Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (63 page)

Over the years, Scarpa was paid $158,000 by the FBI for his services. He had agreed to work for the bureau with the provisos that his identity would never be disclosed to anyone outside of the bureau—even to prosecutors—and that he would never be called as a trial witness. It is a type of agreement used by law-enforcement agencies with informants they consider extremely important.

Before the war, in 1988, when Scarpa was fifty-eight, he underwent emergency surgery for a bleeding ulcer and received a pint of blood from a member of his crew who later died of AIDS. Three years later, in the midst of the war, Scarpa was diagnosed as suffering from the illness. He lost fifty pounds, became emaciated and easily fatigued. But ignoring failing health, he supervised his crew with an iron hand, eagerly hunting for Orena foes. Although Orena’s men were unable to clip Scarpa, his luck faded. On December 29, 1992, near his home in Brooklyn, he was shot in the left eye in a dispute over a narcotics transaction unrelated to the Colombo battles. By 1993, blind in one eye, bald, and emaciated, he was unrecognizable as the terrifying warlord he had once been.

At the outset of the conflict, the Colombo family was relatively secure. Indeed, the government knew little about the scope of the family’s expanding illicit operations. Scarpa’s information had mainly provided the FBI valuable intelligence about the borgata’s chain of command, vague information about deals that were being engineered, and pejorative gossip about his Mafia enemies. But generally Scarpa withheld information that could lead to indictments on serious charges against anyone in the gang.

“We had very little on the Colombo family,” admitted John Gleeson, the prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District who was then in charge of the organized-crime section. “We were struggling along, there was nothing big in the works.”

Gleeson, like other federal lawyers in New York, was unaware of Scarpa’s involvement with the FBI, when in 1990 he assigned another prosecutor in Brooklyn, George A. Stamboulidis, to start making inroads against the Colombos. Stamboulidis got a break when a Colombo wannabe, Michael Maffatore, desperate for leniency on narcotics charges, began talking about an unsolved murder in the family. Wearing a concealed tape recorder, Maffatore obtained
small victories for prosecutors by implicating other wannabes in the homicide. It was a start, but it was more like a pinprick than a weighty blow to the Colombos’ superstructure.

To stir up more action, Stamboulidis bombarded accountants, and other supposedly legitimate people known to be working for the family, with subpoenas to testify before a grand jury. Counting on the fear of perjury to loosen tongues of the family’s civilian auxiliaries, Stamboulidis hoped the subpoenas would become building blocks for evidence against the main targets: Vic Orena; his two mobster sons, Victor junior and John; and Carmine Persico’s son, Little Allie Boy, who, like his father, was believed to be playing a big hand in the gang while in prison.

The strategy paid off just as the internal fighting flared up. A subpoenaed accountant, Kenneth Geller, cooperated with inside information about the Orenas’ loan-sharking rings and Little Allie Boy’s seamy business ventures. Fear drove Geller into the welcoming arms of the prosecutors. He was paying the Colombo family $11,000 a week in vigorish for loans of more than $1 million. Seeking to strike it rich, he had borrowed the cash from loan sharks for investments that failed. To meet his weekly installments to the Mob, Geller dug himself into a deeper hole by embezzling money from legitimate clients. With subpoenas flying, Geller thought the Colombos would bump him off as a possible informer as soon as it became evident that indictments were imminent. His only option was moving quickly to help the government by wearing a wire to obtain evidence against the mobsters, and then seek anonymity and security in the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Between November 1991 and October 1993, twelve gangsters and an innocent teenaged employee in a bagel shop went to their graves. At least a dozen Colombo
warriors
and five passersby were wounded. Among the dead was Joseph Scopo, an Orena supporter, son of Ralph Scopo, the union leader convicted in the Commission case. The absurdity of the shoot-outs was highlighted by Persico gunmen apologizing to the Genovese borgata for mistakenly
killing
one of their inactive soldiers, seventy-eight-year-old Gaetano “Tommy Scars” Amato, who made the mistake of visiting an Orena social club when a Persico raiding party attacked.

The warfare simplified the government’s efforts to decimate the family through convictions. Colombo members and associates flipped and became cooperating witnesses to avoid long sentences after being arrested on racketeering and murder conspiracy charges. Others defected out of fear they would be
slain. At least twelve members became government witnesses, including Carmine Sessa, the consigliere, and two capos.

Aided by the accountant Geller’s testimony and by Mob traitors, the government made its biggest catch by snaring Victor Orena, whose quest to become a godfather was his undoing. He was arrested on April Fool’s Day in 1992, hiding in the home of his mistress, equipped with an arsenal of four loaded shotguns, two assault rifles, and six handguns. Before the year ended, Orena was found guilty on RICO charges, of murder, conspiracy to murder, and large-scale loan-sharking. The sentence for Little Vic, at age fifty-eight, was life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

A total of sixty-eight capos, soldiers, and associates from both sides were rounded up and indicted as a result of the two years of gunfire, internal wrangles, and Stamboulidis’s grand jury summonses. Like their leader, Little Vic, high-level Orena warriors and helpers were convicted, mainly for murder conspiracy, racketeering, and loan-sharking. Also imprisoned were Little Vic’s sons, Victor junior and John, and Tom Petrizzo, the construction racketeer who pilfered a small fortune in steel from the West Side Highway. Dennis Pappas, Orena’s financial guide, went to prison for his large-scale finaglings.

From the Persico camp, sentenced to long prison terms were Carmine’s younger brother, Ted; his cousin Andy Russo; and his strongman, Hugh McIntosh. The oldest Persico brother, Alphonse “Allie Boy,” died before the war at age sixty-one, in 1989, while serving a twenty-five-year sentence for extortion.

The most mysterious combatant finally convicted as a byproduct of the fighting was Gregory Scarpa, the Persicos’ ruthless capo and FBI mole. Federal prosecutors, unaware of his double life as mobster and informer, brought racketeering charges against him for the first time in his life. The federal indictment came only after the Brooklyn DA’s office grabbed him on a state gun-possession charge. Even after his indictments, Scarpa continued to provide information secretly to DeVecchio in the flickering hope of being spared yet one more time. But his double-dealing tricks were played out, and in 1993 he pleaded guilty to multiple federal counts of racketeering.

Scarpa’s court sentencing was closed to the public. There was real fear by the prosecution and the defense that revelations about his undercover work would mark him as a high-level squealer and probably endanger his life in prison. At the secret hearing, he made a final pitch for leniency on the basis of his liaisons with the FBI. It failed. He was sentenced to ten years by Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who described his duplicity and violent acts “as worse than those
of a wild animal.” A year later, Scarpa died of complications from AIDS in a prison hospital. He was sixty-six.

Scarpa’s tangled relations with the Mob and the government became a searing legal headache for prosecutors and created another casualty: his handler, FBI Agent Lynn DeVecchio, the Colombo Squad supervisor. News of Scarpa’s extraordinary FBI alliance seeped out to lawyers representing the Orena faction. At a racketeering and murder trial in 1995 of seven Orena members, embarrassed prosecutors admitted that the relationship between Scarpa and DeVecchio had compromised their case. The government conceded there was circumstantial evidence that DeVecchio had disclosed confidential information to Scarpa. Prosecutors were compelled to turn over to defense lawyers internal complaints from other agents that DeVecchio presumedly provided highly sensitive information to the mobster about the identities of Colombo turncoats who were secretly aiding the FBI. DeVecchio’s critics alleged that he had helped Scarpa evade arrests and had given him tips on how to track down Orena soldiers during the 1991-1993 struggle.

After
reviewing
classified FBI reports, some prosecutors suspected that DeVecchio had tipped Scarpa that his Wimpy Boys Club had been bugged by the Secret Service during a counterfeit-credit-card investigation, and also alerted him in 1987 that his son, Gregory junior, was about to be arrested on federal drug-trafficking charges.

Three FBI agents who worked under DeVecchio on the Colombo Squad testified about his behavior during the war. Their suspicions grew after he refused to arrest Scarpa in 1992, although two defectors implicated the mobster in the murder of an Orena partisan. Agent Christopher Favo asserted that DeVecchio was openly partial to the Persico band. On May 22, 1992, Favo walked into De-Vecchio’s office to report that two Orena members had been shot.

“As I started into that he slapped his hand on the desk and he said, ‘We’re going to win this thing,’ and he seemed excited about it.” Favo recalled. “He seemed like he didn’t know who we were—the FBI. It seemed like a line had been blurred … I thought there was something wrong. He was compromised. He had lost track of who he was.”

The accusations were unprecedented. No other FBI agent had previously been publicly accused of helping a mafioso commit crimes and covering up for him.

DeVecchio vehemently denied that he had spilled secrets to Scarpa or had undermined investigations of the Colombo family. An agent with a distinguished record, he resigned his $105,000-a-year job soon after the Justice Department found insufficient cause to prosecute him for misconduct. “The bottom line is that I never gave Scarpa any confidential information about the war or any other matter,” DeVecchio insisted in an interview. He attributed the agitation over his relationship with Scarpa to agents and prosecutors inexperienced in organized-crime investigations, and who misinterpreted justified and legal techniques in dealing with informers.

As for his comment to Favo, “We are going to win this thing,” DeVecchio added, “What I meant was that the fighting inside the Colombo family was going to help us—the FBI—win the war against the Colombos by providing us with tons of defectors and intelligence.”

A defender of DeVecchio, Damon Taylor, the agent who preceded him as the head of the Colombo Squad and who was familiar with Gregory Scarpa’s history, tersely summed up the gangster’s value to the bureau: “He was the crown jewel, for all his faults. I would give credibility to anything he said.”

Pouncing on the Scarpa revelations, defense lawyers for the Orena group tried turning the tables on the prosecution, accusing DeVecchio of inciting the war to manufacture evidence against Orena supporters. They contended that DeVecchio supplied Scarpa with information to help him kill opponents. In effect, the lawyers argued, Orena defendants, on trial for conspiring to kill their Persico enemies, had justifiably acted in self defense against the combined murderous plotting of Scarpa and DeVecchio. DeVecchio, according to the attorneys’ theme, deliberately encouraged crimes rather than preventing them.

The defense arguments partially succeeded. In a setback for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District, nineteen Orena faction defendants accused of gangland murder conspiracies were acquitted, or had their convictions reversed. Faced with spending the rest of his days in a cell, a desperate Vic Orena latched on belatedly to “the Scarpa Defense” theory in a bid for a new trial. The ploy did not work for him. His appeal to overturn his conviction was rejected and his one hundred-year sentence was affirmed by appeals judges.

For most Orena warriors the Scarpa imbroglio was a temporary courtroom victory. Plentiful evidence, and traitors, had been generated by the Colombo family war to convict them on other charges, and they eventually joined their leader, Little Vic, in prison.

Scarpa’s double life ended with a judicial rebuke of the FBI and Lynn
DeVecchio. Federal District Court Judge Charles P. Sifton, examining evidence in several requests by Orena-faction defendants for new trials, chided the agent directly and, indirectly, the bureau. “Scarpa emerges as sinister and violent and at the same time manipulative and deceptive with everyone, including DeVecchio,” the judge said. “DeVecchio emerges as arrogant, stupid, or easily manipulated but, at the same time, caught up in the complex and difficult task of trying to make the best use of Scarpa’s information to bring the war to a close.”

Scarpa’s protégé Lawrence Mazza, forty years his junior, testifying as a defector against former companions in the Colombo family, sketched a complex portrait of his Mafia mentor. Mazza said that after contracting AIDS, Scarpa encouraged him to sleep with his young mistress, Linda, the mother of two of his children. “He told me he wouldn’t take anything away from Linda that she wanted. He loved her too much and he knew how she felt about me and how I felt about her.”

Describing how Scarpa trained him in the arts of loan-sharking, bookmaking, and murder, Mazza testified that the capo exulted in clipping Orena opponents. In a drive-by killing, Mazza said, he used a shotgun and Scarpa fired a revolver to bring down one of their prey. As Scarpa blasted rounds into the face of the dying victim, he shouted triumphantly, “This one’s for Carmine.”

Dynasty