FBI PROBER IS ATTACKED Sleuth behind mob case hit in Brooklyn

THE NEW JERSEY forensic investigator who cracked the case against rogue FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio was strangled and beaten senseless in a Brooklyn shopping center parking lot early yesterday.
The attack on Angela Clemente came after she and others warned authorities that the lives of people involved in the DeVecchio investigation were in danger – possibly from other ex-FBI agents.
Sources close to the case said the 40-year-old single mom of three, who routinely shrugged off offers from the law to watch her back, was summoned to a meeting in Dyker Heights by an unidentified man.
After a short conversation in the Caesar’s Bay Shopping Center parking lot, Clemente told investigators, her assailant asked, “Are you going to keep investigating DeVecchio?”

When she said, “Yes,” the man began punching, kicking and choking her until she lost consciousness, investigators said.
Cops summoned by a passerby’s 911 call found Clemente sprawled on the pavement near her car and still unconscious.
Although DeVecchio had been accused of wrongdoing a decade ago, a Justice Department probe cleared him.
But at the urging of lawmen, informants and witnesses disappointed by the Justice inquiry, Clemente began a seven-year examination of the links between DeVecchio and his prized Mafia informant, Colombo family capo Greg Scarpa Sr.
In March, the 65-year-old DeVecchio was indicted on four counts of murder for allegedly taking payoffs to supply Scarpa with inside information that led to four underworld slayings in Brooklyn. Scarpa died in 1994.
Near Clemente’s heavily guarded bed in Lutheran Medical Center, prosecutor Michael Vecchione, the chief of investigations for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, said, “We consider this very serious. She was working on a case not unrelated” to DeVecchio, he said.
He said the private eye had “a large, ugly welt on her stomach,” cuts and bruises on her neck, head, legs and lip, and choking marks on her neck.
Hospital sources said Clemente had a seizure while being examined, but her injuries were not life-threatening. She left the hospital against doctors’ advice last night, a source said.
The first blow apparently was so hard the 5-foot-4 Clemente doesn’t recall being knocked out, Vecchione said.
Sources close to the case said the motive may have been to discourage Clemente from investigating two Nassau County slayings possibly connected to Scarpa and DeVecchio.
For more than a decade, DeVecchio – a supervisory special agent in charge of the Colombo family squad – allegedly served as a mole, enabling Scarpa’s brutal crime empire to eliminate government informants in their ranks, competitors trying to poach their territory and anyone else who was a possible threat.
The mountain of evidence Clemente collected against him exposed what some have called one of the worst corruption scandals in U.

S. history.
Last month Clemente claimed ex-FBI agents had embarked on a campaign of “witness tampering, harassment and intimidation” to help DeVecchio.
In an explosive letter to the Justice Department, she accused at least three former agents of illegal tactics.
She demanded that the feds protect potential witnesses in DeVecchio’s upcoming state trial and open a probe.
Former Michigan Tech University Prof. Stephen Dresch, who worked with Clemente on the DeVecchio investigation, doesn’t know who attacked her, but he’s sure it had something to do with DeVecchio.
“The meetings she has had in the recent past were all DeVecchio-related,” he said. “In the past 10 days, she met with a former Mafia source in Brooklyn or Staten Island about the DeVecchio case.
“These are people terrified of the federal government who don’t want to get involved in the case out of fear of retaliation from the feds.