Peter Lance - Deal with the Devil: The FBIs Secret Thirty-Year Relationship with a Mafia Killer

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

If I dont have my money by Thursday, Ill put him right in the fucking hospital.... I wanna break his mothers face and break his fuckin legs and arms.

Greg Scarpa Sr., recorded on a series of FBI wiretaps

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

Larry Mazza, Scarpas protg and co-conspirator

In my heart, as Scarpas handler, of course I knew he was doing hits....

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, DeVecchios number two in the FBIs Colombo Squad, on DeVecchios relationship with Scarpa

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 Scarpa

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

Lin DeVecchio after the dismissal of murder charges against him in 2007

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 governments unacceptable willingness to employ criminality to fight crime.

Judge Gustin Reichbach after the DeVecchio murder case was dismissed

Gregory Scarpa Sr. was a study in complication. A peacock dresser, he carried a wad of $5,000 in cash at all times. He simply couldnt resist a chance to stealeven a handful of change from the phone company.

Five foot ten, two hundred and twenty pounds,

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.,

I started out one way and ended up with the devil, Mazza later said.

Still, Scarpa, who bragged that he loved the smell of gunpowder,

And yet Scarpas daughter, Little Linda Schiro, described him as incredibly lovingthe kind of dad who was there for us every night for dinner at five oclock. Whatever he was on the outside, he was really gentle at home.

He could transform himself, said Little Linda. He could go kill someone and five minutes later hed 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 Mazzas 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.

The man was the master of the unpredictable and he knew absolutely no bounds of fear, said Joseph Benfante, one of Scarpas former lawyers.

Scarpa had an action jones, one former assistant district attorney recalled.

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 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 familys 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 FBIs New York Office. During these secret sessions, conducted in hotel rooms, automobiles, and Scarpas 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 well see, while many of the debriefings contained detailed intelligence on the organizational structure of the Mafia,

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, 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.

In 1989, Everett Hatcher, a decorated DEA agent, was gunned down by Scarpas nephew Gus Farace, who was a member of Gregs Wimpy Boys crew.

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,

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 caselocating 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,

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,

By that time, Scarpa had been infected with HIV after a tainted blood transfusion and was given only months to live. At least thats what the government told the sentencing judge. If hed 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 Lins 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.