If the ongoing hearing is any indication, next month’s long-awaited trial of former FBI supervisor R. Lindley DeVecchio is going to be a blockbuster event. 

Last week, for example, it was disclosed that a key prosecution witness will testify that DeVecchio served as a lookout/protector for a band of bank burglars headed by the late Gregory Scarpa Sr., a murderous mobster who was also an informer for the ex-agent. 

The witness, Scarpa’s son, Gregory Jr., was a member of his father’s bank burglary crew, and claims to have seen DeVecchio during several bank jobs, according to the testimony of Thomas Dades, a retired investigator for Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes.

Dades is one of several investigators and prosecutors who testified at a hearing before Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach in an effort to rebut defense allegations that the DA’s office improperly used testimony for which DeVecchio had received immunity to obtain a murder indictment against the retired agent. 

At the hearing, Dades and others who were involved in the DA’s investigation testified that they did not use, directly or indirectly, any of the immunized

testimony that DeVecchio gave on three occasions during the 1990s during their own investigation.

But they did get an earful from Scarpa’s son, Dades testified. The retired NYPD detective said that Scarpa Jr. told members of the prosecution team that during the 1980s DeVecchio was on the scene as the father-son gangsters, (left, courtesy Sandra Harmon) along with other Colombo mobsters and associates “were doing, like bypass burglaries of banks … not armed bank robberies while the bank was opened.”

Scarpa Jr., who is currently serving 40 years for murder conspiracy, drug dealing and other charges, said his father had told him that DeVecchio “was always there,” Dades testified, adding that “once or twice” the younger Scarpa spotted DeVecchio “present at the banks to interfere in case the police came.”  

Reichbach blocked follow-up defense queries into that subject as beyond the scope of the hearing, forcing DeVecchio’s attorneys, and Gang Land, to wait until after trial begins on September 10 to learn further details about the ex-agent’s alleged nighttime exploits.

But DeVecchio’s lawyers, who have previously blasted the murder charges against the decorated ex-agent as “ludicrous” and “beyond belief,” managed

to pry some new insight about the prosecution’s evidence from Dades (right) and other witnesses during the hearing.

Under questioning by defense attorney Mark Bederow, Dades testified that Scarpa Jr. told prosecutors that he maintained a ledger in which he recorded payments that his father had given to DeVecchio, whose code name between father and son was “D,” for favors the agent provided to the Scarpa crew.

Scarpa Jr. told prosecutors that he never met or spoke to DeVecchio but said that he accompanied his father to clandestine meetings he had with the G-man, Dades testified.

“He said that on numerous occasions they would meet him on a road in Jersey, Route 9, where Mr. DeVecchio would be in a car. Greg Senior would leave the car, with Greg Junior in the car, and get into the car and say that was ‘D’ that he was meeting,” said Dades.

During a testy exchange with another witness, Bederow learned that the prosecution contends that DeVecchio used a “go-between” to threaten the elder Scarpa’s longtime companion from cooperating with FBI officials during a prior internal investigation of corruption allegations against DeVecchio.

“Your client instructed Linda Schiro to tell those individuals to go fuck themselves,” testified assistant district attorney Michael Vecchione, who will

serve as the lead prosecutor at the trial. Vecchione, (left) the chief of Hynes’s Rackets Bureau, said that the confrontations between DeVecchio and the “go-between,” John Baran, took place in front of the FBI building at 26 Federal Plaza.

According to court records, Schiro, the linchpin of the prosecution’s case, told the grand jury that indicted DeVecchio that she was present for many meetings between Scarpa Sr. and DeVecchio over the years and overheard them discuss four murders from 1984 to 1992.

Dades, who solved the 1995 murder of Schiro’s son Joseph, maintained a friendly relationship with her after that and convinced her to cooperate with Hynes’s office’s probe in 2005, according to testimony at the hearing.

Scarpa Jr., 56, began talking with the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office last year after self-styled forensic analyst Angela Clemente trumpeted him as a credible witness who could aid the prosecution, according to evidence that emerged at the hearing.

Clemente, who followed Dades to the stand, said she met Scarpa Jr. in 2003 while she was trying to uncover evidence that mobster Joseph Russo was 

wrongly convicted of two murders during the bloody Colombo war.

Under questioning by Bederow, Clemente, (right) whose attorney also represented the late Russo, conceded that she had read DeVecchio’s immunized testimony. But she steadfastly denied passing it along to a prosecutor, even when confronted with emails in which she did just that. (Prosecutors who saw transcripts of the testimony, say they never read them.)

In an effort to tarnish her credibility, Bederow zeroed in on Clemente’s ties – and her financial arrangements – with the DA’s office, the Russo family and relatives of two other Colombo wiseguys involved in the DeVecchio saga.

Clemente admitted getting hotel and travel expenses from the DA’s office and the Russo family, but didn’t say how much. She also testified that she is working on a contingency fee basis for family members of the late Colombo mobster, Nicholas (Nicky Black) Grancio, who have a wrongful death lawsuit pending against DeVecchio.

The Judge gently chided Clemente for waiting until the morning of her appearance to give DeVecchio’s lawyers thousands of pages of documents that she had been ordered to turn over to the defense. The hearing ends next week, with the testimony of Clemente, and Sandra Harmon, who had once planned to write a book with Schiro and is now working on one with Scarpa Jr.

Scarpa Jr. and Schiro have each told prosecutors that during the early 1980s, Scarpa Sr. used DeVecchio to return a stolen World Series ring belonging to New York Yankee Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford, Gang Land has learned.

“Greg (left) was a big Yankee fan, and when they found a ring belonging to Ford in the loot from a Queens bank burglary, he reached out to DeVecchio and he arranged to have another agent return the ring,” said one source familiar with the accounts provided by Scarpa Jr. and Schiro.

Sources say prosecutors intend to have both witnesses relate the fascinating story at DeVecchio’s trial as evidence of the close relationship between the former agent and the late Scarpa Sr.

In a confusing, disjointed account about the caper on the witness stand that was reported in the New York Post, Clemente testified that the incident convinced her that the internal FBI probe of DeVecchio was a “faulty” endeavor that was doomed to fail.

Bederow, who is sure to question Clemente about the episode next week, declined to comment about the reputed return of Ford’s stolen World Series ring by his client.

Gang Land contacted the 78-year-old erstwhile Yankee lefty for the final say in this week’s column. Sounding as spry as he did in the 1950s and 60s when he was winning 236 games and losing only 106 as the “Chairman of the Board,” Ford said more than one ring was stolen, and he never got any back. Yankee owner George Steinbrenner had replacements made for him, he said.

“My rings were stolen from the bank, from the safety deposit box,” said Ford. “I don’t recall the year, but we never got them back. The Yankees had a day for me at the Stadium and Mr. Steinbrenner had the rings remade for me.”

Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti

Mob Star: The Story of John Gotti – the book it took yours truly and Gene Mustain 17 years to do – tells the complete saga of John Gotti, from his treacherous rise to his defiant downfall. Although we didn't know it at the time, we began working on "Mob Star" in 1985, when we began covering the Gotti story as news reporters.

The first edition came out in 1988, and we finished this new edition three days before Gotti died in June 2002. We added a postscript, and with a 40,000-word update, the new edition contains the entire Gotti saga right up to his time in prison and his death from throat cancer.

The 378 page, full-size book uses eight additional chapters, a prologue and an epilogue to complete the story we began telling (better than any other reporters, we might add!) when we covered the Gotti-orchestrated, midtown Manhattan assassination of former Gambino boss Paul Castellano.

For the last and best words on Gotti, this is the book to have. It is specially priced at Amazon.com at $11.02, more than five bucks off the suggested retail price.

The best of Gang Land is available in a book store near you. Or you can pick up a copy of "JERRY CAPECI'S Gang Land: Fifteen Years Of Covering The Mafia" at a special low price from the Godfather of online booksellers, Amazon.com.

The 330-page oversized book includes an index and eight pages of photographs. It is sure to contain a few of your favorite columns, as well as some you may have missed during Gang Land's lengthy run that began in 1989 in The New York Daily News and continues today online and in The New York Sun.

The book's 125 columns chronicle the New York Mafia landscape from John Gotti's heyday in 1989 as the swashbuckling Dapper Don to the remarkable day in 2003 when Gotti's longtime rival Vincent (Chin) Gigante gave up his Daffy Don routine and confessed to having put on a crazy act for three decades.

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