Deal With the Devil: The FBI's Secret Thirty-Year Relationship With a Mafia Killer
Page 12
In his book, Lin DeVecchio reveals a similar affinity for firearms. “From the first time I fired a pistol, I loved shooting and I loved guns,” he writes. He claims to be a “crack shot,” indeed “one of the better shots in the Bureau.”22 And, again like Scarpa, DeVecchio didn’t just use guns, he sold them.
In early 1976, at a time when his FBI salary was likely under $40,000,23 DeVecchio was arrested by undercover agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) for selling two German Lugers valued at $60,000.24 According to a story published thirty years later by New York Times reporter Alan Feuer, the arrest occurred “when Mr. DeVecchio traveled from New York to King of Prussia, Pa., to sell a Nazi-era Luger at the Valley Forge Gun Show.”25
In testimony under oath at a 1997 federal court hearing, DeVecchio admitted that while working as an active-duty agent he regularly attended gun shows “in different parts of the United States” with a gun dealer who was a friend of his.26 Asked by defense lawyer Gerald Shargel if he had “told people, including undercover agents,” that he was a “silent partner” with the dealer, DeVecchio said, “No. Nothing like that.”
In his book, DeVecchio insists that he sold only one Luger to an ATF agent and that he did it on behalf of the “grieving wife” of a thirty-six-year-old medical doctor killed in a car crash. “All the proceeds went to her,” he writes.
In court, DeVecchio admitted that he made the sale in the parking lot of the gun show, without filing the requisite paperwork, and that he asked “to be paid in cash or to have checks made out to cash.”27 When confronted by Shargel at the hearing with documents from the case in which the ATF agents reportedly accused him of making “incomplete or false statements,” DeVecchio testified that he “couldn’t recall” that. In fact, in the course of the two-day hearing, he responded, “I don’t recall,” or words to that effect, more than fifty times.28
Admitting that he sold two guns (which would have been in violation of federal firearms statutes), DeVecchio was asked by Shargel whether the widow’s entire collection wasn’t worth closer to $250,000.
He replied, “That was handled by the gun dealer.”
Shargel: With you, wasn’t that right?
DeVecchio: Not all the time. I was not always present with him.
Shargel: Didn’t you tell the agents that you were in for a commission?
DeVecchio: I don’t recall what I said to them.
Shargel: You don’t recall?
DeVecchio: No it was twenty-two years ago. I don’t recall that.
Shargel: Well how many different checks did you cash. Do you recall?
DeVecchio: I have no idea.
By statute it’s a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison on each count, for “any person except a . . . licensed dealer to engage in the business of . . . dealing in firearms.”29
As Alan Feuer reported in the Times, “Without a license, [DeVecchio] moved through the stalls of the firearms bazaar, and was soon approached by Michael Flax, an undercover agent with [ATF].” Flax told Feuer that his job was to troll the shows in plainclothes looking for illicit deals and that in 1976 “several people he caught similarly selling guns without paperwork went to prison.”
Flax, who is now retired, told Feuer that his modus operandi for undercover buys was to approach prospective unlicensed sellers and say, “Gee I’d like to get this gun. . . . Do we have to go through all the paperwork?” According to Feuer, Flax said that he bought one Luger from DeVecchio in the parking lot, and after a multiweek investigation “a second agent secretly recorded the F.B.I. man selling another gun.” Flax told Feuer that at one point DeVecchio “gave him a phone number at which he might be reached. It was, he said, an office of the New York F.B.I.”
As Feuer reported, “a few weeks later, Mr. Flax brought the case to [Daniel M.] Clements, then a young federal prosecutor in Baltimore.”
“Flax comes to me saying, ‘You’re not going to believe this,’” Clements told Feuer, “‘I have an F.B.I. agent selling guns illegally.’”
But as he moved forward to prosecute, Clements recalled, he was thwarted by Rudolph W. Giuliani, then a thirty-two-year-old aide to Judge Harold Tyler, the deputy attorney general in Washington. After being asked by Giuliani to prepare a pair of memoranda on the case, Clements told Feuer that he met with the aide twice. At both meetings, “Mr. Giuliani repeated his desire not to prosecute the case, saying the guns were old and the sale of them without paperwork did not warrant prosecution.”
So ultimately, just as with the series of Justice Department indictments of Gregory Scarpa, the illegal gun sale case against Lin DeVecchio (in Flax’s words) “went away.”
In his memoir, DeVecchio writes off the incident as a kind of technicality.
I sold one to an undercover agent who was scouting the gun shows trying to buy from people who didn’t file the appropriate paperwork. It was like shooting fish in a barrel because so many of the collectors didn’t want to be on record in case their guns were later restricted by new gun control statutes to the point where they couldn’t resell them. And some of these people had tens of thousands of dollars tied up in their collections. Well, I was one of the fish that got shot in the barrel.30
But his claim that he sold just one Luger is inconsistent with his testimony in 1997, when he admitted to selling two.31 Further, in another section of that testimony, referring back to the Luger arrest, DeVecchio claimed ignorance of the law:
Shargel: You know that was a violation and it was found by the investigating authorities that you had violated section 922 of Title 18. You know that, right?
DeVecchio: I know that now. . . . I didn’t know it at that time. I wouldn’t have violated it.
Shargel: You didn’t know you were breaking the law at the time you were doing it?
DeVecchio: That’s correct.
Shargel: Did you know at the time that knowledge wasn’t an element under the subsection of 922?
DeVecchio: I don’t know what the Act reads or all the paragraphs in them.
Shargel: Are you aware as you sit here now, Judge Harold Tyler[,] then with the United States Department of Justice, concluded that you had clearly violated the law; and only as a matter of discretion you would not be indicted.
DeVecchio: I had no knowledge of that.
We can only speculate about how Lin DeVecchio might have treated a Mafioso who claimed he wasn’t aware of a law he’d broken. But the important point here is that early on, Rudy Giuliani decided that Lin DeVecchio was an agent worth protecting, just as top FBI officials found Greg Scarpa worthy of special treatment.
In the mid-1980s, when Giuliani, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, declared war on the Mafia, DeVecchio returned the favor by using Greg Scarpa to provide the probable cause that legalized most of the wiretaps used to convict three family bosses in the Commission case.32 That prosecution helped solidify Giuliani’s reputation as a crime buster and advanced his political career exponentially.
Years later, in 2007, when DeVecchio faced four counts of murder following his indictment by the Brooklyn DA, the Justice Department delivered for him again by paying for part of his legal bill, which was estimated at the time to be $450,000.33 For those fees to be approved, the U.S. attorney general himself, or his designee, had to conclude that DeVecchio’s actions were within the “scope” of his employment at the Bureau and that the payment of the fees was “in the interest of the United States.”34
“With Scarpa and DeVecchio,” says attorney Gerald Shargel, “the law was being selectively enforced. In protecting Greg from his many crimes, the Bureau was shielding a Mafia killer. In allowing DeVecchio to escape prosecution for the illegal gun sales, the Justice Department was protecting an FBI agent. In both instances the intervention was legally and morally wrong.”35
Giuliani’s help to DeVecchio in the German Luger case was a variation on the mysterious quid pro quo that had insulated Greg Scarpa Sr. So as the Grim Reaper began
his twelve-year association with “Mr. Organized Crime,” the two men shared much more than a love for guns.
PART II
Chapter 11
THE ROYAL MARRIAGE
The FBI’s Manual of Investigative and Operational Guidelines (MIOG), the rule book governing the conduct of all special agents, requires that when a confidential informant is opened he must interface with two contacting agents.1 “This is an ironclad rule to make sure a single agent doesn’t get too cozy with their informant,” says retired Special Agent Jim Whalen, who worked in the New York Office.2
From the moment Lin DeVecchio reopened Greg Scarpa, however, he dealt with him one-on-one. According to a report later issued by the Department of Justice inspector general, that particular relationship ran counter to “FBI protocol.”3 But it was formally sanctioned in an FBI memo on March 11, 1981, which not only granted DeVecchio permission to meet Scarpa alone but also waived the rule that Scarpa must sign for “monies paid.”4
As DeVecchio writes in his book, “The CI is required to sign a receipt, but no truly effective TE will ever sign anything, so you’re careful not to look foolish when you ask. You’re required to have a backup agent to witness the handling of cash. Again, no Top Echelon worthy of the term will ever agree to meet with two of you. Top Echelon is a royal marriage and three is a crowd. You seek a waiver from the brass.”5
A federal judge later concluded that the agent-informant guidelines were waived in this instance “on account of Scarpa’s distrust of anyone else.”6
Another FBI guideline DeVecchio managed to avoid in dealing with Scarpa was the recommendation that supervisors shouldn’t run CIs themselves. When DeVecchio reached the rank of supervisory special agent (SSA) in 1983,7 former agent Whalen argues, he should have passed off TECI “34” to agents under him in his squad.
“It was carved in stone,” says Whalen, “that no supervisor shall handle an informant. But the New York SAC made an exception for DeVecchio.”8 The question is, in the cost-benefit analysis, whether that special treatment was worth it.
In his book, the former SSA lavishes praise on Scarpa. “From the day of our first sit-down and for the ensuing twelve years,” he writes, “Scarpa furnished incredibly valuable information that led to countless RICO convictions and life sentences; Title III bugs and taps; solutions of murders and other serious crimes; and the Mafia Commission Case that, along with the individual family hierarchy cases, was a big part of the undoing of the Mafia’s power in New York.”9 A November 10, 1980, airtel stated that Scarpa provided the FBI with an organizational chart of the Colombo family,10 and continued to pass on intelligence on other soldiers and capos.11
There’s also little doubt that tying his star to Scarpa helped DeVecchio’s career take off. He was eventually given the Bonanno and Colombo squads to oversee, and he became the supervising agent on the Mafia Commission case.12 “The guys who had TE’s were the king shits of the office,” said one Organized Crime Strike Force prosecutor in Boston who talked to Boston Globe reporter Ralph Ranalli.13 But at what price?
As the newly released airtels demonstrate, in the early weeks of their relationship, Scarpa was already furnishing DeVecchio with false information about a homicide.
The aforementioned airtel included a comment Scarpa had made a few months earlier about a recent homicide:
ON AUGUST 26, 1980, SOURCE ADVISED THAT DOMINIC [sic] SOMMA, A COLOMBO FAMILY MEMBER, WAS RECENTLY HIT ON A CONTRACT APPROVED BY CARMINE PERSICO.
But what Scarpa doesn’t say is that he killed Somma himself—in a spectacular shooting in front of six other members of his crew at the Wimpy Boys social club. His role in the murder was later confirmed in a May 1993 FBI 302 memo covering the debriefing of Carmine Sessa, a former Colombo consigliere who was Scarpa’s chief asset during the third Colombo war, from 1991 to 1993.
The story behind Somma’s rubout begins with the attempted burglary by Scarpa’s crew of the Dime Savings Bank in Queens in late August 1980. Working inside the bank during the off-hours break-in were Sessa, Robert “Bobby Zam” Zambardi, Dominic Cataldo, Joseph Figueroa, Joseph “Joe Brewster” DeDomenico, and Costabile “Gus” Farace, who was Scarpa’s nephew. Their specialty was looting safe-deposit boxes after gaining entry by bypassing alarm systems. The so-called Bypass crew often broke into banks over weekends, when they’d have extended access to the vaults.14
Wimpy Boys club, 7506 Thirteenth Avenue, Brooklyn
(New York Daily News)
On this particular job, according to Sessa, Somma was working outside as a lookout with Scarpa’s son Greg Jr. Their assignment was “to radio the men inside, if there were any problems.” But as Sessa told Special Agents Jeffrey W. Tomlinson and Howard Leadbetter II, “SCARPA JR. was neglectful and a security guard walked in on the burglars.”
Thinking fast, Joe Brewster told the guard that they were a cleaning crew and while the guard was calling in to confirm their story, the Bypass crew escaped. Later, Somma complained to the crew’s nominal boss, capo Anthony “Scappi” Scarpati, about Junior’s performance.15
In an earlier interview, Sessa had said that the shooting of “Big Donny” Somma had initially been sanctioned by Allie Boy Persico, who had learned that Somma was dealing drugs. But that contract was about to be withdrawn. Now, apparently furious that his son had been criticized, Scarpa told Sessa that he wanted to “hit” Donny “before the orders for his murder were cancelled.”16 So the Grim Reaper summoned Somma to the ironically named Wimpy Boys club, where he did business.
Later that day, as Big Donny walked in unaware of the danger he faced, he passed John and Joseph Saponaro, two brothers who were playing cards in an outer room. He then went straight to Scarpa’s office in back. Inside, Scarpa was waiting, along with Joe Brewster, Farace, Zambardi, and Sessa. As soon as Somma came through the door, Scarpa pulled “a revolver with a long barrel from a desk drawer” and killed him instantly.
“We’re all talking and joking and out of nowhere Greg whips out a piece and shoots the guy in the head,” Sessa said. “Christ almighty, the guy’s brains were all over me! My ears were ringing from the gunshot. Calm as he can be, he told us to roll the body in the rug and get rid of it.”17 Sessa later told the Feds that he, Zambardi, and Greg Jr. dumped the body near the Arthur Kill landfill on Staten Island.
The fact that Dominick Somma would have the effrontery to complain about Scarpa’s son was all it took to set Scarpa off. He would continue to smolder over the incident, later telling Sessa, “I’d like to dig him up and shoot him again.”18 Still, in the very same 209 in which he reported Somma’s death, DeVecchio assured Bureau officials that:
This informant has not exhibited any tendencies toward emotional instability and has furnished no information known to be false.
Did Lin DeVecchio know that Scarpa was lying to him about the Somma hit? We can’t say for sure, but we can get some insight from DeVecchio’s own book. In his memoir, rather than describing the murder as a contract hit “approved by Carmine Persico,” as he did in that August 26, 1980, airtel, DeVecchio uses Big Donny’s murder to make the point that Scarpa “was indeed a fearless individual who enjoyed killing.”
Once a member of Scarpa’s crew complained about his son’s lackluster performance during a bypass bank burglary and Scarpa responded to the complaint by drilling the man on the spot and having him buried.19
Clearly, at the time when he was writing his book in 2010 Lin DeVecchio knew the truth about Dominick Somma’s execution and burial. The question is, did he know it when he sent that airtel to Headquarters thirty years before? If so, he was passing on false information to his superiors in DC—and, worse, facilitating Scarpa’s lies.
Thus, in assessing the agent’s twelve-year relationship with Greg Scarpa Sr., the central question is as old as the Watergate scandal: What did DeVecchio know and when did he know it?
Scarpa and the Beauty Queen
The guidelines on how FBI agents should react to knowledge of cri
minal activity by an informant were revised by Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti on December 4, 1980, five months after the Bureau reopened Scarpa. They provided that “if necessary and appropriate, informants may be authorized to participate in two different types of otherwise criminal activity” at the behest of the FBI: “ordinary” and “extraordinary.”
“Ordinary” criminal activity (effectively misdemeanors) could be authorized by an FBI field office supervisor or higher FBI official. “Extraordinary” criminal activity was defined as any activity involving “a significant risk of violence, corrupt actions by high public officials, or severe financial loss to a victim.” Only SACs could authorize extraordinary criminal activity, and only with the approval of the pertinent U.S. attorney.20 And in no case was homicide ever sanctioned or envisioned as a crime the Justice Department would permit.
Two days before the Civiletti guidelines were issued, DeVecchio filed a short 209 memo involving routine intelligence from Scarpa on low-level Colombo family matters:
Source advised that JACKIE DI ROSS and JOHN PATE are currently shylocking JUNIOR PERSICO’s money in the Staten Island area. The source advised that DI ROSS has been meeting frequently with CARMINE PERSICO, and more recently has been used by PERSICO to contact members of other LCN families on PERSICO’s behalf.21
But the very next day, December 3, 1980, Gregory Scarpa committed his second murder since DeVecchio had reopened him that past summer.
There was no mention of the homicide in any of the recently released 209 memos or airtels sent to FBI Headquarters.
As we’ve seen, on February 2, 1975, while he was still married to Connie Forrest and living with Linda Schiro, Scarpa flew to Las Vegas for a quickie marriage to Lili Dajani, who was Miss Israel 1960.22 According to a series of articles in the Long Beach Press-Telegram, Dajani was the daughter of Dr. Isa Dajani, an Arab dentist “who trace[d] his lineage to the time of the Crusades” and Mrs. Chava Rechtman-Dajani of Santa Monica, California, “a descendant of six generations of Jewish settlers who founded the town of Rehovot, Israel.”23