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

by Peter Lance

  When that 209 was introduced by Lin’s defense team during his murder trial in 2007, it created a small media storm. In a story headlined “Crime Bosses Considered Hit on Giuliani,” New York Times reporter John Sullivan wrote that Giuliani “came within single vote of having a contract put on his head by the leaders of the five New York organized crime families.”11

  “That was one vote I guess I won,” quipped Giuliani, who, by 2007, was considering a bid for the White House.12 Suggesting that he took the threat in stride, Giuliani’s campaign released a statement in which he said, “You get used to living with it. You say to yourself, ‘It’s worth doing what you are doing and it’s always a remote possibility.’”13

  The 209, penned by DeVecchio, was part of six hundred pages of memos documenting his contacts with Scarpa turned over at trial that day, October 24, 2007. But two days later, a story by Times reporter Michael Brick raised questions about the legitimacy of the threat. Under the headline “ ’80s Plot to Hit Giuliani? Mob Experts Doubt It,” Brick quoted former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew McCarthy, the lead Southern District prosecutor on the 1995 “Day of Terror” case, as noting that “the Sicilian Mafia killed Italian judicial magistrates and police officers, [but] the American Mafia didn’t do that. . . . In the United States, their general M.O. was that killing prosecutors and cops could do nothing but bring harm.”14

  Brick, who covered the DeVecchio trial, also quoted “Gang Land” columnist Jerry Capeci as disputing whether “John Gotti would have gone along with the proposal.”15 Was the plot real or a Scarpa fabrication? It’s impossible to say for sure at this point. But the date that the alleged threat found its way into a DeVecchio 209 is curious. It was the same day Scarpa had his closest crew member, Joseph DeDomenico, killed.

  “Was it meant to deflect attention away from the significance of Brewster’s murder?” asks defense attorney Flora Edwards.16 It’s impossible to say, but it’s worthy of mention that both reports—Brewster and Giuliani—supposedly came from Scarpa Sr. on the very same day.

  The Death of Sal

  Nine months earlier on January 14, 1987, one day after the sentencing of Carmine Persico, Gregory Scarpa’s older brother Salvatore “Sal” Scarpa was gunned down. Sal was sitting in a social club at 1275 Seventy-Fourth Street in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn ten minutes before midnight when five armed gunmen came in for what seemed at first to be a robbery.17

  After they forced the patrons to lie on the floor while they confiscated their money and jewelry, Sal Scarpa was shot once in the back of the head by one assailant, who was wearing a mask. The other four members of the crew were said to be African American, and before they fled the club one of them yelled out, “Howard Beach!”—a reference to an infamous racial attack just a month earlier, when three young black men were attacked in the largely Italian neighborhood in Queens after their car broke down. Wielding baseball bats and spewing racial epithets, a gang of white teens descended on the three young men, beating one of them severely, and another, twenty-four-year-old Michael Griffith, was killed after being hit by a car on the Belt Parkway while escaping from the attackers.18 Charles Hynes, who went on to become the Brooklyn DA, was appointed a special prosecutor in the case,19 in which twelve suspects were indicted.20

  On the night of Sal Scarpa’s murder, though, there was no compelling reason to believe that race was the prime motive. Neither, it seemed, was robbery. After Sal was shot at close range, his body was found with his watch, a gold pendant, and $313 in cash intact.

  Salvatore and Gregory Sr. were the sons of first-generation immigrants from the village of Lorenzaga in the comune of Motta di Livenza near Venice. Greg was made in 1950 and Sal is believed to have preceded him into the Profaci family.

  At the time of his death, Sal was free on bail awaiting trial for cocaine possession. It was just the latest in a series of charges dating back to the 1950s that rivaled those of his younger brother Greg. The newly released FBI files show that the two brothers were in on the December 1959 tractor trailer heist for which Greg was arrested.21

  As noted earlier, Gregory quickly agreed to inform for the Bureau but severed his ties after agents pressed him on the whereabouts of Sal, who’d escaped.22

  His loyalty didn’t last long. By late November 1961, after he was reopened, Greg named Sal, along with Carmine Persico, Hugh “Apples” McIntosh, and Salvatore Albanese, as “criminal associates.”23 Beyond that, in the 1,153 pages of newly released airtels and 209s from Greg’s file, there are very few references to Sal, who went on to became a capo in the family.

  Sal Scarpa’s name didn’t surface in the press until twenty years later, when he was indicted with Charles LoCicero, son of the Sidge, in a quarter-million-dollar scam involving a fraudulent maintenance contract for the old Brooklyn Navy Yard. After the yard was closed by the Pentagon, the City of New York paid $24 million for the site in 1964 for use as an industrial park. But it proved slow to attract tenants and soon became a feeding trough for the Colombo crime family.24 On February 10, 1981, LoCicero and Sal Scarpa were accused in a complex $250,000 bogus billing and kickback scheme uncovered by the city comptroller.25 But two years after an audit found “widespread fraud and mismanagement” at the 265-acre park, no one had been brought to trial.26

  Charles LoCicero, the uncle of Richard, who was brutally murdered in the Paine Webber securities theft case, was listed as “special projects and safety coordinator” for the park, while Sal was on the books as an “elevator contractor.” The 1981 indictment named him in fourteen counts of alleged bribery, forgery, and grand larceny. He ended up pleading guilty to eleven counts in October 1983 after more than $500,000 in elevator-repair bills he’d submitted had been paid by the corporation running the park. It’s unclear from the published record if Sal did any jail time or what fines he may have paid, but the comptroller’s investigation revealed that he’d been doing business out of a five-by-eight-foot office in the rear of a Brooklyn espresso shop.27

  A Case of Fratricide?

  While Sal Scarpa’s murder was never officially solved, Angela Clemente, the forensic investigator responsible for the release of the Scarpa FBI files,28 believes she has identified the shooter, and she insists that Greg Scarpa Sr. himself was behind the rubout.29 Clemente, who has worked for years to clear the names of several Colombo family members convicted after the 1991–1993 war, is one of the most knowledgeable researchers on the relationship between Lin DeVecchio and his Top Echelon informant.

  In 2004, she unearthed dozens of FBI 302 memos documenting the undercover work of Greg Scarpa Jr. in an eleven-month FBI sting of al-Qaeda bomb maker Ramzi Yousef at the federal jail in Manhattan from March 1996 to February 1997.30 That initiative is covered in detail in Chapter 38.

  After DeVecchio’s indictment on March 30, 2006, Clemente was cited by reporters for the New York Post and the Daily News for her contributions to the DA’s investigation.31 According to a New York Times piece on Clemente’s 2008 lawsuit to force the release of the Scarpa files, “the Brooklyn district attorney’s office . . . said her work on Mr. Scarpa was instrumental in helping the office file quadruple murder charges against Mr. Scarpa’s former F.B.I. handler, Roy Lindley DeVecchio.”32 Clemente was also singled out for her “invaluable assistance” by Special District Attorney Leslie Crocker Snyder in her 2008 report, declining to indict Linda Schiro on perjury charges.33

  In a report posted on her website in 2006, Clemente, whose principal source was retired NYPD detective Tommy Dades, identified Sal Scarpa’s killer as one Philip “Philly Boy” Paradiso.34 What makes that connection interesting is that Dades and Brooklyn Assistant DA Mike Vecchione, DeVecchio’s prosecutor, had earlier linked Paradiso to Jimmy Hydell, one of the principal victims of Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, Greg Scarpa Sr.’s longtime partner in crime.35 As we’ve already established, Joe Brewster DeDomenico worked for Casso and Scarpa in different permutations of their Bypass crews, and in this investigation we’ve found a number of lin
ks between Scarpa’s homicides and the string of murders executed on Casso’s orders in what became known as the Mafia Cops case.

  Indeed, just weeks after Brewster was slain, the tenth victim in the series of mob-related hits in 1987 was John Otto Heidel, a convicted forger who, like DeDomenico, worked for both the Colombo and Lucchese families.36 Heidel was shot eight times while changing a tire at Thirty-Fifth Street and Avenue U in Brooklyn at four fifteen on the afternoon of October 8.37 After shooting Heidel in the chest, buttocks, and back, the killers fled in a light blue 1983 Oldsmobile. In Philip Carlo’s Gaspipe, Casso identifies Heidel as a member of the same Bypass crew Brewster had worked for.38

  Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, 1989

  During this three-week period in the fall of 1987 between the murders of Brewster and Heidel, we get the first real indication of the link between the DeVecchio-Scarpa scandal and the case involving retired NYPD detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, known as the Mafia Cops.

  The U.S. attorney for the EDNY alleged that Eppolito and Caracappa, convicted of receiving up to $375,000 in bribes from Anthony Casso, “directly participated in, or aided and abetted, eight murders, two attempted murders, one murder conspiracy, several instances of obstruction of justice, drug distribution and money laundering.”39

  In naming Philly Boy Paradiso as the shooter in the Sal Scarpa murder, Clemente claims that Greg Scarpa Sr. was behind his own brother’s rubout, because at that point in January 1987 Sal “told someone that he thought Greg was an informant.”40

  Knowing how bloodthirsty Greg Scarpa was, I was skeptical when I first heard Clemente’s theory, because Scarpa had always been murderously protective of his family. Indeed, he’d initially withdrawn from informing for the Bureau back in 1960 after they pressed him on his brother Sal’s whereabouts. But relationships change over time, and the research I’ve now done has convinced me that Clemente’s assessment is correct.

  The first piece of new evidence came from an FBI 302 memo dated May 24, 1994, memorializing the debriefing of Joseph Ambrosino.

  Known as “Joey Brains,” Ambrosino had previously testified that he entered “the family” by first associating with Sal Scarpa. He began working for him in 1976 and did a variety of crimes including burglary and assault.41 Later, he became a full-time member of Greg Scarpa’s Wimpy Boys crew. But when he was interviewed by SSAs R. Patrick Welch and Robert J. O’Brien in 1994, Ambrosino told them that “Sal Scarpa and Scarpa Sr. had a love/hate relationship.”42

  Ambrosino said that Sal had initially defended his brother. During the 1970s, he reported, “there was a rumor on the street that Scarpa Sr. was an informant.” When Ambrosino brought that up to Sal, the elder Scarpa admonished him, saying that “nobody could prove the rumor and that if you couldn’t prove somebody was a ‘rat’ you shouldn’t be making statements about the person you suspect.”

  As the years passed, however, and Greg Scarpa continued to dodge every federal charge he was indicted for, the rumors persisted. It was only logical to wonder whether he was getting some kind of inside help from the government—and it was common knowledge among wiseguys that no one got a pass on an indictment without some kind of reciprocation.

  Anthony Casso, who committed a number of crimes with Greg Scarpa Sr., knew him well, so I reached out to him and asked whether he thought it was possible that Greg could have been involved in his brother’s murder. Casso was quick to respond: “Greg was totally responsible for Sal’s death,” he wrote me. “Sal was telling people that Greg was an informant.”43 Casso was also emphatic about Scarpa’s motive in the killing of his trusted soldier Joe DeDomenico. “Greg was afraid that Brewster would reveal him as an informant,” Casso wrote.44

  In a May 2012 interview with the New York Post, Scarpa’s daughter Little Linda Schiro was quoted as telling a reporter that she believed “her father’s murder victims included Scarpa’s own brother Sal, her uncle.”45 So the evidence suggests that, within the space of nine months, Scarpa’s fear of being exposed as an FBI “rat” drove him to kill not just his brother but the loyal crew member he’d treated like a second son.

  First Sparks, Then the Bomb

  In Cosa Nostra, as in any warlike society caught in a cycle of revenge, killing begets killing, which leads to more killing. To fully appreciate the trajectory of homicides that led to the murders for which the Mafia Cops were convicted, we need to revisit the assassination of Big Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino family.

  The only reason Castellano didn’t get the same hundred-year sentence as his peers in the Commission case was that he never made it to trial.46 He was gunned down outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan on December 16, 1985, in a bold move by capo John Gotti to take over as godfather.

  As Gotti’s soon-to-be underboss, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, later testified, the two of them watched behind the tinted windows of a Lincoln parked on the northwest corner of Third Avenue and Forty-Sixth Street in Manhattan as Castellano’s black Lincoln pulled up in front of the restaurant, driven by his aide and bodyguard Thomas Bilotti. When they got out, four gunmen wearing “white trench coats and black Russian hats” came out of the shadows and started firing, leaving both men dead.47 Each was shot six times in the head and torso.48

  As Anthony Casso tells it, Gotti’s audacious move had not been sanctioned by the Commission. Thus, “Gotti would have to pay and pay dearly,” wrote his biographer Philip Carlo. “Castellano was not just a boss, he was the boss of bosses and he’d been shot down in the street like some errant punk.”49

  Within twenty-four hours of the murder, Greg Scarpa Sr. told his contacting agent Lin DeVecchio that “the hit on Paul Castellano, Gambino boss, and Thomas Bilotti was set up by John Gotti and Frank DeCicco.”50 As we’ll see, DeCicco, another Gambino capo, would soon pay a heavy price for his association with Gotti.

  After the double hit, Anthony Casso says he was summoned to a meeting on Staten Island at the home of Lucchese consigliere Christie “Tick” Funari. There, he says, two members of the Commission, Lucchese chief Tony “Ducks” Corallo and Vincent “Chin” Gigante of the Genoveses, “placed a bull’s eye on John Gotti’s . . . head.”

  The contract was given initially to Genovese soldiers from New Jersey, but the man who would later be known as the “Teflon Don” proved hard to kill. Eventually, says Gaspipe, he got the job.51

  Though the intended hit was later attributed to members of the hyper-violent Westies gang,52 Gaspipe insists that the man he used for the would-be rubout was Herbert “Blue Eyes” Pate, an ex-cop who was an explosives expert.

  On the afternoon of April 13, 1986, Pate drove to the Veterans and Friends Social Club in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, where Gotti was supposed to be attending a meeting with DeCicco. Known as “Frankie Hearts,” DeCicco had conspired with Gotti to lure Castellano to the steak house rubout and his future in the reconfigured borgata seemed bright.

  But while the parties met inside the club, Pate attached a bomb to DeCicco’s Buick Electra. Then, believing he’d seen Gotti get into the vehicle with Frankie after the meeting, he pushed a button on a detonator. A blast rocked the neighborhood. DeCicco was killed instantly, and the man Pate mistook for Gotti—Frank Bellino—was severely injured.53

  As it turned out, Gotti never showed up for the meeting. Sammy Gravano, who rushed over to DeCicco after the bomb went off, gave this account: “When I heard the explosion, I didn’t think of a car. It was so fucking powerful, it sounded like a whole building blew up. . . . I came out of the club and Frankie’s car is in fucking flames and there’s Frankie Hearts with the blood shooting out of his feet.”54

  Frank DeCicco’s Buick after the bombing

  (New York Daily News/Getty)

  After that botched hit, Casso says, “John Gotti prepared for all out war.”

  Chapter 18

  I SHOT HIM A COUPLE OF TIMES

  Now the bull’s-eye was on Casso. Five months later, on September 14, 1986, a quiet Sunday aft
ernoon, he was sitting in his tan Lincoln Town Car finishing an ice cream cone when he spotted a dark-windowed car pulling up beside him. Before he could reach for his gun, bullets and buckshot tore into him. By Philip Carlo’s account, Casso “got low and rolled catlike to the passenger side,” opening the door. Wounded, he then fled in a zigzag pattern as the shooters, Jimmy Hydell and Nicky Guido, kept firing.1

  Hydell was a low-level Gambino associate. Sammy Gravano later told the Feds that he had been “conned into thinking that Gaspipe should be killed in retaliation for DeCicco’s murder.” The Gambino capo who sent Hydell after Casso was Michael “Mickey Boy” Paradiso, who happened to be the brother of Philly Boy Paradiso, the alleged shooter of Sal Scarpa—another example of the few degrees of separation between these Mafia murders.2 In Friends of the Family, the book he later wrote with Brooklyn Assistant DA Michael Vecchione, Detective Tommy Dades says he first uncovered the links between Casso and the so-called Mafia Cops when he got to know Betty Hydell, Jimmy’s mother.3

  “Jimmy Hydell was a stone-cold killer,” wrote Dades. “He even arranged the murder of his longtime girlfriend, an innocent young woman named Annette DiBiase. . . . A friend of his shot her in the head five times and buried her in the woods.”4

  Once he’d identified Hydell as one of his assailants, Anthony Casso took swift and brutal action.

  In a 1998 prison interview, Casso told Ed Bradley on 60 Minutes that he hired NYPD detectives Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa to kidnap Hydell. “Louis and Steve . . . put him in the car. . . . The kid thought they were taking him to the station house. But they took him to a garage [where] they laid him on the floor. They tied his feet, his hands cuffed, put him in the trunk of the car. The police car comes in, the guy’s kicking in the trunk. He’s making noise. I took him to a place that I have pre-arranged. . . . Sat him down. I wanted to know why I was shot, and who else was involved.” After that, Casso said, he shot Hydell.