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

by Peter Lance

  On March 10, Judge Weinstein issued a 101-page “judgment, memorandum and order” denying Vic Orena’s petition for a new trial. In the opinion Weinstein acknowledged that:

  Scarpa was well-paid by the F.B.I. for his information. What is possible, but not self evident, is that DeVecchio also “paid” Scarpa by passing along information, creating a two-way street for communication that was dangerous and un-authorized. Did DeVecchio do this? Was he so captivated by Scarpa as to have reversed their roles? Defendants emphatically answer “yes” to both questions.15

  But as to Orena’s allegations that key exculpatory “Brady material” was withheld from the defense at the time of Vic Orena’s trial—evidence of the allegedly corrupt relationship between Scarpa and his control agent—Weinstein reached this conclusion:

  There was . . . no “suppression” of evidence of this naked fact of informer status. The court concludes that defendants knew, or should have known, that Scarpa was likely to have been an informant. There is no “suppression” where defendant or his attorney “either knew, or should have known, of the essential facts permitting him to take advantage of [that] evidence.”16

  “It’s an absolutely astonishing conclusion,” says Flora Edwards. “Judge Weinstein decided that defendants like Vic Orena Sr. were somehow supposed to have known about this ultra-secret Top Echelon informant relationship that was known to only a handful of people in the FBI.”17

  Weinstein then crystallized the defense’s principal theory for the appeal and rejected it:

  Even accepting these assumptions, and acknowledging the Scarpa-DeVecchio connection’s troubling coziness, does not warrant the further inferences that Scarpa had a license to kill bestowed upon him by DeVecchio, that he committed the Ocera murder, that he initiated and fueled a faux Colombo War to consolidate his power, and that he did all this with DeVecchio’s authorization and assistance. Even if all the information defendants have presented in their “record” were found to be subject to Brady—and it is not . . . the sum of it would still be insufficient to support so fantastic a theory.18

  Just eighteen days after Charles P. Sifton, chief judge of the Eastern District, had considered the same suppression of evidence of the Scarpa-DeVecchio scandal sufficient grounds to throw out the murder convictions of the Russos and Monteleone, Jack Weinstein interpreted it from the government’s point of view—and denied Vic Orena a new trial.

  Four Decades in the Supermax

  Eighteen months later, in September 1998, Greg Scarpa Jr. came to trial. He arrived hoping that, after he’d risked his life ratting out al-Qaeda terrorists, the Feds might grant him a portion of the consideration they’d shown his father for more than three decades.19 But Judge Reena Raggi, a former EDNY prosecutor who presided at his trial, was unsympathetic. After allowing less than an hour of testimony from Greg Jr. about the Yousef initiative, Raggi accepted the government’s argument that Scarpa’s undercover work for the Bureau was insignificant and more likely “part of a scam.”20

  Reena Raggi was no stranger to the Scarpa family. In fact, twelve years earlier as an AUSA in the Eastern District, she signed the indictment of Junior’s father in the Secret Service’s credit card case—the very case in which Lin DeVecchio had intervened with Judge I. Leo Glasser to urge leniency for Scarpa Sr.21

  Testifying under a grant of immunity, Lin took the stand at Junior’s trial and denied any wrongdoing in his dealings with Greg Jr.’s father.22

  Although the younger Scarpa was acquitted at trial of five murders, the jury was persuaded that he was guilty of loan sharking, bookmaking, and tax fraud. During the trial, Greg Jr. renounced his life in the Mafia, doing exactly what Judge Weinstein had asked his father to do at the time of his sentencing. “I’m washing my hands of everything,” he testified. “I don’t want to do nothing with nothing. I don’t want to know nobody.”

  He argued that he’d been in prison during the 1990s war and hadn’t received a penny from his old man since 1989.23 Greg Jr. also tried in vain to call John Napoli as a witness, to help the jury understand what he risked in ratting out Ramzi Yousef.24

  But Judge Raggi seemed unmoved by Junior’s undercover work for the FBI. Accepting the government’s “scam” theory, she threw the book at him, sentencing him to forty years in the same prison that housed Yousef and Murad: the Supermax in Florence, Colorado.

  “The double standard shown to my brother, considering what he did with those terrorists, was beyond belief,” Greg’s younger brother Frank told me in an interview. “If you look at the record of what our father did and how Greg Jr. in every instance was executing his orders, the fact that he tried to help his country against Yousef and the others and got forty years in return shows you how the Feds just wanted to bury the DeVecchio scandal with my brother. They were much more concerned with saving those war cases than getting to the truth.”25

  Greg Jr. wasn’t heard from again publicly until January 2004, when Flora Edwards managed to convince Judge Weinstein to grant Vic Orena Sr. a second hearing for a new trial.26 Testifying via video link from ADX Florence, Greg Jr. reiterated what he’d sworn to in affidavits in 1999 and 2002.

  Junior, who kept the books for his father, testified that DeVecchio was paid more than $100,000 over the years in return for his inside help, rewarded with vacations to places like Aspen, and treated to call girls in a Staten Island hotel.27 He testified that he’d watched FBI surveillance videos of the Wimpy Boys club, which were provided to his father by DeVecchio. He swore that Lin had acted as “a lookout” on one of the bank robberies by the Bypass crew.28 He insisted that his father had killed Tommy Ocera. And he reaffirmed that his brother Joey had planted the bag of guns under Vic Orena Sr.’s girlfriend’s deck while his father and DeVecchio waited in nearby cars.29

  In a filing prior to trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney Patricia Notopoulos wrote that Junior’s allegations “suggest[ed] recent fabrication.”30

  After the hearing on January 7, 2004, Judge Weinstein seemed to agree. In keeping with his refusal to show any mercy to the elder Orena, he issued a brief decision declaring that “the court finds this witness [Gregory Scarpa Jr.] to be not credible.”31

  Weinstein, who had presided over Vic Sr.’s trial—in which the conviction rested in part on the highly questionable testimony of low-level Colombo wannabes Michael Maffatore and Harry Bonfiglio—did not accept the notion that Greg Jr. might be speaking the truth. Despite the astonishing evidence the younger Scarpa had produced from the Ramzi Yousef sting—most of which was self-authenticating—Weinstein simply did not believe Junior’s testimony about his father’s dealings with DeVecchio.

  Informing on a Homegrown Terrorist

  Then, a year later, an extraordinary event occurred inside the Supermax that once again underscored the younger Scarpa’s credibility. Confined to a seven-by-twelve-foot cell in the prison known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,”32 Greg Jr. was locked down in solitary. At some point in 2005 he found himself in a hardened cell adjacent to that of Terry Nichols, the disgruntled army veteran convicted with Timothy McVeigh of planting the bomb on April 19, 1995, that killed 168 people at the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

  The Murrah Federal Building after the 1995 bombing

  Communicating with Nichols via the pipes connected to the back-to-back sinks in their cells,33 Greg Jr. learned chilling details about a cache of nitro-methane-based high explosives that the FBI had somehow missed during a search of Nichols’s former home in Herington, Kansas.

  Nichols told Scarpa Jr. that these explosives lay buried in a crawl space beneath the house and the convicted bomber was fearful that unknown persons might find them and use them on the upcoming tenth anniversary of the Murrah Building blast in April.34 According to Nichols, the binary explosives were buried with an ammunition can under a pile of rocks beneath the house, which the Bureau had supposedly searched following his arrest ten years earlier. He then pinpointed for Greg Jr. the precise location and gave a detailed descriptio
n of the Kinestik explosives, which could be detonated with blasting caps.

  Terry Nichols and his former home in Herington, Kansas

  In Triple Cross I detailed how the word from Nichols to Scarpa Jr. was passed to forensic investigator Angela Clemente and how the FBI initially refused to take action. At that point Valerie Caproni had risen to become the Bureau’s general counsel—the top lawyer at the Hoover Building in Washington. A polygraph specialist was eventually sent to the Supermax and reportedly concluded that Scarpa Jr. had failed a lie detector test.35 After learning details of the “test” that suggested that it hadn’t been properly administered, I contacted John Solomon, who was then chief of the Associated Press’s Washington bureau. Following the intervention of two members of Congress, Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican, and Representative William Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat, the FBI reluctantly conducted a search of Nichols’s old house.

  The result: In precisely the same part of the crawl space in boxes described precisely by Greg Scarpa Jr., the special agents found the Kinestiks.

  Two days after the search Solomon reported:

  WASHINGTON (AP) The FBI is facing the possibility it made an embarrassing oversight in the Oklahoma City bombing case a decade ago after new information led agents to explosive materials hidden in Terry Nichols’ former home, which they had searched several times before. FBI officials said the material was found Thursday night and Friday in a crawl space of the house in Herington, Kan. They believe agents failed to check that space during the numerous searches of the property during the original investigation of Nichols and Timothy McVeigh. “The information so far indicates the items have been there since prior to the Oklahoma City bombing,” Agent Gary Johnson said in a telephone interview from Oklahoma City.36

  In a follow-up story on April 14, 2005, the AP’s Mark Sherman reported, “While the FBI found no evidence supporting the idea that an attack is in the works for Tuesday’s 10th anniversary [of the Oklahoma City bombing], the information that explosives had been hidden in Nichols’ former home in Herington, Kansas, turned out to be true.”37

  In that story, Sherman confirmed that “the tip came from imprisoned mobster Gregory Scarpa Jr., 53, a law enforcement source said this week.”

  “Clearly the FBI—particularly Valerie Caproni, the general counsel—had every interest in discrediting Gregory Scarpa Jr.,” said Clemente, who first supplied me with Scarpa Jr.’s trove of intel from Yousef back in 2004. “Caproni was privy to Scarpa’s intel about Yousef. She thought he would be buried forever and they would throw away the key and now, here he was in March of 2005 tipping the FBI to another major embarrassment connected to a massive act of terror.”38

  It was the second time Greg Scarpa Jr. had given compelling and credible intelligence to the government in an effort to interdict possible acts of terror—a development that obviously supported his credibility. I had told much of his story in my 2004 book Cover Up. Now, in the fall of 2005, after Angela Clemente provided Congressman Delahunt with additional intelligence on the Scarpa-DeVecchio relationship, Delahunt’s office contacted the Brooklyn DA.

  The Other Top Echelon Scandal

  Delahunt made the referral because he knew only too well about problems related to a potentially compromised FBI agent. In the mid-1970s, when he was serving as the district attorney of Norfolk County, near Boston, Delahunt’s own office had been stonewalled in an almost identical pattern to the Scarpa-DeVecchio case. At the center of that case was James “Whitey” Bulger, the bloodthirsty head of the notorious Winter Hill Gang, who had evaded arrest for years due to his own status as a Top Echelon informant for the FBI.

  In Bulger’s case the contacting agent was John Connolly, a twenty-two-year Bureau veteran. But the outcome of that Boston case was decidedly different from what transpired with Lin DeVecchio. In 2008, Connolly was convicted of second-degree murder for passing intelligence to Bulger and his associate Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi. The leaks had led to the 1982 murder in Miami of a potential witness against Bulger and Flemmi.39

  The forty-year sentence Connolly received was the final blow to the once-celebrated agent, who had been sentenced to ten years in federal prison in 2002 after being convicted on racketeering counts connected to his handling of Bulger. Released on June 28, 2011, Connolly was transferred to a Massachusetts state prison to serve out the remainder of his sentence.40

  During the Miami trial the parallels to the Scarpa-DeVecchio case became clear. First, a federal judge, who had been a prosecutor at the time Connolly ran Bulger, testified that Connolly had been a star agent whose work had served to “decimate” the Mafia in New England.41 “John Connolly . . . had a certain flair that attracted a confidence and trust with underworld figures,” said Judge Edward F. Harrington, the former Boston U.S. attorney from 1977 to 1981, who was the defense’s first witness at the trial.42

  Former FBI SSA John Connolly

  (Associated Press)

  Like Lin DeVecchio, Connolly had been a highly decorated Bureau comer. He’d received commendations from every FBI director from J. Edgar Hoover to William Sessions. He’d lectured on informant development at Quantico and was even nominated to become Boston’s police commissioner.43 But at his 2008 murder trial, prosecutors charged that John B. Callahan, a World Jai-Alai executive, was murdered on orders from Bulger and Flemmi after Connolly had told them the FBI was investigating Callahan’s ties to the Winter Hill Gang.

  John Martorano was later identified as the hit man who shot Callahan and left his bullet-riddled body in the trunk of a car at Miami International Airport.44 Martorano became a cooperating witness and testified for the government along with Connolly’s former FBI supervisor John Morris, who had previously admitted that he had accepted $7,000 in bribes from Bulger and Flemmi.

  Federal prosecutors told jurors that Connolly knew he was “signing the death warrant” for Callahan when he passed the sensitive FBI information to Bulger and Flemmi.45

  FBI surveillance photo of Flemmi (left) and Bulger (right)

  Congressman Delahunt had actually gone to grammar school with Martorano, and one night in 1976 he ran into him at a restaurant as the killer met with Bulger and Flemmi, who were about to shake down the restaurant owner for $175,000. After opening an investigation into that possible extortion, in his capacity as Norfolk County DA, Delahunt turned the case over to the FBI. But the Winter Hill pair went unpunished.46 Delahunt didn’t fully understand why until the Connolly-Bulger scandal became public.

  In 2004, after his election to Congress and appointment to the House Judiciary Committee, Delahunt started investigating the issue of FBI agents who might have become compromised in relations with their informants.47 On February 7, 2005, Delahunt’s staff sent a prosecution referral to the office of Charles J. Hynes, the district attorney of Kings County (Brooklyn), whose office had been blindsided by the Feds during the third Colombo war. According to Hynes, that initial referral raised questions about Lin DeVecchio’s interaction with Greg Scarpa Sr. around the time of the Nicholas Grancio homicide in January 1992.48

  Meeting at the Brooklyn DA’s Office

  In 2004, I had told much of the Scarpa-DeVecchio story in my book Cover Up.49 A year after its publication and after the Delahunt referral, I met with Kings County Assistant DA Noel Downey, Bureau Chief in the Rackets Division, and George Terra, the investigator who had arrested Carmine Imbriale in 1992.

  Both of them expressed an interest in my findings on Greg Scarpa Sr. It was Terra’s arrest of Imbriale that had prompted Lin DeVecchio in the C-10 squad to contact Scarpa and warn him—using the “Hello” line, according to Chris Favo.50

  As I sat in the DA’s conference room across a table from Terra and Downey, they told me that they’d already started looking into the allegations that DeVecchio may have facilitated Scarpa’s murder spree.

  After the meeting, I returned to California and went back to work on Triple Cross, which focused on al-Qaeda master spy A
li Mohamed. Then, early on the morning of January 4, 2006, I was awakened by a call from Bo Dietl, the well-known former NYPD detective, who had read both 1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up.

  “Peter, you better get up,” he said. “WNBC just broke the story that the Brooklyn DA has a grand jury examining DeVecchio.”

  I went to my computer and accessed the story, first reported by Jonathan Dienst:

  “The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office has opened a criminal investigation into a former FBI agent who may have leaked information to the mob,” the piece began. Citing the Mafia Cops scandal, but describing the DeVecchio matter as “unrelated” to that case, the WNBC piece ended by quoting several unnamed “former federal officials” who “expressed doubts that the investigation would go anywhere.”51

  But three months later, with Noel Downey at his side, DA Hynes announced the indictment of DeVecchio on four counts of murder conspiracy in the deaths of Mary Bari, Joseph “Joe Brewster” DeDomenico, Larry Lampasi, and Patrick Porco. Also charged were Craig Sobel and John Sinagra, described as “Colombo triggermen.”52

  Porco was an eighteen-year-old friend of Joey Scarpa’s who was shot to death over Memorial Day weekend in 1990. Seven months earlier on Halloween night he’d witnessed the murder of seventeen-year-old Dominick Masseria, who was killed on the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Brooklyn after an altercation with Joey, who was Greg Sr.’s son by Linda Schiro.53 The alleged shooter in that killing was Craig Sobel.

  According to a statement from the DA on the day the indictment was announced, “in May of 1990 Porco was questioned by detectives at the 62nd Precinct about Masseria’s murder. DeVecchio contacted Greg Scarpa to tell him that Porco, 18, had been speaking to authorities about Joseph Scarpa’s involvement in the Masseria shooting. Sinagra is charged with carrying out a Scarpa-ordered hit on Porco, to prevent him from speaking about Masseria.”54