by Peter Lance
The question is whether that somebody was Scarpa himself. The evidence we’ve uncovered suggests that Scarpa not only “stalked” Ocera but participated in the murder and later sought to frame Vic Orena for it. If Leale was a conspirator to Scarpa’s garroting of Ocera, then Scarpa would have had a strong motive to want him dead—and killing him in the fall of 1991, during a Commission-ordered truce, would have made it look like the Orenas had broken the peace.
“There is no way that my father would have sanctioned the killing of Jack Leale,” said Andrew Orena. “There was too much to lose. Contrary to what Scarpa was telling Lin, my father had the backing of the Commission and he was desperately trying to broker a resolution before shots were fired. The last thing he would do was get anywhere near a hit like that.”35
Shootout on Eighty-Second Street
On the morning of November 18, 1991, Little Linda Schiro, Greg Scarpa’s daughter by his common-law wife, Linda, was getting her infant son Freddy dressed to go out shopping. Her father reportedly had three crew members with him as he left the house: Joseph “Joe Fish” Marra, Carmine Sessa’s brother Larry, and Dean Capiri. The Lincoln they were driving was parked behind Big Linda’s Mercedes.36
According to the testimony Big Linda gave at Lin DeVecchio’s trial in 2007, Greg Sr. helped his daughter take his grandson out and put him into a baby seat. He then took off with his crew in the Lincoln. Just then, as Little Linda was about to pull into the street behind them, she said she saw a van come out of nowhere, “speeding up the block.”
“I cut the van off,” she told a television interviewer in 2011.37 “My father’s car gets to the stop sign and I’m behind his car and this van is behind me. I leaned down to get the portable radio and I heard popping sounds, and as I looked up I saw a whole bunch of guys dressed in black from head to toe. Black hoods, black ski masks, shooting up my father’s car.” The Lincoln was stopped at the corner of Eighty-Second Street because it had been cut off by a panel truck.38
Big Linda and Little Linda Schiro, 2007
(Peter Lance)
“It was like something out of a Mafia movie,” said Schiro. “I got in the way between the van and my father’s car because if I wasn’t there, nobody in that car would have had a shot [at survival].”
Moments later, Little Linda grabbed her son and ran back into the house. When Big Linda opened the door, she said her daughter was screaming, “Mommy, I think they killed Daddy.” But Scarpa and the three crew members had been able to drive around the panel truck and escape.39 About ten minutes later, Little Linda said her father came back. “We both looked at each other,” she said. Then he told her, “Every single person involved [in this] is going to pay.”
A team of FBI agents quickly arrived on the scene. In short order, they determined that the panel truck had been rented in Queens. Based on a description of the van that came from Scarpa loyalists, they identified two of Cutolo’s crew members, Vincent “Chickie” DeMartino and Frank Ianacci, who were seen earlier that day getting into a similar van. They’d left their car at a social club at Seventy-Seventh Street and Thirteenth Avenue, five blocks away, and were later reportedly spotted returning to it after the hit attempt.
All that information was contained in a 1992 FBI 302 describing the debriefing of Carmine Sessa. Curiously, Sessa told Agents Jeffrey Tomlinson and Howard Leadbetter II that later on the day of the ambush, Scarpa had told him that it was DeMartino and Ianacci who had attacked him—which was suspicious, since the assailants’ faces had been covered.
Special Agent Chris Favo, DeVecchio’s immediate subordinate in the C-10 (Colombo) squad, later told OPR investigators that he was the source of the panel truck rental details and that he’d given that information to DeVecchio.40
Larry Mazza, who would soon embark on a killing spree with Scarpa, later told agents that Senior found out where the panel truck had been rented from “his law enforcement guy.” In his debriefing, Mazza suggested that this source had been “the Girlfriend”—a code name that multiple witnesses have said Scarpa used for Lin.41
Then, the day after the incident, Lin DeVecchio sent this 209 to Washington using Scarpa Sr. as his source. In it, “34” cites himself as the target of the attack.
An attempt to “hit” GREG SCARPA was made on November 18th, 1991 by members of the ORENA faction of the COLOMBO Family. SOURCE said there were several shooters and SCARPA’s daughter was almost shot in the attempt. The SOURCE did not know which crew attempted the “hit” but noted that this would start the shooting war between the two factions.42
There it was: the official announcement, from the very source who had engineered Carmine Sessa’s first attempt to kill Vic Orena, that the attack on Eighty-Second Street would now trigger “the shooting war.” Since the other families seemed unwilling to challenge Vic Orena, Scarpa was now using the attempted hit as a justification to retaliate—and he would do it with a vengeance. As his daughter later put it, “After that incident, that was the end of anything normal in our family. Once those people did that in front of us, he became an absolute irate maniac.”43
The Killing Machine was about to go into overdrive.
Chapter 26
GO OUT AND KILL SOMEBODY
The next move by the Persico faction was another attempt to kill Vic Orena. On or about November 23, five days after the shootout in front of Scarpa’s house, Wimpy Boys member “Joey Brains” Ambrosino was with Michael Sessa on Staten Island. According to Joey, Michael’s brother Carmine called and told them that Vic Orena had been spotted with Joe Scopo and Orena capo Thomas Petrizzo on the street in front of a funeral parlor at 101st Avenue in Ozone Park, Queens.
Quickly moving into action on Carmine’s orders, Ambrosino beeped John Pate, Bobby Zambardi, and Bobby Zam’s stepson “Jerry Boy” Chiari, the kid Vic Orena had promised to induct into the family if he stopped selling drugs. Now, Chiari was being summoned to kill him. As Ambrosino later testified, the second crew was instructed to bring “all the equipment” and link with Carmine, Michael, and Brains at a Rockaway Parkway diner. The “equipment” consisted of “machine guns, handguns [and] bulletproof vests.”1
But after beeping Zambardi up to eight times with no response, Ambrosino said, Pate’s crew didn’t arrive at the diner until after five P.M. When Carmine Sessa pulled up to meet them, he announced that Orena, Scopo, and Petrizzo were gone. At that point, according to Ambrosino, Carmine yelled at his brother for assembling the murder squad too late.2 The next day, when word of the second murder plot against Orena filtered back to his faction, some of Cutolo’s crew reportedly took action. The victim was Hank Smurra, the same capo who had initially targeted Joe Scopo at Turquoise. Carmine Sessa later related the events leading up to his death to FBI agents.
According to Sessa, after two failed moves on Orena, he was “concerned about Persico loyalists becoming targets.”3 With their faction outnumbered three to one, it was time to find new places to hide. So he instructed Smurra to drive to Staten Island and look for safe houses.4 Sessa later told the agents that Smurra said he’d be accompanied by a man named “Leo” (last name unknown), whom Carmine didn’t know. Sessa said he was “cautious.” But Smurra insisted he’d be “okay . . . with Leo.”
Later that day, when Smurra returned to Brooklyn, he was shot to death. His body was found in his car in the Sheepshead Bay area.5 Masked gunmen had approached the vehicle and pumped three shots into his head while he was still behind the wheel.6 Sessa later told Bureau agents that he’d heard secondhand from Michael “Black Mike” Calla that the shooters included “Chickie” DeMartino, one of Cutolo’s crew members who had allegedly made the move on Greg Scarpa outside his house.7 Ambrosino also testified later that Calla had identified DeMartino as Smurra’s killer.8
Hank Smurra after being shot to death as he sat in his car
(New York Daily News)
The day after Smurra’s murder, Lin DeVecchio filed a 209 in which “34” warned that “the PERSICO faction will do
ubtless retaliate soon.” Scarpa added that “ski masks are being worn since neither side is sure of the ultimate settlement of this dispute and the actual shooters don’t want to be identified for fear of future reprisals.”9
In this case, Scarpa’s prediction of a retaliation was dead-on. Hank Smurra’s death represented the second murder in the third Colombo war, following the hit on Jack Leale, who was killed on November 4. Whether or not Scarpa was responsible for that hit, the FBI’s star informant was now about to take control of the war away from his surrogate Carmine Sessa, who had blown two attempts on Vic Orena.
During Lin’s 2007 murder trial, Sessa admitted that he had “learned the ways of the Mafia through Mr. Scarpa [his] sponsor.”10 But apparently he hadn’t learned enough. Scarpa’s next move was an elaborate plot that would leave nothing to chance. He wasn’t simply going to wait around for a target of opportunity, as Sessa had done with Vic Orena. This time, the Mad Hatter would drive the action.
The Impossible Mission
On November 28, Thanksgiving morning, ten days after the purported attempt on his life by Cutolo’s shooters, Greg Scarpa was at a safe house on Staten Island.11 He stood watching as the members of his crew disguised themselves as Hasidic Jews, dressing all in black with full beards, frock coats, and the round fur shtreimel hats Hasidim wear over their long curling sideburns, known as payot. Scarpa had gotten word from his two spies in Billy Cutolo’s camp12 that later that morning Cutolo would be celebrating the holiday at the home of his girlfriend’s grandmother in a Hasidic neighborhood of Brooklyn.13 So, in a plot right out of Scarpa’s favorite television series, Mission: Impossible,14 his costumed crew would be walking near the house with TEC-9s and other weapons hidden in their coats. When Cutolo emerged from his car to enter the holiday dinner, he would be assassinated.
Ambrosino later testified that the Hasidic costumes were picked up by Anthony “the Arab” Sayegh, a member of their crew.15 They were reportedly kept at the home of Larry Fiorenza’s girlfriend. On the morning of the plot, as the members of the hit team suited up, Ambrosino testified that he got a call from Fiorenza, who told him to “go buy the New York Post.”
That very morning, the Post had run a story by reporter Murray Weiss alleging that Scarpa had been a government informant. So the plot was canceled.16
The stories within the family about Scarpa’s being a government snitch dated back to the 1960s, and they continued to dog Greg Sr. as he operated with virtual impunity, avoiding federal charge after federal charge.
“This is a guy who seemed to walk between the raindrops,” said one lawyer who represented Scarpa but asked not to be identified.17 Anthony Casso told me that Scarpa’s motive for killing both his own brother Sal and Joe Brewster DeDomenico, whom he thought of as a son, was that he suspected them of spreading rumors that he was a government informant. Now this latest Post story was threatening to derail Scarpa’s plan to eliminate Vic Orena.
Carmine Sessa later testified that he was worried the allegations in the Post story might be true, and he had good reason to feel that way. After he became a cooperating witness in 1993, Sessa told FBI agents of the many indications he’d had over the years that Scarpa had an official source who protected him.
As early as the 1980s, Sessa said, Greg Jr. told him that his father “had someone in law enforcement providing him with information.”18 Not only did Sessa confirm how Scarpa had received the list of Wimpy Boys crew members about to be arrested by the DEA in 1987,19 but a year later, after he and Joe Brewster and Bobby Zam were busted for a bank robbery, he told agents that “Scarpa Sr. had some influence to keep his crew on the street,” and that he had “an angel looking after him.”20 Sessa also said he was “amaze[d]” that Scarpa didn’t “hesitate” to discuss criminal activities inside the Wimpy Boys club, even though he’d warned Sessa that it had been bugged.
“That made Sessa suspicious about Scarpa Sr.’s relationship with law enforcement,” the agents wrote in their 302.21
But now, on Thanksgiving Day 1991, as the crew suited up to take out Cutolo, Sessa had to placate the other family members who were worried that if Greg Sr. was a snitch, they might be in jeopardy. So he sought out “Joe T” Tomesello, the capo who had been appointed part of a three-man ruling panel by Junior Persico back in 1986. Tomesello, a family elder, had a solution. “To settle everybody’s mind,” he suggested, Sessa should tell Scarpa to “go out and kill somebody on the Orena faction . . . to prove himself.”22 As Sessa later testified during Lin DeVecchio’s trial, the sense among the family members was that the FBI would never allow a confidential informant to commit murder. So to deflect the criticism and prove that he wasn’t “a rat,” Scarpa should “go out and do a piece of work.”23
Now that he had to prove to the Persico loyalists that he wasn’t an informant, Scarpa was even more motivated, so he went off on a rampage, trolling the streets of Brooklyn with Larry Mazza and Jimmy Del Masto in his tricked-out murder wagon and killing or wounding one person per week between early December 1991 and January 1992. “Here we have a paid government informant,” says Flora Edwards, “who is acting more like a secret government agent and to protect his cover he feels compelled to kill. From this point on, the blood he spilled is now on the hands of the FBI as well.”24
Taking Out Tommy Scars
Scarpa’s next victim turned out to be an aging gangster who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. On December 3, 1991, at 9:38 A.M., Greg was cruising past the Mother Cabrini social club at 2284 McDonald Avenue in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn,25 when he thought he spotted Nicky Grancio, one of the Orena capos he saw as a threat.
As it happened, the man Scarpa saw was thirty-eight-year-old Joey Tolino, Grancio’s nephew, who resembled his uncle. Tolino was standing talking to Gaetano “Tommy Scars” Amato, a seventy-eight-year-old member of the Genovese family. From his passing van, driven by Jimmy Del Masto, Scarpa gave Mazza the word to fire, and a volley of bullets hit Tolino and Amato, killing the old Genovese soldier where he stood and wounding Tolino in the foot.26
It was the fourth war-related shooting in two weeks. On November 28, Carmine’s brother Larry Sessa, who had been with Scarpa during the alleged hit outside his house, was chased by a group of gunmen while he walked down Eighty-Sixth Street. As they closed in on him, a car driven by Ron Calder, another Persico loyalist, pulled up and Larry jumped in. Speeding off, Calder was shot in the shoulder and hand, then lost control of the car, running into four innocent pedestrians on the sidewalk, who were also injured.27
Now, on the morning of Amato’s slaying, law enforcement sources were quoted in the New York Post as predicting an extended conflict.
“The whole family is in turmoil,” one source said. “This is not going to end easily.”28
The very next day, another aging wiseguy, seventy-nine-year-old Rosario “Black Sam” Nastasi, a longtime Colombo bookmaker, was shot around one A.M. while playing cards at the Belvedere Social Athletic Association at 985 Sixty-Third Street in Bensonhurst.29 His girlfriend, forty-seven-year-old Kay Duggan, was wounded in the attack. She was later treated for a superficial chest wound at Maimonides Medical Center and released. With two bystanders now caught in the crossfire, this open mob war on the streets of Brooklyn was starting to produce unmistakable collateral damage.
In a 209 filed the day of the Nastasi hit, Lin DeVecchio blamed the “turmoil” entirely on the Orena faction—with no mention of the drive-by shooting of Amato, which had been reported in the Post, or the role his source, Scarpa Sr., had played in it.
On December 5th, 1991, advised that . . . the current turmoil within the COLOMBO Family is caused by ORENA wanting to be the official Boss and to that end has approximately five Capos backing him. As a result of this internal conflict, two COLOMBO members aligned with PERSICO, HANK SMURRA, and ROSARIO NASTASI, were recently killed. Further, an attempt to kill GREGORY SCARPA Sr., a COLOMBO member loyal to PERSICO, was made without success, and all of the hits and attempts
were authorized by VIC ORENA.30
The day after Nastasi’s murder, Scarpa struck again. This time, he fired a rifle from his van at Vincent Fusaro, the thirty-year-old night manager of the Venus Diner in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, who was a member of Cutolo’s crew. According to Larry Mazza’s testimony at Teddy Persico’s subsequent trial, Mazza was coming back from a numbers pickup with Scarpa and Jimmy Del Masto when they spotted Fusaro stringing Christmas lights with his wife outside his house in the Bath Beach section of Brooklyn. It was 3:35 on a Friday afternoon.31 Mazza described what happened next:
Greg had a rifle on him. Most of us had pistols, and he told us to stop, he was going to shoot him, but Jimmy [Del Masto] kept going, certainly not prepared for that. And Greg told us to go around the block. And he told [us] to cover our license plate. [We] had tape in the car [to] cover the plate. We went around the block, but we never stopped to put the tape on. Everybody was jittery. As we pulled up, Greg opened the window and fired three shots . . . hit Fusaro and killed him.32
“It was a hell of a shot,” Mazza later said in a 2012 New York Post interview. “Guy went down like a sack of potatoes.” But as a measure of Senior’s thoroughness and brutality, Mazza said that he “shot him two more times—once in the neck and once in the body.”33 Scarpa later admitted that he used an M1 carbine in the attack.34 Fusaro, who had no criminal record, was hit in the head and died instantly.35 His terrified neighbors wouldn’t talk to the police. “In this neighborhood, mum’s the word,” said one man, who refused to give his name to a reporter. According to the New York Times, both Police Commissioner Lee P. Brown and Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes would not yet characterize the violence, which had already claimed three lives, as part of a “mob war.”36
Vincent Fusaro after being shot by Greg Scarpa Sr.
(New York Post)
That same Times piece, quoting “the authorities,” reported that “Mr. Orena has decided to take the family over for himself, an action that has divided the Colombo organization and brought other families into the action.”