Deal with the Devil

by Peter Lance

  Out of the Supermax

  I had always intended to end this book at this point. But as I was completing the final chapters, I made a surprising discovery: After spending twenty-three years in federal prison, the last fourteen of which he served in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell at ADX Florence—the Supermax prison where Yousef, Murad, and Nichols are housed—Greg Scarpa Jr. was moved to a maximum-security prison in the Midwest.

  Back in 2004, I got some insight into just how impregnable the Supermax was when I sought to interview Greg Jr. there. At first my request was turned down by Warden Robert Hood, who claimed that my interview of Junior “could pose a risk to the internal security” of the Supermax and “to the safety of staff, inmates and members of the public.”41 He later rejected my appeal on the grounds that such an interview would “disrupt the good order and security of the institution.”42

  Just how a journalist with a reporter’s notebook, a pen, and a tiny digital recorder might disrupt the order of a hardened federal prison was a puzzle to me, but that was how Warden Hood saw it.

  Then, in late March 2012, as I was writing the final chapters of this book, I noticed on the Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator website that Greg Scarpa Jr. was now in residence at a less restrictive facility. So I reached out to him through his younger brother Frank, a former sulky driver who had grown up on Greg Sr.’s horse farm in New Jersey. Frank put me in touch with Greg Jr.—and soon I began a series of interviews with him.

  Scarpa Jr.

  (Associated Press)

  Though author Sandra Harmon had purported to tell Junior’s story in her 2009 book Mafia Son,43 Greg Jr. told me that her book was an inaccurate and “sensationalized” account.44 Now, for the first time, we have a hint of what it was like to grow up under the Killing Machine.

  Scripture tells us that “the sins of the father shall not be visited upon the son.” So I approached Greg Jr. without judgment. He’s the one living person who arguably knew his father best. A Mafia captain himself, he committed many crimes on his father’s orders, but later twice risked his life to provide the FBI with intelligence on a pair of world-class terrorists. In the hundreds of pages of FBI airtels, memos, and 209s documenting DeVecchio’s debriefings of Greg Scarpa Sr., nothing comes close to hearing the story as Greg Jr. tells it. And while there isn’t sufficient time or space in this book to tell it all, Junior’s account suggests that we’ve only begun to uncover the full truth.

  Chapter 43

  THE SON ALSO RISES

  The first thing I wanted to confirm with Greg Jr. was whether he stood by the various statements he’d previously made under oath—including the testimony he gave at his own trial in October 1998, his multiple sworn affidavits or affirmations, and the allegations he had made on January 7, 2004, when he appeared via video from the Supermax at the hearing for Vic Orena.1

  In those statements, sworn to under penalty of perjury, Junior had alleged that Lin DeVecchio not only passed key intelligence to his father, but that he’d been on Greg Sr.’s payroll and that he’d actually appeared on the scene of at least one bank robbery committed by the Scarpa Bypass crew. Greg Jr. had also claimed that DeVecchio was present with his father when his half brother Joey allegedly planted the bag of guns under the deck of Vic Orena’s girlfriend’s house in an effort to frame Little Vic for the Tommy Ocera murder.

  When I pressed him on those claims, Junior confirmed them without hesitation. “Right. Everything I said was right [i.e., correct] in those words.”2

  “So you stand by what you said and you have no reason to change your mind?”

  His reply was immediate. “Right, right, right.”

  I was particularly interested in whether he would confirm his earlier sworn statements that his father was involved in the murder of Tommy Ocera and that the framing of Vic Orena had been done as a “trophy” for Lin DeVecchio.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said emphatically, with the confidence of a street guy who had spent half of his adult life doing crimes and the other half behind bars.

  “What about your allegation that Lin DeVecchio was on your father’s payroll?” I asked him, reminding him that DeVecchio had reopened his father in June 1980 after Senior had been closed for five years. “In the book Lin says he met him in June 1980 and then a couple of weeks later he recruited him,” I said, wanting Junior to clear up a discrepancy in the 209s. “But one of the 209s said it took six months,3 and in one of your sworn statements you said it took Senior a long time to agree to work with him. You were out [of prison] during that period. So for how long did Lin woo your father?”

  That’s when Junior made his first stunning revelation to me: the allegation that his father had been associating with DeVecchio from at least the mid-1970s—years before reopening him. “In the seventies he was together with him,” said Greg. “Seventy-five, seventy-six, seventy-seven they were friends. They were goin’ out to restaurants. My father told me everything he did and who he was goin’ with, just in case somethin’ happened, so I would know, you understand?”4

  I asked him if he had a precise memory of when DeVecchio first started connecting with his father. Was there an event he could fix in his mind?

  “It had to be seventy-five, seventy-six,” he said. “Without a doubt, because there was something [between them] that had to do with me getting straightened out”—a reference to Junior’s induction into the Colombo family. I asked him when he’d gotten made and he said, “I was twenty-five.” Junior was born in 1952, so that would have been some time in 1977.

  I asked him where they’d had the ceremony and he said, “Queens Terrace.” That was the same location where Joseph Colombo had celebrated his son’s wedding back in 1967. At that time, “34” had even given his FBI contacting agent, Anthony Villano, the details in a 209.5 So it made sense that Greg Sr., who was very close to Colombo, would use that location as the site where his eldest son and namesake would “get his button.”

  But the implication that Lin DeVecchio had been auditioned by Greg Sr. for years before he agreed to return to his Top Echelon role was staggering. If Junior was correct, this suggested that DeVecchio had lied to the FBI brass in his 209, as well as to Anderson Cooper when he described the 1980 reopening during his 60 Minutes interview. But that wasn’t the most damning aspect of what Junior told me.

  Junior also fixed the mid-1970s as the time when his father started offering payoffs to DeVecchio.

  In his sworn affidavit of July 30, 2002, Greg Jr. had alleged that “DeVecchio’s cut of the proceeds came out of my father’s numbers racket. Over the years DeVecchio received over $100,000 from my father, including an all-expense trip to Aspen, Colorado, in the 1980s.”6

  I asked him about that now. “So he was paying him as early at the mid-seventies?”

  “Oh yeah, yeah. See, I used to take care of the books—the rackets, the numbers. We’d put our expenses down. It would depend on the numbers—whatever we’d do—and he’d say, ‘Deduct eight hundred, deduct twelve hundred [dollars].’ So I’d put down ‘miscellaneous’ and that was for him [DeVecchio]. I tried to explain that to them [the prosecutors] and they said, ‘He’s lyin’, ’cause he [Senior] didn’t start ’til the nineteen eighties.’”7

  I asked him how the money would be delivered.

  “It was paid in different ways,” he said. “He [Senior] would wrap it in a rubber band. He wouldn’t hand it to him. It was paid in envelopes. There was no set pattern. There were times when he would meet him in New Jersey. We’d be on our way back from the farm, into Brooklyn, and this guy [Lin] would be on a side road, off the Garden State.”

  In his May 1995 compelled statement, when he swore under oath that he opened Greg Sr. in 1980, Lin admitted to meeting Senior in New Jersey “on one or two occasions” but insisted that it was on official business and only after the 1980 reopening. Further, he has categorically denied ever taking bribes from “34.” But Junior stressed that some of the alleged payoffs happened in New Jersey, and sometimes the
exchanges, he said, were two-way.

  “When we’d go home and he [Scarpa] had to see him for information or to give him cash [DeVecchio] would be on the side road. And we’d stop and my father’d get out of the car. I’d be sitting there and he’d go in the car with him. They’d do what they had to do. And he’d come back. And a couple of times he would come back with notes. He would show me the notes.”

  At this point, Junior dropped another bomb, insisting that one of the “notes” his father received from DeVecchio included the name of one of the four victims in the Brooklyn DA’s indictment.

  “There was Joe Brewster’s name on a note one time,” he said, “and that’s when it all started, with Joe. That’s the conversation with Joe. You understand? It wasn’t like DeVecchio was callin’ any shots or nothin’ like that. He was just giving that information, and the brains of what had to be done was from Senior.”8

  But during our interviews Junior emphasized time and again how his father had felt protected and insulated by DeVecchio—recounting how Senior acted with incredible bravado even when making calls to him while he was doing time in hardened facilities like Leavenworth.

  “These were conversations in general,” he said. “There was no hiding. No ‘Don’t talk now.’ First of all, Senior—this guy really, really believed he had a license to kill, Peter, because he used to tell me when I was on the phone in Leavenworth—he would actually tell me when guys got whacked.”

  The “Big Bang”

  Whether or not Lin DeVecchio was “callin’ any shots” with Greg Scarpa Sr., or directed him in any way, it’s clear from what Junior told me that DeVecchio was capable of trying to manipulate his father to achieve a goal. Until now, the evidence I’d examined from the 302s of cooperating witnesses, trial transcripts, and DeVecchio’s many 209s on Scarpa had convinced me that Senior incited the third war for control of the family. While I’m still confident of that, one thing I hadn’t managed to determine conclusively, before talking with Junior, was what role, if any, the Bureau may have played in provoking the conflict. Greg Jr. added some new insight on that issue as well.

  He told me a story that suggests that two years before Carmine Sessa and his surveillance team rolled up on Vic Orena in June 1991, the FBI had planted a false rumor with Greg Sr. in an effort to provoke a fight between him and the Orena faction.

  “There was an incident when I was in Lewisburg,” Junior said, meaning the federal prison. It involved an alleged threat to him.

  “I spoke to my father about it,” said Greg, “and he told me that Lin told him that this [threat] had come from Ralph Scopo and the other side—the Orena faction.”

  After word of the threat was communicated to Senior, Greg Jr. got stabbed by another inmate at Lewisburg. That sent Senior into a tailspin. Junior insisted to me that the incident that led to the stabbing had nothing to do with any interfamily rivalry. Still, he said, his father “went crazy” after “the FBI” told him that the stabbing had been ordered by Scopo, the elder capo who was convicted during the Mafia Commission case.

  Junior was certain that Scopo had nothing to do with it. In fact, he insisted to me that Scopo had treated him like a son in prison. “He’d been really nice to me,” Greg Jr. said. “But to start the war . . . they [the FBI] were feeding my father information.”

  After the stabbing, Junior said, his father came to see him on a surprise visit. “I say, ‘Dad. Listen to me. I don’t know what’s going on out there. But I’m telling you that [the stabbing] had nothin’ to do with those [Orena] guys.’ But he says, ‘It came from Ralphie Scopo.’ And I says, ‘Dad. You’re wrong.’ And he says, ‘Don’t argue with me, Greg. They [the FBI] told me. They’ve got it down. They know what they’re doin’.’ He was convinced whatever that guy [DeVecchio] told him was concrete.”

  To make the situation worse, Junior said his father kept insisting, based on what he’d been told by the Bureau, that Ralph Scopo had put the word out that he (Senior) “might be a rat.” According to Junior his father told him, “This is what you got to do. You got to go tell Ralphie that if anything happens to your father outside, then you’ve got him in there. And I’m gonna do the same thing out here. I’m gonna go to all those guys and tell them, if anything happens to my son, I’m gonna kill yous all out here.”

  So I asked Greg Jr., point-blank, “Are you saying that the Feds were putting false information into your father’s mind and making him paranoid?”

  “That’s exactly what they were doing,” said Junior. “They were workin’ on him. As smart as my father was, he trusted them. So it got to the point where he was ready to retire, but they wanted a big bang! Do you understand? They wanted a big fuckin’ bang. And that’s how they’re celebratin’ it now.” As Greg Jr. described it to me, that “big bang” the Feds wanted was the third Colombo war.

  The Lookout

  Another allegation Greg Jr. had previously sworn to under oath was that Lin DeVecchio was “present during a bank robbery at which Junior was present.”9 In his interviews with me, he said that DeVecchio was on the scene of “a couple” of heists, but one in particular he remembered was the botched burglary at the Dime Savings Bank in 1980 that had led to the death of Dominick “Donnie” Somma.

  “It was the one where the cleaning guy showed up,” said Greg. I asked him where DeVecchio was and he said, “He was on the street prowlin’ around. He was lookin’ after me. That’s what my father had him there for. For me. My father wasn’t there. I was there and he wanted to make sure—as much damage as he did to me over the years, Senior was lookin’ out when he had to look out.”10

  In light of that, I asked Greg Jr. how he felt about his father.

  “My feelings aren’t good,” he said. “I always thought he was giving me one hundred percent in sincerity, loyalty, and love—which is what I was giving him—and then I find out that it wasn’t the case. And it wasn’t the case really with anybody. That was just him. He just maneuvered everybody. Including the FBI. Including my mom. Including Linda. He played the fuckin’ chess game with everybody. My brothers, my sister. Forget about it. This guy was just out for himself. I mean, don’t get me wrong, he made everybody around him happy, but it was all to make him succeed in what he was lookin’ to do.”

  I asked him what he thought it was that drove his father. Was it money? Was it power? “It was all that,” he said. “It was money. It was power. And it was to stay out of prison. He couldn’t do jail time.”11

  In that single sentence, Greg Scarpa Jr. provided the Rosetta Stone to the complex mystery that was his father. A brilliant, brutal, manipulative strategist who used the FBI and the people around him, including his Mafia family and his blood family, to get what he wanted: the fortune he amassed from drug dealing, hijackings, stock fraud, high-end bank heists, and scores of other violent crimes; the power he derived by operating at the upper echelons of the Colombos; the intel he received from his handlers to eliminate his enemies and rise higher and higher in the borgata; and ultimately the freedom that “time out of jail” bought him. It was the freedom to murder and racketeer—an effective license to kill conferred, or at least allowed to stand, by the FBI.

  Greg Scarpa Sr. had used his eldest son to further his personal ends—literally demanding that Junior kill his “second son,” Joe Brewster, so that Senior could continue walking the knife’s edge between Mafia über-capo and “rat.” Still, Junior was his father’s son, and as bitter as he may be over how his father used him, in our interviews he expressed a lingering admiration for his old man.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “This man ruined my life and the lives of my brothers and sisters, and he put a mark on my name that I’ll have to live with forever. He was the Grim Reaper, but he was still my father. Would I follow him again? Never. Would I break the law for him? Absolutely not. Do I pray each day for the people he killed and the bodies he had buried? You bet. He got to renounce this life at his sentencing, and I renounced it a long time ago. I carry around
a huge amount of remorse. But Senior wasn’t just a capo. He operated for years at the boss level of the family. He knew things and saw things that few made guys ever did, and he played the FBI for everything he could get. In his book, DeVecchio said he admired him, and I have to say to a small degree I go along with this. I admire him the way you might stand back and look at a tornado or a hurricane—some really powerful force of nature. Do you want it in your life? No. Do you feel bad for the bodies it leaves behind? Damn right. But hating my father would be like hating an earthquake or a tidal wave. When you see something like that coming, you just have to get out of its way.”

  A Chance to Make It Right

  For several years, an attorney for Gregory Scarpa Jr. has been litigating a 2255 motion in Eastern District federal court so that new evidence can be presented that accurately reflects the service Junior rendered in his stings of Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols, two terrorists responsible for the collective loss of thousands of lives. Between the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the “planes as missiles” plot spawned by Yousef in 1995 and executed by his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed on 9/11, thousands of innocents died—countless more victims than have ever been killed by any figure in the history of American organized crime.

  Even though Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who showed clemency to Greg Sr. in 1993, found Greg Jr. “not credible” in the 2004 hearing for Vic Orena, Judge Edward Korman, the former chief judge of the EDNY, is now considering Junior’s case.12 It was Korman who presided over the trial that acquitted Vic Orena Jr. and John Orena in 1995 after Assistant U.S. Attorney Ellen Corcella was forced to turn over the letter disclosing eight potential leaks that may have come to Senior from Lin DeVecchio.13

  The fact that Korman saw enough merit in Greg Jr.’s petition to continue the case suggests a willingness at least to hear the evidence.