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

by Peter Lance

  Colombo, by now the boss of the family, became concerned that Charlie would talk, so he told Scarpa that he would arrange to pay the money necessary to “fix” the case.53 Eight months later, LoCicero emerged from jail, but Scarpa informed the FBI that the Sidge was “causing trouble within the family.” After rumors surfaced that the INS case had been dismissed, Colombo—who had never come through with the “fix” money he’d pledged to pay—became suspicious that the Sidge might have cut a deal with the Feds.54

  By September 1965, Scarpa told his handlers that “LoCicero [was] completely down and out as far as ‘La Cosa Nostra’ is concerned” and that he was now “despised and detested” by the other members of LCN.55

  The situation had apparently grown so dire that LoCicero, once the third-highest-ranking man in the borgata, was getting by on $50 a week.

  One Last Big Score?

  In addition to his son Frank, the Sidge, who seemed to favor all variations on the name “Charles,” had two other sons—Carlo and Charles Jr. He also had a grandson56 named Richard, who had been arrested for felonious assault at the age of seventeen.57 The younger LoCicero was locked up again a year later on the same charge, and in 1966 he was indicted for rape. In the Mafia tradition, though, he somehow escaped conviction on all three charges, and he curiously managed to get himself a job as a courier for the brokerage house of Paine, Webber, Jackson & Curtis. Astonishingly, considering his “rap sheet,” young Richard was trusted with carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars in securities throughout the Wall Street district.

  On August 16, 1966, just as his grandfather Charlie was hitting rock bottom, Richard LoCicero was asked to deliver $370,862 in negotiable stocks from Paine Webber’s office at 25 Broad Street to the Grace National Bank two blocks away at Hanover Square. But the young mob-connected courier never made it. Richard later claimed that a man forced him into a building, tied him to a door handle, and escaped with the securities.

  Apparently Richard had taken a detour, because the building where he said he’d been accosted was two blocks south and one block east of the bank.

  Gregory Scarpa seemed to know every detail of the Paine Webber heist. In fact, according to an airtel memorializing the incident, he told his contacting agent that “it was not actually a theft but a ‘give away.’”58 As Scarpa explained it:

  July 29, 1967: The securities were in “Fat Tony’s bar” [at] Fourth Avenue and 20th Street Brooklyn, in the basement [where] they were attempting to sell [them] at 35 cents on the dollar.59

  It’s unclear whether Scarpa received any reward money in exchange for that information, but the airtel states that “the NYCPD subsequently recovered some of the securities involved and made a number of arrests.”60 The airtel notes that the recovery was apparently “based” on intelligence that Scarpa had furnished. Two of the six people arrested were Richard’s uncles, the Sidge’s sons Carlo, twenty-eight, and Charles, nicknamed “Ditty,” twenty-six.

  Richard was later called to testify before a Kings County (Brooklyn) grand jury, and even though Scarpa told his contacting agent that the Sidge’s grandson had been “uncooperative,” the young courier’s very appearance on the witness stand sealed his fate.61

  At three thirty A.M. on April 5, 1967, Richard LoCicero’s body was found in the driveway near a row of houses between Sixty-Seventh and Sixty-Eighth Streets in Brooklyn. His corpse was riddled with up to one hundred stab wounds62 and his stomach had been ripped open.63 According to the police, after spending the evening bowling in the neighborhood, the younger LoCicero was driven by a friend to his grandmother’s house, where he occasionally slept. His mother and stepfather lived a few blocks away in an apartment over a pool room on Eleventh Avenue. The witnesses who found him lying on his back refused to comment to the press. “We don’t talk about such things,” one middle-aged man told a reporter.64

  Whether or not Richard had actually confessed to the grand jury was unknown, but in the ways of Cosa Nostra, it didn’t matter. The risk was too great that he’d “flipped”—particularly since he had three prior felony arrests on his record and he’d been fingered as a co-conspirator by Scarpa.

  After the murder hit the papers, Brooklyn’s chief assistant district attorney, Elliott Golden, referred to Richard LoCicero as a “star witness.” He then stated emphatically, “We serve notice on the underworld that we will not tolerate such intimidation.”65

  In July, Greg Scarpa Sr. told his contacting agent that Charlie the Sidge had had a “nervous breakdown” and had been hospitalized.66 The slain courier’s grandfather had deteriorated to the point where he was living off a card game run by one of his sons. We may never know whether the bogus securities robbery was a last-ditch ploy to help raise some cash for him. But less than a year after Richard was brutally murdered, Charlie the Sidge himself, onetime consigliere of the Profaci family, was shot to death just blocks from where his grandson had been stabbed.67

  Live by the Gun, Die by the Gun

  LoCicero, then sixty-four, was sitting on the third stool from the door at Calisi’s luncheonette at Eleventh Avenue and Sixty-Sixth Street, sipping a malted. On the counter before him was a pack of Lucky Strikes. Suddenly, a gunman with his face obscured fired from the doorway and fled through the busy streets. The weapon was described by terrified witnesses as either “a carbine” or a shotgun.68 The assailant was never caught, but it’s not farfetched to speculate that Greg Scarpa Sr. may have been the shooter.

  First of all, the rifle and shotgun were his weapons of choice.69 Second, as his former bookmaking partner and sponsor in the family for years, LoCicero had enough evidence on Scarpa to put him away for multiple life terms. Not only had Scarpa made no effort to save his plummeting mentor, but for years he’d been passing on the kind of negative intel that degraded LoCicero to the FBI. Further, Scarpa’s actions had put LoCicero’s grandson at great risk. Scarpa’s debriefing on the Paine Webber “give away” had led to the arrests of Richard’s uncles—a chess move that effectively forced the younger LoCicero before the Brooklyn grand jury. After that, his rubout was a foregone conclusion.

  As consigliere, Charlie the Sidge had once been within striking distance of a seat on the Mafia Commission. He was a hardened gangster with a criminal record dating back to 1925,70 a man who had once ordered the wholesale murder of an outlaw gang.71 But he was no match for the Killing Machine, who used his position of influence with the Bureau to diminish LoCicero’s importance in the family.

  If Scarpa did pull the trigger on LoCicero, there was little chance the hit would be linked back to him. The luncheonette rubout wasn’t exactly a murder the NYPD or the Bureau would rush to solve. As Valachi told the McClellan subcommittee, “you live by the gun and the knife and die by the gun and the knife.” Both weapons had been used on the LoCiceros. And there was another prophetic lesson that LoCicero should have learned from Valachi: No one “retires” from the Mafia.

  Given his position in the borgata, LoCicero’s murder rated a long two-column story in the New York Times.72 But Gregory Scarpa, the treacherous TE informant, had long since written the Sidge’s obituary with the Bureau.

  Chapter 9

  THE OCTOPUS

  When Greg Scarpa Sr. first became J. Edgar Hoover’s inside source on Cosa Nostra, he described the old-school Sicilian Mafia as the Black Hand or the Comarada. But he left out the name the criminal network was best known by in Italy: La Piovra, or the Octopus. Over the decades, the multiple arms of the Mafia had reached into every institution of Italian society, from the church to parliament to the three principal police agencies that maintained law and order: the Carabinieri, the Polizia di Stato, and the Guardia di Finanza.

  In Octopus, her exposé on the Mafia’s control of the heroin business, Claire Sterling noted that the eight-armed marine mollusk “has the most highly developed brain of all invertebrates. . . . Some kinds inject a poison that paralyzes their prey. The octopus can also squirt a black fluid, forming a dark cloud that hides the animal
so it can escape.”1 The more you read the secret memos from “34” sent year after year to the Director from the FBI’s New York Office, the more you get a sense of just how far Scarpa’s tentacles reached.

  He had become the ultimate political gangster. If knowledge is power, then his influence was profound. There’s little doubt that the Federal Bureau of Investigation shaped its seminal view of the Mafia from Scarpa’s point of view. And, as he manipulated top officials including Hoover into paying off his gambling debts while currying favor with New York officials like Assistant Director in Charge (ADIC) John Malone, Scarpa ensured that in the agent-informant relationship, he was the one who called the plays.

  In his unique position TECI 3461 supplied the kind of nuance and analysis that a hundred wiretaps could never yield. But since Scarpa controlled the flow of information, he also used his status as a snitch to target others, creating doubt in the minds of his FBI handlers about who could be trusted and who couldn’t. A prime example relates to the homicide of Charles LoCicero’s grandson Richard.

  According to Scarpa, Elliott Golden, the same assistant DA who issued that stern warning to the mob about intimidating witnesses, had himself been compromised by the boss of the Colombo family. In an airtel to Hoover on January 3, 1966—just fifteen months before Richard LoCicero’s bloody corpse was discovered—Scarpa made this assertion:

  January 3, 1966: Informant advised that in December, 1965 JOSEPH COLOMBO was engaged in selling benefit tickets for ELLIOT [sic] GOLDEN, an Assistant District Attorney in the King’s County Office. The tickets cost $3.50 each, but were sold at $20.00 with the balance of $16.50 going to GOLDEN. Informant stated that he sold 20 tickets himself at the request of Colombo.2

  In a family with a hundred made members at that time and hundreds more associates, the aggregate “kickback” to the assistant DA could have been substantial if Scarpa was telling the truth. Golden, who died in 2008, may never have known that a Top Echelon FBI informant had made such an accusation against him. Indeed, he went on to become a New York State Supreme Court judge.3 So if the FBI believed the allegation, it didn’t hurt the assistant DA’s career.

  But Golden’s public identification of Richard LoCicero as a “star witness” implied that Richard had cooperated. So after Richard’s murder, Golden’s warning to the Mafia to avoid tampering with the grand jury only served to reinforce their reputation for vengeance against “rats.” By speculating that the stabbing might have been linked to Richard’s testimony, intentionally or not, Golden was furthering the belief on the streets of Brooklyn that if you informed on the mob you didn’t just die, you died badly.

  A more intriguing question raised by the airtels is whether Scarpa himself had any role in the initial theft of the Paine Webber securities or in Richard LoCicero’s grisly rubout. The evidence is circumstantial but intriguing. First, consider the fact that in relating the story of how the Sidge had pocketed his son’s wedding money, Scarpa had already set the stage for a theory he floated after Richard’s death—that the younger LoCicero might have been killed by his own.

  August 11, 1967: Informant advised concerning the murder of RICHARD LOCICERO that . . . the whole LOCICERO family are very poorly regarded and were never “close.” He stated that they were constantly fighting among themselves and it was the informant’s personal unsupported belief RICHARD LOCICERO was killed by because they suspected [he] was giving information to the Brooklyn DA’s office concerning his involvement in the theft of securities from the brokerage firm of Paine, Webber, Jackson and Curtis.4

  The airtels also revealed that Scarpa himself had more than a distant knowledge of the theft. In fact, two months after that memo went to Hoover, Scarpa came right out and admitted that the Sidge’s youngest son had approached him about buying the hot stocks.

  October 6, 1967: Informant telephonically advised that CHARLES LOCICERO, the youngest son of CHARLIE THE SIDGE had approached [him] with an offer to purchase the remaining securities which were obtained in the captioned theft.

  Five days later, Scarpa made this report to Anthony Villano by phone:

  October 11, 1967: Informant advised that he had again been contacted by CHARLES LOCICERO aka “DITTY” at which time “DITTY” assured Informant that he personally had possession of between $190,000 and $195,000 worth of securities, which included negotiable bonds from captioned [Paine Webber] theft and would be willing to sell same for 15% of their face value.

  So via Ditty LoCicero, Scarpa had access to some of the stolen securities. We know, from his 1971 indictment in Chicago and his 1974 indictment in Newark, that Scarpa specialized in high-end stock thefts. We know how close he was to the LoCicero family. We know the control he might have exercised over Assistant DA Elliott Golden, given his knowledge of the alleged kickbacks on the raffle tickets. We know that Scarpa was adept at tying off any loose ends that might put him in legal jeopardy. And, most of all, we can now appreciate how Scarpa himself was focusing the lens through which the New York Office of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover viewed the Colombo crime family.

  Scarpa had already alleged that the LoCicero sons hated their father, and after the Sidge was rubbed out, a pair of airtels underscored just how disloyal both Scarpa and the family boss were to the man who had once been consigliere:

  April 19, 1968: Informant was . . . contacted by [JOSEPH] COLOMBO on 4/22/68 when they attended LOCICERO’S wake. At that time COLOMBO confided that LOCICERO’s murder was “no problem . . .” COLOMBO advised that the LOCICERO murder was a “family affair” not having anything to do with “their family”—the COLOMBO LCN family.5

  April 26, 1968: COLOMBO asked what Informant felt he lost [in LoCicero’s death] to which COLOMBO was assured by Informant that although LOCICERO had at one time been his “captain,” he never had any “love for him.”6

  In that same memo, Scarpa made an extraordinary statement, which suggested to the FBI that Joseph Colombo himself knew who committed the Sidge’s murder.

  April 26, 1968: COLOMBO advised that it was inevitable that LOCICERO would be killed by his own “family,” since he was responsible for the murder of his grandson RICHARD and COLOMBO was surprised that FRANK had “worked so fast.”

  There it was in black and white: Greg Scarpa was blaming the Sidge’s hit on LoCicero’s own son Frank. With that single debriefing, “34” tied off all the loose ends that might have implicated him in the Paine Webber theft, Richard LoCicero’s death, or the luncheonette murder of Richard’s grandfather. Tony Villano had it from the boss’s own lips to Greg’s: It had been a family affair, in the traditional sense of the word. The son, who had felt cheated by his old man from the time of his wedding, had reportedly finished him off after the Sidge induced his grandson to steal $370,000 in securities.

  Now consider another scenario: Did the down-and-out sixty-four-year-old Sidge, who signed his name with an “X” and was living on $50 a week, have the contacts to fence high-end paper from the Paine Webber heist? That was Scarpa’s specialty. Who had the dirt necessary to induce an assistant DA to spill grand jury secrets and put Richard LoCicero in jeopardy in the first place? Who had a motive for silencing the grandson? Who had been offered $195,000 of the stolen stocks? Who had a motive for killing the grandfather, who went back years with him in the family—an impoverished old gangster who might have been persuaded by the Feds to flip? Finally, who was in the best position to explain the theft and the two murders that followed to the FBI, diverting attention away from himself?

  The answer is clear: Gregory Scarpa Sr.

  The last item in another airtel said it all:

  May 3, 1968: Concerning COLOMBO’s above reference to FRANK, this is unquestionably FRANK LOCICERO, son of subject who was arrested 7/27/66 based on information furnished by NY TE Informant and charged with violation of parole.7

  Not only had Scarpa made sure that the FBI believed Frank LoCicero had killed his own father, but he furnished enough probable cause to ensure Frank’s arrest. Curiously, however,
Frank was never arrested, indicted, or prosecuted for his father’s murder.

  Closing Scarpa a Second Time

  In 1968, the same year that the Sidge was rubbed out, Gregory Scarpa was arrested for assault after he beat a victim on the head with a pipe. That case too was dismissed. Years later, the FBI would adopt strict guidelines forcing the closure of CIs who committed such acts of violence,8 but as long as J. Edgar Hoover was alive, “34” was protected.

  When Hoover died in 1972, however, Scarpa lost his principal “rabbi” in the Bureau. Villano retired a year later. In that summer of 1973 as the Watergate break-in enveloped Hoover’s successor L. Patrick Grey, the Bureau’s obsession with organized crime seemed to take a backseat to the potential “high crimes and misdemeanors” of the executive branch.

  From the day after Villano’s retirement through Greg’s closing in 1975, Scarpa never gave the FBI a single lead to another high-end theft or hijacking. The best he could offer, in February 1974, was a report that a load of hair dryers had been stolen and that his crew had paid $5 apiece for them.9 With his “broker” Villano gone and no prospect of further reward money, Scarpa had apparently lost his incentive.

  In mid-March 1974, Scarpa made another report to the Feds that could hardly be considered Top Echelon intelligence. The “Persico faction,” he noted, was now in control of the carting contract for the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which had been turned over to the City of New York.10 Scarpa didn’t supply any details, perhaps because hundreds of thousands of dollars were being stolen from the shipyard via a scheme for which his brother Sal and Charles LoCicero Jr. were later indicted. More on that later, but one thing is clear: By 1975, Hoover’s onetime star informant was reduced to passing along what amounted to low-level Mafia gossip: