The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office has taken a bold step to beef up its sensational case that charges retired FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio with aiding Colombo capo Gregory Scarpa in committing four murders from 1984 to 1992, Gang Land has learned. 

Sources say prosecutors plan to use Gregory Scarpa Jr., a long-imprisoned mobster son of the late Scarpa, to back up their key prosecution witness – Scarpa’s longtime lover Linda Schiro – regarding two mob rubouts that the son was involved in before he was incarcerated in 1988.

After months of secret talks with the younger Scarpa, prosecutors have decided that his intimate knowledge of his father’s dealings with DeVecchio far outweighs the heavy baggage that he will carry with him to the witness stand, sources have told Gang Land.

Scarpa Jr. is a multiple murderer with at least half a dozen killings on his extensive mob resume. Worse, at least as far as being a credible witness goes, he has lied under oath at least twice – at his racketeering and murder trial in 1998, and in 2004 at a post conviction hearing on behalf of onetime acting Colombo boss Victor (Little Vic) Orena.

But the story he’s offered to tell is clearly tantalizing to prosecutors: Sources familiar with numerous debriefings say Scarpa Jr. has linked DeVecchio to the 1984 murder of Mary Bari, 31, a former girlfriend of a top Colombo mobster, and

the 1987 gangland-style slaying of mobster Joseph (Joe Brewster) DeDomenico, 44. The younger Scarpa was the triggerman in the DeDomenico killing, and he held Bari down as his father shot her dead in a mob social club, according to court records. [The photos of Greg Sr. & Linda (above) and Greg Sr. & Greg Jr. (left) are courtesy of Sandra Harmon, author of "Mafia Son," a work in progress about Greg Scarpa Jr.]

DeVecchio, 66, is also charged with aiding the elder Scarpa orchestrate the 1990 murder of Patrick Porco, 18, then a potential witness against Scarpa and Linda Schiro’s son, Joseph, and with the 1992 murder of mob rival Lorenzo Lampasi during the height of the bloody Colombo war.

The 55-year-old turncoat has told prosecutors for District Attorney Joe Hynes that he helped kill both Bari and DeDomenico after DeVecchio gave the elder Scarpa negative information about them, sources said. 

Bari, a former mistress of then-fugitive underboss Alphonse (Allie Boy) Persico, (right) was killed, Scarpa Jr. told authorities, after the elder Scarpa related that DeVecchio had reported that “she was about to flip,” and Colombo family higher-ups sanctioned the hit. Scarpa Jr. said approval was obtained at several mob meetings, sources said, including one with the gangster for whom he would testify 20 years later, Little Vic Orena.

Scarpa Jr. has told Hynes’s staffers that his father decided to whack Joe Brewster after DeVecchio warned him that DeDomenico had become a “born-again Christian and could become a major problem” for the elder Scarpa, sources said.

“He’s risky. I’d keep my eye on him,” is what DeVecchio reportedly told his

father, Scarpa Jr. said, according to sources familiar with the turncoat’s account.

In addition to fingering the ex-agent in the Bari (left) and DeDomenico homicides, sources say Scarpa Jr. also corroborates Schiro’s testimony to the grand jury that his father paid DeVecchio tens of thousands of dollars in bribes during their long relationship. 

He never met DeVecchio – he was the elder Scarpa’s control agent from 1980 to 1992 – but for several years the younger Scarpa kept a ledger detailing his father’s monthly payments as high as $2500 under the heading, “miscellaneous,” sources said.

Scarpa Jr.’s current federal prison term for racketeering and murder conspiracy doesn’t end until 2035. While he will receive immunity from prosecution for his testimony, he will not receive any reduction of his sentence for his cooperation with state prosecutors.

In fact, while technically his admissions to committing murders that were part of his federal case should not hinder a pending motion for a new trial, they certainly won’t win him any sympathy from the federal judge assigned to his case.

Sources say Scarpa Jr. has admitted lying from the witness stand at his 1998 trial, primarily about his involvement in murders that he blamed on his father. He insists, however, that he testified truthfully when he linked DeVecchio to payoffs,

supplying his father information about mob rivals and other criminal activity, and alerting the younger Scarpa of an impending federal drug arrest in 1987 several weeks after he killed Joe Brewster. (left)

In 1997, when DeVecchio was granted immunity and forced to testify at a post conviction hearing for a new trial by Orena, the retired agent angrily denied leaking any FBI secrets to Scarpa Sr. or taking part in any criminal activity with him.

“That’s nonsense,” he snapped. “I did not give him investigative information. I have never given him any investigative information.”

In 1996, two years after three FBI agents reported their belief that DeVecchio, who was their supervisor, had engaged in numerous improprieties with his top-echelon informer, an internal FBI inquiry cleared DeVecchio of any wrongdoing. He retired soon after.

In addition to Scarpa Jr. and Schiro, Brooklyn prosecutors plan to elicit trial testimony from the FBI agents who reported DeVecchio to their bosses, as well as several Colombo family defectors who told the feds after they cooperated that the elder Scarpa had a high-level law enforcement source.

Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach (right) has scheduled trial for September 10.

A month earlier, however, prosecutors must establish at a pre-trial hearing that they received no information, directly or indirectly, from DeVecchio’s immunized testimony to obtain their indictment. The burden will be on the prosecution to show that the grand jury investigation was not tainted by members of Hynes’s office, or from information that emanated from freelance forensic analysts and journalists whose work triggered the DA’s probe in 2005. 

Two weeks ago, FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni was heard apologizing that the FBI had been too aggressive, and had overstepped its power to collect telephone records, emails, financial data and other information in the guise of justice.

Two decades ago, however, when Caproni was an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn, the FBI was anything but aggressive in her view. In fact, she was so frustrated by the FBI’s do-nothing approach in finding a murderous federal drug fugitive who’d been indicted in November 1987, she decided to call in the U.S. Marshal Service to track him down.

And that was before Caproni began to suspect what she and most authorities now believe: that DeVecchio tipped off the elder Scarpa about his son’s imminent arrest and the dutiful son fled with his wife and two year-old daughter, according to FBI documents.

But a superior advised the young prosecutor to tread softly, noting that the FBI would not be happy if she usurped its jurisdiction in Scarpa Jr.’s case. So in April, 1988, she called the FBI’s fugitive squad leader and asked whether “there would

be any problem” if she sought help from the U.S. Marshal’s office in Brooklyn. When he told her to “do what you gotta do,” she did just that, according to an internal FBI memo about the episode.

In August, 1988 – nine months after the Drug Enforcement Administration had officially asked the FBI for help it never received – deputy U.S. Marshals located Scarpa Jr. (right) at a Best Western Hotel 70 miles away in Lakewood, N.J., contacted the DEA, and arrested him.

The next day, when FBI officials read about the arrest by deputy U.S. Marshals and DEA agents in the New York Daily News, they sent no congratulatory letters to either agency. Instead, they commissioned an inquiry to determine why the U.S. Marshal’s office had not notified the FBI about the impending arrest, as it had done with the DEA.

In explaining the agency’s angst to Caproni’s supervisor, the FBI agent who conducted the inquiry into the matter stated: “The FBI considers its Fugitive Program to be a significant investigative program.”