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

by Peter Lance

  After attributing the origin of the investigation to the referral from Congressman Delahunt, Hynes described the underlying charges against Lin DeVecchio as “the most stunning example of official corruption that I have ever seen.”

  One Million Dollars’ Bail

  Ten years earlier, the thirty-two-month OPR investigation into DeVecchio’s activities had ended with no charges filed. He’d retired to Sarasota, Florida, where he’d led a quiet life, working as a private investigator and serving on the board of his homeowners’ association.55 Now, at the age of sixty-five, DeVecchio was facing four counts of homicide, each one carrying a possible sentence of twenty-five years to life. During the press conference, Hynes had even accused DeVecchio of receiving $66,000 in “payoffs” from Scarpa.56

  Lin DeVecchio (left) surrendering on the night before his arraignment and (right, in the background) surrounded by former FBI agents following his release on $1 million bail the next day

  (Photos, from left to right: Associated Press; Robert Stolark/The New York Times/Redux)

  Allowed to fly up to New York to surrender the night before—thus avoiding one “perp walk” before the press—DeVecchio nonetheless spent the night handcuffed to a metal chair and locked in a room adjacent to the DA’s detective squad.57

  The next day he was arraigned and released on $1 million bail. But even though he walked out of the courthouse a free man, he couldn’t avoid the de facto “perp walk” that followed, with a pack of reporters and camera crews chasing him. As he moved down Jay Street outside the courthouse, DeVecchio was surrounded by a phalanx of nearly fifty retired FBI agents—five of whom had come up with the $1 million bail money.58 Dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and red-and-blue ties, they pushed the media mob back as they protected the onetime star agent, who now faced a fate similar to John Connolly’s.

  The sight of a cadre of former FBI agents swatting aside reporters on a public street created such a stir that Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) mentioned it during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on May 2. “After the [arraignment],” Grassley said, “the agents surrounded DeVecchio ‘in a human blanket’ as he left the courtroom so that he could not be questioned by reporters. One agent wrote, ‘[I]t might even be said that a few reporters received a few body checks out on the sidewalk’ and that he ‘was never prouder to be an FBI agent.’”59

  Noting that DeVecchio was innocent until proven guilty, Grassley nonetheless told the Judiciary Committee members that he was “concerned about the public perception created by such aggressive and broad support of DeVecchio by current and former FBI personnel.”

  “It could leave the impression,” he said, “that the FBI as an institution is circling the wagons to defend itself as well as DeVecchio against the charges.”60

  In an earlier “Gang Land” column, filed after word of the grand jury investigation surfaced, Jerry Capeci predicted that the DeVecchio murder case would have “stunning implications for both law enforcement and some convicted gangsters.”61 And within hours of DeVecchio’s arraignment the indictment of “Mr. Organized Crime” created a tabloid sensation.

  “Mob Fed’s Filthy Lucre—FBI Agent Cashed in As Mafia Slay Mole: DA.” That was the page-one headline in the New York Post over the story by veteran crime reporter Murray Weiss, who wrote that Lin’s alleged motives were “greed and adulation from his bosses.”62 Quoting unnamed sources, the New York Daily News reported that “DeVecchio could face charges in as many as three other gangland murders, two of them on Long Island,”63 a reference to the Minerva-Imbergamo killings.

  The Friends of Lin

  But a series of former Feds, many of whom would have much to lose if DeVecchio was convicted, rallied to his side. In a move virtually unprecedented in the face of pending charges, James Kallstrom, the retired assistant director in charge of the New York Office, issued a statement on the case to the Daily News.

  Then working as a senior counterterrorism adviser to New York Governor George Pataki, Kallstrom actually declared DeVecchio innocent. “Lin DeVecchio is not guilty and did not partake in what he’s charged with,” Kallstrom told the paper. “It’s as simple as that.”64

  Kallstrom also agreed to serve on the advisory board of the Friends of Lin DeVecchio Trust, a website and fund-raising arm for the ex-agent’s defense.65 Another board member was former FBI undercover agent Joseph Pistone, a.k.a. “Donnie Brasco,” who later offered to testify at the trial of John Connolly.

  A Boston Globe story during that trial described Pistone as Connolly’s “longtime friend.”66 Now, with respect to Lin DeVecchio, Pistone told reporter Alan Feuer of the New York Times, “We’ve all worked with Lin since the early 1970s. We’re all veteran street guys. If anyone could smell something bad, it would be us. And with Lin, we never smelled bad.”67

  Another staunch defender of DeVecchio, and Friends of Lin advisory board member, was James M. Kossler, the former chief coordinator of organized crime squads in the New York Office, to whom Lin had once reported.68

  In his book, DeVecchio quotes Kossler as declaring, “This prosecution of Lin DeVecchio is the most outrageous abuse of prosecutorial authority that I have seen in my career.”69 Kossler, whom Lin describes as “the master strategist of our championship season,” was a key player in the Mafia Commission case; he too stood to lose if DeVecchio’s conviction led to new appeals from any imprisoned survivors of that landmark case.

  As an early measure of his disdain for Special Agent Chris Favo, who brought the initial allegations against DeVecchio, Kossler was quoted by Fred Dannen in his 1996 New Yorker piece this way: “The trouble with Chris Favo is that Chris Favo has a very high opinion of himself. He works sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, and you lose all objectivity when that happens. You see things you can’t relate to or understand. This whole thing was a travesty, and Lin’s reputation has been destroyed. Why wasn’t Favo stopped? If I’d been there, I would have cut his nuts off.”70

  One of the principals of the Friends of Lin, who later penned a series of updates on DeVecchio’s trial, was Chris Mattiace, who ran the Colombo Squad before Lin took it over. Mattiace was the former SSA who downplayed Greg Scarpa’s multimillion-dollar-a-year Staten Island drug operation by declaring in DeVecchio’s book that “Greg Scarpa himself was not big enough for our interests at the time, much less his son and the Dead End Kids.”71

  Within months of the indictment, the Friends of Lin DeVecchio had raised $80,000 for Lin’s defense.72 But in a precursor of what was to come, less than two weeks after DeVecchio’s arraignment, his attorney Douglas Grover, himself a former federal prosecutor, filed pleadings seeking to transfer the case to federal court, arguing that the former supervisory special agent was “immune from prosecution.”73

  “It’s important to get some perspective,” says defense attorney Ellen Resnick, “on just how devastating DeVecchio’s conviction could have been, not just to the Colombo war cases, but to the Mafia Commission case on which Rudy Giuliani had based his political career.”74

  Lin DeVecchio had been the contacting agent for Greg Scarpa Sr., the informant who had provided most of the probable cause for the Title III wiretap warrants in that case.75 Now, a battery of current and former Feds were lining up to make sure their man Lin didn’t go down without a fight.

  Chapter 40

  THE COVER UP VIRUS

  The year 2007 started out badly for DeVecchio’s defense. Judge Frederic Block denied DeVecchio’s motion to remove his murder case from Brooklyn to the friendlier turf of federal court. Douglas Grover had made two arguments for the removal: first, that everything Lin had done with respect to “34” had been under “the express authority” conferred on him “by virtue of his position as Supervisory Special agent of the FBI investigative organized crime squads,” and, second, that the “evidentiary basis for this prosecution” included his OPR-compelled statement and his testimony in the 1997 Orena hearing, for which he was granted immunity.1 Neither of those immunized stateme
nts contained substantive details on any of the four murders in the DA’s indictment.2 Grover nonetheless argued that DeVecchio was effectively insulated from prosecution.

  But Judge Block rejected the “express authority” argument, noting that Lin was “simply being charged with outright murders that have nothing to do with his federal duties.” He cited the landmark 1932 Supreme Court case Colorado v. Symes,3 which held that, “while homicide that is excusable or justifiable may be committed by an officer in the proper discharge of his duty, murder or other criminal killings may not.”4 So the case went back to state court.

  It was the Brooklyn DA’s case to lose—and, over the next ten months, the office took a series of actions that virtually guaranteed that the case would be dismissed.

  The first hint of trouble actually came in an unrelated case on March 16, 2006, two weeks before the DeVecchio indictment was announced. That was the day New York Times reporter Michael Brick filed a story suggesting that Michael Vecchione, Charles Hynes’s lead prosecutor for Lin’s trial, may have suppressed evidence in the case of Jabber Collins, a former drug addict turned jailhouse lawyer who was serving a thirty-three-year term for the murder of a rabbi—a case Vecchione had prosecuted in 1995.5

  In 2001, Newsday had reported that Vecchione had traveled to Puerto Rico, ostensibly to subpoena a witness in Collins’s case, and had taken with him Stacey Frascogna, a DA’s assistant, with whom Vecchione later had an affair.6

  A red-faced Hynes was subsequently forced to drop the murder charges against Collins, who had already served fifteen years. The dismissal came just one day before potentially embarrassing testimony by Vecchione and Frascogna about alleged misconduct in the case.7

  The next sign of trouble in the DeVecchio prosecution came in early February 2007, when the New York Post reported that Greg Scarpa Jr., who had spent months cooling his heels in the Metropolitan Correctional Center after Hynes’s office transferred him from the Supermax, might not be called to testify against Lin.8 In an interview with me later that year, former NYPD detective Tommy Dades, who had worked with Vecchione to develop the Mafia Cops case, said that “Greg Jr. was getting impatient” with the assistant DAs in Hynes’s office, who would leave him alone for “a month at a time” in the federal jail without a visit.9 Dades said the problem began when Noel Downey, who had been the lead prosecutor on People v. Lin DeVecchio, left the office to take a job in private practice—another setback for the DA’s team.10

  “When Noel was there,” Dades told me, “we would take Greg out once a week from the MCC. Let him breathe, visit with relatives at the DA’s office. . . . For years, this guy has been living in a seven-by-twelve-foot cell. He was one of our primary witnesses and we needed him to be happy. But when Noel left and [Assistant DAs] Kevin [Williamson] and Monique [Ferrell] took over the case, they’d leave him there for weeks on end.”11

  Dades, who had been chief investigator on the DeVecchio case, had his own problems. On March 15, the New York Post reported that the ex-detective was facing manslaughter charges after an altercation outside his house on December 19, 2006, that left one man dead.12 In defense of Dades, Vecchione reportedly appeared before a Staten Island grand jury looking into the scuffle, in which one James Coletta, who had tried to intervene, fell to the ground with cracked ribs and later died of internal injuries.13 Dades was later cleared of the manslaughter charges,14 but in mid-May 2007 he abruptly resigned from the DA’s staff.15

  The Alleged Affair with a Mob Witness

  Meanwhile, Hynes’s office was plagued by other staff problems related to the DeVecchio prosecution. A month earlier, Maria Biagini, a fifteen-year veteran of the office who had been assigned to John Napoli—the witness the DA had moved to a jail cell at Fort Dix, New Jersey, to help buttress Greg Jr.’s testimony—was forced to resign amid allegations that she had fallen in love with the former Gambino associate and actually concocted a scheme to bear his child.16

  Napoli was important to the DA’s case because he had vouched for Greg Jr.’s credibility in his 1996–1997 sting of Ramzi Yousef. But Larry Celona of the New York Post, who broke the story, reported that “in one letter [Biagini] suggested a bizarre scheme to get [the witness] released to a fertility doctor, who would collect sperm that could be used to impregnate her.”17 According to Celona, Biagini “allegedly loosened her prisoner’s strings and allowed him to contact his family and take money from relatives. He used the cash to throw dinner parties, attended by his family and the investigator—all in violation of DA policies, the sources said.”

  A day later, the New York Sun reported that “the FBI [was] now leading an investigation into [Biagini’s] actions, which could result in criminal charges.”18

  The next setback for the Brooklyn DA came in mid-March, when Judge Gustin Reichbach, who was presiding over the DeVecchio case,19 ordered the prosecution team to submit sworn statements that they had not read either DeVecchio’s May 1995 compelled statement or his February 1997 testimony in the Vic Orena hearing, when he’d answered, “I don’t recall,” in response to Gerry Shargel’s questions.20

  Judge Gustin Reichbach

  (Getty)

  In both instances, Lin had been granted immunity, and in canvassing the DAs this way, Reichbach was acquiescing to the defense’s invocation of Kastigar v. U.S., another landmark decision by the U.S. Supreme Court.21 The Kastigar holding established that if a criminal defendant has previously been granted immunity, a prosecutor has to build a “firewall” between the defendant’s prior testimony and any new investigation of criminal charges leading to an indictment. The ruling later became known colloquially as the “Oliver North defense” after it was used by Lieutenant Colonel North during the Iran-Contra scandal.22

  North, whose attorney had arranged immunity for him during the nationally televised Iran-Contra hearings, was thus protected from conviction in the case built by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, whose memoir of that 1980s scandal was called Firewall.23

  Now, Hynes’s chief prosecutors on the case, Monique Ferrell and Kevin Richardson, had to affirm under oath that they had read neither DeVecchio’s compelled statement nor his 1997 testimony as they prepared the prosecution’s case.24

  Problems with Sinagra and Sobel

  But before the DA’s office even got to a Kastigar hearing in August, Kings County prosecutors experienced two massive setbacks in the parallel cases relating to the Patrick Porco homicide. John Sinagra, a.k.a. “Johnny Loads,” accused in the Porco slaying, had pled not guilty on the day of DeVecchio’s arraignment.25 He was scheduled to go to trial before Lin, in June 2007.

  But in early May, a twelve-year-old file came to light that threatened the case. Under New York law, which forces prosecutors to act with “due diligence” in filing murder charges, Sinagra’s lawyer argued that an informant had come forward years earlier who had named Sinagra as a suspect, and the DA hadn’t acted on that information quickly enough.26

  In response to that allegation, former NYPD detective Tommy Dades had to file a sworn affidavit. Back in 1995, Dades had investigated the murder of Joey Scarpa, Greg Sr.’s son by Linda Schiro, who was killed by rival drug dealers. In the affidavit, Dades stated that while debriefing John Novoa, an associate of the younger Scarpa, Novoa had effectively fingered Joey for the Porco hit.

  “Novoa did not mention defendant Sinagra to me,” Dades testified under oath.27 It was not until he was investigating the DeVecchio case in 1995, Dades stated, that he learned of Sinagra’s possible link to Porco’s death.

  But on April 20, 2007, at a Sinagra pretrial hearing, the DA’s office suddenly came forward with a document they said had been “discovered” the night before. It indicated that an informant did, in fact, name Sinagra as a suspect during a debriefing in 1995.28 The question was, why hadn’t Hynes’s office come forward with it earlier?

  At another hearing in mid-May, an angry Judge Reichbach said that he was “incredulous” and “flabbergasted” that the Kings County DA’s office “co
uld have information on a mob-related shooting and it just disappears into the ether.”29

  The very next day, under the headline “DeVecchio Cop ‘Tryst’ Bombshell,” Sinagra’s lawyer Joseph Giametta charged that investigator Dades, already under fire on the due diligence issue, “had a relationship with Little Linda Schiro in the summer of 2005.” Judge Reichbach quickly sustained a DA’s objection to that allegation, and the New York Post reported that Little Linda denied the charge. In fact, she insisted that she would take the witness stand to say so under oath.30 But at that point, with the multiple staff and evidence problems that had surfaced since the first of the year, Charles Hynes’s office seemed to be back on its heels.

  By late May, a flurry of finger-pointing had begun. Assistant DA Kevin Richardson blamed the misplaced document in the Sinagra case on the NYPD, alleging that the Porco murder investigation had been closed by the police department back in 1995 “for statistical purposes”31—in other words, to get an unsolved homicide off the books. Judge Reichbach called the closure “not only inexplicable but inexcusable.”32

  On June 3, the lawyer for Craig Sobel, who had been charged in the Dominick Masseria slaying, pursued the Sinagra defense, arguing that the police had information linking Sobel to the church-steps hit ten years earlier but had failed to act.33

  A few days later, the DA sheepishly offered to let Sinagra cop a plea to a reduced prison sentence of two to six years—but the defendant passed, feeling confident of his chances at a dismissal.34 Finally, on June 12, Judge Reichbach declared that “negligence [was] not good cause” for the delay in charging Sinagra and threw out the cold-case murder charges, freeing him after fifteen months behind bars.35 Underscoring the setback for Hynes’s office, already plagued by serious personnel issues, the headline in the New York Post said it all: “Slay Rap KO’d in ‘Mob Fed’ Shocker. Judge Blasts ‘Too Late’ Cops and Brooklyn DA.”