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

by Peter Lance

  That trial was as close as Lin DeVecchio would ever come to a guilty verdict. But now the stakes were enormous for the Feds. Quoted in a New York Times piece the next day, James Kallstrom, the ADIC of the FBI’s New York Office, cautioned that “no conclusions should be drawn concerning the allegations against Mr. DeVecchio until the internal inquiry is completed.” He noted that DeVecchio had not been suspended or demoted and that his salary of $105,000 a year had not been cut.46

  James Kallstrom, former ADIC, FBI, New York Office

  But as we’ve pointed out, the OPR would drag on for another nine months before Kallstrom sent the memo to FBI Director Louis Freeh warning him that if the probe continued it would “have a serious negative impact on the government’s prosecutions of various LCN figures in the EDNY and cast a cloud over the NYO.”47

  As former EDNY AUSA John Kroger admitted in his book, “The Scarpa Senior–DeVecchio scandal derailed the government’s assault on the Colombo Family.”48

  And what about Ellen Corcella’s promise to the jury that Lin would see his day in court? If he was going to be prosecuted, the senior AUSA who had to make that happen was Corcella’s boss, Valerie Caproni. The question was, would Caproni press for a no-holds-barred investigation of DeVecchio, or would she circle the wagons in an effort to contain the potential damage to her war prosecutions?

  On July 17, 1995, two weeks after charges against the Orena brothers were dismissed, Caproni was contacted by phone and asked to answer questions submitted by the Public Integrity Section (PIS) of the Justice Department “concerning allegations against . . . SSA R. Lindley DeVecchio.”49

  One of the questions submitted to Caproni by a PIS attorney was “DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT SSA DEVECCHIO THAT YOU INTEND TO USE TO INDICT OR PROSECUTE HIM?”50

  Keep in mind that as recently as April 12, three months earlier, Caproni had disclosed eight probable leaks from DeVecchio to Scarpa. During the Orena brothers’ trial, Corcella had promised the jury that Lin would “get his day in court.”51 Yet now Caproni passed the ball back to Justice, telling the Public Integrity Section that “any prosecution of SSA DeVecchio was now up to the PIS, DOJ.”52

  Meanwhile, throughout the summer of 1995, as DeVecchio’s OPR investigation continued, Valerie Caproni did her best to minimize the impact the probe might have on those ongoing war prosecutions. She sent a letter dated July 24, 1995, to Ralph Regalbuto Jr., a supervisory special agent in the Office of Professional Responsibility in Washington, which she termed “the first installment of mark-ups of 302s prepared during the OPR.”

  In this group, I am sending back my 302s, as well as a memorandum that is based largely on certain conversations I had with various agents, and the 302 of George Stamboulidis. Andrew Weissmann’s 302 should be marked up shortly, and I hope to have the 302s of the cooperating witnesses available by the end of the week.53

  That package from Caproni contained multiple pages of 302s memorializing her OPR debriefings and those of AUSAs George Stamboulidis and Andrew Weissmann. Virtually every page contained Caproni’s handwritten comments. Many were heavily redacted.

  “Valerie Caproni had succeeded in getting the OPR delayed and getting assistant U.S. attorneys to sit in with the cooperating witnesses to contain whatever damage they might do to the war prosecutions,” says Flora Edwards. “I don’t know how you can look upon her editing of the 302s in any other way than as a further effort to interfere. The FBI agents who interviewed Caproni, Weissmann, and Stamboulidis were supervisors in the Bureau. Experienced investigators. They wrote the 302s based on what they had been told and now here was Caproni coming in and seemingly trying to rewrite them.”54

  In the page reproduced here, from Weissmann’s August 16, 1994, debriefing, Caproni crossed out Weissmann’s comment that he found it “incredible that someone [i.e., DeVecchio] would actually want Scarpa Sr. on the Street instead of jail.”

  FBI 302 of Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann, with handwritten notes by Valerie Caproni, head of the EDNY Criminal Division

  Now, by early September 1996, with the Feds’ grant of immunity ensuring that DeVecchio would never be convicted for the alleged crimes that had prompted the OPR investigation, the writing was on the wall. Despite the sho cking revelations of misconduct uncovered during the thirty-one-month-long investigation, and the admissions two separate federal prosecutors had made regarding DeVecchio’s alleged leaks, the chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Criminal Division, informed Lin’s attorney Douglas Grover, “We have determined that prosecution of SSA DeVecchio in this matter is not warranted.”55

  The OPR was closed. No indictment, no prosecution. And Lin DeVecchio retired from the FBI with a full pension.

  Chapter 38

  ORGANIZED CRIME AND TERRORISM

  The Feds wasted no time in rebounding from their loss in the trial of the Orena brothers. Six days after the “Black Eye for the FBI” headline appeared on the front page of Newsday, the New York Times ran a piece headed “New Indictment for Reputed Colombo Crime Family Captain.”1 As if to distance itself from charges that the Bureau had been sleeping with the enemy for more than three decades in its relationship with Greg Scarpa Sr., this story heralded a new indictment for his son Greg Jr., whom the Times described as having a life that “reads like a script from a gangster soap opera.”

  Greg Jr., then forty-three, was already serving a twenty-year sentence for racketeering stemming from the 1987 DEA case. Now the EDNY was charging that since 1980, the younger Scarpa had led a thirteen-member crew that had committed a series of felonies, including fifteen murders.2

  Virtually every crime in the indictment was for a mob-related activity allegedly committed by Greg Jr. on behalf of his father during the period when Senior was being “controlled” by Lin DeVecchio. At least two of the crew members named in the indictment, Kevin Granato and Robert Zambardi, had been part of Senior’s Wimpy Boys crew. Bobby Zam was also part of Carmine Sessa’s would-be hit team that made the first move on Vic Orena Sr. at the start of the war that Greg Sr. fomented.

  And, as if to visit the sins of the father upon the son, two of the war murders—those of Gaetano Amato and Vincent Fusaro—were included in the indictment even though they were executed solely by Greg Sr. while his son was in prison.3

  The al-Qaeda Sting

  Considering that his father committed many of the crimes for which Greg Jr. was being charged, the indictment indicated a double standard for the Justice Department. But the younger Scarpa also gave the FBI a tremendous opportunity. As fate would have it, in the spring of 1996, while housed on the ninth-floor tier of the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), the federal jail in Lower Manhattan, he was placed in a cell in between two world-class Islamic terrorists.

  On one side was Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the al-Qaeda bomb maker, who I proved in my book 1000 Years for Revenge4 was not only responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing but also was the architect of the “planes as missiles” plot executed on September 11, 2001, by his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM).* On the other side of Greg Jr.’s cell was Yousef’s lifelong friend Abdul Hakim Murad, a pilot trained in four U.S. flight schools, who was to be the lead pilot in the original configuration of what was called “the planes operation,” as Yousef had conceived it in Manila in the fall of 1994.5 Finally, in a nearby cell was Eyad Ismoil, Yousef’s codefendant in an upcoming trial for the Twin Towers bombing.

  Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, Greg Scarpa Jr., Abdul Hakim Murad

  Murad had first met Yousef in the early 1980s at a mosque in the Kuwaiti city of Fahaheel on the Persian Gulf, where they both grew up.6 By 1991 Murad had attended the Emirates Flying School in Dubai, where he got his single-engine private pilot’s license.

  On November 19, 1991, as the Colombo war was just beginning to heat up, Murad flew to Washington. Over the next eight months he attended four separate U.S. flight schools: Alpha Tango in San Antonio, Texas;7 the Richmor Aviation Flight School in Schenectady,
New York; Coastal Aviation in New Bern, North Carolina, where he got his multiengine license on June 6, 1992; and the California Aeronautical Institute in Red Bluff, California.8

  When he passed through Manhattan in 1992, Murad performed a visual inspection of the World Trade Center.9 Later, he would boast to a Philippine interrogator that he had initially chosen the Twin Towers as a target for Yousef.10 After a fire in their Manila bomb factory in early January 1995, Murad was captured and interrogated by Colonel Rodolfo B. Mendoza of the Philippine National Police.

  Right after the fire, Yousef and KSM fled to Islamabad, Pakistan. Yousef was eventually captured and rendered back to New York, but FBI agents arrived at the arrest site late. KSM, who hung around long enough to give an interview to a reporter using his real name, then escaped.11 By 1996, Yousef and Murad—also rendered back to New York—were on trial in what the Feds called the “Manila Air bombing case.”12 It involved a fiendish plot by Yousef to smuggle a series of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on board a dozen U.S. airliners leaving Asia for America.13

  Two months before his capture, Yousef had performed what he called “a wet test” with a nitroglycerine-based device linked to a Casio watch timer. After Yousef planted it aboard the first leg of Philippine Airlines Flight 434 on December 11, 1994, the IED blew a hole in the fuselage of the 747, barely missing the jumbo jet’s fuel tank. Before the full plot was aborted by his capture, Yousef planned to hide similar devices on up to twelve airliners, with a potential death toll in the thousands.

  By the early summer of 1996, the Feds were prepping to try Yousef for this Casio-nitro bomb plot, which the terrorist had dubbed “Bojinka,” a name reportedly derived from the Serbo-Croatian for “explosion” or “loud bang.”14

  After escaping from the custody of the Philippine National Police in early 1995, a fourth co-conspirator, Wali Khan Amin Shah, had also been captured and rendered back to the United States. He would stand trial with Yousef and Murad, with jury selection set to begin in late May 1996.15 The fourth member of the Manila cell, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was still at large, living secretly in Doha, Qatar, plotting to execute his nephew Yousef’s separate airliner hijacking plot.

  Now, as the trial approached in late winter of 1996, federal prosecutors were obliged under Brady rules to disclose the sum of their case to the defense. So Yousef, who was representing himself pro se, was well aware that Murad’s confession to Colonel Mendoza in the Philippines would almost ensure a conviction.16

  “Yousef believed that Scarpa, being allegedly in the Mafia, was a person who was anti-government,” says Larry Silverman, Greg Jr.’s lawyer at the time.17 “And since Yousef’s whole philosophy was anti–U.S. government, they seemed to develop a relationship.”

  At some point in March, Yousef broke a bed strut away from the wall of his cell, creating a hole, and started passing tiny rolled-up notes, which he called “kites,” through Greg Jr. to Murad, who had similarly broken a hole in the wall adjacent to Junior’s cell.18 Scarpa Jr. hoped that spying on Yousef for the Feds might earn him a fraction of the support from the FBI that his father had enjoyed, if not a reduction in charges or, at minimum, some “downward release time” under Rule 5K1.1 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.19

  As soon as Greg Jr. passed word to the FBI through Silverman that he was getting notes from al-Qaeda’s chief bomb maker, the Bureau sprang into action. The Feds took him so seriously that they gave him a tiny camera to photograph the kites and even supplied an FBI agent, posing as a paralegal named “Susan Schwartz,” to retrieve the film.20

  The initiative began a month before James Kallstrom sent the memo to Louis Freeh urging that the DOJ reach a conclusion in DeVecchio’s OPR. Kallstrom later sought to explain the memo, denying that he had been pushing for an early termination of the DeVecchio investigation.

  “What I was saying,” Kallstrom told an interviewer, “was ‘Look, the investigation has been going on for years. Let’s get it looked at.’ It had nothing to do with a whitewash of the investigation.”21 But a new document, uncovered in this investigation, raises questions about Kallstrom’s insistence that the FBI wasn’t trying to contain the damage to the war cases that would arise from the Scarpa-DeVecchio scandal. On the very same day the memo went out to Louis Freeh, another communiqué was sent to the FBI director that showed up in DeVecchio’s OPR file.

  Although the memo is heavily redacted, it’s clear that Kallstrom (the ADIC) was worried that what he called “the DelVecchio [sic]/Scarpa Sr. relationship” might have a negative impact on the prosecution of Greg Jr. and other adjudicated war cases, such as Vic Orena Sr.’s. Further, in his concern that the continued OPR investigation was “unfair to SSA DelVecchio [sic],” Kallstrom appears to demonstrate a bias in favor of Lin. For the first time, this memo documents that the New York Office of the FBI had been “pressing for a resolution” of the DeVecchio OPR “for over a year.”22

  (Peter Lance)

  The memo, to Director Louis Freeh, was dated just weeks after Junior started the Yousef sting. So now, while one arm of the Justice Department—the Eastern District in Brooklyn, led by Valerie Caproni—was working to convict Greg Jr. on additional charges, the Organized Crime and Terrorism Unit in the Southern District (Manhattan) was using him as an informant to gather intelligence on a world-class terrorist.

  It was in that context that Greg Scarpa Jr., like his father before him, became a mole for the FBI.

  “How to Blow Up Airplanes”

  By mid-May 1996, Ramzi Yousef started passing notes threatening to have his “people” put a bomb on a plane to get “a mistrial.”* One kite was entitled “How to Smuggle Explosives into an Airplane.”23 The Bureau considered Yousef’s threats so alarming that FBI agents met with Larry Silverman and his client at least once a week to debrief Scarpa Sr. Their interviews were memorialized in a series of FBI 302 memos.

  In April 2004, while writing Cover Up, my second book on al-Qaeda terrorism prior to 9/11, I received dozens of these 302s and many of Yousef’s kites from Angela Clemente, the forensic investigator whose Freedom of Information lawsuit led to the release of the Greg Scarpa Sr. files. Angela had been looking into Scarpa Jr.’s case pro bono in the winter of 2004 when he passed the documents to her during a visit to ADX Florence, the Supermax prison in Colorado, where he was incarcerated.

  When I reviewed the documents—which included details of Yousef’s various Manila plots that had not yet surfaced in the mainstream press by the spring of 1996—it was clear to me that Greg Jr. had opened up a significant pipeline to al-Qaeda’s most deadly bomb maker. Consider the following excerpts from a 302 dated March 5, 1996:

  YOUSEF told SCARPA I’ll teach you how to blow up airplanes and how to make bombs and then you can get the information to your people (meaning Scarpa’s people on the outside). YOUSEF told SCARPA I can show you how to get a bomb on an airplane through a metal detector. YOUSEF told SCARPA he would teach him how to make timing devices. . . . YOUSEF told SCARPA that during the trial they had a plan to blow up a plane and hurt a judge or an attorney so a mistrial will be declared.24

  In that same 302, FBI agents uncovered evidence of an al-Qaeda cell loyal to Yousef that was then active in New York City.

  According to SCARPA, YOUSEF has indicated that he has four people here. SCARPA described these four terrorists already here in the United States. SCARPA advised YOUSEF has not indicated who these four individuals are or if he is in contact with these four people or how he contacts them. SCARPA does not know if YOUSEF receives or sends any messages from contacts overseas.

  That revelation about the “four terrorists” should have caused shock waves in the FBI’s New York Office, because after the 1995 conviction of Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and nine other terrorists linked to the plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan—the so-called Day of Terror plot—the conventional wisdom was that the FBI had eliminated the Islamic terror threat to New York City.25

  By late May 1996,
Greg Jr. had also uncovered Yousef’s threats to kill federal judge Kevin Duffy, who was about to preside at the Bojinka trial, and Mike Garcia, the AUSA who would be co-prosecutor along with AUSA Dietrich Snell.26 The Feds took those threats so seriously that they got protection for both targets.

  By April, the quality of the Yousef–to–Scarpa Jr. intel was so good that the FBI decided to take the initiative to a new level, setting up Roma Corp., a phony mob front company, allowing the government to monitor Yousef’s calls.

  Ostensibly located in the historic Flatiron Building, Roma Corp. was an ingenious sting. “The idea was to create a fictitious company that was supposedly a Mafia-run organization,” says Silverman. “Yousef would make calls to that organization. They would then patch through his telephone calls to parties outside of the United States, and the FBI would be able to listen in to those calls, record them, and, of course, make use of the information.”27

  Greg Jr. gave Yousef the Roma office number and conned him into believing that the operation was run by Mafiosi, when in fact FBI agents were manning the phones. Yousef was allowed to make calls to Roma Corp. from the pay phone on the ninth floor of the MCC. The Feds then forwarded the calls through to his “ people”28 in New York and abroad.29 Thanks to the FBI, Greg Jr. even supplied Yousef with a fax number at Roma. Here is a copy of the note Junior passed to Yousef announcing the setup of the patch-through. When the terrorist called the number, he was to identify himself as “Ronnie.”

  (Peter Lance)

  “It’s difficult to describe what a bonanza of intelligence this was for the Bureau,” says a former agent now retired from the NYO. “This was raw data, coming directly from bin Laden’s chief bomb maker, who we would later learn played a key role in designing the 9/11 plot.”30 The Roma Corp. patch-through would soon hand the New York–based FBI agents a second chance to nab Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Yousef’s uncle, as he hid out in Qatar.31