Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  As Selwyn Raab reported in the Times, “In an unusual twist that could damage the government’s campaign against the Colombo crime family, Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said yesterday that an F.B.I. agent had for years disclosed confidential information to a high-ranking member of that Mafia group. . . . In effect, the prosecutors indicated that while Mr. Scarpa was a mole for the Federal Bureau of Investigation inside the Mafia, he was also getting potentially valuable information from Mr. DeVecchio.”29

  Corcella’s letter echoed the earlier sworn affidavit of Valerie Caproni. Curiously, it was originally dated May 2, three days before Lin’s statement, but when the letter reached the defense lawyers, the typed date had been scratched out and the date of the trial’s commencement, May 8, was written in by hand. Because the letter represents such an extraordinary series of admissions by the government, we’re reproducing it here in its entirety:

  (Peter Lance)

  At an earlier hearing, Judge Korman had shaken his head in disapproval of DeVecchio’s alleged conduct, declaring that Scarpa’s control agent “had certainly crossed the line by a fairly wide mark.”30 Now, in a May 10 story on Corcella’s letter, Douglas Grover, Lin’s attorney, told the Daily News, “It’s a disgrace that the government has allowed these allegations to fester for so long without resolving them.”31

  In his opening statement at the Orena brothers’ trial, Gerry Shargel, who represented Vic Jr., called Scarpa “an insane mad dog killer” who used the Colombo war as an excuse for settling private scores with his enemies.32 Referring to the gang war as a “sham,” Shargel told the jury that Scarpa “shaped the FBI’s investigation by deciding what information to feed to DeVecchio.”33 Calling DeVecchio a “rogue agent,” Shargel argued that “the idea that this was a war with two sides is nonsense. This war was sparked and fomented, believe it or not, by a special agent of the FBI.”34

  Clearly the defense’s strategy was to put Lin DeVecchio on trial—and, if Ellen Corcella’s opening statement was any indication, it was working. Corcella actually hinted that DeVecchio might someday face criminal charges. “Don’t get distracted,” she told jurors. “We are not here to try an FBI agent.35 . . . You are not here to determine if Agent DeVecchio was incompetent or guilty of venality or if Scarpa compromised DeVecchio. He’ll get his day in court.”36

  The next day, it was Orena defense lawyer Alan Futerfas’s turn. Futerfas reminded the jury of Scarpa’s extraordinary run as a TE informant. “He’s committed oodles of crimes and . . . was he told [by the Bureau], ‘We don’t want you. We don’t want to mess with the likes of you’? No. The silence, ladies and gentlemen, was deafening.”37

  After nearly two months of trial, given the first opportunity to expose jurors to the full truth behind the Scarpa-DeVecchio relationship, which he termed “a Faustian pact,” Futerfas argued that DeVecchio must have known that his star source was committing crimes.

  “This is a Machiavellian scenario but it’s a true scenario. . . . This isn’t fiction,” he said in his summation. “DeVecchio is a thirty-year agent for the FBI. He taught informant development. . . . He’s been around the block. This is a seasoned agent. He knew just what he was doing. He knows what happens when you let Scarpa loose, when you give him information about people you want him to kill. Favo knew what would happen. Because when DeVecchio told Scarpa that Imbriale was an informant Favo went and said, ‘You can’t do that. Scarpa will kill him.’ And is it a mere coincidence . . . that the man, Scarpa, who had this corrupt relationship with DeVecchio, is the same man who’s the most prolific killer and provocateur in this so-called conflict?”38

  The best that Ellen Corcella could offer in response was to plead with the jury not to turn the proceedings “into the trial of the FBI and Lin DeVecchio rather than a trial about the defendants.” She warned them not to think that with “a verdict of guilty everyone will forget DeVecchio’s misdeed. This is not so, ladies and gentlemen. Do not let them lay Lin DeVecchio at the United States Attorneys’ Office feet, because I will not accept that.”39

  Then, clearly sensing that the jury had bought the defense’s arguments about the alleged “unholy alliance” between the SSA and his source, Corcella told jurors that their verdict was “not in any way going to cover up Lin DeVecchio’s actions. You are not going to let the FBI escape embarrassment. . . . Regardless of what your verdict says, there are legal ways to deal with the problem of Lin DeVecchio.”40

  “That’s when we had a sense that we’d won it,” Shargel told me in an interview.41 “Ellen Corcella had actually become a member of the defense team. That’s how shocked the jury was at the evidence of this unbelievable misconduct by DeVecchio.”

  “Black Eye for the FBI”

  That was the boldfaced page-one headline in Newsday the day after the jury came in on July 1. “7 Acquitted in Mob Case,” ran the subhead. “Brooklyn Jury Says Federal Agent Fueled Mob Feud.” The story on the inside ran under the banner headline “FBI Guilty.” Reporters Joseph A. Gambardello and Patricia Hurtado noted that this was “the fourth defeat for Brooklyn federal prosecutors in a Colombo family case and the second in which Colombo captain Gregory Scarpa’s ghost dealt the fatal blow.”42

  Juror No. 186 told the reporters that “the defendants were a group of guys trying to keep themselves alive” while “Scarpa was running free doing what he wanted to do,” including murder. “It was him [Scarpa] who made it seem like a war,” said Juror 238. “It was a bit scary,” she said. “That the FBI was feeding information to anyone so deadly,” Juror 180 chimed in.43

  A Daily News piece by Greg B. Smith the same day listed the war trials scorecard. Of the seventy-five initial indictments, sixteen Colombo defendants had been acquitted and forty convicted, “including five who’ve demanded new trials.”44 Smith also reported that, with the clearing of his sons, Vic Orena Sr. was now going to petition the Feds for a new trial as well. In a New York Post piece, Al Guarte quoted Gerry Shargel as saying that “the jurors were all just absolutely shocked by the testimony about the relationship between DeVecchio and Scarpa.”45

  That trial was as close as Lin DeVecchio would ever come to a guilty verdict. But now the stakes were enormous for the Feds. Quoted in a New York Times piece the next day, James Kallstrom, the ADIC of the FBI’s New York Office, cautioned that “no conclusions should be drawn concerning the allegations against Mr. DeVecchio until the internal inquiry is completed.” He noted that DeVecchio had not been suspended or demoted and that his salary of $105,000 a year had not been cut.46

  James Kallstrom, former ADIC, FBI, New York Office

  But as we’ve pointed out, the OPR would drag on for another nine months before Kallstrom sent the memo to FBI Director Louis Freeh warning him that if the probe continued it would “have a serious negative impact on the government’s prosecutions of various LCN figures in the EDNY and cast a cloud over the NYO.”47

  As former EDNY AUSA John Kroger admitted in his book, “The Scarpa Senior–DeVecchio scandal derailed the government’s assault on the Colombo Family.”48

  And what about Ellen Corcella’s promise to the jury that Lin would see his day in court? If he was going to be prosecuted, the senior AUSA who had to make that happen was Corcella’s boss, Valerie Caproni. The question was, would Caproni press for a no-holds-barred investigation of DeVecchio, or would she circle the wagons in an effort to contain the potential damage to her war prosecutions?

  On July 17, 1995, two weeks after charges against the Orena brothers were dismissed, Caproni was contacted by phone and asked to answer questions submitted by the Public Integrity Section (PIS) of the Justice Department “concerning allegations against . . . SSA R. Lindley DeVecchio.”49

  One of the questions submitted to Caproni by a PIS attorney was “DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT SSA DEVECCHIO THAT YOU INTEND TO USE TO INDICT OR PROSECUTE HIM?”50

  Keep in mind that as recently as April 12, three months earlier, Caproni had disclosed eight probable leaks from DeVecchio to S
carpa. During the Orena brothers’ trial, Corcella had promised the jury that Lin would “get his day in court.”51 Yet now Caproni passed the ball back to Justice, telling the Public Integrity Section that “any prosecution of SSA DeVecchio was now up to the PIS, DOJ.”52

  Meanwhile, throughout the summer of 1995, as DeVecchio’s OPR investigation continued, Valerie Caproni did her best to minimize the impact the probe might have on those ongoing war prosecutions. She sent a letter dated July 24, 1995, to Ralph Regalbuto Jr., a supervisory special agent in the Office of Professional Responsibility in Washington, which she termed “the first installment of mark-ups of 302s prepared during the OPR.”

  In this group, I am sending back my 302s, as well as a memorandum that is based largely on certain conversations I had with various agents, and the 302 of George Stamboulidis. Andrew Weissmann’s 302 should be marked up shortly, and I hope to have the 302s of the cooperating witnesses available by the end of the week.53

  That package from Caproni contained multiple pages of 302s memorializing her OPR debriefings and those of AUSAs George Stamboulidis and Andrew Weissmann. Virtually every page contained Caproni’s handwritten comments. Many were heavily redacted.

  “Valerie Caproni had succeeded in getting the OPR delayed and getting assistant U.S. attorneys to sit in with the cooperating witnesses to contain whatever damage they might do to the war prosecutions,” says Flora Edwards. “I don’t know how you can look upon her editing of the 302s in any other way than as a further effort to interfere. The FBI agents who interviewed Caproni, Weissmann, and Stamboulidis were supervisors in the Bureau. Experienced investigators. They wrote the 302s based on what they had been told and now here was Caproni coming in and seemingly trying to rewrite them.”54

  In the page reproduced here, from Weissmann’s August 16, 1994, debriefing, Caproni crossed out Weissmann’s comment that he found it “incredible that someone [i.e., DeVecchio] would actually want Scarpa Sr. on the Street instead of jail.”

  FBI 302 of Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann, with handwritten notes by Valerie Caproni, head of the EDNY Criminal Division

  Now, by early September 1996, with the Feds’ grant of immunity ensuring that DeVecchio would never be convicted for the alleged crimes that had prompted the OPR investigation, the writing was on the wall. Despite the sho cking revelations of misconduct uncovered during the thirty-one-month-long investigation, and the admissions two separate federal prosecutors had made regarding DeVecchio’s alleged leaks, the chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Criminal Division, informed Lin’s attorney Douglas Grover, “We have determined that prosecution of SSA DeVecchio in this matter is not warranted.”55

  The OPR was closed. No indictment, no prosecution. And Lin DeVecchio retired from the FBI with a full pension.

  Chapter 38

  ORGANIZED CRIME AND TERRORISM

  The Feds wasted no time in rebounding from their loss in the trial of the Orena brothers. Six days after the “Black Eye for the FBI” headline appeared on the front page of Newsday, the New York Times ran a piece headed “New Indictment for Reputed Colombo Crime Family Captain.”1 As if to distance itself from charges that the Bureau had been sleeping with the enemy for more than three decades in its relationship with Greg Scarpa Sr., this story heralded a new indictment for his son Greg Jr., whom the Times described as having a life that “reads like a script from a gangster soap opera.”

  Greg Jr., then forty-three, was already serving a twenty-year sentence for racketeering stemming from the 1987 DEA case. Now the EDNY was charging that since 1980, the younger Scarpa had led a thirteen-member crew that had committed a series of felonies, including fifteen murders.2

  Virtually every crime in the indictment was for a mob-related activity allegedly committed by Greg Jr. on behalf of his father during the period when Senior was being “controlled” by Lin DeVecchio. At least two of the crew members named in the indictment, Kevin Granato and Robert Zambardi, had been part of Senior’s Wimpy Boys crew. Bobby Zam was also part of Carmine Sessa’s would-be hit team that made the first move on Vic Orena Sr. at the start of the war that Greg Sr. fomented.

  And, as if to visit the sins of the father upon the son, two of the war murders—those of Gaetano Amato and Vincent Fusaro—were included in the indictment even though they were executed solely by Greg Sr. while his son was in prison.3

  The al-Qaeda Sting

  Considering that his father committed many of the crimes for which Greg Jr. was being charged, the indictment indicated a double standard for the Justice Department. But the younger Scarpa also gave the FBI a tremendous opportunity. As fate would have it, in the spring of 1996, while housed on the ninth-floor tier of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), the federal jail in Lower Manhattan, he was placed in a cell in between two world-class Islamic terrorists.

  On one side was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the al-Qaeda bomb maker, who I proved in my book 1000 Years for Revenge4 was not only responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing but also was the architect of the “planes as missiles” plot executed on September 11, 2001, by his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM).* On the other side of Greg Jr.’s cell was Yousef’s lifelong friend Abdul Hakim Murad, a pilot trained in four U.S. flight schools, who was to be the lead pilot in the original configuration of what was called “the planes operation,” as Yousef had conceived it in Manila in the fall of 1994.5 Finally, in a nearby cell was Eyad Ismoil, Yousef’s codefendant in an upcoming trial for the Twin Towers bombing.

  Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, Greg Scarpa Jr., Abdul Hakim Murad

  Murad had first met Yousef in the early 1980s at a mosque in the Kuwaiti city of Fahaheel on the Persian Gulf, where they both grew up.6 By 1991 Murad had attended the Emirates Flying School in Dubai, where he got his single-engine private pilot’s license.

  On November 19, 1991, as the Colombo war was just beginning to heat up, Murad flew to Washington. Over the next eight months he attended four separate U.S. flight schools: Alpha Tango in San Antonio, Texas;7 the Richmor Aviation Flight School in Schenectady, New York; Coastal Aviation in New Bern, North Carolina, where he got his multiengine license on June 6, 1992; and the California Aeronautical Institute in Red Bluff, California.8

  When he passed through Manhattan in 1992, Murad performed a visual inspection of the World Trade Center.9 Later, he would boast to a Philippine interrogator that he had initially chosen the Twin Towers as a target for Yousef.10 After a fire in their Manila bomb factory in early January 1995, Murad was captured and interrogated by Colonel Rodolfo B. Mendoza of the Philippine National Police.

  Right after the fire, Yousef and KSM fled to Islamabad, Pakistan. Yousef was eventually captured and rendered back to New York, but FBI agents arrived at the arrest site late. KSM, who hung around long enough to give an interview to a reporter using his real name, then escaped.11 By 1996, Yousef and Murad—also rendered back to New York—were on trial in what the Feds called the “Manila Air bombing case.”12 It involved a fiendish plot by Yousef to smuggle a series of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on board a dozen U.S. airliners leaving Asia for America.13

  Two months before his capture, Yousef had performed what he called “a wet test” with a nitroglycerine-based device linked to a Casio watch timer. After Yousef planted it aboard the first leg of Philippine Airlines Flight 434 on December 11, 1994, the IED blew a hole in the fuselage of the 747, barely missing the jumbo jet’s fuel tank. Before the full plot was aborted by his capture, Yousef planned to hide similar devices on up to twelve airliners, with a potential death toll in the thousands.

  By the early summer of 1996, the Feds were prepping to try Yousef for this Casio-nitro bomb plot, which the terrorist had dubbed “Bojinka,” a name reportedly derived from the Serbo-Croatian for “explosion” or “loud bang.”14

  After escaping from the custody of the Philippine National Police in early 1995, a fourth co-conspirator, Wali Khan Amin Shah, had also been captured and rendered back to the
United States. He would stand trial with Yousef and Murad, with jury selection set to begin in late May 1996.15 The fourth member of the Manila cell, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was still at large, living secretly in Doha, Qatar, plotting to execute his nephew Yousef’s separate airliner hijacking plot.

  Now, as the trial approached in late winter of 1996, federal prosecutors were obliged under Brady rules to disclose the sum of their case to the defense. So Yousef, who was representing himself pro se, was well aware that Murad’s confession to Colonel Mendoza in the Philippines would almost ensure a conviction.16

  “Yousef believed that Scarpa, being allegedly in the Mafia, was a person who was anti-government,” says Larry Silverman, Greg Jr.’s lawyer at the time.17 “And since Yousef’s whole philosophy was anti–U.S. government, they seemed to develop a relationship.”

  At some point in March, Yousef broke a bed strut away from the wall of his cell, creating a hole, and started passing tiny rolled-up notes, which he called “kites,” through Greg Jr. to Murad, who had similarly broken a hole in the wall adjacent to Junior’s cell.18 Scarpa Jr. hoped that spying on Yousef for the Feds might earn him a fraction of the support from the FBI that his father had enjoyed, if not a reduction in charges or, at minimum, some “downward release time” under Rule 5K1.1 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.19

  As soon as Greg Jr. passed word to the FBI through Silverman that he was getting notes from al-Qaeda’s chief bomb maker, the Bureau sprang into action. The Feds took him so seriously that they gave him a tiny camera to photograph the kites and even supplied an FBI agent, posing as a paralegal named “Susan Schwartz,” to retrieve the film.20