Gregory
Scarpa Sr. was a study in complication. A peacock dresser, he carried a
wad of $5,000 in cash at all times. He wore a seven-carat pinky ring
and a diamond-studded watch. 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. A single bank robbery by his
notorious Bypass Gang on the July 4 weekend in 1974 netted $15 million
in thirteen duffel bags full of cash and jewels. His sports betting
operation made $2.5 million a year. His crew grossed $70,000 weekly in
drug sales. And yet, fifteen years after becoming a “made” member of the
Colombo crime family, while he was a senior capo, Scarpa was arrested
for “pilfering” coins from a pay phone. 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, 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.” For more than forty-two years, as
capo of the Colombo family (or
), he roamed the streets
of Brooklyn like a feudal lord, earning the nicknames “the Grim Reaper,”
“the Mad Hatter,” “Hannibal Lecter,” and “the Killing Machine.” He even
signed personal letters with the initials “KM.”
But Scarpa was
also a homebody with three separate families. In 1949 he married Connie
Forrest. They had four children, including Gregory Jr., who started
doing crimes for his father at the age of sixteen. 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. 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-old former Miss Israel. Years later, Dajani’s lover, an
ex-abortion doctor named Eli Shkolnik, was murdered on Scarpa’s orders.
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 protégé, schooling him in the crimes of
loan sharking, bank robbery, and homicide.
“I
started out one way and ended up with the devil,” Mazza later said. 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.”
Still, Scarpa, who bragged that he “loved
the smell of gunpowder,” 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. “He
was just a vicious, violent animal,” said Mazza. “Unscrupulous and
treacherous . . . just a horrible human being.”
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.”
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.
“He could transform himself,” says Little Linda. “He could go kill someone and five minutes later he’d be home watching
Wheel of Fortune with my brother and me.”
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 he was
stringing Christmas lights with his wife. 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. 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, he ordered him shot. 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 his grave dug in advance of the
murder, but Catanzano escaped when DEA agents arrested him before the
execution could take place.
“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. “If he’d lived four hundred
years ago, he would have been a pirate.” 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.
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.
“Scarpa had an action jones,” one
former assistant district attorney recalled. 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.”
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
More
than eleven hundred pages of files, uncovered in the course of
investigating Scarpa’s career, demonstrate that his relationship with
federal law enforcement dates back to the Kennedy administration. 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 multi-page
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, “34,” as Scarpa was known, also gave the Bureau reams of
disinformation.
A brilliant Machiavellian strategist, Scarpa not
only stayed on the street for forty-two years, avoiding prison after
fourteen 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 Colombo and Carmine Persico. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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 set up his
own nephew’s murder to take the heat off the other New York families.
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
$158,000 in fees and bonuses for his services, 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. 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 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.
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.
After breaking a second civil rights murder
in 1966 as an FBI “special” asset, 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.
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, 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.
By that time, Scarpa had been infected with HIV
after a tainted blood transfusion and was given only months to live. 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 during 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 following 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. 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 on his clandestine dealings with Scarpa.
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. 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. Said his own daughter,
“Little Linda” Schiro, “It was like growing up with a serial killer.”
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.
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 half the murders Mazza says Scarpa
committed before he quit keeping track. (Mazza later reaffirmed the
number in a 2012 interview with the
New York Post.) 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. 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.
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.
Even as he was
being ravaged by the HIV virus—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.
Today, as suspicion of
governmental ethics and competence runs higher than ever, the fact that
the FBI used such a known murderer as its secret weapon against what Lin
DeVecchio calls “the Mafia enemy” underscores the moral ambiguity that
colors so much federal law enforcement in the United States. From the
time J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI forged its alliance with Gregory Scarpa Sr., a
young capo for the Profaci crime family, there was no turning back.
“They enlisted a violent killer to stop much less capable murderers,”
says defense lawyer Ellen Resnick, whose work helped to expose this
unholy alliance. “It was the ultimate ends-justify-the-means
relationship.”
Excerpted from “Deal With the Devil: The FBI’s Thirty-Year Relationship With a Mafia Killer”
by Peter Lance. Published by William Morrow, an imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 2013 by Tenacity Media Group Ltd.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
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