Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  As it turned out, Gotti never showed up for the meeting. Sammy Gravano, who rushed over to DeCicco after the bomb went off, gave this account: “When I heard the explosion, I didn’t think of a car. It was so fucking powerful, it sounded like a whole building blew up. . . . I came out of the club and Frankie’s car is in fucking flames and there’s Frankie Hearts with the blood shooting out of his feet.”54

  Frank DeCicco’s Buick after the bombing

  (New York Daily News/Getty)

  After that botched hit, Casso says, “John Gotti prepared for all out war.”

  Chapter 18

  I SHOT HIM A COUPLE OF TIMES

  Now the bull’s-eye was on Casso. Five months later, on September 14, 1986, a quiet Sunday afternoon, he was sitting in his tan Lincoln Town Car finishing an ice cream cone when he spotted a dark-windowed car pulling up beside him. Before he could reach for his gun, bullets and buckshot tore into him. By Philip Carlo’s account, Casso “got low and rolled catlike to the passenger side,” opening the door. Wounded, he then fled in a zigzag pattern as the shooters, Jimmy Hydell and Nicky Guido, kept firing.1

  Hydell was a low-level Gambino associate. Sammy Gravano later told the Feds that he had been “conned into thinking that Gaspipe should be killed in retaliation for DeCicco’s murder.” The Gambino capo who sent Hydell after Casso was Michael “Mickey Boy” Paradiso, who happened to be the brother of Philly Boy Paradiso, the alleged shooter of Sal Scarpa—another example of the few degrees of separation between these Mafia murders.2 In Friends of the Family, the book he later wrote with Brooklyn Assistant DA Michael Vecchione, Detective Tommy Dades says he first uncovered the links between Casso and the so-called Mafia Cops when he got to know Betty Hydell, Jimmy’s mother.3

  “Jimmy Hydell was a stone-cold killer,” wrote Dades. “He even arranged the murder of his longtime girlfriend, an innocent young woman named Annette DiBiase. . . . A friend of his shot her in the head five times and buried her in the woods.”4

  Once he’d identified Hydell as one of his assailants, Anthony Casso took swift and brutal action.

  In a 1998 prison interview, Casso told Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes that he hired NYPD detectives Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa to kidnap Hydell. “Louis and Steve . . . put him in the car. . . . The kid thought they were taking him to the station house. But they took him to a garage [where] they laid him on the floor. They tied his feet, his hands cuffed, put him in the trunk of the car. The police car comes in, the guy’s kicking in the trunk. He’s making noise. I took him to a place that I have pre-arranged. . . . Sat him down. I wanted to know why I was shot, and who else was involved.” After that, Casso said, he shot Hydell.

  “I didn’t shoot him in the head. That was somebody’s house. You make a mess. . . . No, I shot him a couple of times.”

  “What’s a couple?” asked Bradley.

  Casso admitting to the Hydell murder to Ed Bradley

  (CBS News)

  “More than a couple,” Casso replied. “Maybe I shot him ten times, twelve times. . . . At that time, I gave Louis and Steve, I think, forty-five thousand dollars for delivering him to me.”5

  Eppolito and Caracappa were also accused of working for Casso in seven other homicides, including the murder of an innocent young man named Nicky Guido who happened to have the same name as the mob-connected would-be assassin who had fired at Casso with Hydell. During a police records search of suspects, Caracappa reportedly turned up the wrong Nicky Guido’s address; Casso then dispatched three killers,6 via his associate Burt Kaplan. They visited the house of the wrong Nicky, who lived on Court Street in Brooklyn, and shot him outside his home on Christmas morning 1986.7

  The Mafia Cops. Version 2.0

  On March 9, 2005, in announcing the indictment of the heavyset Eppolito and the tall, gaunt Caracappa—dubbed “Fat and Skinny” by Casso8—Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes called the case “one of the most shocking examples of criminal activity [he’d] ever witnessed.”9 On March 30, 2006, just over a year later, while announcing the four-count murder indictment against Lin DeVecchio, who was accused of leaking key FBI intel to Scarpa that led to four deaths, Hynes used an almost identical phrase, calling the DeVecchio case “the most stunning example of official corruption [he had] ever seen.”10

  But the two cases had remarkably different outcomes.

  The Mafia Cops case had been developed for months by Dades, Vecchione, and Joseph Ponzi, head of the DA’s Investigations Unit. But it was eventually removed by the Feds to the Eastern District, and it was in federal court that Eppolito and Caracappa were ultimately convicted on racketeering, extortion, and the murder counts.11 They drew life sentences that were later upheld on appeal.12 Homicide is a state crime, and Dades and Vecchione were bitter that the multiple-murder case had eluded them. They make it clear in their book that they believed the case was usurped by Mark Feldman, a senior assistant U.S. attorney in the Eastern District.

  After claiming that Feldman promised to let him try the Hydell murder first, before the Feds prosecuted Eppolito and Caracappa, Vecchione writes that Feldman reneged. In fact, he calls the AUSA’s behavior “such an act of cowardice and betrayal that I couldn’t find the words to explain it.”13

  Because the case was moved to federal court, for reasons we’ll discuss, Anthony Casso was denied a chance to take the stand against the cops. So the Feds used Burt Kaplan as their principal witness to prove the charges.

  “At least at that point,” says Andrew Orena, “Hynes’s office still had the DeVecchio case. It was Vecchione’s chance for payback for what happened with the Mafia Cops. But as we later found out, when Lin’s case blew up, that wasn’t to be.”14

  The common denominator between the two scandals was Anthony Casso, and based on what he told me during our interview on September 23, 2011, we can now rewrite part of the story surrounding “Fat and Skinny,” described by Dades and Vecchione in their book as “the two worst men ever to wear the badge of the NYPD.”15

  According to the account by Dades and Vecchione, when Casso first sought the names of the men who’d tried to kill him, “Burt Kaplan . . . told him that he had cops inside the Sixty-third Precinct, where the assassination attempt had taken place. Kaplan eventually handed Casso a manila envelope containing all the crime scene photos and reports—and the names of the men who had tried to kill him: Jimmy Hydell . . . and Nicky Guido.”16

  Calling Kaplan a “Liar”

  But when I spoke to Casso via phone from a Supermax prison, he insisted that he first got the identities of his would-be killers from another source: Greg Scarpa Sr.

  Casso said, “When Kaplan got on the stand [at the Mafia Cops trial], he testified that he met me after I got shot in [19]86, two to three weeks later, by a park in Brooklyn, and he brought me the envelope from the two detectives with all the photographs of the people who shot me and all kinds of information. But that was a lie. A total lie. When I got shot, it was on a Sunday. Greg Scarpa reached out for me the next day, Monday, and I knew who shot me, I knew everybody who shot me, I knew everybody’s name. Jimmy Hydell. It was given to me that Mickey Boy Paradiso was involved. There were four people involved in the actual shooting. One kid was a young kid. They used him to drive a backup car, so I didn’t hunt the kid. I let him go.”17

  When I asked Casso who supplied Scarpa with that intelligence, he named Lin DeVecchio. “Did Scarpa tell you that Lin was the source of the information?” I asked.

  “No, but Joe Brewster did,” Casso said. “Joe Brewster was Scarpa’s right-hand man. When Greg went to meet DeVecchio a lot of the time Joe Brewster was with him. One time I’m driving by the Veterans Hospital in Brooklyn and I saw Joe Brewster walking along outside the fence in the parking lot. I pulled my car over. I got out to talk to him, and on the other side there’s the Fed. It was Greg Scarpa talking to DeVecchio. That’s about the first time I even heard about DeVecchio—like, his name. Joe Brewster told me, ‘Here, don’t let Greg see us, he’s in there
talking to that guy.’ I don’t know if Brewster ever knew that Greg was an informant. I think he thought he was just getting information from Lin.”

  Casso later told me that after he was shot, it was Greg Scarpa Sr. and not Burt Kaplan who identified his shooters. “Greg brought me the information,” he said, “and at that time I knew Greg was getting [it] from the FBI.”

  Casso insists that if the defense in the Mafia Cops case had called him to testify, he could have “proven Kaplan was lying about that part of the story.” For reasons we’ll discuss later, however, the ex-Lucchese boss was never asked to testify.

  Casso also told me that he offered to testify for Michael Vecchione at Lin DeVecchio’s trial in 2007. If that had happened, his presence on the stand would have represented a living, breathing witness to Greg Scarpa Sr.’s crimes—a Mafia boss who was ready to finger Lin for the leak that led to the death of Jimmy Hydell. However, the Brooklyn DA never called him, and the trial fell apart.

  Still, Casso’s new revelations underscore the significance of the string of murders in 1987 that began with the death of Sal Scarpa in January and ended with the October slaying of John Otto Heidel, another associate of Gaspipe’s who worked in the same Bypass gang as Joe Brewster, killed just a few weeks before him.

  The Real Grim Reaper

  As a man who sent 666, the so-called Number of the Beast, to the pager of his consigliere each time he made a significant kill, Gregory Scarpa Sr. must have believed in the devil. But he also believed in God. In fact, he invoked the name of the deity multiple times in the late 1980s after it became clear that the HIV he’d contracted in 1986 had turned into full-blown AIDS.

  At that point he was given only months to live,18 but he stuck it out until the summer of 1994. By then he had lost more than a hundred pounds and degenerated to the point where he had the grayish pallor and sunken eye sockets of a death camp inmate.19

  The full story of how the real Grim Reaper caught up with Greg Scarpa is a fascinating study of “34’s” own tenacity and grit. He not only stayed alive for years after doctors had predicted his death, but as the virus weakened his body, he became the violent field general in the third Colombo war—roaming the Brooklyn streets, shooting victims, and taking human life at a rate that outpaced any of his previous murder sprees. At one point, Scarpa even broke house arrest and waged a running car-to-car gun battle—at a point when most AIDS patients would have been lying in a hospice.

  Years before, in a deposition, Scarpa explained his longevity this way: “The sign of my birth is Taurus, which is a bull. Take it from there.”20 He described himself as rarely sick, but for him the beginning of the end came after he developed a stomach ulcer. He denied that it was linked to any tension or the anxiety that came from his life in the mob, and no doctor ever made a definitive diagnosis. But the ulcer was the apparent by-product of large quantities of aspirin Greg started taking after back surgery in the late 1970s.

  “Depending on how I felt at the time, it would average out to . . . four to six aspirin a day,”21 he told lawyers who questioned him after he filed a negligence action against Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn. The lawsuit stemmed from his hospitalization in August 1986, during which he received AIDS-tainted blood from a transfusion.

  In multiple depositions, Scarpa and Linda Schiro described the day when he developed internal bleeding, growing so weak that he almost passed out. Until then, they insisted, Scarpa was at the peak of health. “He was never sick, never colds, anything,” Linda swore under oath during one deposition.22

  In addition to their account of Greg’s medical circumstances, those depositions also reveal how Scarpa, long a top captain in the Colombo family, presented himself to the outside world. In one session, he described his occupation as that of a self-employed “professional gambler.”23 At the point he was hospitalized for the ulcers, he said he made “approximately . . . $700 to $750 a week.”24 That was just months after Scarpa was indicted as one of the largest traffickers in counterfeit credit cards in New York—following that incident in which he paid an undercover agent $9,000 in cash.

  On the public record, however, Scarpa was consistent. In 1984 and ’85, he filed tax returns with the IRS listing his occupation as “gambling.”

  On the 1984 1040 he declared an income of $27,400 and a year later that number had grown to $36,200, which broke down to roughly $700 a week.25 Scarpa told the lawyers representing the hospital that his last official job had been at the age of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, when he was “employed by the United Furniture Workers of America, Local 76.”26 That was a few years before he began working with Charlie “the Sidge” LoCicero, who, Scarpa later told the Feds, had burned down Florentine Furniture to destroy IRS records.27

  Internal Bleeding

  According to Linda Schiro, the first sign that Scarpa was in medical trouble came on a weekend in August 1986. Greg looked “pale and very weak,” she said; his color had turned “gray,” and his stools were black. That Monday she drove him to see his doctor, Emanual Schiowitz, who found blood in Scarpa’s stool.

  Schiowitz suggested that he be hospitalized. They chose Victory Memorial, said Linda, because Greg had had his back surgery there and because it was “right in the neighborhood.”28 After his admission to the hospital, Greg deteriorated rapidly, said Linda. He began feeling sick and dizzy. He was losing blood, and after several days the doctors told her that his condition was “life-threatening.”29

  By the following Saturday, Linda said, one of the doctors insisted that Scarpa “needed an operation or he would die. He would bleed to death.”30 The hospital called in Dr. Angelito Sebollena to perform “emergency” surgery to stop the internal bleeding. Linda insisted that “Greg didn’t want the surgery,” but in later depositions Scarpa admitted that he was passing out and semiconscious by then.

  Linda said they got a second opinion from another doctor, who told her that “if he didn’t have that operation, he would probably die.”31 But before the surgery, Scarpa underwent a series of transfusions using blood donated by family and friends, including several Mafia associates. As Greg later testified, they used the unscreened blood because Linda was told by nurses at Victory Memorial that “she would be putting [Greg] at risk by getting hospital blood.”32

  But after the surgery, which Scarpa claimed in his lawsuit was botched, Schiro said he developed a heavy fever and was “half dead.”33 At that point, she said, Scarpa passed out and she had to drag him to his bed. Soon “everybody was in a panic because there was blood coming out from his mouth, from his nose, from all over.” According to Schiro, Sebollena said, “Don’t worry. I have everything under control.”34 But Linda finally hired a private ambulance and rushed Senior to Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan, where he was stabilized.

  The Fatal Transfusion

  A few weeks after his release from Mount Sinai, Scarpa was recuperating when he said he got a phone call from Dr. Schiowitz. The call began, said Greg, “with the usual niceties . . . and then he says, ‘I have some news to tell you, but you shouldn’t get too upset about it.’ So I said, ‘What’s that?’ [And] he says, ‘You contracted the HIV virus from some blood that you received. You shouldn’t get over-anxious about it because it doesn’t mean that you will get AIDS.’”35

  Scarpa, whom Lin DeVecchio described as “fearless,” nonetheless called that diagnosis “devastating.”36 He later told lawyers that in short order he was able to determine who the source of the tainted blood was: Paul Mele, a reputed mob associate who had donated blood prior to Greg’s surgery. Mele, whom Scarpa had known since he was seventeen, was a weightlifter who was believed to have taken intravenous steroid injections. Shortly after Scarpa got the news from his doctor, Mele, only twenty-eight at the time, died of AIDS-related pneumonia.37

  Initially, Scarpa said that his blood’s T-cell count was normal, but by 1991 it had plummeted to almost zero; he had full-blown AIDS.38 Typically, once the measure of T cells in the blood drops below two hund
red, cellular immunity is lost.39

  By August of that summer, Scarpa was taking the drug AZT and experiencing severe side effects. “Each morning I would find myself in a condition where I would be almost like to a point of passing out,” he said during a second deposition. “I would become very dizzy. It was hard for me to just . . . stand.”40

  At that juncture, he said, his doctors switched him to Virex, an antiretroviral drug that had none of the same side effects. Later, when asked if he’d had any problems with pneumonia, the illness that killed Mele, Scarpa responded that he hadn’t. Then he said, “Thank God.” For a man who’d been so cold-blooded about taking human life, Gregory Scarpa was now on the receiving end.

  “Anybody else would have been dead at that point,” says his daughter Little Linda, who spoke to me after the DeVecchio trial. “But not my father. He had amazing, amazing strength in him.” So much so that, as the 1980s wound down, he started preparing for what would become the most violent and bloody conflict ever for control of the Colombo crime family.

  Before that happened, however, Scarpa had to endure another trauma: the massive manhunt for his nephew Costabile “Gus” Farace, a member of the Wimpy Boys crew who was eight months out of prison when he gunned down an undercover DEA agent.

  Chapter 19

  MURDER ON THE OVERPASS

  By every published account, DEA Special Agent Everett Hatcher died a hero.1 The forty-six-year-old African American agent had been with the Drug Enforcement Administration for twelve years. He was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army reserve, following a six-year tour in Germany as a deputy provost marshal.2 After finishing his active duty, Hatcher returned to New York City to teach in the public school system. In 1974 he earned a master’s in education from Boston College but was drawn back to law enforcement, working as an investigator for the Manhattan DA before signing on with the DEA.3