by Peter Lance
June 16, 1971: It is noted the NYO requested a sizeable increase in informant’s monthly payments. It is felt that the consistently high quality of information furnished by the source and the risks he is subjected to in his role as a member, are commensurate with the requested increase. JOSEPH “Crazy Joe” GALLO is planning to begin hostilities against COLOMBO. It is therefore of utmost importance that . . . the informant be nurtured and maintained to insure that the ultimate destruction of this “crime” family can be effected.
A Role in Colombo’s Shooting?
Given Scarpa’s capacity for betrayal, the question of whether he played a role in the attempted assassination in Columbus Circle is worth considering—especially in light of what the airtels now reveal. Twelve days before Colombo was gunned down by Jerome Johnson, an African American, Scarpa was laying the groundwork for a scenario that would later support the theory that Joe Gallo was behind the hit.
On 6/10/71: Informant advised that he had recently met with JOE COLOMBO at which time COLOMBO confided that during the previous week he had been told that a car containing a number of Negro individuals was observed circling his block many times in the early AM hours. It is well know[n] that GALLO became friendly with Negro hoodlums while incarcerated and . . . it is possible that GALLO has enlisted their aid at the present time.
Joe Colombo after the shooting
(Corbis)
Considering his hatred for Colombo, the reckless Crazy Joe Gallo would certainly have been at the top of any suspect list—reason enough for Scarpa to use Gallo’s association with blacks to mask any role that he himself may have played in the assassination attempt. Further, in an airtel documenting his debriefing the day after the Unity Day shooting, Scarpa seemed to know a great deal about Johnson, who was a virtual enigma to the NYPD at that point.
June 29, 1971: Informant has learned that JOHNSON was a “would-be Black wise guy” and hung out in Greenwich Village . . . and that JOHNSON had often visited social clubs and after hours joints in Brooklyn . . . this is the kind of person who if approached correctly, would “do anything” for a price.15
On July 7, Scarpa took a different tack, confirming via Joseph Yacovelli, the consigliere, that Persico would be named underboss in the event of Colombo’s death. Now he shifted any potential blame away from himself by suggesting to the FBI that Carmine the Snake was responsible for the aborted hit, and that he’d used Johnson to make it look like Joe Gallo was involved.
July 7, 1971. Informant advised that as soon as COLOMBO was dead that [Joseph] YACOVELLI [consigliere] would name CARMINE PERSICO as underboss . . . and that perhaps this could have been one of the factors which would have given PERSICO a motive to set up a hit on COLOMBO as well as the fact that JOE GALLO would logically be assumed to be the person who “gave the contract.”16
At that point, though, Persico was already facing a federal conviction that would eventually lead to a fourteen-year sentence. It was the mercurial Joe Gallo, not Persico, who was Scarpa’s immediate threat.17 If the other family members believed it was Gallo who hired Johnson, Scarpa knew that Crazy Joe would also be marked for death—thus removing him, as well as Persico, as barriers to Scarpa’s advancement. This was treachery on an almost Shakespearean level—the kind of machination that would lead Scarpa’s own attorney, Lou Diamond, to describe him as a “puppeteer.”
“He lived to manipulate people against people,” Diamond said in an interview with Fred Dannen for the New Yorker. “Greg was probably one of the better gin rummy players. He had an excellent mind. An ability to focus, plan. You had to understand the brilliance of the man.”18 A cunning strategic mind, access to FBI intelligence, and a willingness to commit murder: that was Scarpa’s deadly triad of assets, and he used them to his full advantage in the days after Colombo’s shooting.
Two weeks after the bloodshed in Columbus Circle, this airtel went to Hoover:
July 15, 1971. Informant advised that it appears that CARMINE PERSICO is “on the move” in attempting to gain control of the Colombo family as well as the vast resources of the IACRL. PERSICO had advanced $30,000 to the League to continue present operating expenses.
In the same memo, Scarpa said he’d learned that one of Colombo’s brothers-in-law had come to visit the boss at Roosevelt Hospital, and that this unnamed relative had advised Colombo capo Mimi Scialo that he knew “where Joey Gallo would be that night and it might present the excellent opportunity to ‘hit him.’” According to Scarpa, however, Scialo told this individual that “because of all the police protection on Gallo it would be a ‘kamikaze mission’ and that some time should elapse before the hit was attempted.”
In keeping with the tradition that revenge is a dish best served cold, the forces within the family waited nine months, until Joe Gallo’s birthday, to start the next Colombo war.
Joe Gallo taking the Fifth at a McClellan hearing, February 17, 1959
(Associated Press)
The Death of Crazy Joe
In a criminal organization that traces its roots back to Sicily, symbols are revered. From the Mass-card pictures of saints burned in the palms of inductees during the initiation ceremony to the pricking of inductees’ trigger fingers, the rituals of the mob are rife with meaning. One of the most famous scenes in The Godfather was inspired by an incident during the first Colombo war in which Profaci gunmen killed a Gallo loyalist, Joseph “Joe Jelly” Gioiello, and tossed his clothing—filled with fish—in front of a restaurant the Gallo brothers frequented. The image inspired Mario Puzo’s immortal line “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”19
I had the good fortune to interview Puzo just months before his death in 1999 and he told me that the legendary horse’s head scene in his fictional chronicle of the Corleone family was inspired by a real-life Sicilian practice. “If one farmer had a dispute with another farmer,” he told me, “the aggrieved party would grab his neighbor’s prize piece of livestock. Maybe it was a cow or a sheep or a goat. The animal would be killed and the severed head would be nailed to the door of the rival’s home as a warning.”20
When it came to cruelty, the Mafia had few rivals. So the date chosen to close the books on Crazy Joe was his forty-third birthday. As if to send another message in the bargain, the bloody shootout took place in a restaurant just a block away from police headquarters.
On the last night of his life, Joseph Gregory Gallo, dressed in a pinstriped suit, laughed and drank champagne at the Copacabana nightclub in a party that included his sister Carmella Fiorello; his wife of three weeks, a striking Italian American beauty named Sina Essary; Essary’s ten-year-old daughter; and Gallo’s burly forty-three-year-old bodyguard, Peter Diapoulas, who was accompanied by a date, Edith Russo of Brooklyn. At four A.M., they took a black 1971 Cadillac downtown to Little Italy for dessert at Umberto’s Clam House, a new restaurant on Mulberry Street that had recently been opened by Matty “the Horse” Ianiello, a reputed member of the Genovese family.21 In a cruel bit of Cosa Nostra irony, the location of the second-most-celebrated murder in recent Mafia history bore the name of Gallo’s target in the first: Umberto “Albert” Anastasia.
While sitting at a pair of butcher-block tables near the bar, the party drank soda and ordered Italian delicacies.22 Gallo, who witnesses said was “jolly and relaxed,” was facing the wall when suddenly a pair of assailants came in and opened fire. The lead shooter, described as five foot eight with thinning black hair, carried a .38.23 As the guns went off and the women screamed, Diapoulas was struck twice and went down.
Joe Gallo, shot in the left elbow and buttock, got up and ran to the street while the other restaurant patrons hit the floor. A volley of shots was fired—twenty in all—as Crazy Joe staggered out onto Hester Street, where one of the shooters finished him with a shot to the back. The killers then fled through a back door and jumped into a pair of getaway cars. Carmella rushed outside and stood over her brother’s body, wailing.
A week later, the police reported that they were seeking t
wo associates of Colombo consigliere Joseph Yacovelli who had been on the lam. By early May, Joseph Luparelli, a close Yacovelli associate who had set the Gallo murder plot in motion, had turned himself in.
Umberto’s Clam House the morning of the Gallo murder
(Corbis)
A detailed investigation by New York Times reporter Nick Gage revealed that Luparelli had been at the bar in Umberto’s that night when he saw Gallo come in with his party. Yacovelli had been waiting months for an opportunity to strike at Gallo, and as soon as he was contacted, he dispatched the hit team, which included Luparelli; Carmine DiBiase, a Colombo racketeer who had once been charged with murder; and two brothers identified simply as Sisco and Benny.
According to Luparelli, it was DiBiase who opened fire as Gallo and his bodyguard sat with their backs to the door.24 Four guns were used in the shooting. After fleeing the scene, the hit team drove to Nyack, New York, where they hid out in an apartment Yacovelli had rented months earlier as he plotted Gallo’s death.
The bloody public execution of Joe Gallo in front of his family touched off another wave of gangland murders. Within three weeks, ten Mafia figures were rubbed out. The newly released files suggest that one of those homicides was the work of Gregory Scarpa—a hit that came at the same time he was schooling the FBI on this latest outbreak in Colombo hostilities.
Death of a Codefendant
In an airtel recounting a briefing on the day of Gallo’s murder, Scarpa not only ID’d Carmine Persico as the man who was ultimately responsible for the plot, but he claimed that two of the five rubouts surrounding the murder involved government informants.
July 25, 1972: On 4/7/72 Source advised that the murder of GALLO was engineered by the Persico crew as a retaliation for shooting JOE COLOMBO and incidents created by GALLOS. Source said he learned that the PERSICO people met with representatives of other LCN families the previous week and conclusions reached were that 5 people had to be killed including two or three informants. It is noted that JERRY CIPRIO as well as RICHARD GROSSMAN were both murdered and were suspected of being Federal informants.25
What that airtel doesn’t reveal, but has since been discovered in the course of this investigation, is that Gennaro “Jerry” Ciprio was a close associate of Joseph Colombo, who had been indicted with Greg Scarpa in November 1971 in a plot to steal $450,000 in securities from the U.S. mail.26 On April 10, three days after Gallo’s murder, Ciprio was standing outside of Gennaro’s Italian Feast Specialties, a restaurant he owned on Eighty-Sixth Street in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn, when he was instantly killed by a shotgun blast to the head.27
The original securities case was brought in Chicago, where the bonds were taken. Ciprio was listed as the number two defendant behind Scarpa, who was named as the top co-conspirator among a list of eleven charged. But by July 1972, with Ciprio out of the picture, Scarpa’s attorney successfully convinced a federal judge to transfer the case to the Eastern District of New York (EDNY) in Brooklyn—Greg’s home turf.28
On April 6, 1973, for unexplained reasons, the EDNY U.S. attorney appeared in open court and asked that the case be dismissed. The dismissal order made no reference to the other surviving codefendants originally charged with Scarpa.29
Meanwhile, the day after Ciprio’s murder, a federal agent hastened to tell the New York Times that the shotgun-blast victim “was a dangerous man who could have done a lot of damage in any war unless he was hit first.”30 So much for the presumption of innocence. The agent’s quote was a New York variation on the old Texas phrase “he needed killing”—not the kind of sentiment one would expect to hear from a government agent, unless he had some reason to excuse the shotgun murder.
The Ciprio murder is more than forty years old; any ancillary evidence was likely destroyed long ago. But the implications in this airtel are potentially staggering. If Ciprio was in fact a “Federal informant,” as Scarpa attested, he might have been talking to prosecutors in Chicago, and word that he’d flipped could easily have reached New York. Even if one of “34’s” handlers had unwittingly mentioned to him that Ciprio was a cooperating witness (CW), once Scarpa pulled the trigger on Ciprio, whoever had leaked word of Ciprio’s status as a CW could have effectively become a co-conspirator to homicide.
There are several “might”s and “maybe”s in that proposition, but it’s clear from an examination of the fourteen-page indictment in the securities case that the Feds in Chicago had done a thorough job. With Ciprio as a co-conspirator, Scarpa would have been vulnerable to conviction. But with Ciprio dead, the case would have been far more difficult to prove.
If that was the only evidence, associating Greg Scarpa with the murder might be considered a stretch. But when Carmine Sessa, a longtime Scarpa crew member, started talking to FBI agents, he told them a story that contained remarkable parallels to the securities case from which Ciprio was violently removed.
According to an FBI 302 memo dated April 18, 1994, Sessa told agents that “somebody got killed” during the course of a crime involving “bonds.” As Supervisory Special Agents David H. Parker and Robert J. O’Brien related Sessa’s debriefing, the case involved a “change in venue in [the] prosecution and the charges were subsequently dropped.” Sessa recalled that “Scarpa Sr. and Joseph DeDomenico, a.k.a. Joe Brewster, killed somebody, whose name Sessa didn’t know.”31
Was Jerry Ciprio that victim? We can’t say for sure, but without him the case was dismissed—and Greg Scarpa had a habit of eliminating witnesses who threatened him. Further, this wouldn’t be the only time that charges were dropped against the FBI’s TE informant.
As we’ll see, another huge stock fraud case against Scarpa ended up dismissed for unexplained reasons. That one was developed by the Newark Strike Force in 1974.
Can we say definitively that Scarpa killed Ciprio? No. Does he look good for it, as detectives say? Absolutely.
“In the years the FBI ran Scarpa Senior, he was given a virtual hunting license,” says defense attorney Flora Edwards, who represented Scarpa’s chief rival for control of the family in the 1990s. “Looking at this case, it’s clear to me that as soon as Ciprio’s name showed up under Greg’s in that indictment, he was a dead man.”32
Chapter 7
GOD, THE MOB, AND THE FBI
Considering his skill as a “chess player,” one has to ask, what was Greg Scarpa’s motive in claiming to the Feds that Joey Gallo was behind the Colombo attack? The airtels reveal that Scarpa would have been in jeopardy if Crazy Joe had been successful in reviving his crew. Peter Diapoulas, Gallo’s bodyguard, later told reporter Nick Gage that before his death Gallo “planned to establish his gang as the sixth Mafia family in New York.”1
Whether or not that was a realistic goal, Gallo was determined to get his share of the Colombo family spoils he felt he’d been denied since the hit on Anastasia. In a borgata, where there are only so many slices of the pie, a powerful capo like Scarpa, who had refused to throw in with the Gallo crew, would have been a serious obstacle to Crazy Joe’s resurgence. So it’s no surprise that, on July 25, a week after the Chicago securities case was moved to Brooklyn, J. Edgar Hoover received an airtel quoting Charlie “Moose” Panarella, a Persico loyalist, as saying that “GREGORY SCARPA is on top of the GALLO hit parade.”2
In just two and a half years, by acting as the FBI’s sole oracle on the Colombo crime family, Scarpa had made a series of brilliant moves. Whether or not he himself played a role in Colombo’s shooting, Scarpa had already taken steps to legally neutralize the boss and his son. He then identified his principal competition in the family, Carmine Persico, as the source of the Gallo murder, and with the death of Crazy Joe he insulated himself from a dangerous rival. At the same time, the rubout of Jerry Ciprio helped him beat a stock-theft charge that could have sent him to prison for years. Given his relationship with the Justice Department, Scarpa had little reason to fear the federal government. That explains why he was willing to take the witness chair before the same S
enate subcommittee that had grilled Joe Valachi. His testimony came just three weeks after Colombo was shot.
Defying McClellan
On July 21, 1971, in keeping with the double life he was leading, a defiant Greg Scarpa appeared before the McClellan subcommittee, grinning and dressed to the nines in white loafers, camel-colored slacks, a diamond-studded watch, and a bright blue blazer sporting a gold, red, green, and white lapel pin with the logo of the Italian-American Civil Rights League—the same group he’d privately denigrated to his FBI contact agents.3 When questioned by the senators about his links to a $100 million theft ring, Scarpa took the Fifth Amendment sixty times. This was one exchange involving McClellan, Scarpa, and Florida senator Edward J. Gurney:
McClellan: Do you want to deny whether you met with Colombo?
Scarpa: I respectfully decline to answer the question, Senator, on the ground it may tend to incriminate me.
Gurney: I did notice that you were laughing uproariously at the exchange I had on [dumping mob counterfeit money at] the church bazaar. Were you listening at that time?
Scarpa: I respectfully decline to answer the question, Senator, on the ground that it may tend to incriminate me.4
Scarpa wouldn’t even say whether he’d ever met Joseph Colombo, even though an FBI airtel to Hoover three days earlier confirmed that Scarpa had spoken to the boss just thirty minutes before Jerome Johnson gunned him down.5
Greg Scarpa takes the Fifth at the McClellan hearing, July 21, 1971
(Associated Press)
Another witness at the hearing—a professional thief serving a five-year prison sentence—testified that the theft ring he worked with had stopped using Scarpa as a fence because they considered him “dangerous.”