Gregory Scarpa
Life On The Edge
 GREG Scarpa, who died of AIDS in 1994, lived his entire
life on the edge, functioning as a top echelon FBI informer for some 35 years. A week
after Scarpa's death, Tom Robbins and I reported in
The New York Daily News that former FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover used Scarpa to solve the Ku Klux Klan slayings of three civil rights workers in
Philadelphia, Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964.
On
May 24, 1996, a federal judge unsealed reams of FBI documents that confirmed that the FBI
used Scarpa on secret missions to the deep South during the civil rights era. The released
papers do not mention the 1964 case, in which Scarpa kidnapped a Klansman and
threatened him with death to learn where the bodies of the victims were buried, but they
reveal that he made a similar mission in 1966. "If he'd lived 400 years ago, he would
have been a pirate," says a former Scarpa lawyer.
Scarpa was the intended target of the first
shootout of the bloody Colombo war that began in 1991 and ended two years
later with 12 dead, including two bystanders. A staunch supporter of the
winning Persico faction, Scarpa killed more rivals than any other member of
either side in the conflict. "I love the smell of gunpowder," he said after one
shooting. Following the war, he survived an
 ambush in which he lost an eye. Jailed
in 1994, he offered up a deathbed alibi for Alphonse Persico on the eve of his trial.
Before Scarpa (left) could testify, however, he died of AIDS, contracted from tainted blood that
a Scarpa cohort had donated shortly before Scarpa underwent surgery in 1986.
His son Joseph Schiro Scarpa, one of two children he had with his long time
common-law wife, Linda Schiro, was killed in a dispute between
Brooklyn drug dealers in 1995. In
March, 2006, based on Schiro's testimony, the
Brooklyn District Attorney's office obtained an indictment charging Scarpa's
longtime FBI handler, R. Lindley DeVecchio, with aiding Scarpa commit four
Brooklyn murders from 1984 to 1992, including the former
girlfriend of a top family mobster. Eighteen
months later, while Schiro was still on the witness stand, the DA's office
dropped the charges after hearing tape
recordings in which Schiro gave vastly different accounts of three of the
murders in interviews she had with Robbins and
me in 1997 for a book project that never materialized. |
