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

by Peter Lance

  By January 1968, the Bureau had upped Scarpa’s monthly cash payments to $600—the equivalent of nearly $4,000 in current dollars22—and the airtels started flowing again.23 Right away, he began showing results:

  January 18, 1968: Based on information furnished by informant . . . approximately 50 individuals have been arrested by the NYCPD* and charged with gambling.24

  “Of course, you have to keep in mind,” says Levine, “that this kind of thing could have served Scarpa’s interests. It’s entirely possible that some of those fifty guys were competitors of Greg’s. If he had a problem with another wiseguy in the family, or he wanted to move in on another guy’s action, all he had to do was drop a dime on him with the Bureau. . . . The FBI was eating out of his hand.”25

  Retired FBI Special Agent Dan Vogel adds, “It would be a perfect way to get rid of his competition and, at the same time, stay protected.”26

  Reaching Out to Sinatra

  J. Edgar Hoover’s thirst for gossip was legendary. One of his closest friends was columnist Walter Winchell, who convinced gangster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, a partner with Albert Anastasia in Murder Incorporated, to surrender to Hoover in 1939.27 Greg Scarpa, who was a brilliant judge of character, understood that. When he revealed the details behind a secret meeting between Joseph Colombo and the man later known as the Chairman of the Board, the account of his debriefing didn’t just go out in a traditional airtel; it was flashed to Hoover by teletype from the New York Office.

  In this case the gossip involved not only Frank Sinatra but arguably the most flamboyant and celebrity-conscious writer in the nation at that time, Truman Capote. The story began in Boston, when Joseph “the Animal” Barboza, a vicious killer in the family of New England crime czar Raymond Patriarca, “flipped” and started talking to the Feds.

  Barboza before the House Crime Committee, May 25, 1972

  (Associated Press)

  According to Scarpa, Barboza and his attorney John Fitzgerald, who had lost his leg to a mob car bomb,28 decided that the Animal would publish his memoirs, as Valachi had done through writer Peter Maas. The initial teletype, written in the bold, clipped style of a telegram, never mentioned Capote, but it was provocative nonetheless.

  February 15th, 1968: Informant advised Joseph Colombo, NY LCN Commission member, recently returned from trip to Miami. Colombo confided to informant, trip was not a vacation but a favor for Raymond Patriarca, New England LCN “Boss.” Patriarca aware that Colombo, a close friend of singer Frank Sinatra, requested that Colombo get Sinatra to intercede with Author, known to Sinatra, who is presently writing book based on information from stool pigeon which would be damaging to Patriarca. Colombo said he “sat” with Sinatra in Miami and characterized Author as “bad” and “ruthless” individual. Sinatra said he “would do anything” for Colombo, but that this author might even tell of Sinatra’s efforts to muzzle him, and therefore “begged off.”29

  Another teletype, sent from the Boston SAC the next day, clarified what was clearly just a rumor, noting that “the name of Truman Capote had arisen as a possible author for the book, however, no definite agreement has been reached.”30

  Why Raymond Patriarca would suspect that Old Blue Eyes might have any influence over Capote, whose chilling 1965 account of the Clutter family murders, In Cold Blood, had become an international bestseller, is anybody’s guess. Capote was never known as a Mafia aficionado. Apart from his bestselling books, however, by 1968 Capote was famous for something else: the celebrated Black and White Ball he’d thrown at the Plaza Hotel in 1966 to honor Katharine Graham, owner of the Washington Post. Among the masked guests at the affair, later dubbed the “Party of the Century,”31 were Frank Sinatra and his diminutive then wife, Mia Farrow.32

  Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra at the Black and White Ball

  (Corbis)

  Sinatra and Farrow were even mentioned in the second paragraph of society writer Charlotte Curtis’s coverage of the event in the New York Times; a piece headlined “Capote’s Black and White Ball: ‘The Most Exquisite of Spectator Sports.’”33

  We don’t know whether Raymond Patriarca was a regular reader of the Times, but a later airtel, on March 13, 1968, attempted to explain why Colombo had been dispatched to Miami:

  March 13, 1968: In the recent murder trial of JERRY ANGIULO and others in connection with the gangland slaying of ROCCO DE SEGLIO, questions by the defense attorneys concerning this book [by Barboza] were asked and the name TRUMAN CAPOTE came up during this interrogation.

  The airtel concluded with a note saying that, “according to JOSEPH BARBOZA, all discussions relative to this book have ceased. has stated that he is no longer interested in same, fearing physical harm.” It’s impossible to say who the man known as the Animal was more afraid of— Cosa Nostra or the “ruthless” Truman Capote—but this series of entries by Greg Scarpa Sr. was sure to keep Hoover begging for more.

  “We Turned Enough Cheeks”

  In 1966, Scarpa reported that “an organization is being formed called AID,”* whose purpose was “to combat the anti-Italian sentiment now in the U.S.”34 Three years later, Joseph Colombo had morphed it into the Italian-American Civil Rights League (IACRL), defying the traditional rule that Mafia business be conducted in secret.35 As far as Colombo was concerned, the FBI’s investigation of the mob was nothing more than “harassment.” As unrealistic as that may have been, the boss began to identify with minority groups and antiwar protestors, who had also become targets of the Bureau. In one airtel, Scarpa related that the boss had told him, “We turned enough cheeks. We got to take steps. Enough is enough.”

  On April 30, 1970, after Colombo’s son Joe Jr. was arrested, about thirty “members” of the new group picketed the FBI’s New York Office, at Third Avenue and Sixty-Ninth Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.36 Scarpa not only carried a picket sign, he also acted as an occasional public spokesman for the group, denouncing the government—even as he was secretly betraying the Mafiosi with whom he was picketing. Within weeks, the small cadre of protesters grew to five thousand. By midyear, Colombo boasted that the Civil Rights League had forty-five thousand dues-paying members. The mainstream media didn’t take him seriously until the IACRL held its first Unity Day rally at Columbus Circle that June and fifty thousand people showed up.

  In November 1970, Frank Sinatra did a benefit concert for the group. Soon its political clout grew exponentially. Later, at Colombo’s urging, the ABC television network announced that it would excise the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” from its popular series The FBI.37 Al Ruddy, who was producing the film adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, made the same pledge.38 Even U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell promised to remove the term “Mafia” from all Justice Department press releases.39

  In May 1971, Rabbi Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League, announced he was joining forces with the IACRL to fight what he called harassment by the federal government.40 As Nicholas Pileggi wrote in the New York Times, “After 48 years of hiding behind his lapels, Colombo had emerged as a formidable public figure. He posed for pictures, kissed children, signed autographs, talked to Dick Cavett and Walter Cronkite and generally comported himself more like a political candidate than a Mafia boss.”41 Colombo even made the cover of Time, pointing his finger defiantly at the camera. But while Carlo Gambino was initially supportive, Colombo’s high profile soon began to anger the other Commission bosses.

  Joseph Colombo, Time, July 12, 1971

  (Time magazine)

  On June 28, 1971, Colombo was walking near a stage in Columbus Circle, about to address tens of thousands of supporters at the second Unity Day rally, when a twenty-five-year-old black man named Jerome Johnson, posing as a cameraman, lunged forward and shot him twice in the head. Johnson was killed almost instantly by an unknown shooter and Colombo, critically injured, was rushed to nearby Roosevelt Hospital.42

  Although the police reported that Johnson had links to the Gambino crime
family, another prime suspect was Crazy Joe Gallo, who had been paroled from prison on April 11.43 Gallo was immediately questioned by police but soon released for lack of evidence. Colombo lay in a coma for years and never recovered, leaving a vacuum for control of the family that touched off a second war for succession.44

  As the bodies fell, the bloodshed only enhanced Greg Scarpa’s value to the FBI—and the airtels to come reveal how he brilliantly exploited the struggle for family dominance between his chief rival, Carmine Persico, and the unpredictable Joey Gallo.

  Chapter 6

  AGENT PROVOCATEUR

  The term “agent provocateur,” from the nineteenth-century French, literally means “provocative agent,” but it has come to represent a person employed by a law enforcement agency to entice another person to commit an illegal act.1 Although the FBI paid Gregory Scarpa for his services on a COD basis and insisted in one of its memos that “he [was] not an employee of the Bureau,”2 the newly released secret files prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Scarpa wasn’t just supplying inside intelligence to the Bureau. Rather, he was acting with the apparent consent of top FBI officials to commit crimes and induce other members of the Mafia to break the law.3

  The Bureau’s strategy was clearly to facilitate Scarpa so that he could move higher and higher in the family hierarchy, and thus be positioned to provide J. Edgar Hoover with the kind of top-shelf intelligence on the Mafia he coveted. In the course of Scarpa’s two long runs as a Top Echelon informant, from 1962 to 1975 and 1980 to 1992, he officially earned $158,400 in monthly and lump sum payments from the FBI.4 At the same time, with the help of his FBI contacting agent in the late 1960s, Scarpa pocketed some $52,000 in reward money from insurance companies anxious to recover a portion of the millions of dollars he stole in precious gems, gold, furs, liquor, cigarettes, antiques, negotiable securities, and bonds.5

  Adjusted for 2013 dollars, the combined total paid to “34” by the FBI and insurance companies was an astonishing $1,077,668.50.6

  Thus, as a double agent, Scarpa betrayed both of his paymasters: the Bureau and the “family” to which he’d sworn a blood oath back in 1950. With the lethal precision of a deep-cover mole, he supplied federal prosecutors with enough probable cause to secure the Title III wiretaps that led to the virtual dismantling of one of the most powerful and dangerous New York families.7 Yet the intel he gained from his dealings with the Bureau gave him the edge he needed to eliminate virtually every made member who stood above him in the family or posed a threat to his own criminal interests.

  Based on the intel or probable cause he furnished, the Feds eventually indicted the godfathers Joseph Colombo and Carmine Persico; Colombo’s son Joseph, whose arrest triggered the Italian-American Civil Rights League picketing at the FBI; Carmine’s son Little Allie Boy Persico; underbosses Alphonse Persico and Gennaro “Jerry Lang” Langella; and dozens of capos, including John “Jackie Zambooka” De Ross and Dominick “Donnie Shacks” Montemarano. Finally, Scarpa’s plotting also helped him to inflame the conflict with the Gallo brothers, leading to their violent demise and ending their threat to his advancement.

  The Scarpa airtels dating from October 1967 through October 1984 offer a fascinating chronicle of the mobster’s deliberate undermining of three separate family factions: the Colombos, the Gallos, and the Persicos, culminating in Carmine the Snake’s 139-year sentence. Persico’s imprisonment paved the way for the third war for the takeover of the family in the early 1990s—the bloody conflict in the streets of Brooklyn that Scarpa instigated and waged while he was under the purported “control” of FBI Supervisory Special Agent Lin DeVecchio.

  In the end, Gregory Scarpa Sr. never reached the top of the family. But that was entirely the result of his infection with HIV in 1986, which weakened him and led to his death at the age of sixty-six in 1994. Had Scarpa remained in good health, given his cold-blooded willingness to wipe out all enemies in his path—and the extraordinary protection and intelligence he received from the FBI—there is every likelihood that he would have ascended eventually to the position of boss.

  Taking Out Colombo

  Scarpa’s drive to take control of the family began in earnest in the early 1970s, when he first targeted the very godfather who trusted him. Though Joseph Colombo eventually died in 1978 from the wounds he received during the assassination attempt in Columbus Circle, it’s clear from the airtels that he was marked for removal years earlier by Scarpa, the very capo described in those FBI memos as Colombo’s “choice lieutenant.”8

  In May 1971, the New York Times ran a profile on Colombo, who was then, at forty-eight, the youngest Mafia leader in the country. Noting that “Colombo [put] a high premium on loyalty,” the piece reported that the boss had recently been arrested along with thirty others on an interstate gambling charge, for an operation that grossed between $50,000 and $100,000 a week. The article was written by Nicholas Gage, the dean of organized crime reporters at that time and one of the most thorough journalists ever to cover Cosa Nostra. But what Gage could not have known at the time was that the precise intelligence that led to Colombo’s arrest had come from Gregory Scarpa. Moreover, it was Scarpa who actually estimated the amount of the protection money, or “pad,” that Colombo was using to pay off the NYPD.

  November 3, 1970: Informant advised that . . . JOSEPH COLOMBO is in partnership with approximately ten individuals who each control a numbers operation in the New York area. Informant estimated the weekly gross is between $50,000 and $100,000 and having a weekly payoff to the NYCPD on a divisional and borough level of approximately $2,500–$5,000.9

  In that same airtel, Scarpa also identified the bagman who made the purported payoffs, though the identity of the courier is redacted in the files as released by the Bureau.

  Still, the full significance of Scarpa’s duplicity can be measured by examining his FBI debriefing memos in the months leading up to the attempted slaying of Colombo and in the years that followed as the boss wasted away in a coma.

  On October 11, 1967, Scarpa informed his contacting agent, Anthony Villano, that Colombo’s son, Joseph Anthony Jr., would be married on December 9 at the Queens Terrace Restaurant. The event was guaranteed to bring out the New York LCN hierarchy, giving the Bureau a major surveillance opportunity.

  October 11, 1967: COLOMBO has been taking great pains and precautions to screen the waiters and other employees at the restaurant to make sure no information concerning the affair is “leaked.” Informant also learned that there will be no other affair in progress that night and that the entire premises will be used exclusively for ANTHONY’s wedding party.10

  A year later, it was Scarpa Sr. who tipped the Bureau to an alleged scam by the young newlywed Anthony Jr. to melt down up to half a million dollars in U.S. silver coins for sale at a higher price.11 But that same memo underscored Scarpa’s capacity for deceit, because in the months following Anthony’s arrest, while publicly protesting it and working actively on behalf of the Italian-American Civil Rights League, Scarpa was secretly telling his FBI handlers he was “disgusted” at Colombo’s actions.

  November 9, 1970: Immediately subsequent to COLOMBO JR.’s arrest, COLOMBO SR. became enraged and organized picketing of the NYO of the FBI, alleging harassment. It is interesting to note that this picketing lasted for approximately 2 months, culminating in a march from Columbus Circle. Throughout this entire period the informant participated on a regular basis in all activities and was able to keep the Bureau advised on a current basis as to exactly what COLOMBO’s intentions were.

  For the first Unity Day rally in 1970, Scarpa even boasted to the Bureau that he had “personally supervised the unloading of about 100 chartered buses from his area alone,” noting that the event had the “complete blessing of CARLO GAMBINO,” then the boss of bosses in New York.12 Another memo in November reported that “Informant has the full confidence and a close working relationship with JOSEPH COLOMBO.”13

  But by the spring of 1971, Scarpa was grousi
ng to his contacting agents that Colombo was a “bloodthirsty, vindictive man” who might “be going prematurely senile.” In that same airtel, as an example of how Greg Sr. often gave the Bureau conflicting intelligence, he reported that “COLOMBO anticipates no problems with ‘CRAZY JOE’ [Gallo], who is being released from prison this week.” Yet after Colombo was shot Gallo became one of the NYPD’s lead suspects, and just days before that second Unity Day rally on June 28, Scarpa reported that Colombo had done a 180-degree turn in assessing the threat:

  June 16, 1971: COLOMBO continued that in the event GALLO hit one of his “crew,” informant should be ready, because at that time they would take swift and decisive action and wipe out the entire GALLO mob in one fell swoop.14

  Without any suspicion that Scarpa was informing on him to the Bureau, Joe Colombo had so much faith in Greg that he was willing to dispatch him to help exterminate an entire faction of the family.

  On the Brink of Upheaval

  At that point, just before the attack on Colombo, Scarpa painted a vivid portrait for the FBI of a family under siege, noting that Joe Gallo was hunkering down and blocking off streets in his Brooklyn neighborhood.

  June 16, 1971: GALLO has been barricading President Street and will not allow cars in the neighborhood. GALLO had beaten up some “hangers on” and had allegedly hurt his hand while choking the mother of one of his own crew. In addition, GALLO had removed all of the Unity Day posters from shop windows and sent his crew up to scrape any Civil Rights stickers off cars in the neighborhood.

  Scarpa used the simmering conflict to his full advantage, making it clear to Bureau officials that his intel was indispensable at a critical time. In fact, that same June 16 airtel confirmed that Bureau officials saw Scarpa as their own “agent provocateur.” At that point, they weren’t simply content to arrest Mafiosi for breaking the law. The FBI now had an affirmative plan to destroy the Colombo family.