the McClellan Committee, Hoover instructed all SACs to “develop particularly qualified live sources within the upper echelon of the organized hoodlum element who will be capable of furnishing the quality information needed to attack organized crime.”42