One of his attorneys once told The New Yorker magazine that Scarpa being an FBI informant was as inconceivable as finding out that “Mother Teresa is assisting Saddam Hussein.”
By: CAROL E. LEE. Jan 21, 2007 2:48am
SARASOTA — By the time R. Lindley DeVecchio settled in Sarasota, his days at the FBI had become gangland lore.
He worked Brooklyn turf alongside storied undercover agents like “Donnie Brasco,” back when mobsters gunned each other down in the streets and children stumbled upon bullet-riddled corpses while playing outside.
Having sealed up a 33-year career with the FBI, DeVecchio bought a courtyard-style home set among hammocks of palms in virtually crime-free Palmer Ranch. He became a grandfather. He got elected president of a homeowners association where the major issue is landscaping.
And then he got indicted for murder.
The supervisory special agent who helped bring down the leaders of New York City’s five organized crime families now faces four 25-years-to-life prison sentences in what a prosecutor at the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office has called “one of the worst cases of law enforcement corruption in the history of this country.”
As he awaits another pretrial hearing this month, DeVecchio, 66, has also been busy tending to some local matters, leading the search for a property manager at his deed-restricted community and coordinating elections to the homeowners association.
Some 1,200 miles north, in the chambers of a small Brooklyn courtroom, sits the bane of his golden years.
The foot-thick case file charges that when DeVecchio was investigating organized crime in the 1980s and 1990s, he gave a legendary capo in the Colombo family the addresses of his enemies and details about whom among his crew might be a rat.
Get the Daily Briefing newsletter in your inbox.
Start your day with the morning’s top news
Delivery: DailyYour Email
The leaks led to the shooting deaths of a young woman, an 18-year-old kid, a mobster flirting with born-again Christianity and a bus company employee, court documents say.
DeVecchio, who declined to speak publicly about his pending trial or his life in Sarasota, pleaded not guilty to all four counts of second-degree murder at his March 30 arraignment in Brooklyn State Supreme Court.
And a 1994 internal Justice Department investigation into similar accusations found he had done nothing wrong.
“We deny the allegations in as strong a language as you can possibly deny anything,” said one of DeVecchio’s lawyers, Mark Bederow. “He’s being falsely accused of the worst crimes imaginable.”
But Brooklyn prosecutors say DeVecchio became too entwined with top-echelon informant Gregory Scarpa Sr., a “made” Colombo family mobster who once boasted that he stopped counting the number of murders he committed after reaching 50.
DeVecchio, prosecutors say, fed Scarpa confidential FBI information that kept the Colombo consigliere out of jail and helped him take out rivals. He took weekly payments in return and extracted inside information about the Mafia that aided his rise in the bureau, court files allege.
New York tabloids have since branded DeVecchio a “rogue,” and his court appearances are main events. There, the case generates the pomp of blue-ribbon kinds on which prosecutors make names for themselves.
Here in Sarasota, DeVecchio’s presence mostly goes unnoticed.
Taking the occasional note and wearing a sticker name tag, he sat quietly through a two-hour community meeting last week, where residents gave out certificates for best holiday decorations and a sheriff’s deputy explained how he handles teenage disturbances.
In DeVecchio’s community, Savannah at Turtle Rock, the rare mention of his legal woes falls on shrugged shoulders. His neighbors do not pry.
“It’s not an issue. The folks here — which is very, very nice — judge you for what you’re doing,” said Ron Mingst, who lives next door to DeVecchio, whom he met at a New Jersey gym about five years ago. “You’re doing a good job in the community. You’re doing a good job as president of our association. That’s what they see.”
From clerk to agent
In 1963, DeVecchio was 23, with a political science degree from George Washington University and a clerk’s job in J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Scarpa was in his initial years as an informant.
DeVecchio became an agent a few years later and soon specialized in organized crime at the bureau’s New York City office.
“He was one of the best informant analysts that we had,” said James Kossler, one of DeVecchio’s former bosses. “He was very good at developing informants and getting information that we needed.”
Informants are paid FBI sources who are not allowed to participate in criminal activities without permission from the bureau.
But Gregory “The Grim Reaper” Scarpa dabbled in a medley of crimes: loan sharking, drug dealing, burglary, illegal gambling and murder.
One of his attorneys once told The New Yorker magazine that Scarpa being an FBI informant was as inconceivable as finding out that “Mother Teresa is assisting Saddam Hussein.”
Handling the mobster was a touchy endeavor, and the FBI had a falling out with him in the mid-1970s.
DeVecchio brought Scarpa back into the fold in 1980 after getting permission from the bureau.
The charismatic agent with curly, dark hair and a mustache became the only one in the bureau to deal with the informant.
“Scarpa immediately became an important source of information in connection with the FBI’s war on organized crime because he was highly placed in the Colombo crime family,” DeVecchio stated in court records. “Moreover, Scarpa understood the inner workings of the Colombo crime family.”
DeVecchio’s informant finesse helped then-U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani jail leaders of the city’s Cosa Nostra in the celebrated 1986 Commission case.
“Without Lin or without that informant, we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what we did,” Kossler said.
But the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office says that over the course of their 12-year relationship, Scarpa also gave DeVecchio rolls of rubber-band bound cash for confidential information, and DeVecchio kept $66,598 of FBI money intended for Scarpa.
DeVecchio has said he never took more than small gifts from Scarpa, such as a pan of lasagna and a Cabbage Patch doll when they were popular and scarce. He vehemently denies intentionally giving any information to Scarpa that could have led to the murders of which he stands accused.
“At no time did I ever instruct Scarpa to murder anyone,” DeVecchio stated in an affidavit. “Nor did I ever conspire with him to plan any murder.”
The murders
In late September 1984, DeVecchio walked up the four steps leading to Scarpa’s two-story home on Avenue J in Brooklyn and suggested he “take care of” the girlfriend of Alphonse Persico, a fugitive and the brother of the Colombo family boss, court documents charge.
He said 31-year-old Mary Bari had talked to federal agents and might reveal the location of Persico, prosecutors allege.
A few days later, Scarpa and his crew lured Bari to a Brooklyn bar with the promise of a job offer. As she entered the club, one of them allegedly slid his arm around her and pushed her to the floor. She was shot three times in the head, the case charges.
Prosecutors say DeVecchio gave Scarpa a similar tip a year and a half later. He told him that one of his crewmen, Joseph DeDomenico, 44, had cut him out of profits from robbing jewelry and fur stores, and could be a liability because he was dating a born-again Christian, court documents allege. Being born again was one step from being a rat, prosecutors say Scarpa later told his right-hand man, and he ordered DeDomenico killed.
DeVecchio again warned Scarpa of a potential snitch among his ranks in May 1990, prosecutors charge. And a couple of Scarpa soldiers later shot 18-year-old Patrick Porco in the head and dumped his body on a street corner, the case alleges.
A bloody internal war broke out in the Colombo family the following year, in the wake of its boss’s imprisonment.
DeVecchio was a supervisor of the FBI squad investigating the Colombo family. Scarpa continued to pick off rivals.
One of them was Lorenzo Lampasi, 66, whom he shot with a rifle outside his Brooklyn home after DeVecchio gave Scarpa his address, prosecutors charge.
The war lasted about a year. Nearly a dozen people died.
Retired to Florida
Scarpa was convicted on gun charges in 1992. The FBI ordered DeVecchio to cut ties.
Around the same time, some of DeVecchio’s colleagues began to question the orthodoxy of his relationship with Scarpa, who died in prison in 1994 while serving time for murder and racketeering.
The department conducted a two-year investigation and found DeVecchio innocent.
He retired from the FBI in October 1996.
He sold his home in Dumont, N.J., where he had lived for decades, and moved to Sarasota in 2004.
Here, he blends in as a typical retiree. He belongs to a motorcycle club. And like many who have chartered a new beginning in paradise, he shoots the breeze over the fence with his neighbor, Mingst, about their home building woes.
His prospects for another term on the homeowners’ board appears untainted by the lawsuit. No one else has volunteered for the job, although the 82 homeowners probably would have elected DeVecchio anyway.
“No one has come up to me and wanted to discuss the situation, and I’ve never even heard that someone would say that we want to remove him from the board,” said Burke Terhune, the board’s secretary.
But for DeVecchio, the trial looms.
Unless he gets permission from a judge — as he did to watch the July Fourth fireworks at Sarasota Bay — he can always be found inside his three-bedroom home during a mandated curfew from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.
He wears an electronic monitoring anklet. He has had to notify a judge of his plans to lunch with his fiancée, get a haircut or peruse the Ellenton outlet mall. And this summer he had to reschedule a homeowners board meeting because it conflicted with a court appearance.
DeVecchio simply told the group he had to “go and testify,” Terhune said.
“It seemed like it was New York City or someplace. He said the next meeting will be at this time, if it’s OK with the rest of you,” Terhune said.
No one asked questions.
At every one of R. Lindley DeVecchio's pretrial hearings over the past nine months, a suited support system has collected in the courtroom. Close to 20 former FBI agents have come to his defense. Five of them signed for his $1 million bail. "What is important here is not only for Lin personally, but these charges impact directly on all of us as retired agents," said DeVecchio's former colleague, Christopher Mattiace. "We want to give him the moral support and of course to raise the necessary financial wherewithal." To that end, they have created a Web site, www.lindevecchio.com, that dissects DeVecchio's case, lists reasons why he is innocent and takes donations for his legal expenses. So far they have raised more than $80,000, said James Kossler, who oversees the site. "We're still trying to raise money to pay his bills and make him whole and get this thing over with," said Kossler, one of DeVecchio's former bosses. During the grand jury investigation, some former FBI agents visited witnesses in the case to question them about DeVecchio. Prosecutor Michael Vecchione argued during DeVecchio's arraignment that the visits amounted to intimidation. But Judge Gustin Reichbach dismissed the presumption. "To me, intimidation means threats or promises of harm to come, not the mere active investigation which seems to me to not be inappropriate," he said. -- The friends of Lin DeVecchio Trust Web site can be found here: http://www.lindevecchio.com
