Peter Lance
It’s true that Greg Jr. was known as “the marijuana king” of Staten Island. “But he has never been convicted of a single homicide,” says his former lawyer Larry Silverman. “So when Caproni and the other prosecutors in the EDNY supported that forty-year sentence, it had nothing to do with anything remotely resembling fairness or justice.”
“It was about the cover-up,” insists Clemente, who pushed to reopen the DeVecchio investigation along with Andrew Orena, the son of Vic Orena, the reputed head of the Colombo crime family, who got a life sentence in 1992. It was Orena’s faction, allegedly pitted against a faction of the family controlled by Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, that DeVecchio claimed had led to the infamous Colombo war between 1991 and 1992.
Back then, when Orena and his capo, Pasquale Amato, were sentenced to life, their attorneys had no idea that Greg Scarpa Sr. had not only instigated the war, but that he’d killed a third of the victims himself—and done so with the alleged support and encouragement of R. Lindley DeVecchio, the FBI’s top New York agent on organized crime.
By early 1992, Christopher Favo, DeVecchio’s number two in squad C-10 of the FBI’s New York Office, had become concerned that key intelligence on the location of witnesses in the Colombo war was finding its way to Scarpa Sr.
In January of that year, Favo gave DeVecchio what was thought to be the address of Orena’s girlfriend where he was believed to be hiding out. He also furnished a mistaken address for one of Vic’s soldiers. Later, a cooperating member of Scarpa’s crew admitted that he’d tried to kill both men by hunting them at the faulty addresses, which Greg Sr. had supplied to him from his “law enforcement” source.
It was that mistake on the hideout address that was one of the eight possible “disclosures” by DeVecchio to the “Grim Reaper” contained in EDNY prosecutor Ellen Corcella’s letter to defense lawyers on May 8, 1995. Corcella worked directly under Caproni, who was found to have withheld a key piece of exculpatory evidence from defense attorneys documenting the alleged corrupt relationship between the hitman and DeVecchio whom the killer referred to in code as his “girlfriend.”
