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

by Peter Lance

But in the ninety-six pages of Cover Up devoted to the Scarpa-DeVecchio scandal, the so-called immunized testimony was referenced only a handful of times and always from court pleadings or open-source news stories.

  Only one of the four murders in the DA’s indictment was even mentioned in my book, and in a single paragraph:

  On May 22, 1992, Scarpa Sr. killed rival soldier Larry Lampasi with a shotgun; another Orena loyalist was wounded. When Special Agent Chris Favo reported both attacks to DeVecchio, he laughed, slapped his desk with his open hand, and exclaimed “We’re going to win this thing.”80

  As noted, that very line turned up in the finale for the HBO mob series The Sopranos; DeVecchio even used it for the title of his book.81

  “Ninety-nine percent of Cover Up has nothing to do with DeVecchio’s immunized state or hearing testimony,” says Flora Edwards. “Years after many of these murders were committed, to claim that but for an investigative reporter’s enterprise work, DeVecchio would not have been indicted, or that the Brooklyn DA, with a grand jury, didn’t have sufficient independent means of building the case . . . is patently ridiculous.”82

  In late July 2007, lawyers retained by HarperCollins on my behalf filed a motion to quash the subpoena from Thompson Hine and a second subpoena I’d received from the DA. The motion cited the New York shield law, which protects reporters from having to give up sources or material uncovered in the course of an investigation.*

  On August 9, I appeared at the Kastigar hearing. While I came prepared to face jail for contempt rather than give up a single confidential source, my lawyers reached an agreement with Judge Reichbach for me to testify on a limited basis without having to betray a source or turn over a single document. The Kastigar hearing proved to be a precursor to what would soon happen at trial.

  Warm-Up to the Main Event

  In addition to me and forensic investigator Angela Clemente, reporter Jerry Capeci had been subpoenaed to testify at the hearing. On August 2, an article in the Daily News, where Capeci’s “Gang Land” column had run for many years, reported that he would fight the subpoena, in which the DeVecchio defense team was seeking “conversations between Capeci and Scarpa’s girlfriend Linda Schiro.”

  In court pleadings, Capeci reportedly stated that he’d promised Schiro in 1996 to keep conversations about her life with Greg Sr. “strictly confidential.”83 Ultimately Capeci was never compelled to appear, because Judge Reichbach granted his request to quash the subpoena.84

  When Noel Downey took the stand at the hearing on August 8, he admitted that he’d read parts of Cover Up. But he denied ever reading DeVecchio’s compelled statement or his immunized court testimony.85

  Four days later, I testified that Lin’s immunized statements were never discussed during my 2005 meeting with Downey and Terra. I characterized the meeting as “part of my effort as a reporter to learn as much as I could about what may or may not have been the status of [the DeVecchio] investigation for purposes of journalism.”86 On cross-examination, Mark Bederow asked me if I’d ever discussed with Downey any of the four murders in the indictment and I confirmed that I hadn’t.87

  After listening to the testimony of another nine witnesses, including Angela Clemente and Tommy Dades, Judge Reichbach decided to reserve judgment on the Kastigar issue until after the trial. But the hearing proved to be a major success for Thompson Hine, because it ended up costing the DA its second and third “seats”—the two assistant DAs who were scheduled to try the case with lead prosecutor Michael Vecchione.

  In the course of the Kastigar proceedings, Monique Ferrell and Kevin Richardson, who had replaced Noel Downey, admitted that in preparing for the hearing they had read Lin’s controversial 1995 compelled statement and 1987 testimony. So rather than face a possible negative ruling on the Kastigar issue at trial’s end, they recused themselves.88 “In order to protect against any problems down the line,” said the DA’s spokesman Jerry Schmetterer, “we volunteered to make some changes in the prosecution team.”89

  Turning Down Gaspipe’s Offer?

  In a sign of how the Mafia Cops case intersected with the DeVecchio prosecution, and how it might have affected Assistant DA Vecchione’s attitude toward the case, Anthony Casso told me that he’d sent a letter to the Brooklyn DA’s office offering to testify about the intelligence he says he got from Scarpa Sr. via his FBI contacting agent.

  “It’s difficult to see how that wouldn’t have been a huge plus for the DA,” says Flora Edwards, “getting corroboration on the leaks from a living family boss. Remember how successfully the Feds had used Al D’Arco, who was an acting Lucchese boss just like Gaspipe.”90 But when I asked Casso what response, if any, he got from Vecchione, he said, “He never answered me.”91 I made several attempts to confirm Casso’s allegation with Vecchione, but he never got back to me.

  Casso says that if he had been allowed to testify at Lin’s trial, he was prepared to tie DeVecchio to other leaks. He told me that beyond the identity of Jimmy Hydell—whose murder he confessed to Ed Bradley—“Greg [Scarpa Sr.] got more information from DeVecchio. He got the locations of other people, where they were living.” That revelation corroborated the disclosures Valerie Caproni and Ellen Corcella had made back in 1995 relating to leaks DeVecchio may have made to “34.”

  “We’ll never know,” says Andrew Orena, “whether or not Casso would have helped the prosecution of Lin DeVecchio. But you have to wonder whether Mike Vecchione was worried about those charges of a potential conflict with his book deal on the Mafia Cops and he didn’t want to muddy the waters by risking bringing the Cops case into the DeVecchio trial.”92

  In the late summer of 2007, as the DA’s office scrambled to prepare for what would soon become the biggest murder trial in Brooklyn Supreme Court in years, Judge Reichbach postponed the trial date to October 1 to give Monique Ferrell and Kevin Richardson’s replacements time to prepare.

  But on October 1, the next major shock occurred in the case. Lin DeVecchio waived his right to a jury trial. Now Gustin Reichbach—who’d been a member of the radical Students for a Democratic Society in the 1960s—would have sole responsibility for determining the former SSA’s fate. The judge himself even seemed surprised, admitting from the bench that in 1969 the FBI had kept a file on him in which he’d been referred to as “one of the most dangerous people” in SDS.93 He went even further, trying to talk the defense out of their decision.94 But Lin DeVecchio, who appeared at the hearing, told Reichbach he was confident that he would be impartial.

  Gaveling down, Judge Reichbach set the new start date for October 15.

  PART V

  Chapter 41

  AGENT OF DEATH

  As the trial began, the New York Post’s page-one headline read “Agent of Death: FBI ‘Rogue’ on Trial.” The double-truck story inside focused on the DA’s opening references to the Mary Bari murder and how Greg Scarpa Sr. had allegedly made light of it with Lin DeVecchio. “Mob Mirth at Moll’s Slay” read the banner headline above the piece, which carried the subhead “‘Crooked Fed’ & ‘Grim Reaper’ Joked.”1

  The sidebar column, by veteran Post crime reporter Steve Dunleavy, was captioned “Dirt Bag Is Grime of Century.” In the column, Dunleavy quoted retired detective Joe Coffey, who once ran the NYPD’s Organized Crime Task Force:

  (New York Post)

  “It was no secret in the ’80s that DeVecchio was on the take from [Colombo crime-family mobster Gregory] Scarpa,” Joe Coffey said. “He was a loudmouth walking around with pinky rings and, even in those days, $2,000 suits. I worked on the same cases as he did, and a lot of us and other feds knew about him, too.”2

  Coffey is something of an NYPD legend. Among other career benchmarks, he led the successful hunt for David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” serial killer.3 In the course of DeVecchio’s trial, the defense would produce a memo from Lin, dated September 4, 1984, in which Scarpa reportedly called the celebrated Coffey a “bad cop” with Mafia ties.4

  That memo was not among
the 1,153 Scarpa files released to me by the FBI, and Coffey, who is credited with solving eighty mob murders in his career, called the charge “laughable,” insisting that Scarpa’s allegations were “completely disproved” after an investigation.5 In a subsequent interview with me for this book, Coffey called DeVecchio “one of the dirtiest FBI agents [he’d] ever met.”6 Still, Coffey’s allegations about DeVecchio, cited in Dunleavy’s column, and the defense’s attack on him are some indication of how this murder trial turned into a bare-knuckle proceeding from day one.

  The trial opened to a courtroom so packed with observers that members of the press were relegated to the empty jury box. Facing the bench on the left side was Team DeVecchio, consisting of the defendant and three lawyers from Thompson Hine: lead counsel Douglas Grover, Mark Bederow, and Ginnine Fried, a young associate who went on to work as assistant chief counsel at the Department of Homeland Security.7 On the People’s side was Racket Bureau chief Mike Vecchione, along with Assistant DAs Laura Neubauer, Jacqueline Linares, and Joe Alexis—the latter three all recent additions to the prosecution team after Monique Ferrell and Kevin Richardson were forced to withdraw over the Kastigar issue.

  The rows in the galley not filled with reporters were occupied by more than a dozen former agents from the Friends of Lin DeVecchio, as well as a series of Mafia buffs, Brooklyn Supreme Court watchers, and family members related to victims of the third Colombo war. The expansive blond walls of the modern courtroom were decorated with framed pictures from the Civil Rights era, including a photograph of Paul Robeson, the African American singer who was blacklisted during the McCarthy years for his left-leaning political views. Robeson had graduated from Columbia Law School, which was also the alma mater of the man on the bench, Gustin Reichbach. Throughout the proceedings, while he demonstrated a steel-trap legal mind, Reichbach, who died in 2012 from pancreatic cancer,8 brought an unmistakable panache to the trial. Each day he came into court dressed flamboyantly, with striped shirts and bright ties under his judge’s robes. Behind him on the wall, next to the words “In God We Trust,” was a black plastic frame with the scales of justice lit up in red and blue neon lights.

  On trial for crimes that carried four sentences of twenty-five years, the sixty-seven-year-old defendant had aged significantly since the 1980s, when he’d reopened Greg Scarpa. In those days, Lin DeVecchio had had a full head of curly hair and a drooping mustache. Known as a dapper dresser, he wore expensive suits with pocket squares and monogrammed shirts,9 and occasionally sported a gold bracelet and a wiseguy-style pinky ring.10 Now he was clean-shaven. His hair had mostly turned to gray and he wore it in a military-style brush cut.

  In contrast to the swaggering image he’d projected as a senior organized crime supervisory agent, DeVecchio now maintained the demeanor of an accountant, in conservative suits and understated ties. While he drove a Harley-Davidson back home in Florida, here in Brooklyn, on trial for his life, he came across as a kind of victim.

  The “first seat” for the DA was Mike Vecchione. A short, mustached bulldog of a man, he’d been off for some time during the summer after back-to-back prosecutions, so the job of delivering the opening statement fell to Joe Alexis, a big, barrel-chested assistant DA who’d recently been assigned to the case. As he got up to begin, the unspoken question was whether his office could overcome the Kastigar challenge and convict the former supervisory special agent, who had already been twice immunized by the Justice Department. But if he was worried, Alexis didn’t show it:

  During trial we will prove beyond a reasonable doubt, that on September twenty-fifth, nineteen eighty-four, Greg Scarpa killed Mary Bari here in Brooklyn, and the defendant helped him do it. That on September seventeenth, nineteen eighty-seven, Greg Scarpa killed Joseph DeDomenico here in Brooklyn, and the defendant helped him do it. That on May twenty-seventh, nineteen-ninety, Greg Scarpa killed Patrick Porco in Brooklyn, and the defendant helped him do it. And on May twenty-second, nineteen ninety-two, Greg Scarpa killed Lorenzo Lampasi here in Brooklyn, and the defendant helped him do it.11

  Alexis told the court that Scarpa “ran the most bloodthirsty of crews” and that he “lived a double life.” He wasn’t just an informant, said Alexis, but “a special informant. Because rather than working for the FBI, Scarpa had the defendant, FBI agent Roy Lindley DeVecchio, working for him.”12

  That was the essence of the DA’s case: not that Lin had ever pulled the trigger himself but that, by allegedly leaking intel to Scarpa Sr. over the years and keeping him out of prison, DeVecchio had become his enabler—his effective partner in crime.

  At the time of trial, not being privy to the 1,153 pages of secret “Scarpa files” from the Bureau—which proved the killer’s Machiavellian strategy to ignite the third Colombo war—the DA adopted the Feds’ explanation for the conflict: that Vic Orena had moved to “seize . . . control” of the family and that “Greg Scarpa and his men sided with the Persico faction.”13

  Continuing his opening statement, Alexis promised that Larry Mazza would sit on the witness stand to document the war murders in the indictment.14 Later he signaled that Linda Schiro, “the love of Greg Scarpa’s life,” would also testify.15 But he never mentioned the name of the DA’s true “star witness,” Greg Scarpa Jr., who had been waiting patiently in the MCC for more than ten months to reveal what he knew about his father’s relationship with “Dello” or “D,” as he’d known DeVecchio. Detective Tommy Dades, who had resigned from the DA’s office, told me that after Noel Downey’s departure the prosecutor’s office had seemed to neglect Junior; now it seemed that, for unknown reasons, they were abandoning him as a witness.

  When it was Doug Grover’s chance to frame the case for his client, he described Scarpa, DeVecchio’s coveted TE source, as an “ugly” and “miserable human being,” but an “informant with a fuel that made the engine of all these [Mafia] investigations run.”

  Citing the landmark Mafia Commission case, Grover reminded the court that those investigations, driven by Scarpa’s intel, later turned into “prosecutions and convictions” for the government.16 Early in his opening, as if sensing that the case would rise and fall on Scarpa’s gumar, Grover tried to preempt Linda Schiro’s testimony, dismissing it in advance as “a fantasy.”17 For some time, the DA’s office had been paying Schiro a fee—not unlike the FBI’s multiyear stipend to Greg Sr.—and now Grover used that to attack her credibility.

  What you are going to see on this witness stand [in Schiro], is someone who is so desperate and so financially driven, that . . . she will say anything for the two thousand dollars a month the District Attorney has been giving her for the last two years. . . . She is a person who cannot be trusted.18

  Moving on to Chris Favo and the allegations against DeVecchio during the OPR, Grover conceded that “perhaps DeVecchio [became] too careless . . . in his dealings with Scarpa.” But he insisted that, as a result of that OPR probe, “there were no administrative sanctions, there were no criminal sanctions, and life went on.”19

  Still working to undermine Schiro, Grover noted that “the one thing that came out of the [OPR] investigation in 1994 and 1995 and sticks with every witness today with the exception of Linda . . . no one knew who [Scarpa’s] law enforcement source was, no one, not Larry Mazza, not no one.”20

  “As far as the defense was concerned,” says attorney Flora Edwards, “if Schiro’s credibility could be seriously impeached it would be game over.”21 Indeed, in his opening statement—which ran for forty pages of trial transcript—Douglas Grover devoted more than thirty pages to an attack on Schiro, whom he described as

  the foundation of this case [and] someone who you will see is patently untrustworthy, who has her own agendas, and frankly who is capable of concocting any story. She’s not credible. And no human being, Your Honor, Lin DeVecchio or anybody, deserves to be sitting here as a result of the stories that this woman is making up.22

  The Second String

  The trial of Lin DeVecchio, accused b
y DA Joe Hynes of committing “the most stunning example of official corruption [he’d] ever seen,”23 was about to commence with its first witness.

  But just like the prosecution team itself—the late-term replacements who filled in for Assistant DAs Downey, Ferrell, and Richardson—the lead witness, NYPD detective sergeant Fred Santoro, was a stand-in for Detective Tommy Dades, the chief investigator on the case, who had abruptly quit five months earlier.24

  Worse for the DA’s office, and proof that the Kastigar sword of Damocles still hung over the proceedings, Grover argued that Santoro’s testimony would be “tainted,” since he had sat with Dades through part of DeVecchio’s 1997 immunized testimony during the Vic Orena hearing.25

  Noting that this was a nonjury bench trial and that he could “separate” out the Kastigar issues, Judge Reichbach allowed Santoro to be sworn. But for the next several hours Santoro offered little more than a boilerplate primer on the organization of Cosa Nostra—with zero testimony about DeVecchio’s alleged connections to any of the murders in the indictment. The closest he got was describing the players in the Colombo family, using an organizational chart prepared by the DA. It was the kind of general testimony Lin DeVecchio himself had given in countless LCN trials, including Vic Orena’s.

  The next day, when Grover started cross-examining him, Santoro admitted that during the previous day’s testimony he had confused the Commission case with the “Windows” case, a separate prosecution of Lucchese family members that involved Gaspipe Casso.26 Santoro then admitted that this was the first time he had ever testified as “an organized crime expert” and that his familiarity with the DeVecchio case came “from reading the newspaper.”27

  After developing little or no inculpatory evidence from Santoro, the DA then called FBI agents Ray Andjich and Jeffrey Tomlinson, two of Chris Favo’s colleagues, whose reports about Lin DeVecchio had, in part, prompted the OPR investigation. The Justice Department was apparently concerned enough about what the two agents might say on the stand that it dispatched two attorneys from Washington, Robert S. Tully and Jay F. Kramer, to “observe” them. Tully and Kramer sat in the jury box just a few feet away from the special agents, who were still on active duty.