Deal With the Devil: The FBI's Secret Thirty-Year Relationship With a Mafia Killer

by Peter Lance

  Until Scarpa’s 1975 closure, memos like the one below were regularly interspersed with his detailed debriefings. They served to reassure the DC brass by reiterating the mantra that the man later described as “the Mad Hatter” was truthful, “emotionally stable and reliable” and “has never furnished any information known to be false.”

  (Peter Lance)

  Many of these airtels are available at www.peterlance.com. But in the pages ahead we’ll include some of the highlights. They begin in November 1961 and offer extraordinary insight into the activities of Joseph Profaci, the family boss at the time. Known as “the Olive Oil King of New York,” Profaci was described by Attorney General Robert Kennedy as “one of the most powerful underworld figures in the United States.” He ran his family from what was described as “a cluttered office” at the Mamma Mia Importing Company at 1414 Sixty-Fifth Street in Brooklyn.5

  Profaci was a complicated boss. He’d served a year in prison in Sicily for theft before emigrating to the United States in 1921.6 Yet he was deeply devout, and despite the murderous racketeering of his underworld family, he harbored dreams of one day returning to Italy to be decorated by the Pope with a Vatican knighthood.7

  Virtually everything the FBI learned about Profaci in the early 1960s came from the debriefings of Gregory Scarpa Sr., whose principal “padrone” in the borgata was Charles LoCicero. In the following excerpt from an airtel, Scarpa, identified as “the informant,” is described as a “leader” in the crime family.

  June 25, 1962: The informant is a leader in the Profaci gang of the New York underworld organization whose leadership comprises the “Commission.” He is closely allied with CHARLES LOCICERO . . . who has been identified as an advisor to the Profaci organization. The informant is currently active as an operator of a numbers racket in Brooklyn.8

  Known as “Charlie the Sidge,” LoCicero was consigliere during the first of three wars within the family. The initial Profaci-Gallo conflict was waged from 1961 to 1964.9 At least seven members of the family were murdered and three others went missing and were presumed dead.10 The dispute arose because a crew of hotheaded young soldiers, who had reportedly carried out a legendary contract killing, felt cheated. The gang included Carmine Persico, known as “Junior,” and the three violent Gallo brothers, Crazy Joe, Larry, and their younger brother Kid Blast.11 Their claim to fame derived from their alleged participation in the most celebrated Mafia rubout of the 1950s: the barbershop slaying of Umberto “Albert” Anastasia, the boss of what is now the Gambino family.

  The Barbershop Quintet

  Nicknamed “the Lord High Executioner,” Anastasia was one of the principals behind the Brooklyn-based “kill-for-hire” organization known as Murder Incorporated. Named by Harry Feeney, a reporter for the New York World-Telegram, Murder Inc. was responsible for hundreds of homicides nationwide from 1931 to 1940.12

  On October 25, 1957, Anastasia was getting a haircut at the Park Sheraton Hotel in midtown Manhattan when, shortly after ten fifteen A.M., two gunmen came in wearing fedoras and hiding their faces behind sunglasses and scarves. One of them told the shop owner, “Keep your mouth shut if you don’t want your head blown off.” Then, while Anastasia sat with his eyes closed, they quickly moved to chair number four in the thirty-five-by-twenty-eight-foot shop and opened fire.13 Ten shots rang out. The first two blew Anastasia from the chair, forcing him against the mirrored glass wall. Struck in the left hand and wrist and right hip, he ricocheted off a glass cabinet as the shooters kept firing. They hit him one more time in the back and finished him with a bullet to the back of the head.

  Albert Anastasia of Murder Incorporated, dubbed “the Lord High Executioner”

  The gunmen coolly departed, dropping one .38 Colt in a hotel corridor as they headed toward West Fifty-Fifth Street and the second (a .32 pistol) on the steps leading down to the BMT subway.

  The Anastasia crime scene

  (Corbis)

  The murder was never solved, but almost thirty years later, a witness at a federal trial testified that Carmine Persico took credit for the hit.14 Crazy Joe Gallo also boasted of his own involvement. Claiming that a five-man crew had pulled off the hit, Gallo joked that Anastasia had been dispatched by “a barbershop quintet.”15

  Having made their bones with the Anastasia murder, Persico and the Gallo brothers waited patiently for Profaci to take care of them. Then, in 1959, they saw a chance for advancement. Frank “Frankie Shots” Abbatemarco was a fifty-nine-year-old Profaci captain who raked in $2.5 million a year—almost $7,000 daily—from a lucrative numbers and loan-sharking operation. On November 4, as he left Cardiello’s bar near Park Slope, two men in fedoras and topcoats started firing.16 They chased Abbatemarco back into the tavern and finished him off with six shots. Joe Gallo was later identified as one of the shooters.17

  Expecting Profaci to reward them with Abbatemarco’s action, Persico and the Gallos were outraged when the boss distributed the capo’s operations to upper-tier family cronies. On February 27, 1961, nine months before Scarpa started fully cooperating with the Feds, the Gallos kidnapped four of Profaci’s top men, including his brother Frank, his brother-in-law Joseph Magliocco, and Joseph Colombo, a top Profaci killer who would one day rule the family. Charles LoCicero, who was highly regarded in the family, negotiated their release, and Profaci put out the word that he wanted to make peace with the rebel faction. But soon enough, the boss would renege and use Carmine Persico to sell out the Gallo brothers.

  Tempted by the Snake

  Gregory Scarpa, the FBI’s new eyes and ears inside the family, provided the Bureau with the intimate details of what followed. Around this time, Profaci learned that he was dying of cancer. We don’t know to what degree his failing health contributed to his subornation of Persico, but after the betrayal, Carmine was forever branded “the Snake” by other members of the family. Nonetheless, in a debriefing from the fall of 1961, Scarpa recounted how Persico had first asked him to throw in with the Gallo side.

  November 13, 1961: Informant stated that when the GALLOS first left the organization . . . CARMINE PERSICO originally went with the GALLOS and approach[ed] the Informant in an effort to persuade him to join. The informant stated that he knew the GALLOS were crazy . . . all of the men who originally went with them are either dead or have returned to the organization. . . . After the [GALLOS] were “made” they began to run wild and pushed for more and more authority in the organization. As a result of this, the decision was made to dispose of them.18

  Scarpa explained that a “peace” meeting was proposed to Larry Gallo, who was asked to come to the Sahara Lounge in Brooklyn with two crew members on Sunday, August 20, 1961. Persico apparently guaranteed their safety. But when they arrived, Carmine and another Profaci killer, Joseph Scimone, threw a rope around Larry’s neck and started to strangle him.19 The murder was interrupted when a police officer happened by.*

  In the airtels, Scarpa offered new details on the attempted hit, insisting that a garrote, not a gun, was the weapon of choice because of the “heat” then coming down on the Mafia.

  March 20, 1962: Informant advised that it would [not] be a good idea to gun them down and leave bodies lying all over the streets in Brooklyn. He stated that the plan was to just have them disappear and never be seen again. Informant stated that on Sunday when the attempt was made on LARRY GALLO, three of the men in the Sahara Lounge were to disappear. If the plans had worked and these three had been successfully taken care of, a call would have been made to JOE GALLO . . . to come down for a pow-wow, that his brother was there and that JOE GALLO would have been disposed of when he came in.20

  Persico and Scimone were later indicted in the garroting, but the charges were dismissed.21 That same year Joe Gallo was convicted of extortion and an attempt was made to poison him as he awaited transport to Sing Sing prison.22

  A Plot to Kill the Boss

  By May 1962, Scarpa told the FBI that his padrone, Charles LoCicero, the family consigliere, was �
��endeavoring to get JOSEPH PROFACI to step down as head of the Brooklyn organization.”23 As Profaci lay dying, Charlie “the Sidge” made his own plans to take over as godfather, but he was thwarted when “Joe Malayak” Magliocco, the three-hundred-pound underboss, was anointed godfather by the Commission.

  July 2, 1962: Informant advised that on seven one sixty two, AMBROSE MAGLIOCCO advised that his brother JOSEPH MAGLIOCCO had been selected as boss . . . and SALVATORE MUSSACCHIO, also known as SALLY THE SHEIK [was selected] CONSIGLIERE.

  At that point, Scarpa confirmed that LoCicero was demoted from consigliere—the number three position in the family—to capo. Angered, the Sidge decided to retaliate, and this report was flashed as a teletype from New York to Headquarters.

  September 13, 1962: Informant advised that CHARLES LOCICERO had assigned informant to kill JOSEPH MAGLIOCCO. LOCICERO assigned to drive for informant on [the] hit. Informant and cased Long Island estate of MAGLIOCCO on September 11 last.*

  The prospect of Gregory Scarpa, their principal confidential informant, being contracted to hit the new family boss caused immediate alarm within the FBI. That teletype was quickly followed by another, sixteen hours later:

  September 13, 1962: Informant has been instructed that under no circumstances can he participate in the murder of JOSEPH MAGLIOCCO.

  Given the swift negative reaction, four days later Scarpa attempted to placate the Bureau brass:

  September 19, 1962: LOCICERO did not get Commission approval for the assassination of MAGLIOCCO, but did not want to admit that to Informant. From the conversation with LOCICERO the Informant does not feel there will be any action against MAGLIOCCO in the immediate future.

  We don’t know whether Scarpa had told the FBI the truth about LoCicero’s alleged takeover plan or whether he concocted the proposed rubout to enhance his own status with the Bureau, but one of the most revealing memos in the newly released files was sent to Hoover on November 15, 1962. It came from the SAC of the FBI’s New York Office, who suggested that, depending on who survived the internecine warfare, Scarpa could end up in a senior leadership position.

  November 15, 1962: This source is furnishing excellent information from a position within the Italian criminal organization. . . . It is of particular interest that LOCICERO is attempting to undermine MAGLIOCCO in hopes of taking over the “family” himself. It would appear that such a move, if successful, would place this source [Scarpa] in the inner circle at the top operational level of one of the most important “families” in the . . . organization. As such, this situation should be followed very closely.

  Nearly three decades later, after the third war within the family (1991–1993), defense lawyers would argue that the FBI had protected Scarpa at all costs over the years because they wanted their own informant at the top of one of the Five Families.24

  The position of boss would have given Scarpa a seat on the ruling Mafia Commission—an unprecedented achievement for the Bureau if such a goal had been realized. We now have confirmation from the FBI’s own files that the New York SAC recognized that potential as far back as 1962.

  Joseph Magliocco’s reign as family boss was short-lived. After he succumbed to a heart attack in late December 1963, control of the family went to Joseph Colombo, the son of a Cosa Nostra soldier who had served as a top enforcer for Profaci during the first conflict with the Gallo brothers.

  Colombo was anointed as Don after he followed Carmine the Snake’s path and betrayed a plot he’d been contracted to execute against the heads of the Gambino and Lucchese families. As it turned out, Joe Malayak was closely aligned with Joseph Bonanno, Valachi’s godfather, who came up with a scheme to murder Thomas Lucchese and Carlo Gambino, two other Commission members. Colombo was given the contract, but rather than carry it out, he came clean. Magliocco was then stripped of his title, Bonanno was exiled, and Colombo was awarded the position of boss by a grateful Carlo Gambino, the most powerful Commission member at the time.25

  Chapter 4

  THE SPECIAL GOES SOUTH

  Seven months later, J. Edgar Hoover finally found a way to make some affirmative use of the Brooklyn hit man who had been on his payroll for three years. “Whatever else he may have passed along in the way of intelligence,” says Fredric Dannen of the New Yorker, who wrote a definitive profile of Scarpa in 1996, “we know from the work he did in Mississippi that he became a clandestine asset for Hoover.”1

  In that hot summer of 1964, the biggest crisis facing the U.S. Justice Department was the disappearance of three young civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney. Working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), they had traveled to Philadelphia, Mississippi, on June 21 to look into the Klan’s role in burning the Mount Zion United Methodist Church and disappeared that same night. When their empty, fire-charred Ford station wagon was recovered a short time later, the FBI was called in to work the case.

  Evidence later presented at trial would prove that the local KKK kleagle, or recruiter, Edgar Ray Killen, had conspired with a deputy sheriff to stop the young men for speeding as they left town.2 After a chase, they were forced off the road, driven thirty-four miles to a remote location, and shot to death in cold blood.3 Their bodies were thrown back in the station wagon and driven to a nearby farm, where they were buried under fifteen feet of red clay in an earthen dam. The Ford was then set ablaze and dumped in a swamp.

  As detailed in my second book, Cover Up, the disappearance immediately became a national news story and ignited a firestorm at the Justice Department. Dozens of special agents were rushed to Neshoba County to comb the fields, in what Hoover dubbed the MISSBURN case.4 The 1988 film Mississippi Burning dramatized how the agents located the station wagon. But weeks passed without any significant leads as to the fate of the three young men, and the investigation stopped dead.5

  “Back then, a lot of local people feared the FBI as much as the Klan and nobody was talking,” says Judge W. O. Chet Dillard, who was a state’s attorney at the time. “Old J. Edgar figured that if he was gonna break that [case]—and he was hurtin’ to break it—he was gonna have to go to some extreme measures, and he did.”6

  FBI missing poster for Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner

  Sometime in early August, the Bureau enlisted Gregory Scarpa, the FBI’s Top Echelon informant—who had earlier been contracted to murder the boss of his own crime family—to go to Mississippi to accomplish what the agents could not.

  “Hoover was getting a lot of pressure about the bodies not being found,” Scarpa’s common-law wife, Linda Schiro, testified in 2007. “They approached Greg to go down to find the bodies.”7

  Schiro, who was seventeen when she and Greg were flown to Mississippi, testified that they went to a hotel and found “eight or nine FBI agents” waiting. Scarpa winked at the agents, Schiro testified; then one of them knocked on the door of their room and gave him a gun.

  “Greg changed his clothes,” she recalled, “and then he . . . left some money on the dresser. He told me that if he didn’t come back to . . . go back home.”

  An account of the story by Tom Robbins and Jerry Capeci, which ran in the New York Daily News in 1994, alleged that “Scarpa, according to sources, kidnapped [a] klansman” who had knowledge of the burial site.8 “Armed with an FBI-supplied pistol,” they wrote, Scarpa “put the gun in his mouth and threatened to ‘blow his f——ing brains out’ if he didn’t spill the beans.”

  But Judge Dillard, who interviewed a number of sources close to the incident, has a different account—one that suggests that Scarpa became even more violent during the interrogation. “The man who knew where Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney were buried was the mayor of a local town,” says Dillard.9 “After Scarpa grabbed him, they took him to an undisclosed location, and while the agents waited outside, Scarpa started working on the guy.”

  Dillard says that Scarpa first “put a pistol to [the mayor’s] head, demanding to know where those boys were. But [he] told him a phony story
.” It was only after Scarpa checked with FBI agents to confirm the lie that he “put the barrel of the gun in the man’s mouth and cocked it.”

  Then, says Dillard, fearing reprisals from the Klan, the mayor lied a second time and the agents outside confirmed it. “It was at that point,” says Dillard, “that Scarpa took more drastic steps.” Taking out a straight razor, he proceeded to unzip the man’s fly.

  “He was threatenin’ to emasculate him,” says the judge. And that’s when the terrified Klansman “blurted out the location of the dam.”10 Years later, a lawyer who represented Scarpa disclosed that Scarpa, the so-called Mad Hatter, had admitted to the interrogation by razor blade.11

  On August 4, 1964, the three bodies were recovered six miles southwest of Philadelphia. Goodman and Schwerner had each been shot once in the head. Chaney, the black man in the group, was shot three times and beaten savagely.12

  Schiro testified that Scarpa later returned to the hotel and told her “they found the bodies.” She said that an FBI agent came by to retrieve the gun and handed Greg an envelope with cash “an inch thick” in a rubber band.13 After that, Schiro and Scarpa vacationed at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach.

  Scarpa’s Next Mission

  Eighteen months later, Hoover used Scarpa in a second mission to Mississippi to extract a confession from another KKK member. In early 1966, Vernon F. Dahmer, an African American farmer and shopkeeper who had allowed his store to be used for voter registration, was targeted by the Klan. On January 10, in the dead of night, two carloads of hooded Klansmen, brandishing shotguns and carrying twelve gallons of gasoline, showed up at Dahmer’s house and set it on fire.14 In the blaze that followed, the fifty-eight-year-old Dahmer held the attackers at bay while his family escaped. But he later died in his wife’s arms.