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

by Peter Lance

  Apparently, Scarpa himself was confident that DeVecchio’s intervention with Judge Glasser would pay off. In a sworn affidavit in 1998, Linda Schiro stated that “prior to his sentencing, DeVecchio told Senior that he would receive a sentence of probation from the judge.”27 Greg Scarpa Jr. also reiterated his father’s confidence. At a January 2004 hearing, Junior testified under oath that his father had told him “he would just be getting probation” after pleading guilty to credit card fraud.28 During his own trial in 1998, Junior testified that the deal was made by Lin DeVecchio, “because [Scarpa Sr.] was a Top Echelon informant.”29

  Judge I. Leo Glasser himself revealed that DeVecchio had intervened with him on Scarpa’s behalf, and he noted that Greg Sr., who by then had been diagnosed with HIV, “did not have long to live.”30

  Whether it was because of DeVecchio’s intervention or some other back-channel effort, on June 18, 1986, a deal was cut. On paper Scarpa was looking at seven and a half years in prison and a $250,000 fine,31 but Judge Glasser allowed him to plead guilty to one count in the indictment. He was sentenced to five years’ probation and a $10,000 fine—a virtual slap on the wrist.32 If it was Lin DeVecchio who played the AIDS card with the judge, it worked. But rather than succumb in a matter of months, as Glasser expected, Greg Scarpa lived for another eight years.

  Extortion and Credit Card Theft

  Still, Ed McDonald, the tenacious Brooklyn Strike Force attorney, would not let the matter pass without comment. On July 22, 1986, in a scathing four-page letter to Judge Glasser, who approved the plea deal, McDonald chronicled Scarpa’s stunning criminal history, from his first arrest for possession of a firearm in 1950 up through the latest credit card bust. As McDonald noted, “within the last two years, using the Wimpy Boys Social Club as his headquarters, Scarpa has supervised efforts by members of his crew to extort protection money from local merchants through the use of physical violence.” Given Scarpa’s criminal history, McDonald went on to recommend that he “be sentenced to a period of incarceration and a substantial fine,” describing him as “one of the biggest distributors of counterfeit credit cards in the New York metropolitan area.”

  DeVecchio described the credit card case this way in his memoir:

  The only time [Scarpa] got any help from me was when he was arrested by the Secret Service for buying counterfeit credit cards from a wired cooperating witness. It was a sting. My lawyer Doug Grover’s law partner Norman Block [sic]* was the federal prosecutor. . . . I got Scarpa’s approval and my supervisor’s approval to go to headquarters for permission to reveal his TE status to Block and for Block and me to go to Judge I. Leo Glasser and tell him privately in the judge’s chambers. Which we did. They made the decision from there to give Scarpa probation.

  Six years after he intervened on behalf of Scarpa in that credit card case, however, DeVecchio seemed to suggest something different when he was under oath. In the November 1992 murder trial of Carmine Sessa’s brother Michael, DeVecchio testified for the government as an expert witness. Although he didn’t mention Scarpa by name, DeVecchio gave an account that appears inconsistent with that passage from his book.

  In the following excerpt from the trial transcript, he’s being cross-examined by the defendant’s attorney Gavin Scotti:

  Scotti: Does the Bureau reward these informants sometimes for the information they give?

  DeVecchio: It does, yes.

  Scotti: Do those rewards sometimes take the form of cash payments?

  DeVecchio: Yes it does.

  Scotti: Do those rewards sometimes take the form of helping informants out of jams, when, for example, an informant might get picked up by some other . . . law enforcement officer, brought in for questioning and the informant says, “Call up Agent DeVecchio. I work for him.” Does the informant sometimes get a little help from the FBI, see if you can cut this fellow a break, he’s a good informant for us?

  DeVecchio: No.

  Scotti: You never did that? . . . You’ve never told anybody, this is a very valuable informant for us, he is in the middle of a very intricate investigation, and it would really help us out an awful lot if you could see your way clear to cutting him loose or letting him back out on the street to help us?

  DeVecchio: I’ve not done that.

  Scotti: You’ve not done that?

  DeVecchio: That’s correct.33

  Nearly five years after that testimony, DeVecchio’s comments came back to haunt him. At a hearing for Vic Orena, the former Colombo acting boss who was convicted of murder—based in part on evidence allegedly planted by Greg Scarpa—defense attorney Gerald Shargel referred to Lin’s testimony in the Sessa case:

  Shargel: Do you remember November of 1992 . . . testifying in this courthouse . . . against Michael Sessa?

  DeVecchio: I may have testified. I made a lot of testimony.

  Shargel: Let me show you what I will have marked . . . as B for identification, transcript of November 2nd, 1992 and ask if that refreshes your recollection as to whether you testified there?

  DeVecchio: Yes.

  Shargel: Do you remember on page 119 giving this answer:

  QUESTION: You’ve never told anybody, this is a very valuable informant for us, he is in the middle of a very intricate investigation, and it would really help us out an awful lot if you could see your way clear to cutting him loose or letting him back out on the street to help us?

  ANSWER: I’ve not done that.

  QUESTION: You’ve not done that?

  ANSWER: That’s correct.

  Do you remember giving those answers to those questions?

  DeVecchio: Yes.

  Shargel: Those were lies, weren’t they Mr. DeVecchio?

  DeVecchio: No, they were not.

  Shargel: Wasn’t it a fact that just two months before, you asked these prosecutors to cut Gregory Scarpa a break because of the information he had given you?

  DeVecchio: I requested they consider that.

  Shargel: Wait a minute. You requested they consider that?

  DeVecchio: Let him out on bail. That’s what I said.

  Shargel: You’ve lied before to cover your own tracks, haven’t you?

  DeVecchio: I have not lied at all Mr. Shargel and I resent that. I have not lied.34

  We’ll leave it for the reader to decide what to make of Lin DeVecchio’s testimony in those court proceedings. By the summer of 1986, however, one thing was clear: Thanks to his intervention, Greg Scarpa Sr. was “back on the street.” And, despite the warning from FBI Headquarters that he was “not to get involved in any future unauthorized criminal activity,”35 Scarpa continued to break the law in a ruthless ongoing enterprise that included numbers running, loan sharking, hijacking, extortion, and murder, while presiding over the multimillion-dollar narcotics operation that led to the arrest of his son’s crew the following year.

  With the dismissal of the credit card case, Scarpa had now beaten three separate indictments brought by federal prosecutors working with strike forces in Chicago, Newark, and Brooklyn. Despite his health problems, the Grim Reaper had every reason to feel untouchable.

  It’s fair to argue that with his criminal record, and absent the FBI’s help in thwarting the Secret Service charges, Scarpa Sr. might have been sentenced to a full seven years. Given the virus in his system, that could have amounted to a death sentence.

  If he’d been locked down in a federal prison, however, he would never have been able to instigate the third Colombo war—and twelve people killed between 1991 and 1993, not to mention two other probable war-related Scarpa hits, might still be alive.36 That’s not an unfair assumption, given the evidence we’ll produce that Scarpa not only fomented the conflict but pulled the trigger himself, or ordered it pulled, in six of the homicides and a number of the other shootings.

  Long before he fired the first shot in that war, however, Greg Scarpa committed murder again. And this time the victim was one of his most loyal and devoted crew members: Joseph DeDomenico, also known as
Joe Brewster.

  Chapter 16

  DEATH OF A SECOND SON

  Joe DeDomenico went way back with Greg Scarpa Sr. In fact, when Linda Schiro first met Scarpa at the Flamingo Lounge in 1962, nineteen-year-old Joe was already close to Greg.1 Carmine Sessa, Scarpa’s wartime consigliere, was one of Joe’s best friends. He later testified that they’d been doing scores together since they were in their early teens.2 Along with brothers John and Joe Saponaro and Bobby “Zam” Zambardi, they were five kids from the mean streets of Brooklyn who started out stealing cars and hijacking trucks, then learned to rob banks and kill on the orders of their capo, Greg Scarpa Sr.

  Sessa remembered that, as far back as the 1960s, when a witness “flipped” on a case involving stolen bonds, Scarpa and Joe Brewster “killed somebody” to make it go away.3 (That was the rubout that may have taken the life of Jerry Ciprio.) In June 1974, DeDomenico was arrested with Scarpa in that sale of $4 million in counterfeit IBM stock certificates developed by the Newark Strike Force,4 another case that was ultimately dismissed.5 The Killing Machine so trusted Brewster that Joe was a witness to two separate homicides Scarpa was involved in within the first six months of his reopening by Lin DeVecchio in 1980: the precipitous murder of Dominick “Big Donny” Somma at the Wimpy Boys club in August and the slaying of former abortion doctor Eli Shkolnik on December 3. Over the years, Scarpa became so friendly with DeDomenico that Greg was the best man at Joe’s wedding and godfather to his son.6

  One of DeDomenico’s specialties was bank burglaries, and from the early 1970s forward he worked two separate Bypass crews: one for Scarpa and the other for Greg’s lifelong “compare,” Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, who was then a capo in the Lucchese family. As we’ll see, during Lin DeVecchio’s murder trial, his lawyers suggested that it was DeDomenico’s defection from Scarpa to another Bypass crew that led to his death. But the evidence uncovered in this investigation indicates that Scarpa Sr. not only worked with Casso, and shared in the profits from some of his scores, but “34” also used his FBI connections to provide Casso with intelligence. At the same time Joe Brewster DeDomenico swung back and forth between both crews.

  In the 2008 book Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss, by the late Philip Carlo, Casso identified Joe Brewster as one of his crew members at the time of a 1972 incident that Scarpa helped resolve. According to Casso, he was driving on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn with his wife, Lillian, and his daughter Jolene when suddenly he was “surrounded by unmarked FBI vehicles . . . driven by stone-faced agents.” After being summarily jerked from the car, he was cuffed and taken into custody. According to Casso, Joe Brewster and another member of his crew were arrested the same day.7

  After putting up the bail money for Joe and getting back on the street himself, Casso reached out to Scarpa, whom Carlo described as “a fierce war captain in the Colombo crime family who was known by a select few to have good friends in law enforcement.” Learning through his attorney that the Feds had a “snitch” named Bobby Dennish who was going to flip on his burglary crew, Casso reportedly met Scarpa Sr. at his own social club on Bath Avenue in Bensonhurst and asked for help finding Dennish.

  Senior said he’d get back to him, writes Carlo, and when they met two days later at Mary’s, a restaurant on Eighty-Sixth Street, Scarpa told Casso that, according to his FBI control agent (Anthony Villano at the time),8 “Dennish was stashed in Topeka, Kansas.” As Carlo tells it, Casso was able to get word to Dennish that if he “threw the case, did not ID him or the others in open court, he’d take care of him.” And he did: The charges were dropped.

  But like Scarpa, Casso wasn’t the type to leave loose ends. A source with specific knowledge of the case told me that Dennish was later lured back to JFK airport with a free airline ticket, where he was picked up by none other than Joe Brewster and murdered.9

  In Gaspipe, Carlo writes that over the years “Scarpa and Casso did more and more business together, hijacking valuable trucks and stealing all kinds of goods from Kennedy Airport.”10 Scarpa even reportedly offered to sponsor Casso in the Colombo family when “the books were opened,” but Anthony “politely declined” and went on to become acting boss of the Luccheses. Casso himself later pled guilty to his role in fourteen murders and was implicated in another twenty-three.11 In the Mafia pantheon of epic killers, that put Casso on the same level as Gambino consigliere Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, who pled to nineteen homicides.12

  Still, Joe DeDomenico remained a strong mutual connection between the two ruthless mobsters. When I interviewed Casso, he told me that Scarpa used to give him “tips” on scores.

  “Diamonds and jewelry, stuff like that,” said Casso. “And I’d take Joe Brewster with me. He’d come work for me. And Brewster would go breaking in.”13 Casso further insisted that Scarpa trusted Brewster as much as he trusted his own son.

  “Brewster was the guy who really knew everything,” Casso told me. “Part of that was ‘cause Junior was locked up for a lot of years, so the only two people who knew everything about Greg Senior were Joe Brewster and his girlfriend Linda.” In fact, when Linda Schiro testified at the DeVecchio murder trial in 2007, she recalled that Scarpa “loved Joe Brewster like his own son.”14

  The Murder of Bucky

  According to Carmine Sessa, the Colombos’ wartime consigliere, Joe DeDomenico took part in four separate bank burglaries that Sessa was involved in from 1980 to 1984. The first was the Dime Savings Bank heist that led to Dominick Somma’s death.15 According to Sessa, it was DeDomenico’s quick thinking during that aborted robbery that allowed the crew to escape.

  The next burglary was a successful $1 million heist at a bank on Northern Boulevard in Queens, which yielded “gold bars, diamonds, jewelry and cash.” Sessa’s personal cut was $48,000 to $50,000.16 He told the agents that the crew on that score included Brewster, Gus Farace (Scarpa Sr.’s nephew), and Bobby Zambardi, who used jackhammers to penetrate the vault. This time, the outside lookout working with Greg Jr. was Robert “Bucky” DiLeonardi, and just like “Big Donny” Somma, he ended up dead.

  In fact, DiLeonardi’s rubout was an eerie precursor to Brewster’s eventual demise. According to what Sessa told the agents, Scarpa ordered DiLeonardi executed “because he had been overheard bragging about crimes in which he had participated,” including “bank robberies.”

  The hit team dispatched by the Grim Reaper this time reportedly included Sessa, Greg Scarpa Jr., and two members of Senior’s Wimpy Boys crew: Billy Meli and Kevin Granato.17 The plan was for Bucky to drive Junior and Sessa to see somebody on Staten Island because Junior “had a problem to settle.” Meli and Granato would follow in a separate car.

  According to Sessa, on the day of the hit DiLeonardi picked him up with Junior in his own car and drove across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Brooklyn. When they reached Hylan Boulevard on Staten Island, they turned onto a side street near Russo’s restaurant, where the younger Scarpa told Bucky to pull over. Suspecting nothing, DiLeonardi complied—at which point, according to Sessa, Greg Jr., who was sitting in the backseat, shot him “several times in the head, killing him.” After the hit, Junior and Sessa reportedly left the vehicle and joined Meli and Granato in the getaway car. They then drove toward Junior’s house on Holten Avenue and tossed the murder weapon into Wolfe’s Pond.

  In a strangely prophetic conversation, Sessa told his FBI debriefers that he discussed the murder later with Joe Brewster, who told him that “everybody has to follow orders or be killed themselves.” At some point after that, Brewster himself started disobeying his capo, Greg Scarpa Sr., and once that happened—“son” or no son, best man or not—in Senior’s ice-cold words, “he had to go.”

  DeDomenico’s next bank job with the Scarpa crew was the successful robbery of a bank in Queens, with Zambardi, Granato, Sessa, and a fourth accomplice named Joseph Figueroa. By Sessa’s account, Figueroa had also been in on the Dime Savings job.

  This time the split was $15,000 to $20,000 per man, with th
e lion’s share of the proceeds getting “kicked up” to Greg Sr. DeDomenico had a contact at ADT, the alarm company, and the crew learned how to bypass alarm systems so they could get into banks during off hours. The system had worked in two of the scores, failing only during the 1980 Dime job. In February 1984, when Greg Sr. decided to hit the same bank again, they used a police scanner to tip them off to any law enforcement presence.

  According to Sessa, the crew this time consisted of DeDomenico, Greg Jr., Zambardi, Figueroa, and Anthony Frezza, who went on later that year to drive Mary Bari to her death, only to get whacked himself. The Bari murder was another homicide where Senior and Junior would trust both Carmine Sessa and Joe Brewster to keep quiet.

  But on February 18, during their second burglary at the Dime, the police scanner went off and the crew fled. Joe Brewster, the seasoned thief, had his car parked behind the bank. He got away clean with Sessa and Bobby Zam. Out of loyalty to Figueroa, though, they doubled back to pick him up—only to get boxed in by NYPD patrol cars. Sessa, Zambardi, and Brewster were pulled from their vehicle, questioned, and arrested.

  What Was Missing

  In the four years since Lin DeVecchio had started sending 209s to Washington based on his debriefings of Greg Sr., there was very little in them about Scarpa’s activities as a bank robber. So, again, the question is, what did DeVecchio know, and when did he know it?

  The first 209 that even hinted at such activity—given Brewster’s links to Scarpa—was in mid-December 1981. It recounted a meeting from the previous March:

  ON MARCH 4TH, 1981 SOURCE ADVISED THAT JOE BREWSTER IS NOT CONNECTED WITH BUT NOTED THAT THE BURGLARY AT THE CHASE BANK ON THE WEEKEND OF JANUARY 17–19TH WAS DONE BY CREW. SOURCE ALSO ADVISED THAT ADT EMPLOYEE IN NASSAU COUNTY WHO HAS BEEN SUPPLYING WITH INFORMATION ON BANK ALARMS.18