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

by Peter Lance

  But the former beauty queen’s marriage to Scarpa wasn’t her first trip to the altar in Las Vegas. As reported in the Press-Telegram in March 1961, after contacting the California Highway Patrol and reporting her daughter “missing,”24 Mrs. Rechtman-Dajani notified the police that Lili had eloped to Nevada with a twenty-four-year-old man named Martin Geller and that she had sent her mother a telegram that read “Are Married.”25 The couple then reportedly traveled to New York for their honeymoon.

  The five-foot-seven beauty queen, who was one of fifteen semifinalists in the 1960 Miss International Beauty Congress,26 reportedly spoke five languages, including English, French, Italian, Arabic, and Hebrew.27

  Lili Dajani, 1960

  Fourteen years later, when she made her second wedding trip to Las Vegas with Greg Scarpa, Ms. Dajani initially gave her address on the marriage certificate as Los Angeles. But her new address as Scarpa’s third wife was typed in at the top of the certificate: 36 Sutton Place South, Apartment 8G, a posh co-op Scarpa owned in one of Manhattan’s most exclusive neighborhoods. A copy of the marriage certificate is reproduced in Appendix B.

  In 1980, Dajani, then forty years old, was working as a nurse-receptionist at the Central Women’s Center, a facility run by Eliezer Shkolnik, a fifty-two-year-old doctor whose medical license had reportedly been revoked in 1976 due to conditions at the clinic, where he performed abortions.

  In 2006, quoting unnamed sources, veteran Mafia columnist Jerry Capeci reported in the New York Sun that “during the period that Dajani worked for the married Dr. Shkolnik they became lovers . . . a relationship that contributed to his messy divorce that ended with the ex-doctor changing the name of the women’s center, placing it in Ms. Dajani’s name, and remaining on as the center’s administrator.”28

  Capeci also reported that “sources said Ms. Dajani and Scarpa Sr. also had a business relationship. She had invested money with Scarpa . . . an investigative source said, adding that Ms. Dajani was ‘upset with Scarpa’ about her losses.”

  Later, Shkolnik reportedly moved in with his parents in their Forest Hills, Queens, apartment, telling his son, “I’m finally going to get the business back.”29 He also reportedly started talking to the IRS about Dajani and her relationship with Scarpa.

  Then, according to Capeci, at seven thirty A.M. on December 3, 1980, Scarpa, Joe Brewster DeDomenico, and a third unnamed cohort entered the lobby of the Forest Hills building and shot Shkolnik in the head. The former abortion doctor was reportedly found with $1,500 in cash and expensive gold jewelry on his body, ruling out robbery as a motive for the crime.

  In the 2006 “Gang Land” column that broke the Shkolnik story, Capeci quoted unnamed sources as stating that “shortly after he signed up Scarpa, Mr. DeVecchio allegedly alerted his murderous informer that Shkolnik . . . was cooperating with an Internal Revenue Service probe into Scarpa’s activities.” Capeci also interviewed Shkolnik’s son Hunter, a Manhattan attorney, and quoted him as saying that the day after the murder he got a phone call from an anonymous source informing him that an “FBI agent . . . had something to do” with his father’s death.

  In 2007, just before Lin DeVecchio’s homicide trial, Capeci reported that Gregory Scarpa Jr. was prepared to testify that he was the unnamed third co-conspirator in the Shkolnik hit team. He reportedly told prosecutors that his participation in the hit came after a special request from his father, who was proud of the work he did.30

  According to Capeci, “Prosecutors say the slaying of Shkolnik . . . was set in motion by Mr. DeVecchio in the fall of 1980, when he allegedly alerted Colombo mobster Gregory Scarpa Sr. that the ex-doctor was cooperating in a tax probe of the gangster, with whom he shared a mistress.”31

  But later, when the Brooklyn district attorney tried to include the Shkolnik homicide in a list of “prior bad acts” that might be used to impeach DeVecchio during his murder trial,32 Judge Gustin Reichbach rejected the motion, holding that proof of this homicide, “made very late in the proceedings, long after the . . . indictment was returned,” would be “highly prejudicial.”33

  DeVecchio never mentions the Shkolnik murder or Scarpa’s relationship with Dajani in his book. Nor was there a hint of the homicide in his next memorandum, which he filed on March 1, 1981—a detailed four-page FBI letterhead memo on his debriefings of “34” during the period when the violent Forest Hills slaying took place.34

  As we’ll soon see, one of the members of the Shkolnik hit team, Joe Brewster, was later murdered on Scarpa’s orders. That homicide became one of the four counts in the Brooklyn DA’s prosecution of DeVecchio.35 But the key point to keep in mind at this juncture, even putting aside DeVecchio’s possible involvement in the Shkolnik rubout, was that less than half a year into Scarpa’s new stint as a paid Top Echelon informant for the Bureau, the Grim Reaper was continuing to commit murders.

  In the 60 Minutes piece on DeVecchio’s book, Ellen Corcella, the former Eastern District of New York (EDNY) assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted a Colombo war case in 1995, underscored the implications of having an FBI informant, who is known to be violent, killing people while he’s an official Bureau CI.

  “You are absolutely not supposed to keep an informant on the street that is killing people,” she told correspondent Anderson Cooper.

  “Even if that person is giving you valuable information which may have other arrests as a result of it?” Cooper asked.

  “The question I would put to your question,” Corcella replied, “is, when is it valuable enough information that you let people continue to kill other people on the street?”36

  “I Knew He Was Doing Hits”

  In his memoir, Brick Agent, Anthony Villano wrote that “Bureau instructions specifically state that if an agent becomes aware of a conspiracy to commit a criminal act wherein an innocent person might get hurt, it must be prevented from taking place.”37 As we’ll see, during the third Colombo war, which was incited and principally waged by Greg Scarpa, at least half a dozen innocent bystanders were wounded and two were killed.38 That happened more than a decade into Lin DeVecchio’s tenure as Scarpa’s “control” agent.

  Was DeVecchio aware back in the early 1980s that Greg was continuing to commit murders? Without commenting on the time frame, DeVecchio answers that question himself in his book. “In my heart, as Scarpa’s handler, of course I knew he was doing hits,” he writes.39

  But how much did DeVecchio know of the details?

  In his 1993 debriefing, former Scarpa crew member Carmine Sessa confessed to knowledge of another early 1980s Scarpa homicide. During a session with FBI agents Tomlinson and Leadbetter II on May 10, 1993, Sessa recalled that the unknown male, referred to in that FBI 302 as “the victim,” owed a loan-shark debt to Colombo captain Anthony Scarpati. So Scarpa enticed the man to meet him at Occasions, a club Sessa owned at 6908 Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn.

  Most of the same crew who were witnesses to the murder and disposal of Dominick Somma, including the Saponaro brothers, Joe Brewster DeDomenico, Bobby Zambardi, and Greg Jr., all reportedly hid out on the first floor of the club. According to Sessa, as soon as the victim walked in, he was tackled to the floor and then shot point-blank by Greg Sr.40

  Sessa reported that the body was then wrapped in canvas and driven by Zambardi to a collision shop on Sixty-Third Street between Fifteenth and Sixteenth Avenues. It was then moved to a van and reportedly parked by a member of Dominick “Donny Shacks” Montemarano’s crew at a location not far from Scarpa’s Wimpy Boys social club. There it sat all day—for so long that Scarpa actually started to complain about it, since the original “plan had called for the van to be picked up right away.”

  This was the third Scarpa murder since DeVecchio began running him, and there is nothing in the 209s or memos from that period that even hints at the rubout. This killing would take on added significance later, because Occasions, Sessa’s club, was the site of another infamous killing by the Grim Reaper—one of those cited in the Brooklyn DA
’s indictment against DeVecchio. We’ll describe the details of that grisly hit in the next chapter.41

  The Limo Rubouts

  Greg Scarpa Sr. was responsible for at least two more murders in the early 1980s. Both of them involved limo drivers and the motive in both hits was personal.

  Alfred Longobardi was a limo driver who was “married to the mob,” in that he’d been the first husband of Scarpa crew member Carmine Imbriale’s wife. According to Carmine Sessa, Greg was “upset” with Imbriale when he married her.42

  By July 1982, in partnership with his father and “Scappi” Scarpati, Scarpa’s son Greg Jr. was running a nightclub on Staten Island called On the Rocks. One night, Longobardi reportedly came in and got drunk, firing off an insult at Junior. As with Dominick Somma, that slight to Scarpa’s son merited a death sentence in the elder Scarpa’s mind. But according to John Kroger, a former assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, Junior himself initially attempted to do the “work.”43 He reportedly used a knife to flatten one of Longobardi’s tires as his limo sat parked outside his house. The alleged plan was for Greg Jr. to hit him from behind as he changed the tire.

  But when Longobardi got out of the car, he was carrying his infant son. Since Mafia rules forbid the involvement of families in hits, Junior backed away.

  The reprieve didn’t last long.

  As Carmine Sessa told it to FBI agents, Greg Sr. ordered his son and the same crew that had taken care of the victim in Sessa’s club to “participate in Longobardi’s murder.”

  Joe Brewster DeDomenico, Greg Sr.’s. most trusted crew member, was ordered to hire Longobardi’s stretch. The driver was to pick up DeDomenico and Greg Sr. at the airport for a trip to Staten Island, where they would execute him once they arrived. The body would then be left in the stretch, and three other cars from Scarpa’s crew would be waiting to provide backup and a getaway.

  Sessa met them back at the Wimpy Boys club, where Greg Sr. told Sessa that he’d shot Longobardi as the driver parked the stretch. To send a message about “respect,” Scarpa had shot away Longobardi’s face,44 forcing his family to identify him from his tattoos when they came to claim the body. Such was the price that Gregory Scarpa Sr., the FBI’s star informant, exacted from anyone who would dare insult his firstborn son.

  But there was a hitch. As it turned out, when Joe Brewster ordered the limo, he’d placed the call from a pay phone at Mike’s Candy, a convenience store Scarpa Sr. owned a few doors down from the social club.45 When the police traced the limo order back to the store, they started looking for DeDomenico, who was forced to hide out for some time in a Long Island hotel until the heat was off.46

  The death of the second limo driver came after a much more serious offense against one of Greg Sr.’s children.

  Confessing a Murder to Lin

  “Little Linda” Schiro, Gregory’s daughter with Linda Schiro, traveled back and forth to school with her brother Joey via a Brooklyn car service that her father had hired. In an interview she gave for a Discovery Channel documentary that aired in December 2011, Little Linda said that one day, after her brother stayed home sick, instead of taking her to school, their regular driver took her into Prospect Park. “At that time he tried to rape me,” she said. “I didn’t even know if I was going to make it out of the park.”47 Using her “instincts,” Schiro said, she convinced the driver that if he met her after school they could “go somewhere.”

  The driver then took her to school, where she ran into a bathroom, her shirt ripped from the struggle, and called her mother.

  In a subsequent New York Post story reported by Brad Hamilton in 2012, Little Linda identified the driver as one Jose Guzman and gave additional details about the alleged attack.48 “He ripped the buttons on my shirt,” she said, “and started licking my hand. . . . It was disgusting.” In the Post account, Schiro said that she was “hysterical, crying,” and that later, her mother, Big Linda, “went to the car service with a knife and threatened the dispatcher.”

  According to Carmine Sessa, when an enraged Greg Sr. went to the car service, he learned that the driver had quit that particular company. Eventually, though, Scarpa discovered Guzman’s home address and located Little Linda’s alleged attacker near a park, where he was severely beaten.

  But that apparently wasn’t enough for the Mad Hatter. Sessa told the FBI agents debriefing him that the very thought of the violation continued to prey on Scarpa’s mind—so much so that he eventually ordered the driver’s execution.

  Using the same MO he’d employed with Longobardi, Scarpa had Joe Brewster and Bobby Zam rent the driver’s own Cadillac Seville. They directed him to stop at Sixty-Fourth Street in Brooklyn, where, Sessa confessed, he and Scarpa Jr. “shot and killed the victim.” In his book, however, Lin DeVecchio attributes the murder to his own informant, Greg Scarpa Sr., adding that the driver was “a Puerto Rican not involved in the life.”

  According to DeVecchio’s version, Greg Sr. first got a cane and limped into the limo driver’s office, where he “whipped him with it.” But then, unable to live with himself, Scarpa confessed to Lin that he “went back and killed him.”49

  According to the Post story, Guzman was “shot dead, pleading for his life . . . in broad daylight.” Reporter Hamilton puts the location two blocks away from where Sessa described it, “in the middle of 62nd Street in Bensonhurst.”50

  “The next thing I knew, the car service driver was killed,” said Little Linda in the documentary. “I can only assume that he didn’t know who my father was.”

  It’s significant that in his own book, Lin DeVecchio admitted that Scarpa had confessed this murder to him, but does not say when he knew about it. If “34” had done it while he was DeVecchio’s informant, under Justice Department guidelines such a confession should have triggered not just Scarpa’s immediate closing as an informant, but a report to both Lin’s FBI supervisor and the U.S. attorney for the EDNY.

  In 2007, after DeVecchio was indicted by the Brooklyn DA on four counts of murder conspiracy, his attorneys moved to have the sensational case switched to federal court. But in rejecting that motion, Judge Frederic Block cited the AG’s Guidelines “circumscribing authorization for confidential informants to commit crimes.”

  Under the Guidelines in effect during the period covered by the 2007 indictment, a CI could not be authorized to commit a crime of violence unless a special agent in charge, after consulting with the appropriate United States attorney, determined in writing that (1) “the conduct [was] necessary to obtain information or evidence for paramount prosecutive purposes, to establish or maintain credibility or cover with persons associated with criminal activity under investigation, or to prevent or avoid the danger of death or serious bodily injury,” and (2) such necessity “outweigh[ed] the seriousness of the conduct involved.”51

  The current guidelines are even more restrictive: “A [Department of Justice law enforcement agency] is never permitted to authorize a CI to participate in an act of violence.”52

  But as the 1980s unfolded there was much more violence to come. According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Kroger, Greg Scarpa Sr. committed another murder within three years of being reopened by Lin DeVecchio. Once again, his accomplice was Carmine Sessa.

  By early January 1983, among his other criminal activities, Greg Sr. was running an international auto-theft ring that stole high-end vehicles and shipped them overseas. At one point, Scarpa came to believe that Sal “the Hammerhead” Cardaci was about to inform on Billy Meli, one of “34’s” crew members, who was close to Greg Jr. Cardaci was then lured to Mike’s Candy, where Sessa shot him in the head with a .357 Magnum.

  As Kroger described it, the body was then “stripped, covered with lime and buried down in the candy store basement.”53 But there isn’t a word about that murder in any of the 209s that continued to flow to FBI Headquarters in Washington. Not a word on the murders of Longobardi and Guzman, the car service driver who allegedly molested Little Linda. Similarly, there was no men
tion in the FBI airtels or 209s of Greg Scarpa Sr.’s next vicious homicide. This time the victim was Mary Bari, the ravishing mistress of Allie Boy Persico.

  Chapter 12

  GOING TO HELL FOR THIS

  In 1969, Mary Bari was on the verge of her sixteenth birthday. She was a student at New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and the daughter of a candy store owner. One day, she was standing on a street corner near school when the man who would later rise to the rank of underboss of the Colombo crime family1 rolled up next to her.2 Twenty-four years older and married, Alphonse Persico was the brother of Carmine “the Snake.” They called him “Allie Boy,” but there was nothing boyish about him. He dressed in thousand-dollar suits, drove a white Rolls-Royce, and never went out without an armed bodyguard. To the drop-dead-gorgeous Mary, he was like no one she’d ever met.

  “Once they started dating, he started showering her with gifts,” said one of her relatives. “He took her to Vegas, to Hawaii, to Florida. He gave her a fox fur coat. He gave her diamond rings.”3 Even though her mother, Louise, tried to warn her that the Persicos were “bad people,” the headstrong Mary wouldn’t listen. “She had a real crush on him,” the relative said. With her looks and figure, the petite five-foot-two brunette4 had always been sought after by the neighborhood boys, but now they stayed away. Even knowing that Allie Boy would never leave his wife, Dora, Mary pretended he was a normal boyfriend; she introduced him to her family and invited him to her sister’s wedding. To please him, she even got a tattoo of a peach (a pet name) on her derriere. And for eleven years, as the dangerous roller coaster she was riding stayed on its tracks, she lived a life many girls from Bensonhurst only dreamed of.