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

by Peter Lance

  So Casso was assigned a new lawyer, Matthew Brief. In his memoir, Casso alleges that Brief told federal prosecutors he didn’t think the proffer protected his client enough. But according to Casso, Brief, who is now deceased, never informed him of that position at the time.8

  On March 1, 1994, Anthony Casso pled guilty to the full seventy-two counts, expecting to get the short sentence in exchange for sharing everything he knew with the Feds. Immediately after his appearance before EDNY Magistrate Steven M. Gold, Casso was whisked by agent Rudolph to LaGuardia Airport, where they boarded a private plane bound for Texas. At that point in the FBI’s war against the Mafia, Casso, a Lucchese acting boss, was the most notorious CW the Feds had turned since Gravano. Befitting his star status, he was assigned to the “Valachi Suite” at La Tuna, a minimum-security federal prison twelve miles north of El Paso.9 In years past, the suite, a multiroom accommodation complete with a kitchen, had housed Mafia turncoats “Fat Vinnie” Teresa and Jimmy “the Weasel” Fratianno.10

  When Casso started to talk, his debriefings were handled by Rudolph and James Brennan, the same special agent from the Lucchese squad who had been called to that meeting with Scarpa and DeVecchio in the fall of 1993, when “34” reportedly identified Gaspipe as his source for law enforcement intelligence.

  Over the weeks that followed, Casso unleashed so many Mafia secrets that they filled 504 pages of FBI 302s. William Oldham, a former NYPD detective who later worked the Mafia Cops case as an investigator for the EDNY, described them in his 2006 book, The Brotherhoods: The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia.11

  Casso during his 60 Minutes interview

  (CBS News)

  “I spent the next two days and nights reading and rereading Casso’s 302s,” Oldham writes in the book, coauthored with Guy Lawson. “Casso was forthcoming in an unusually detailed way. [He] clearly didn’t want to get into trouble for holding anything back. To the contrary. He was meticulously forthcoming.”12

  But in his interview with me and several follow-up letters, Casso insists that one crucial admission he made to Rudolph and Brennan never showed up in those 302s. He went into even more detail in Phil Carlo’s original manuscript, which I obtained during the research for this book:

  One of the first things Casso began to talk about . . . was corrupt police and FBI agents he had dealt with over the years. As part of the debriefing process, the agents were taking notes to memorialize exactly what Casso said. It is mandated that notes are written down on what is referred to as a 302 form. The “302s” would become viable legal documents that could be, and more than likely would be, used in a court of law.

  Gaspipe then identified what he described as two “crooked agents” who had passed information to him. The first was reportedly a special agent from the Gambino squad. Because he is not the focus of this book, I’ve omitted that agent’s name from the section of Carlo’s original manuscript excerpted below.

  According to what Casso told Phil Carlo, about halfway through his account, after he’d named this first agent as the source of “vitally important” information, Special Agent Richard Rudolph reacted loudly and negatively:

  Agent Rudolph “literally jumped up,” according to Casso, from the table and shouted that he didn’t want to hear anything more about . He threw his pen down on the table and refused to take notes. Agent Rudolph leaned over, pointed his finger in Casso’s face and warned him not to mention or any other corrupt agents, not only to them, but to any assistant U.S. attorneys, i.e. Charlie Rose and Greg O’Connell. Both Charlie Rose and O’Connell were slated to arrive the next day to begin the task of making Casso a viable government witness. Writing up the 302s was the first step in that process and it wasn’t going well at all. Casso was shocked. He expected the agents to be happy; he expected them to be pleased that he was exposing crooked FBI agents. Just the opposite was true.13

  “When Agent Richard Rudolph was contacted for this book,” Carlo noted, “he did not return phone calls.”14 As this book neared completion I was able to reach Special Agent Brennan, and his reaction to Casso’s allegation is reflected later in this chapter.15

  Meanwhile, I uncovered some independent evidence that corroborates Casso’s allegation that he paid a special agent on the Gambino squad for information. It’s in the form of an FBI 302 memo dated January 17, 1992, memorializing the debriefing of Lucchese underboss “Little Al” D’Arco. In it, D’Arco described a payment of four thousand dollars a month made by Casso via Lucchese capo Salvatore Avellino, who controlled the family garbage-industry interests on Long Island.

  Source advised every month AVELLINO would deduct a $4,000.00 expense for a Federal Agent who was supplying confidential information to AVELLINO. . . . AVELLINO informed source that this Federal Agent was on the Gambino squad and he (AVELLINO) was very nervous when meeting him. . . . Source advised he was sure it was a federal agent, meaning Federal Bureau of Investigation Agent, that AVELLINO was paying off, and in turn, receiving confidential information. AVELLINO was quizzed on a number of occasions and advised that this money should be going to a Federal Agent and not a cop.16

  D’Arco’s confession is significant because when Burt Kaplan, Casso’s liaison with the Mafia Cops, became a cooperating witness, he told the Feds that Eppolito and Caracappa were on the payroll for four thousand dollars a month.17 Further, as evidenced by his testimony against Vic Orena, D’Arco was a CW whose credibility the Feds swore by. So, if nothing else, his confirmation that Casso had ordered a monthly payment in that same amount to an FBI agent on the Gambino squad supports Gaspipe’s first allegation to agents Rudolph and Brennan at La Tuna about a “crooked Fed.”

  According to Carlo’s account, Rudolph explained to Casso that he and this Gambino squad agent “had been friends for over twenty years and that agent had integrity and honesty and was above reproach.” So, as Carlo writes, realizing that “the wind was already blowing against him,” Casso didn’t mention that agent’s name again.

  But Gaspipe wasn’t finished. Undaunted, he then offered the name of “another crooked agent.” This is what Carlo wrote in his original manuscript, quoting Casso:

  Let’s talk about him. His name is Lindley DeVecchio. He worked with Greg Scarpa for many years. He supplied LCN with a lot of information.18

  At that point, according to Carlo, Rudolph said:

  “Don’t you get it? I don’t want to hear about any crooked agents here. We aren’t here to talk about crooked agents. We’re here to talk about what you know about the Mafia—got it?”

  Casso suddenly felt like he was standing naked in a cold room, his skin reddened by the frigid air. As he looked at Agent Rudolph, he saw enmity, anger, foreboding in his face. “I thought you wanted to know the truth about all the criminal things I was involved with,” Casso said.

  “Yes, I do,” the agent said. “But I’m not interested in hearing your bullshit about crooked agents, Casso. If you’re here to pull my chain, I’m going to end this right here, right now, and you can go fuck yourself. You got that?”

  By now, realizing that these FBI agents didn’t want to hear anything about other “crooked Feds,” Gaspipe, according to Carlo, revealed that he “had two NYPD detectives killing people” for him.

  “You interested in that?” Casso asked.

  “Getting warm,” Rudolph reportedly replied.19

  Insisting That Lin Was a “Crooked Fed”

  In my interview with Casso, he underscored Carlo’s account regarding the two allegedly “crooked Feds.”

  “I told [Rudolph and Brennan] the[se other agents] were crooked,” he said, “and they didn’t want to hear it. When I brought this up in Texas they threw the yellow pad on the table with the pen. They refused even to write down what I was saying.”20

  Beyond accusing Rudolph and Brennan of refusing to document his allegations, Casso went even further in Carlo’s book. Shortly after Gaspipe’s initial debriefing, Carlo writes, Special Agent Chris Favo came to the Valachi S
uite to interview him.

  Agent Rudolph made sure he sat between Casso and Agent Favo and he constantly gave Casso the hairy eyeball, making sure that Casso said nothing about DeVecchio’s misdeeds. When Agent Favo left, Rudolph told Casso that no one would listen to Favo.21

  Casso also confirmed that account to me: “Chris Favo, when he came to see me, the agents sat right there . . . in between us. Even when the prosecutors came, they made sure they were right between us.”22

  Former EDNY investigator William Oldham, who has read the entire 504 pages of Casso 302s, told me he is certain that “Casso told the truth the first time.” But he recalled that there was no mention of Gaspipe’s allegations about DeVecchio or the Gambino squad agent in those 302s.23

  “In the 302s,” Oldham says, “Casso does not mention, to my recollection, anything other than the crystal ball of information [he got from the Mafia Cops]. He didn’t say a thing about federal law enforcement.”

  I tried to get Special Agent Rudolph’s version of events. But after my repeated attempts to reach him, he never got back to me. However, retired SA James Brennan had this to say: “During the Casso debriefings, Casso did not relate to us at any time that he dealt with and received law enforcement intel from federal agents.”24

  Casso’s credibility was later challenged, and the Feds ultimately reneged on his plea deal. Gaspipe insists that they broke the deal because he was too honest with them about their star cooperating witness, Sammy Gravano.

  As Carlo writes, “When Anthony Casso, in the course of being debriefed by federal agents, talked about dealing drugs with Gravano, talked about murders by Gravano other than the ones Gravano said he committed, the agents didn’t want to hear it. No one in the federal government was interested.”25

  The official reason the Feds broke the deal was their allegation that Casso committed crimes while in prison, including assaulting an inmate and bribing prison guards with cash, auto tires, and tickets to Broadway shows to supply him with liquor, wine, and steaks.26 The assistant U.S. attorney who alleged that Casso had violated his plea agreement was none other than George Stamboulidis, who had prosecuted Vic Orena and helped convict him on the testimony of Sammy the Bull and Al D’Arco.

  Now, instead of the initial six-and-a-half-year proffer, Casso was given 13 life sentences plus 455 years. After spilling his guts to the Feds in 504 pages of 302s—in which Oldham, the former EDNY investigator, had insisted he’d been initially honest—Gaspipe was now locked away in the Supermax prison and was never called to testify for the government at any subsequent trial. In the manuscript for his book Carlo writes that Casso was a victim of his own candor. The consequences of his challenging Sammy the Bull were clear:

  If the defense attorneys could prove that Gravano had perjured himself, there would surely be a wave of appeals and an influx of complaints, creating a nightmare for the Justice Department and an embarrassment of monumental proportions.27

  John Gotti wasn’t the only Mafia boss who could have earned a new trial if juries had believed Casso. Vic Orena might also have merited judicial relief. But the Feds insisted it was Casso’s “lack of credibility” that rendered him ineffective as a witness. Carlo quotes AUSA Greg O’Connell as stating, “Using Casso as a witness would have been like putting Adolf Hitler on the witness stand.”28

  But O’Connell never got to hear about the “crooked Feds” from whom Gaspipe Casso insists he received information. After Eastern District prosecutors broke their deal with Casso, Oldham told me, “He tried to mold his story to whoever he was talking to.” But the former EDNY investigator insists that, in Casso’s initial debriefings, he “never found anything that wasn’t true.”29

  Blaming the Mafia Cops

  While Casso insists that he gave up Eppolito and Caracappa as his NYPD sources only after FBI agents Rudolph and Brennan refused to hear any talk of “crooked agents,” Lin DeVecchio seized on the Mafia Cops in his book to explain the leaks. In furnishing the evidence that prompted DeVecchio’s OPR investigation, Chris Favo and agents Tomlinson and Andjich had speculated that their boss may have leaked information to Jerry Capeci.30 Now, in his book, crediting Capeci with breaking the Mafia Cops story, DeVecchio writes:

  No earlier than March 1994, two months after Favo reported me to North, Gaspipe gave up the Mafia Cops to his debriefers at the Valachi Suite in El Paso. When Jerry Capeci broke the Mafia Cops story, did any of my accusers stop to consider that in view of the close relationship between the Lucchese Family and the Colombo Family, Scarpa’s law enforcement information, if he truly got any, could have come down the pipeline from Gaspipe? Gaspipe was getting extremely singular information from the Mafia Cops.31

  Later in his book, DeVecchio recounts that fall 1993 meeting in Valerie Caproni’s office where Greg Scarpa reportedly claimed he’d received his tips from Gaspipe.

  “Jim Brennan told me,” writes Lin, that “during Gaspipe’s debriefing in the Valachi Suite in El Paso, Gaspipe denied that he gave information to Scarpa, but that doesn’t change what Scarpa said.”32

  Thus Lin DeVecchio’s principal explanation for the massive leaks of FBI intelligence to Scarpa seems to be that “34” received the intel from Casso via the two NYPD detectives. The question is, how likely is it that the depth and breadth of intelligence—particularly the intel supplied during the third Colombo war from 1991 to 1993—could have come from Eppolito, who retired in 1990, and Caracappa, who went out on disability in 1992?

  Prior to Lin’s indictment in 2006, Fred Dannen wrote the most definitive magazine piece on Scarpa and DeVecchio for the New Yorker.33 It was based on multiple interviews Dannen conducted with the key Feds involved, including DeVecchio himself. After he read We’re Going to Win This Thing, I asked Fred for his reaction to DeVecchio’s theory about the source of the leaks. He focused first on the implication that Scarpa had obtained the 1987 DEA arrest lists and the name of Cosmo Catanzano from Casso.

  DeVecchio denies tipping off Scarpa Sr. (and consequently Junior) about the DEA case. And he denies endangering the life of Cosmo Catanzano. He instead blames Gaspipe Casso for supplying that information, which Gaspipe supposedly had learned from the Mafia Cops. This borders on the ridiculous. It does not account for the piece of paper that Junior showed his associates, listing ten people targeted for arrest in the DEA case—a list, Junior said, supplied by “a friend” of his father’s, whom Junior described as “an agent.”34

  Defense attorney Flora Edwards goes further. “Virtually all of the information that was leaked to Scarpa Sr. over the years had to do with federal law enforcement activities,” she says. “Not only was this pair of NYPD detectives not privy to much of that, but Scarpa and Casso were in the most jeopardy from the Feds, not the NYPD. So if they were going to protect themselves and stay out of jail, and they were able to corrupt anyone in law enforcement, their first choice would have been the kind of ‘crooked Feds’ that Gaspipe describes in his book.”35

  Considering all the evidence uncovered in this investigation, it’s now clear that whatever “crystal ball” of intelligence Eppolito and Caracappa may have provided to Anthony Casso, it was a secondary source compared to what he could have gotten from Gregory Scarpa Sr., who was a trusted Top Echelon FBI informant.

  Exposing the Agent Provocateur

  By November 1994, the work done by defense attorneys Alan Futerfas and Ellen Resnick in peeling back the layers on the Scarpa-DeVecchio relationship was taking a serious toll on the war prosecutions. Selwyn Raab reported in the New York Times that Lin DeVecchio was being investigated by the Bureau “to determine if he leaked information to Mr. Scarpa about mob rivals and pending arrests.”36

  Raab quoted DeVecchio’s lawyer Douglas Grover as calling the allegations “ridiculous and pure nonsense” but also took note—for the first time in the media—of the “assertions by defense lawyers that the F.B.I. used Mr. Scarpa as an agent provocateur to provoke a war among factions in the Colombo family and thereby provide evidence for i
ndictments.” Raab quoted Grover as saying that DeVecchio was “angry and annoyed . . . because he knows he is going to be completely cleared.” But he also reported that, on November 10, defense attorney Alan Futerfas had asked Judge Charles P. Sifton for a hearing to determine if “34’s” informant files should be released.

  In his pleadings, Futerfas asserted what was now the emerging defense theory about the third Colombo war: that the government had “turned a blind eye to Scarpa’s activities” in a plan “to create and further a divisive conflict which would enable the FBI to make, it hoped, dozens of arrests and convictions.”

  By the following spring, the stage was set for Futerfas to make that argument in front of a jury in the trial of Vic Orena Jr., his brother John, and five other defendants indicted on murder conspiracy and related racketeering charges.37 But before the trial even began, Valerie Caproni, who was supervising the war prosecutions, and Ellen Corcella, the lead prosecutor in the Orena brothers’ case, were forced to make stunning admissions about the nature of the intelligence that may have gone to Scarpa Sr. from celebrated Supervisory Special Agent Lin DeVecchio.

  Chapter 37

  INSANE MAD-DOG KILLER

  By April 12, 1995, a month before the Orena brothers’ trial, Valerie Caproni, the EDNY criminal division chief who had been so outspoken about the FBI’s handling of the DEA indictment leak in 1987, issued a sworn affirmation in which she made some surprising admissions. As far back as January 27, 1994—ten days after Favo and the other agents first approached ASAC Donald North—Caproni had successfully lobbied Supervisory Special Agents Thomas Fuentes and Jack Barrett, who were first assigned to the DeVecchio OPR, to delay their interviews of CWs. The agreement was that they would hold off for at least six weeks, pending the war prosecutions.1 Given the impact that the disclosures in the OPR might have had on juries, Caproni not only asked Barrett and Fuentes to delay their investigation but insisted that AUSAs be present when any cooperating witnesses, like Larry Mazza, were interviewed.2