by Peter Lance
At that point, other than the mistaken murder of Genovese member Amato, there wasn’t a shred of evidence that any of the “other families” had gotten involved in the violence. But the Times, like the two New York tabloids, was getting much of its law enforcement information from the Bureau—and the FBI was getting its misinformation from Greg Scarpa. So the false story that Vic Orena was principally responsible for the burgeoning war continued to dominate the coverage.
The Black Sheep
On December 17, the Times ran a story on a move by DA Hynes to subpoena twenty-eight Colombo members to a grand jury. Quoting one mob lawyer, who called it a “publicity stunt,” reporter Robert D. McFadden cited “law enforcement officials” as attributing the violent incidents to the “power struggle between Carmine Persico . . . the imprisoned boss and Mr. Orena.” Citing “the authorities” as his source, McFadden reported that Orena had “refused orders, among other things to share profits and relinquish control of the family to Mr. Persico’s son Alphonse.”37
A week earlier, Selwyn Raab had reported a similar allegation in a Times story under the headline “Even to the 5 Families, the Fighting Colombos Have Been Black Sheep.”38 Calling the recent shootings “the worst outbreak of Mafia violence in three decades,” Raab revisited the two previous Profaci-Colombo conflicts, noting that “even within the violent councils of America’s Mafia, authorities say the Colombo crime family has long been feared as an erratic, troublesome gang.” He then reported the theory, spun by Scarpa and communicated to FBI brass by DeVecchio, that the latest conflict “stemmed from Mr. Orena’s refusal to share illicit profits with Mr. Persico’s allies.”39
But what Raab could not have known at that point was that, of the Five Families, the Colombo borgata was the only one with an inside FBI agent provocateur. A violent killer who used his special position with the Feds to destabilize the family from within.
During Lin’s 2007 murder trial, Mark Bederow, one of his lawyers, described Greg Scarpa as “treacherous,” “deceitful,” and “a master liar.”40 Until the disclosure of the 1,153 pages of heretofore secret files on “34,” detailed here for the first time, no one in the outside media—including veteran organized crime reporters like Selwyn Raab—had any real sense of the depth of Scarpa’s treachery when it came to selling out his Mafia brothers.
“This refusal-to-share-the-profits story was pure Scarpa,” said Andrew Orena. “It was a fabrication enhanced by the Feds. Naturally, when the family split apart after the attack on my father, the funds that might have gone to Junior Persico were put on hold, but not before that. This was another one of the stories planted by Greg and put out by the Feds that the media picked up on.”
Andrew said emphatically, “When my father asked Carmine Sessa to poll the captains in the spring, he included Teddy Persico. If he was trying to cheat Junior or stage a kind of power grab, he never would have done that.”41
As to who was really behind this new war, Greg Scarpa Sr. would eventually plead guilty to the murders of Fusaro and two others during the conflict.42 Larry Mazza would confirm Scarpa’s participation in the murder of Tommy Scars. And we’ll examine probative evidence that Scarpa was directly linked to two more homicides—making him responsible for one-third to one-half of the first twelve murders in the conflict. But at this point nobody in the media, and few inside the Bureau, understood the dominant role he was playing as the field general responsible for much of the violence.
The Bagel Shop Killing
Two days after Fusaro’s murder, the civilian toll in the escalating war grew again. On the morning of December 8, James Malpeso, the twenty-one-year-old son of Colombo soldier Louis “Bobo” Malpeso, was shot.43 After he was dropped off at Coney Island Hospital with a gunshot wound to the chest, forces loyal to his father struck back almost immediately and with tragic consequences.44 Anthony Libertore and his son Christopher, who reportedly served as the elder Malpeso’s bodyguards, entered the Wanna Bagel Shop at 8905 Third Avenue in Brooklyn, which was reportedly owned by two members of the Persico faction: Anthony Ferrara and Frank Guerra.45
Mistakenly thinking one of the owners was behind the counter, the father-son hit team opened fire, killing eighteen-year-old Matteo Speranza, a worker in the shop who had absolutely nothing to do with organized crime.46 Speranza, the innocent son of an Italian immigrant, was the fourth person killed in six days.
The Libertores later became government witnesses, testifying at a federal trial against Malpeso, who was convicted of loan sharking and stock manipulation after the jury deadlocked on the murder charges. In a heartfelt outburst during the trial, after Chris Libertore admitted shooting Matteo twice in the face and four times more to make sure he was dead, Umberto Speranza, the dead teenager’s father, jumped up sobbing and yelled, “You bastard, you killed my son!”47
In 1931 Edward Doherty wrote a now-famous piece for Liberty magazine chastising Americans who idolized gangsters like Al Capone. Doherty noted how Americans seemed to justify their murders with the phrase, “they only kill each other.”48 But in the first days of December 1991, while the shooting of Gaetano Amato, a made guy, and the girlfriend of “Black Sam” Nastasi, might have been written off because of their association with the Mafia, the slaying of young Matteo Speranza was proof positive that the violence unleashed by Greg Scarpa Sr. had now touched the public in a bloody and brutal way
Until now, Lin DeVecchio had been able to appease FBI officials in Washington with “34’s” self-serving spin on the war. But the murder of Matteo Speranza seemed to alter the level of scrutiny. This time, when he visited Scarpa at his home on Eighty-Second Street, DeVecchio took along two special agents from the C-10 Colombo Squad, Raymond Andjich and Jeffrey Tomlinson, who accompanied him there two more times.
In his memoirs, Lin explains these exceptions to his one-on-one protocol with Senior this way: “To make it look like an official FBI visit in case anyone saw me go into his house, I took along an FNG, a follower of Favo, a partner of Favo, and, like Favo, a man without a knack, Ray Andjich.”49 In the FBI’s New York Office, “FNG” was an informal term used to describe less experienced agents. It stood for “Fucking New Guy.”
The subtitle of DeVecchio’s book, We’re Going to Win This Thing, is The Shocking Frame-up of a Mafia Crime Buster, and Lin makes it clear in that memoir that he considers Special Agent Chris Favo, his immediate subordinate in the C-10 squad, one of those who set him up.50 In January 1994, Special Agents Favo, Andjich, Jeffrey Tomlinson, and Howard Leadbetter would come forward with suspicions that DeVecchio had passed intelligence to Scarpa. Their allegations would lead to the opening of the OPR internal affairs investigation of their boss, which lasted thirty-one months.
In his book, DeVecchio describes his treatment of Andjich at Scarpa’s house as if he were dealing with a child: “I parked Ray Andjich in the living room in front of the TV and sat down in the kitchen with Scarpa.”51 The 302 report memorializing that meeting, which DeVecchio, Andjich, and Tomlinson filed jointly, would later become known infamously as “the Kitchen 302,” because DeVecchio later insisted that the TV in the living room made it impossible for Andjich (and by implication Tomlinson) to overhear what he was discussing with his informant.
According to that 302, Scarpa denied any knowledge of the “internal war” within the family and claimed Cutolo’s crew must have been “mistaken” in its attack on him:
On December 10, 1991, Supervisory Special Agent R. LINDLEY DEVECCHIO, Special Agent (SA) RAYMOND ANDJICH, and SA JEFFREY W. TOMLINSON contacted GREGORY SCARPA, SR. at his residence, 1243 82nd St., Brooklyn, NY where they identified themselves as FBI agents. . . .
SCARPA was provided with details of the Witness Protection Program in view of the recent attempt on his life, but declined any help from the government and stated that any past incident involving a shooting was a case of mistaken identity and he believed himself to be in no danger. . . .
SCARPA denied any knowledge of a COLOMBO Family intern
al war and said if he ever felt he needed help from the federal government, he would not hesitate to contact one of the above agents.52
DeVecchio may have brought along other agents to the meeting, but the fact that he “parked” them where they couldn’t overhear his debriefing was telling. As noted, Department of Justice guidelines mandate that at the first sign that a confidential informant has committed an act of criminal violence or is suspected of planning to commit one, the U.S. attorney must be brought into the loop. If Andjich and Tomlinson had become aware that Scarpa was linked to the new round of violence, they would have been required to alert the EDNY.
In 1995, during Lin DeVecchio’s OPR investigation, Chris Favo claimed that his boss’s December 10 report was “fictitious,” created to “protect” Scarpa from being readily identified as a source.53 This allowed the Feds to argue, later, that Scarpa’s characterization of the Eighty-Second Street shootout as a “case of mistaken identity” was untrue. Still, on the day after that 302 was filed, DeVecchio filed a much more detailed 209 in which he described what he had learned from Scarpa in that kitchen. It was a report full of half-truths and misinformation that utterly obscured Scarpa’s culpability in the war.
On December 11, 1991, SCARPA SR advised SSA R. LINDLEY DE VECCHIO that the main shooters from Billy CUTOLO’s crew, who were responsible for the hits on HENRY SMURRA, and ROSARIO NASTASI, and the attempts on GREG SCARPA and LARRY SESSA were VINCENT “Chickie” DIMARTINO [sic], FRANK IANNACI, and “Nigger Dom.” The source noted that in several instances, particularly with the attempt on LARRY SESSA, numerous other individuals were involved from CUTOLO’s crew.
The source said the hit on GAETANO AMATO was an accidental shooting by the PERSICO faction when attempting to hit JOSEPH TOLINO. The PERSICO faction contacted the GENOVESE Family and expressed their apologies for the shooting, and were told by officials of the GENOVESE Family that it was regrettable about AMATO, but he should have known better than to be in a COLOMBO location and there would be no retaliation. The source said the PERSICO side believed them to be members close to NICHOLAS GRANCIO at that location prior to the shooting.
The source said an attempt was made to hit JOEL “Joe Waverly” CACACE on December 4 or 5, 1991 by the PERSICO faction, several shots were fired by the PERSICOs and CACACE, but no one was injured.
The source said the hit on VINCENT FUSARO was done by the PERSICO faction, and noted that FUSARO, although not a button, was one of BILLY CUTOLO’s main shylocks, and was very close to CUTOLO.
Concerning the shooting of JAMES MALPESO. . . . Source said this shooting appears to be a separate incident related to a bar fight, although COLOMBO member LOUIS MALPESO, SR. is on the ORENA Side.
The source said that the Killing of SPERANZA, who worked at the bagel shop on Third Ave. was not done by the PERSICO faction. The source said that there are indications that TEDDY PERSICO had some connection with this bagel shop, and that the ORENA faction shooters apparently mistook the kid to be related to the owner or in some way connected to the PERSICOs.
The source said CARMINE SESSA, JOE TOMASELLO, and JO JO RUSSO are currently speaking for the PERSICO faction. Source advised that there is to be a sit-down next week between the two factions in an attempt to resolve the dispute, however, if it can’t be settled amicably, there would be more hits. The source said that law enforcement pressure may slow down the active shooting but it would resume in short order unless some of the players are killed or indicted as a result of current federal investigations.54
Missing from the report was any word of Scarpa’s direct role in the murders of Amato and Fusaro and his role in the shooting of Joe “Waverly” Cacace, which was later confirmed.55 But the most telling aspect of that 209 was in the very last sentence: Scarpa Sr. was predicting that, unless various “players” were killed or indicted, the violence would go on—and he certainly wasn’t talking about himself as a victim or arrestee.
With that 209, Scarpa, and by implication his handler DeVecchio, was signaling to FBI officials that it was the “Orena faction” that had to be stopped, otherwise the bloodshed would continue. There was never even a suggestion that “34” himself had instigated the conflict, or that he had personally escalated it to the point where innocent people were dying.
As far as Washington knew from those 209s, Vic Orena was the aggressor—and federal prosecutors in Brooklyn soon bought into that story.
The 209 ended by noting the existence of “current federal investigations,” but until the outbreak of shooting after Carmine Sessa’s initial attempt on Orena, there hadn’t been any investigations of significance.
How do we know that? Because a senior federal prosecutor in the EDNY has admitted to it. In his epic Mafia history, Five Families, Selwyn Raab quotes EDNY Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gleeson (now a federal judge) as saying, “We had very little on the Colombo family [prior to the start of the war]. We were struggling along, there was nothing big in the works.”56
But soon, as a result of the violence Scarpa engineered, the Eastern District would issue up to seventy-five indictments. With the death toll mounting, Gleeson and fellow AUSAs George Stamboulidis and Andrew Weissmann started working overtime to make cases—and the most significant early indictments were directed at the Orena faction.
On December 19, 1991, as Greg Scarpa Sr. fed Lin DeVecchio more “intelligence” that diverted the focus away from himself, he hammered away at Wild Bill Cutolo, the capo he’d first sought to get indicted:
On December 19, 1991 advised SSA R. LINDLEY DE VECCHIO that the PERSICO faction is only looking to hit ORENA faction officials, and members connected to Billy CUTOLO. Source said CUTOLO’s crew is not highly regarded as a result of the hits on Black Sam NASTASI, and on the kid who worked in the bagel store. The source said numerous members have questioned CUTOLO’s methods, noting that killing “civilians” has brought a lot of law enforcement pressure to the day to day criminal activities.57
There was no mention of Gaetano Amato’s murder by Scarpa or how close Vincent Fusaro’s wife might have come to the bullets from “34.” Cutolo, who had allegedly made the move on Scarpa outside his house, was now being blamed for the murder of Matteo Speranza—despite the assertion in DeVecchio’s last 209 that the shooting of James Malpeso, which supposedly triggered the bagel shop killing, appeared to be “a separate incident related to a bar fight.”
At this point, the FBI and the federal prosecutors they serviced were bent on removing Vic Orena and his captains, convinced by Scarpa that they were the aggressors in the war. The spin against Orena was so pronounced that in DeVecchio’s final 209 of the year, he told his FBI bosses that there was one sure way to end the conflict:
The source said the current dispute is unacceptable to all in the PERSICO faction, and they want to resolve it as soon as possible. The source said that unless ORENA accepts the proposals, after review by Junior PERSICO, the shooting war will continue until one or more of the principals on either side is killed. The source noted that an arrest of VIC ORENA would temporarily halt the shooting war.58
It would be another four months before the Feds made good on that final suggestion by Greg Scarpa. Having twice failed to execute his plan A and have his rival Vic Orena killed, Scarpa now initiated plan B: Orena would soon be arrested for murder, and as we’ll see, the evidence uncovered in this investigation suggests that he was framed.
Chapter 27
THE HIT ON NICKY BLACK
With the coming of the New Year, and no end to the war in sight, the principal campaign to stem the violence was waged by the Organized Crime Investigation Division (OCID) Task Force. A group of elite detectives from the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau (OCCB) were assigned to work out of the FBI’s New York Office at 26 Federal Plaza. Their immediate goal was to arrest as many members of the Colombo family as possible and get them off the streets. Two weeks earlier, Kings County DA Charles Hynes had vowed, “We’re not going to allow this county to become a shooting gall
ery where innocent people are being gunned down.”1 But Hynes’s effort to haul dozens of Colombo wiseguys before a grand jury had little effect.2
The arrest strategy, by contrast, soon began to pay off. Since being a member of the Mafia wasn’t a state crime, the OCID’s main tactic was to lock up the made men and associates for “carrying”—that is, for illegal possession of handguns.
In the course of the war, 123 such gun arrests were made.3 Nearly a third of them were the work of Detectives Joe Simone and Pat Maggiore, a pair of street-smart Italian American cops who had spent years working undercover narcotics and other NYPD specialty units.4
On December 16, Simone and Maggiore arrested “Chickie” DeMartino and two other Colombo associates for carrying nine-millimeter semiautomatics. They’d spotted DeMartino and followed him to Avenue U and East Fourth Street in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn. There they watched as DeMartino linked with twenty-four-year-old Michael Spataro of Staten Island and thirty-four-year-old Gabriel Scianna of Brooklyn, who were reportedly trying to break into a Cadillac using a wire hanger.5
All three arrestees were named in a routine police blotter story in the Staten Island Advance. But the full significance of that NYPD pinch didn’t become clear until Greg Scarpa weighed in. In a 209 dated January 7, 1992, sourcing Scarpa (though his name was redacted in the released version), Lin DeVecchio wrote that all three of the suspects collared by Simone and Maggiore were part of the same Cutolo hit team that allegedly sought to kill “34” and later succeeded in killing Hank Smurra and “Black Sam” Nastasi.
On January 7, 1992, advised SSA R. LINDLEY DE VECCHIO that GABE SCIANNA . . . is an associate of BILLY CUTOLO, and was a member of the “hit team” composed of VINCENT DEMARTINO, MICHAEL SPATARO, FRANKIE IANNACCI, “NIGGER DOM,” and SCIANNA. The source said they were responsible for the hits on HENRY SMURRA and BLACK SAM NASTASI.6