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True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski.

Good Evening, Good fellow, Capo killer thief, a man so diabolically evil that he ordered his eldest son to murder his closest associate and his youngest son to murder his best friend.

When Greg Scarpa was in his early twenties, he became a good fellow the Prafacci family by swearing a blood oath to the mafia, at the time, the country's largest organized crime syndicate, and for twenty five years he betrayed that oath and the men closest to him.

By acting as a paid informant for the FBI.

He fed America's premier law enforcement agency a steady stream of self serving information, accusing the men who trusted him with their lives of every crime he was himself committing.

During those twenty five years of treachery, Scarpa was a one man crime wave who spent only thirty days behind bars thanks to his status as the FBI's ultimate mafia insider, his standing as a prized informant, freedom to engage in mayhem and murder, knowing he had a virtual license to kill.

Greg SCARPA Legendary Evil is a deep dive that provides fresh insight into scarp malignant personality.

Dyer peels back the layers of myth and misdirection to paint as complete and accurate a picture as possible of a man who murdered his enemies and betrayed his friends, of a bigamist who loved only money, of a feared and reviled man whose destructive appetites knew no bounds.

The book that we're featuring this evening is Greg SCARPA Legendary Evil, The Many Faces of a Mafia Killer, with my special guest author Jonathan Dyer.

Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview.

Jonathan P.

Dyer, Thanks for having me.

Dan, thank you very much.

First off, tell us this very interesting story, the origins of this book.

How you came to write this book, Greg SCARPA Legendary Evil.

Sure, my writing partner Joe Pletto, and I were working on some spec scripts based off of Larry Masa's book The Life, and as we did that, Craig Scarpa was obviously a central character, and writing the scripts we got more and more into factors besides Larry Masa that were crucial to that story.

And at one point Joe suggested that I write a biography to Craig Scarpen and I kind of pushed back.

I hadn't written anything of book length nonfiction.

I've written, you know, graduate school stuff.

I'd written some blog entries about baseball, but nothing book length in terms of nonfiction.

And Joe kept pushing a little, pretty pretty gently, but so finally I said, you know, I'll take a shot at it.

I'll give it, give it a world two plus years of research and writing.

After deciding to go ahead and do that, actually closer to three years, i'd kind of put the project aside.

I had a conversation with another friend of mine, Pete Fairley, and Pete was really very kind and persuasive, saying, you know you should do this, don't give up, keep going, and gave me a little pep talk really when I needed it.

And so at that point, I was in contact with Wild Blue Press and they were kind enough to pick up the book.

And that's really how the book came about.

Let's talk about you call it the beginning lawren Zaga to Brooklyn.

This is Greg scarp of Senior's father's journey from Northeast Italy, a small town, to America's biggest city.

And you talked about that by nineteen ninety there was more Italians that lived in New York City than in Italy, except for the exception of the city of Rome.

To talk about Scarpa's early life, Greg Scarpa's early life, his father Salvatore tell us about their early life in New York.

Sure, they came right around the time of the First World War, and there was this huge attime diaspora to New York, as you point out, and both Scarpus's father and mother emigrated to New York, and they were both pretty young, and they were both very poor.

They married in New York and had five children, fourth of which was Greg Scarpa.

He had three older sisters and one younger brother.

And the documents from the Census Bureau from nineteen thirty nineteen forty really indicate just how poor the Scarpa family was.

They were making virtually no money, just a little bit here and there.

And in fact, Greg Scarpa told his daughter Linda about going around Pauling Cole in Brooklyn in New York when he was about eight years old, to try to make a few bucks with his dad.

And those are the circumstances that Scarpa grew up and very poor, a member of a meteor moderately large Italian immigrant family in a largely Italian immigrant neighborhood.

Scarper went to high school, he finished high school, and at the time that he finished high school, right around the mid forties, the United States was demobilizing and he had to compete for employment with literally millions of other young men coming back from being in the service during World War Two.

You say that he joined the Merchant Marines, but right after that he was being recruited by Charlie Decige los Ario of the Profacci family, one of the five mafia families in New York City.

A virtual prerequisite from membership, though, you had to be a Sicilian.

Tell us how he gets to be involved in the Pafacci family despite not being Sicilian.

Yeah, Dan, that was as you point out after a brief service in the Merchant Marine, which his son Gregory Jr.

Told me about, Scarpa was back in Brooklyn and Tallagero of Cicero or the Cicero I've heard it Browns both ways.

Anyway, Charlie decide kind of took him under his arm there in their neighborhood in Brooklyn, and the Profaci family, unlike the other four families of the New York Mafia, did not have this requirement that you'd be from Sicily or be Sicilian in order to join, and that was sort of a screening, vetting idea that the other families had that you would really understand what this mafia organization Coosonostra was all about if you were from Sicily.

But again the Prafacci family was not concerned with that, which is for Scarpa's you know, you want to call it good fortune at the time was important for him because he wasn't Cecilican, so the Cistero tick him under his wing, and Scarpa by the early nineteen fifties earned his button as a good fellow, which meant he was actually a member.

At first, he was an associate, as people that are originally working with other mafia members are but then he earned his button as a good fellow.

In the early nineteen fifties, you.

Talk about that he was married to Connie Farace or Connie Forrest as she went by, and soon had a daughter named Deborah and then later a son named Gregory Junior.

Greg and Connie met in the late nineteen forties and got married and they started a family, just like lots of people did during those baby boom years, and their four children, one of those was Gregory Junior, and Gregory Junior and the other members of the Scarpett family eventually moved to Staten Island.

Greig was doing well enough to tell a Connie pick out a house, anyhouse you like, and you can fix it up exactly the way you want.

So the family moved out of Brooklyn into Staten Island, and Gregory talks about those years is being really good family years.

They had a pool, they had lots of parties at their house.

They enjoyed where they were living.

As Gregory was growing up, and at the same time, Craig, of course, was increasing his profile in the Profacci family and eventually became a coppo.

By the early nineteen sixties in the profaction family.

So there's this dual nature of Scarpa's life, on the one hand, family man and on the other hand, mafia family man.

And that's proceeding through the nineteen fifties and into the early nineteen sixties.

You talk about in the late fifties, the FBI already had regional offices gathering information on mobsters in their territories and reporting regularly to Washington.

But the FBI, you right, made little progress during the fifties to understand the structure and workings of organized crime.

You talk about Gregory Scarpa's criminal career ever evolving, and then an opportunity for the FBI when they contact Gregory Scarpa and want some information from what is the what are they offering, and how do they approach greg Ley Scarpat.

Yeah, just backing up a little, You're absolutely right about the FBI not really having a clear picture of what was going on with organized crime.

A lot of that had to do with jayger Hoover's own vision that there was no organized prime in the United States.

And once John Kennedy became president and his brother Bobby Kennedy became the Attorney General.

That changed quickly.

John Kennedy, as I note in the book, during one of his speeches on the campaign trail in nineteen sixty, noted that there was organized crime in the United States and it was growing.

A number of initiatives start in the FBI to try to figure out what this organization, the mafia, is all about, and so agents were tasked with trying to get informants within the excuse me, within the mafia to provide them with information.

The FBI in New York, in the New York Office, was looking for Greig Scar his brother Sal in connection with a suspected hijacking.

They believe Sal was involved and they couldn't find him.

So they knew that Craig was his brother from some older arrest records that they had, and they approached Greg and asked them to help them find Sal, and Craig, apparently very politely in exchanges that were completely civil, said I'm not going to help you.

I can't do it.

And they pushed for a little while trying to get him to help, and finally he said, look, fellas, I'm going to get killed if people see me talking to you, So you've got to just leave me alone.

And it seemed like at that point that that was it.

FBI and Greg Scarpa were not going to have any relationship.

But Scarpa had a change of heart and he approached the FBI and said, essentially, what do you want to know?

It's very interesting that the FBI had an issue a program almost at the same time called the Top Echelon Criminal Informant Program or TECHI as its short form designated, and they wanted and were interested in gaining information.

So in that regard, what's Greg Scarpa rule with the FBI.

Yeah, that program, as I read the FBI documents, grew out of what was originally called a top hoodlum program.

The TECI program was a little more sophisticated, and again the FBI was trying to get out of the darkness that they existed in with respect to information about the mafia.

And once Greg Scarpa decided that he was going to cooperate with the FBI, not so much to half his brother arrested, but to provide the FBI with the information that they were interested in about bigger picture FBI mafia activity.

Once he decided to go ahead and do that, the amount of information that he provided very quickly was just enormous.

He provided information about the history of the mafia, the history of the mafia in the United States.

He provided information about their ceremonies, about their rules and regulations, about their dues and don'ts I mean.

He provided information about their structure, about their organizational structure, what a papo was, what a boss was, what the boss of bosses, who that was.

He provided them with a wealth of information that was, it appears from the documents, was really brand new to the FBI.

They were very excited about this new contact, Greg Scarpa, who was providing him with them with all this information.

From from Scarpu's point of view, it seems to me that scarp was after two things, and one was money, because the FBI was paying him for this information, and money was really the only thing that Greg Scarpa really loved in his life.

And protection, protection from incarceration, from being arrested, from being tried, convicted, and incarcerated.

So the two sides really had something that they specifically wanted and it paid off for both of them.

Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.

What you haven't mentioned is that Gregory Scarpa said he was a coppo in the Profacci family, meaning the highest member, the boss in the Pafacci family.

There was some dispute on that claim, wasn't it.

Sharp is self reporting to the FBI with regard to the structure the Profacci family, he included himself as a coppo.

And what we find later is that Scarpa, when Joe Colombo became the boss of the Prafacci family, Carpo was no longer a coppo.

When Prafaci died in nineteen sixty two, the heads of the other families in New York were really interested in having some younger leadership in at the head of what became the Columbo family, and Joe Colombo was younger for a boss at the time, and as I recall, in his mid forties.

And Joe Colombo had that same attitude that he was going to try to inject youthfulness into the coppo structure of the Colombo family.

And so Scarpa fully appoint expected to be appointed a coppo under Joe Colombo.

But it didn't happen.

And if it had happened, at least my reading of the documents is that it would have been a reappointment since he had been a coppo and self reported as a coppo under the Profacci family.

What happened instead was, according to Gregory Junior, greg Senior became part of this very close circle of Colombo advisors, Colombo friends, just this inner circle for Joe Colombo.

And again according to Gregory, as a result of that, he had more power in the family than he would have had as a coppo with respect to his closeness to Joe Colombo.

And so we don't see all of these years that he's operating in the Columbo family.

We don't see greg as a coppo, but as a good fellow.

You take us to nineteen sixty two and back to greg Scarpus's personal life.

He began to court a teen despite being married a team from Brooklyn, Linda Diana, who was seventeen years old and he was thirty four at the time.

She became eventually his mistress or as they referred to him as Gumar, and this relationship, as you write, lasted until his death.

They lived together for thirty years and had two children, and for all intents and purposes, husband and wife.

Tell us a little bit about more about this relationship while he is married.

Yeah, he never divorced Connie.

He he bought a horse farm for her in Lakewood, New Jersey and moved her out there.

And this was after he had started having an affair with Linda Diana later Linda Schiro and the good Fellow ethic, if you want to call it, that almost required a powerful mafia figure to have a gumar a mistress, so this was not at all unusual, especially even though he was married.

So that relationship began, as you point out, in the early nineteen sixties, when Scarpa was about twice Linda Sharra's age.

She was actually a minor at the time, and Linda Schiro Linda Diana at the time was already very familiar with the mob.

She lived in Brooklyn.

She'd been around gangsters really from a very young age.

Her her grandmother ran numbers for the mob in Brooklyn, and she dated a mobster for a while before she had met Greg scarp In fact, she was dating him while she first became involved with Greg Scarpa.

So she was very familiar with the mob life and as she said many times quite frankly, when people asked her if she was afraid of Greg Scarpa if she was concerned about her own safety.

She said, look, I admired the guys.

I was thrilled by it.

I wasn't afraid at all.

And that, as you point out, that relationship with Linda Schirow eventually blossomed into Greg and Linda getting a place together and then Linda having two children by Greg Scarpa, a son and a daughter in reverse order.

That the daughter was first and that was Linda Little Linda as the calder, and then Joy Scarper was a couple of years later, all the while Scarpa maintained his marriage.

Very very interesting though, that Linda Diana has a plan, has a plan with Gregory Scarpa and to use to duke to fool Charlie Shiro tell us about this plan to have children, and Charlie Shiro not to be the wiser.

Yeah.

When Linda, well, for most of her life, I suppose she considers herself a devout Catholic and she didn't want to have children out of wedlock, and scarp was already married, so she didn't feel that she could have children with him, and her children could be baptized in the Catholic Church.

So what she came up with was the scheme to get married to this guy, Charlie, and then still have Scarpa's children, but try to pretend and deceive Charlie that they were his, and they were married, the children could be baptized and Linda would have be able to fulfill those goals of having children by Greg Scarpa and the children being baptized in the Catholic church.

Charlie eventually caught on, particularly when a caregiver made a comment about how much Joey looked like Greg Scarpa.

Charlie eventually caught on, and there was a divorce and Linda and Greg moved in together permanently shortly after that.

Just you know, when Linda first brought this idea, the scheme to Greg, he thought it was nuts.

He just said that's crazy.

But eventually he said, okay, let's go ahead and do that, and that's exactly what they did.

You're right that the Joe Prafacci, head of the Prafacci family, dies in June nineteen sixty two at sixty four years old.

Scarpa tells his handlers that the First Columbo War was in full swing Pifacci Gallo feud otherwise that we be call.

Right the Gallow brothers, there are three of them.

Larry Gallow was kind of the brains did outfit, and then Joey was a little more unhinged, and then there was Albert kid Blast Gallo, and the three Gallo brothers that had been brought into the Prafacci family during the nineteen fifties felt that they weren't getting the lucrative assignments, the lucrative jobs, a lucrative posts that they felt they were entitled to, and so there was a lot of grumbling about that.

And then the death of joe Prafacci was an opportunity for a lot of people to try to to maneuver their way into a more powerful position in the Columbo family, and that was one of the goals of the Gallows as well.

And at one point Carman Persico attempted to kill Larry Gallo by strangling him, and the attempted murder was interrupted.

Larry survived, but the bad blood between Carmen Persico, who became an important member in the Colombo family and actually the Columbo family in general, continued passed Profacci's death and into the succession of cential succession by Joe Columbo as the boss of the family.

Let's talk about Greg Scarpa as a killer while at the same time he has various handlers, or at least he has two handlers.

Special agent that will be Lynn de Vecchio will be a very important figure in this story, but she is not his first handler.

So let's talk about Greg Scarpa as a killer and while at the same time, what information is he giving the FBI.

Yeah, we don't have a lot of hard data on Scarpa's killings during the nineteen fifties and the early nineteen sixties.

We do have some testimony from Linda Charro about Barpa killing fairly capriciously a guy he was supposed to be buying some stamps from, and then Scarpa met him in a car Linda Hurd gunshots, and then Scarpa came back with both the money and the stamps or maybe it was coins.

I don't recall off the top of my head, Dan, But at any rate, because as I point out in the book, these guys are living in a world of secrecy.

They're not They don't have a bunch of press following them around we don't have a whole lot of a clear idea what scarp was up to in terms of murders.

We do know that Linda has said that when they first met Scarpid said that he had already killed twenty plus people, And we don't know if that's Scarpa trying to brag.

We don't know if it's absolutely true, and if it is, we don't know who those victims are.

But eventually, as a result of Scarpa being involved with the FBI, we get a clearer picture of the murders that Scarpa was involved in during the sixties, seventies, and eighties and into the nineties.

And in fact, one of the theories that I have in the book is that when Scarpa was first dropped by the FBI in nineteen seventy five, and its first handler was Anthony Veolano, it's my view that another informant told the FBI that of a murder that scarp had been involved in in nineteen sixty four that didn't come to light to the FBI till nineteen seventy five, and that's why scarp was dropped by the FBI as an informant.

They had told him during the crisis after Joe Perfacci died, that he was absolutely not to be involved in murder.

He told the FBI that there was some there was some rumbling that he was going to be told to kill the potential successor to Perfaccio, this guy Maglioco.

And when he told the FBI that, all kinds of alarm bells went off, both in New York and in Washington, and scarp was told in no uncertain terms he was not to be involved in murder, not to be involved in killing.

That was a line he wasn't supposed to cross.

As we know, he crossed it many times.

And again it's my view that when the FBI found out in nineteen seventy five that had been involved, specifically alleged to be involved in a murder in nineteen sixty four, that that's when they dropped him the first time.

So that's some of the sort of skeedgy detail we have on Scarpa's career as a killer up until about nineteen eighty, when we start getting a lot more.

Let's not go into the various accounts of what Scarpug provided to the FBI regarding three very important historic events that occurred in Mississippi.

Can you tell us about his involvement.

Yeah, There's been a lot of speculation over the years, and scarp has sort of fueled some of that speculation by making a few things up.

But there were three cases of that were very large in the civil rights movement, and the first was the murder of Medgar Evers.

The second was the murder of the three civil rights workers who are trying to bridge Straffan Americans to vote, and the fourth was the murder of Vernon Dahmer in nineteen sixty six.

And my review of the documents, the FBI documents, the available testimony that I saw, has led me to conclude that Scarpa had no involvement in the Medgar Evers case.

However, I think it's likely.

I don't think it's a slam done, but I think it's likely based upon the statements that people have made over the years and the consistency of those statements, that Scarpa played a role in helping the FBI locate the bodies of the three civil rights workers that were murdered down in Mississippi.

And part of that is that, or part of my conclusion is derived from the information that is in the FBI documents, and also, as I said, the sort of the consistent testimony of particularly Linda Sharrow over the years about that involvement.

So I think it's likely he was involved in that.

And Dan.

The incredible thing there is that the FBI and the Department of Justice and the Johnson administration were under an enormous amount of pressure to find these guys.

They were down there, they were working.

It was the height of the civil rights era, and there was an enormous amount of tension and pressure.

And the FBI was finding that their own strategies for finding these bodies or maybe even hopefully finding the guys alive, wasn't working and they needed outside help.

And I think that the available evidence leads to a reasonable conclusion that scarp was likely to have helped them.

And on the third matter, the Vernon Dahmer matter, I think the evidence is even more solid, but I still think it's like it's more probably than not that Scarpa helped them solve that murder too.

Vernon Dahmer was an NAACP officer in Mississippi, very active in trying to register African Americans.

He was an African American himself trying to register African Americans to vote.

He had a store, he had a registration booth in that store, and eventually his house was attacked and burned, and during the burning of his house, these guys essentially laid siege upon him, Dahmer fought back.

He fired back, but was eventually overcome by smoking inhalation and died shortly after that.

The prosecution of one of the people that was involved in that is well documented in the state court records in Mississippi, including a twenty two page confession.

And it's my conclusion that that confession came about as a result of pressure that's Scarpa placed upon that individual that we would probably today called enhance interrogation.

And the confession itself stood up the documents indicating that there was payment to an informant, that informant would be killed if his identity were known.

All of the and some other matters as well, but all those together led me to conclude that Scarpa was more probably than not involved and resolving the Vernon Dalmer death murder.

Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.

There's also a very interesting case that became personal for Great Scarpa and really helped them the Regina Passes Crown Jewels case.

Let's talk about something that contributed to his downfall was the phony IBM stock certificates scheme.

Yeah, that was, you know, the game that couldn't shoot straight, couldn't counterfeit straight.

They came up with this cockamade scheme to falsify some stock certificates, and then they were going to sell the stock certificates at at an extreme discount, about ten percent, and whoever bought them could probably use them in any way they could, And part of the scheme was, well, maybe we can use these as collateral for property, collateral for a loan, and then of course the lending institution is going to be stuck with some phony paper and they'll have the money.

So anyway, they went on this attempt to falsify these documents, and they had an enormous amount of difficulty trying to find somebody that could forge the documents.

They had a tough time among themselves deciding who was going to pay for the forged documents, who was going to pay for the printing, who was going to pay the forger.

Scarpa typically was unwilling to dish out money to try to pay the forgers.

Scarpa did not like hatting out money, frankly like taking it in, and Joe Brewster was involved in this as well.

Eventually they got rid of the phony certificate somebody bought them.

They made their way down to Philadelphia, and a bunch of guys that were involved in trying to peddle them down there got caught and prosecuted.

That that got back to the Newark office of the FBI, and they went after the guys that were in Brooklyn that were involved in this, and over a period of a couple of years their arrests.

Scarpa, one of his responses to his own arrests was to threaten to tell in open court what he knew about the FBI and how it was using informants and what the FBI's on methods were.

He apologized it was an error that he made there by making that threat.

They eventually got a grand jury to return some indictments against these guys, and the upshot of it was that, for reasons unknown at least reasons unknown to me and not clear in the documents, that the charges were eventually dismissed against scarp and Brewster and really two years after the fact, and so that never went any further.

Although some guys did either plead guilty or were found guilty, particularly the guys down at Philadelphia and went to prison for being involved in the scheme, and scarp it not so much.

And that elicited some rumors that there was something amiss, didn't it.

Oh yeah, yeah, I mean, the people within Scarpa's orbit certainly knew that he had been arrested and he and Bruce had both been arrested for this, and that there were legal proceedings that were going on.

Then it just kind of disappears.

And really as early as the nineteen seventy two, Carlo Gambino had suspicions about Scarpa being an informant for the FBI, and he told his crew his guys stay away from Scarpay has a big mouth.

You know.

One of the amazing things about this story is that there are all these clues all the way along, and people tended to ignore them.

They just thought, now, it's not possible.

He can't be doing this.

He's the FBI can't be using this guy.

He's just too much of a mafia killer for the FBI to be involved with.

Scarpa would never do that, etcetera, etcetera, and is one of his closest lieutenants for years.

Larry Maza in retrospects that he could see the signs, but at the time he ignored them.

And I think that was generally true among people that were in scarpa orbit.

Not everybody, but mostly.

Let's talk about some characters and some extraordinary events that happen regarding Greg Scarpa.

Let's talk about Larry Masa and how Larry Masa comes to be in Grave Scarpa's orbit.

Yeah, that's an incredible story all in itself.

And Scarpa's mistress, after having a couple of children, approached scarp and said, Hey, there's a young man that I'm interested in.

He works at a local grocery store that I shop there, and I want to take them to bed.

Without being too exact in terms of the conversation between scarp and Linda on that issue, scarp eventually said, yeah, whatever makes you happy.

To Linda, So Larry Massa was the grocery clerk she was talking about, and she eventually fairly quickly seduced Masa.

Maza had no idea who she was, no idea who her putative husband was or the man she was living with was, and eventually found out and greg Scarpa brought him into his orbit.

Larry was kind of casting about, looking for something to do.

He was probably going to be, or at least his plan was to become a fireman like his father had been.

But there were some proceedings in New York that put a temporary halt on the hiring of firemen based upon the allegation that they were biased.

The test for firemen were biased against women.

Larry put that dream on hold.

During that whole period, he was getting deeper and deeper with Linda, having this affair that Scarpa was completely aware of, and then Scarpa offered him a job, a legitimate job at first, and then eventually Maza became part of Scarper's crew, doing the kinds of things that the members of the Wimpy Boys, which is what that crew was called after the club that they hung out in, doing all those things that those guys were doing, and it became a key and very close member of Scarpus crew.

Let's talk about Gregory Scarpa Junior and his introduction to the life.

Yeah, Gregory.

You know, he grew up like a lot of kids, idolizing his dad, and his dad did things with Gregory to, you know, try to do the father son sorts of things.

Taught him some things about sports, tried to make sure that he stayed in school.

Was very insistent on attendance at school.

But Gregory got into a fight with when he was in high school, got in a fight with another classmate and he came home and he had a big lump on his forehead and his father was asking him about it, and greg said, Gregory Junior said, it's no big deal, dad, it was a fair fight.

He got a good lick in.

They exchanged some words and eventually Greig the father told greg Junior, you go back to school tomorrow and if you don't put that kid in the hospital, don't bother coming home.

And that happened.

Of course, greg Junior got expelled.

And this was a kid who was he was a tough kid, good with his hands.

He was a golden glove boxer, and at that point there weren't a whole lot of choices for him.

And eventually he was brought within his father's orbit.

In terms of the Colombo family, Gregory Senior introduced him to Joe Colombo.

Eventually greg Junior became a member of the crew and a member himself, a good fellow.

Then eventually Coppo.

I think that the inflection point, the most important moment, was that moment when his father told him, don't come home if you don't put that kid in the hospital.

Because at that point and he hoped for a non post and ustra life probably disappeared for Gregory.

Yes, let's explain the Columbo family hierarchy in terms of Carmine Persico and his son Ali Boy.

What is the situation you may recall Joe Colombo was there was an attempted assassination on Joe Colombo.

He lived for another seven years, but he's incapacitated.

So there was a vacuum at the top of the Columbo family leadership.

Carmine Persico was approved as the essentially the street boss while Joe Columbo was still alive, and Carmine, a longtime member of the Colombo family, became the boss.

And Carmine was in and out of prison, particularly in the early nineteen eighties, and even though he was in prison, he retained his title as the boss of the family, and that was very difficult.

It's difficult to run something from a distance.

But the Persco was interested in maintaining that position because the financial benefits of being the boss all they flow upward in the mafia, and whoever's at the top, that's where the money ends up, or a good deal of the money ends up.

He had a brother, Alley Boy, and also a son, Little Alley Boy, who was named after his brother, who were also prominent members of still called the Columbo family, and so far as I know, it still referred to as the Columbo family.

It didn't become the Persico family when Carmine took over the reins, but they facilitated and assisted his running of the family from prison.

That fact that Carmen was running the family from prison really contributed a lot to the violence of the late nineteen eighties early nineteen nineties that was known as the Third Columbo War.

It's interesting that he gives his FBI handler and by nineteen eighty it's a person named Lynn de Vecchio, and he's giving information not only on the opposing faction or Tana and his men, but also he's giving information regarding crimes and including murder attributed to Carmine Persico, doesn't he.

Yeah, Lyndavecchio was a special agent for the FBI and he approached scarp in nineteen eighty looking to reopen Scarpa as a teci top echelon criminal informant.

And Lynn was as I said, he was a special agent, and he was a guy who was interested in furthering his own career, and so he saw Scarpa as an informant as a possibility of doing that.

While Lynn Devekia was getting information from Scarpa, Scarpa was giving him information about Carmine Persico and attributing at least eight murders to either Persco's orders or Persco's personally being involved in it.

The bizarre thing is that, as you've picked up on when the family split into two different factions, the back vic Ana on the one hand, and then the faction that back Carmine Persico, the leader of the so called Persco faction was Greg Scarpa, or the most important person in that faction was Greg scar and they were referred to as the Persco Loyalists.

But it's not even a stretch to say that a guy that's telling the FBI that this guy committed eight murders is not loyal to that guy.

He was loyal to Greg Scarpa, and during that entire period he had no qualms about telling the FBI about potential violations of the law of PERSCO and others within the Columbo family were involved in.

And you know, Dan just backing up a little.

When I told you that Joe Colombo had Scarpa as one of his confidants, one of his closest members.

Scarpa is the one who provided the information that made Joe Colombo Junior and Joe Columbo Seniors arrest possible.

Having Greg Scarpa close to you in any sort of capacity was a dangerous proposition, and it certainly was for Carma and PERSCO in terms of his freedom.

That Jesus as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.

Let's talk about I guess the most shocking murders attributed to Greg Scarpa, and it's also these murders are demonstrative of Scarpa's unique murderous character.

Let's talk about Mary Barry, her connection to Scarpa and the reason for her murder.

Yeah, that's such a tragic story.

It's just awful.

She was involved with Ellie Boys, Scarpa's brother, Ellie Boy Persico, and very similar to the story between Scarpa and Linda.

Ali Boy was about twice Mary's age when they met.

She was his mistress for a number of years.

Ali Boy ended up being the subject of prosecution.

Was supposed to show up in court one day and that they just a flipped ended up.

He was He went up to Connecticut where apparently the mafia had this sort of underground railroad to protect members that were on the run, on the lamb, however you want to style it.

Mary was in a tight spot after that because she had hoped that the family would take care of her and continue to support her.

At the same time, their rumors started floating around that Mary was talking to the FBI, that she was talking to local law enforcement, that she was doing this, she was doing that, and the assumption was that she was going to tell the FBI where Ali Boy Persco was.

And the fact is that Ali Boy's family didn't even know where he was, and Mary certainly didn't know where he was.

But this was during the time when Scarpa's handler was Lynda Vecchio, and Scarpa got the job of killing Mary, and Scarpa, in my view, was anxious to make sure that she was no longer alive because she was being used as an informant by the FBI.

There's a bit that I found from a US Marshall who approached the FBI saying they wanted to talk to Mary about the possibility of finding Alley Boy, and the FBI's response was, we have a special relationship with Mary and we would rather not talk to her.

I'm not sure exactly how Scarpa found that out.

Wow, but I think the bit about they were worried that and Scarpa was worried about Mary telling them where Ali Boy was, to me is just complete nonsense.

I mean, Scarpa was telling the FBI that Ali Boy's brother was committing all these murders.

I don't think that Scarpa had any particular loyalty towards Alley Boy that were compel him to say, like, well, we've got to get rid of Mary.

Mary was lured to a club owned by Carma and Sessa, and under the guise of saying they were going to offer her a job, and she needed a job, and when she got to the club, Gregory Junior eventually Tackler held her down while Gregor killed her.

Just absolutely awful, so awful that even some of the mafia guys said, we're going to hell for this.

Yeah, you know, Greg Senior at one point said, they give me these jobs because they know I have the stomach for it.

That admission is just it's remarkable to be able to say that I have the stomach for killing this young, completely innocent girl.

One more testament to Greg Scarpa's murderous intentions is someone he considered like a son, Joe Brewster.

Briefly tell us about Joe Brewster.

Yeah, Joe and Greg went way back in the Profacci family.

They've been friends for a long time.

Joe was really charismatic, good looking guy who was not only a cold blood killer himself, but also a very skilled thief, very skilled at these bank burglaries that were mitting enormous amounts of money.

Joe in the mid nineteen eighties was, in my view, was cutting Scarpa out of some of these jobs that he was doing.

He wasn't giving Scarpa cut of the jobs, and Scarpa just for him that was pretty unforgivable.

The stories were that Joe had his girlfriend who was born again Christian, Joe couldn't kill anymore, he wanted to get out of the life.

And I think there's probably some truth to Joe having some doubts about what he was doing with his life.

But this idea that he was killed because he couldn't really act like a mafia guy anymore because of this born again Christian girlfriend, I think are overstated.

I think it's much more likely that Scarpa and other members of the mafia families decided that Joe had to go because he was acting on his own and he wasn't cutting in the right guys on the proceeds of these bank burglaries.

So Scarpa asked for permission to kill him.

And you need permission from like a higher up in the mafia to kill somebody else on the team, so to speak.

He got that permission.

His son, Greg Junior, is actually the guy who pulled the trigger and killed Joe, who is in the backseat of his car at the time.

Again, this was a guy that for years scarp had talked about.

He's like a son to me.

They clearly had been very close best friends.

He was the best man at Greg Scarpa Junior's wedding.

In my view, because of those money issues, Greg Scarpa decided that's it.

I'm not dealing with Joe anymore.

And the way that Scarpa defaulted to the resolve of problem was with violence and often murder.

Let's explain.

Have you explained the manipulation that you talk about throughout that Scarpa has, the manipulation that he does with Lynn Delvecchio.

What exactly is the nature of that manipulation.

Yeah, I think at the core of it is de Vecchio's own wish to have a success for career at the FBI.

You know, he's a guy who wants to be a big shot, and you know, there's nothing wrong with that, wanting to really advance in your own career.

And I think Scarpa was smart enough.

And this is the one of the unusual things, not unusual, but a little bit surprising that Scarpa, who barely had a high school education, was able to manipulate building full of people that had college educations and a lot of experience when ne Vecchio was an experienced special agent by the time he and Greg Scarpa hooked up together.

But I think de Vecchio was somewhat fascinated with the mafia world, fascinated by Greg Scarpy.

He says quite frankly that he considered Greg Scarpa to be his friend.

And so I think there was a line that got blurred for de Vecchio in terms of that relationship, and I think Scarpa took full advantage of it.

And I also think that that manipulations started really early on, back in the early sixties.

And we see in the FBI documents time and again Will scarp It is testing things, saying what the FBI will do.

For instance, when he first started working for them, he said, you know, I've got about three thousand dollars in debts and I'm thinking of getting out of the life.

But if I had somehow I could pay off these this three thousand bucks, then I could really continue and give you guys everything you want.

And this idea that Greg scarp at the age of thirty four thirty five, which is going to retire from the mafia and go do something else.

Whatever that something else was, it was just preposterous.

But the FBI didn't know that.

They didn't know anything about how the mafia worked, and they ponied up the money.

Scarpa did this time and again in his career, and the manipulation included a heating of information and misinformation or even not thorough information to his handlers, both Anthony Vallano and Lynda Vecchio, and I think that the impulse of the special agents to want to believe what scarp was telling them and use that for their own advancement purposes set them up for being way too credulous about whatever scarp was saying.

And Dan we see this time and again in the FBI documents that scarp is considered to be reliable.

His information is considered to be singular, so they're not getting it from any other source, and that he is emotionally stable.

Just bizarre in retrospect, but we do see that in the FBI files, and I think that that's part of that is is explained by the desire of members of the FBI to have this really high prized informant providing them with information that leads them to other things, other arrests, other convictions, et cetera.

Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear these messages.

Now, let's fast forward a little bit or quite a bit to the diagnosis of Greg Scarpa as having a deadly illness, How that occurs, what is the illness that gets him into the hospital in the first place, And then tell us about the ongoing information about the Third Columbo War.

What exactly information is Greg Scarpa feeding del Vecchio while at the same time he's on the most prestigious hit team along with Larry Maza and and a person named del Masto.

Tell us about that.

Yeah, Greg Scarpa was a lifelong smoker and a scotch drinker.

I mean, he wasn't an alcoholic, but he liked having scotch with his dinners.

And he'd also have been popping asphen due to some back problems that he'd have.

In nineteen eighty six, his stomach essentially just started bleeding.

In a layman's terms, it kind of exploded and he was in very serious condition.

He needed surgery right away, three different surgeries, and as part of that surgery he needed blood transfusions too.

Scarpa, this is the kind of the height of the aide scares, or we're called dan.

There was a lot of misinformation about what was going on.

People weren't really sure what was going on in hospitals, and Scarpa didn't trust the blood supply at the hospital that he was being where he was being operated on, So he told his crew to come down and they would get tested to see if any of them were a match, and a few of them were in One of them was not only a match, but was unknown to everyone he was HIV positive.

He was a weightlifter who was using steroids and injecting himself with steroids, and that's probably how he got HIV became HIV positive.

That blood gets transferred, transfused into Scarpa during these one of these operations, and as a result Scarpa he gets the stomach matter fixed, most of his stomach is removed, but now he's HIV positive again.

This is nineteen eighty six, and he lives for another eight years, which is way beyond what anybody thought he would live at the time.

I mean, there was no real treatment for aids at the time.

There is certainly a reasonable argument that during the Third Columba War from about nineteen ninety two through the end of nineteen ninety three, Scarpa, who was by then experiencing full blown AIDS, had this attitude of I've already got this death sentence, there's nothing to stop me, there are no rails anymore, and so I'm just going to do whatever I want.

And certainly some of his activities during the Third Club of War back up that conclusion.

Well, tell us about this vengeful and murderous campaign he goes on despite this, He's going to die.

These two factions that I talked about earlier that were trying to fill the void of the leadership caused by Carmin Persco's imprisonment, and he was Carmin Persco at this point was going to die in prison.

He wasn't going to get out right.

Pick Arena, who was a coppo in the family, had been appointed acting boss, and Arena wanted to become the boss, not just acting boss.

And you know, he was trying to feather his own nest, and that didn't sit well with a lot of members who were considered themselves Carmine Perscal loyalists.

Didn't set well with Scarpa because it meant that the best hits, the best money, the best gigs would be going to Arena and the people that were close to Arena in Queens, which is where Arena was based.

A lot of guys in Queens were getting their buttons, were getting made into good fellows.

Not so many in Brooklyn.

There was this tension and they tried to resolve it through a number of different meetings.

There was no resolution, there was and what happened was a shooting war on the streets of Brooklyn where Scarpa and two very close confederates, Larry Mas and Jimmy Delmasto, were hunting the streets of Brooklyn for members that were loyal to vic Arena.

And there were some just gruesome murders that were involved in as a result of that, and three of the murders that happened during that period, of the murders that eventually Scarpa confessed to in federal court.

Eventually Great Scarpa goes to jail, he's arrested.

He goes to jail and has to deal with this illness.

How does the state deal with this illness?

Yeah, Well he got sort of a break on that one because the plea bargain was that he was going to admit to these three murders and that he was going to get a life sentence but the judge decided to give him a ten year sentence instead because Scarpa was pretty far in to full blown AIDS by then, and the judge knew that if he gave him a life sentence, Scarper would not be eligible for special medical care, so he gave him a ten year sentence instead, which really blew a lot of people away.

They were very bitter about it.

Here's a guy I've been committing murder for years and years and years, finally had been at only three of those murders and he gets a ten year sentence.

Well, it was going to be a life sentence anyway, because he wasn't going to live much longer.

During this period where scarp is supposed to be, first he's in state court, that he's in federal court.

He's being incarcerated in a state institution of Rikers Island, and then eventually he's going to be transferred to a federal institution.

He's getting treatment for the fact that, and it's really palliative treatment, trying to make his life a little more comfortable while he's in these various states of incarceration.

Eventually he's transferred to a federal hospital in Rochester Minnesota, and a Scarpet, even in the last months of his life, is hoping that he can go home and die at home, and that request is routinely denied by some judges who just they pretty much had enough of Greg Scarpet.

So he died in a prison hospital in June of nineteen ninety four from complications from AIDS.

You write that Linda Siro Linda Diana former stayed with him right to the very end, cared for him when he was at home, stayed with him to the very end.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

In fact, she not just stayed with him at home, but also cared for him when he was in these various either when various prisons, jails, these various caregiving institutions that he was going to live out his sentence, and so she was absolutely loyal to him right to the very end.

And she had as thorough a perspective about who Scarpe was as anybody.

And one of the things that's interesting about that is that Scarpa was asked once again if he could die at home while he was in Rochester, Minnesota, and he was down to about eighty pounds or so very very frail that he was in bed all the time, and there was a hearing on that request, and somebody at the hearing I think it was a probation officer or or no, maybe he's a prosecutor.

Excuse me.

Prosecutor asked the medical professional who was testimony, and he said, does this bigger finger still work?

And the answer was yes.

And so they denied his request to die at home.

And at first Linda's response was this is ridiculous.

He's living in bed, he's completely incapacitated.

And then she said she thought for a minute and thought, you know, but they're right.

If Craig went home, he just might kill someone.

And so right to the end she was loyal to him, and right to the end, Scarpa had the capacity, in her view, to commit murder.

What of de Vecchio and the FBI, What was their talk of the Vecchio knowing that Scarpa was murdering and still petitioned for him to be reopened as a informant.

Yeah, that happened during the Third Columba War and towards the end and when scarp was about to be arrested and incarcerated and Linda Vecchio, when scarp was closed, Lindevechio petitioned for him to be reopened, and the FBI did reopen him briefly as an informant.

De Vecchio in his own book said in My Heart of Hearts, I knew that scarp was still doing hits.

And he doesn't really put a time frame on that in terms of when he knew that.

But there in the documents there are a lot of questions arise.

For example, when Scarpa the day after Joe Brewster was killed on Scarpa's orders, he reports that de Vecchio that Joe Brewster was killed, and he uses the passive voice, or at least that's how it comes out in the notes on the debriefing in the FBI documents, and there's there's nothing in that particular debriefing of de Vecchio saying, well, well, Greg, who killed him and why was he killed?

And and there are plenty of times when Scarpa was very specific about so and so was killed, this guy killed him, that guy killed him, and we see that time and again in the documents.

But with the Brewster killing, we don't see that.

And either he said it and it never got recorded, or de Vecchio was not interested in knowing who it was that killed Joe Brewster because they had an inkling of who that might be.

Now in de vechio defense, he later was charged with providing Scarpa with information that led to some murders, and that was tried in state court.

And in the middle of the trial, when Linda Sharrow was about to started to testify, a reporter that had interviewed Linda a number of years earlier let the court know that what she was saying on the stand was completely different from what she had said earlier, and at that point the prosecution felt that their case had fallen apart.

They moved to dismiss the case, and the case was dismissed, and as a matter of law, that meant that Linda Vecchio could not be charged with and tried for any of that, and in fact it acts as what's called race judicata.

The thing has been adjudicated.

Linda Ki can rightly say that that matter came before court.

The result of that was that essentially, I'm not guilty.

So there were certainly rumblings, and enough rumblings that the Brooklyn District Attorney decided to bring a criminal case, But that criminal case did not result in a conviction of agent of Akio.

Very very interesting.

In the end, tell us the fate of Greg Scarpa Junior and also some of the people you spoke to for this book that were involved with the family, Linda and Lil Linda, tell us about that.

Yeah, Greig Scarpa Junior got out of prison a few years back on a compassionate release.

He spent thirty three years in federal prison.

Four of them were in solitary, and while he was in federal prism, he washed his hands of the family.

He talked about his own regret and I think it's I think it's legiti.

I think your heart felt what he said about regretting the pain that he caused, regretting having been in that life.

I didn't want anything to do with the family.

His father essentially cut him off while he was in prison and told other people don't talk to Greg Greg Jr.

He's been out for a while.

I talked to him on the phone.

I also sent him some questions to answer Greg's story.

To a certain extent, it was told by Sandra Harmon in her book.

Although Greg said that the book is sensational and not accurate, and I tried to figure out where the inaccuracies were, and I detail all of that in the end notes of the book and sometimes in the text too.

So Greg is out, he's living.

My understanding is he's living with his sister.

He's also done some interviews online about his life and his life as a a member of the Columbo crime family.

Larry mass I mentioned earlier, was someone that whose life story in terms of spec scripts Joe Pluto and I had been working on.

Larry did his ten years in prison and he got out.

He's a successful businessman, and he also has sat for a number of interviews.

People are very interested about his life in the mafia, what that was about, and Larry very candid about it about about his life.

And Larry and I had some conversations, and I have not talked to Linda Chyrol.

Little Linda, her daughter, that's my understanding, was involved in a movie that's been made by Mark Wahlberg, starring as Craig Scarpa in a dramatic rendition of Scarpa's involvement on the Vernon Dahmer case by in nineteen sixty six.

And my understanding is that little Linda has been involved in that process and maybe advising on the film.

But I haven't talked to them, Dan.

Most of the research I did was tracking down documents speak online, tracking down court documents, tracking down of course, the FBI documents, not just the scarpet documents, but also the periscope documents and the Mississippi burning documents.

Lots and lots of documents, newspaper articles, interviews, books, et cetera.

Yeah, I just wanted to comment.

It seems like I'm a big fan of the Sopranos, and of course I've watched all the famous mob movies, but especially the Sopranos I saw many of It seemed like these same stories woven into the Sopranos storylines in many episodes.

Yeah, I think that to a certain extent, these stories are fairly generic with respect to the mafia and the way they operate, and so on a certain level, it's almost like, you know, you can pull one name out and put another name in, and it's likely that they were doing the same sorts of things.

For people that study them mafia know a lot about the Mafia.

It wouldn't be any surprise that, Okay, these guys in Buffalo were involved in bone sharking, gambling, numbers, hijacking, burglary is extortion, because that's what these guys do.

They do it in New York, they do it in Kansas City, they do it in Buffalo, they do it wherever they are.

And so I think that there's a certain identity that can be seen throughout these various stories, even the fictionalized ones, as you indicate it, like the Sopranos, that would ring true to anybody that knew about how the mafia operates.

I want to thank you for coming on and talking about your truly extraordinary Greg scarpa legendary evil, the many faces of a mafia killer.

For those people that want to find out more about this book, do you have a website or do any social media?

Yeah, I have a website Jonathan dyerauthor dot com.

People can contact me on there and I will respond to them, and it has a lot of information about this book and the other books I've written.

There's obviously an Amazon listing that has a fair amount of information.

I'm on some social media.

I'm on Blue Sky, on Instagram, I'm on book bub, I'm on I'm not on Facebook or Twitter.

I was on Twitter a number of years ago, but it seemed like everybody on there was really angry about something.

Yeah, so I got off Twitter, but yeah, I'm on a smattering of social media and I have a website.

Publisher.

While getting pressed, can also take any sorts of inquiries that people might have about about the book about me and for this to.

Me, Thank you very much, Jonathan P.

Dyer for Greg scarpa legendary evil, the many faces of a mafia killer.

Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening, and good night.

Same to you, Dan, and thanks very much for having me.

Thank you, good night,