A Dive to the Mat
Why Did the Trial of the Mafia’s Mole
in the New York FBI Fall Apart?
By Sander Hicks (originally published in
the New York Megaphone, August, 2008)
On March 23, 2006, the Brooklyn DA
indicted FBI supervisory agent R. Lindley Devecchio on four counts of murder.
The Brooklyn DA called it one of the “worst law enforcement corruption cases in
U.S. history.” But even worse was the way the trial collapsed, quickly and
quietly last fall. Most people have never heard about any of this.
Devecchio was “Mr. Organized Crime”—the head of the Colombo
crime squad, New York’s Mafia family of Colombos, Gambinos, Luccheses, and
Genoveses. Devecchio was indicted for helping bloodthirsty Colombo don Greg
Scarpa, Sr. kill informers and rivals. The trial was closely followed by those
interested in the bigger picture of FBI corruption in NYC. Devecchio’s story
overlaps with that of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, CIA penetration of
the FBI, and the 9/11 attacks. Even the final episode of “The Sopranos” has a line
that was based on something Devecchio said at the FBI. Tony Soprano’s “we’re
going to win this one” is what Devecchio proclaimed victoriously to the FBI’s
Chris Favo when Scarpa’s rival was blown away. Favo grew alarmed at the time,
but an internal investigation at FBI went nowhere.
Devecchio’s prosecution in Brooklyn stopped abruptly in
November, 2007, when the Village Voice’s Tom Robbins produced 11-year-old
audiotapes. Scarpa’s ex-girlfriend was the star witness with intimate knowledge
of Scarpa’s misdeeds, and Devecchio’s role. But the Robbins tapes showed the
ex-girlfriend, Linda Schiro, in the past had denied Devecchio played a role in
some of the killings.
Lead prosecutor Michael Vecchione told
reporters during a break in the 2007 trial, “Of course she made prior
inconsistent statements back then….Lin Devecchio was still checking in on her,
still supported her, and gave her a sense that he was protecting her… she may
not have been telling the truth then, but she is now, under oath.” A day later,
the prosecution reversed course, and surrendered their case.
Free that night, Devecchio flaunted his
unrepentant love of Mafia culture by dining at Sparks, the Times Square
restaurant famous for the 1985 mob slaying of Gambino Godfather Paul
Castellano.
How could the “biggest case of law
enforcement corruption” be derailed by a couple of old cassette tapes, you ask?
Tom Robbins, in his interview with the Megaphone, was shocked that the
prosecution quit so quickly. But he disagreed with the theory that the DA could
have “taken a dive.”
“What, did you go to law school? I’m
trying to have a conversation with you here,” laughed Robbins. He evaded the
question of Devecchio’s guilt or innocence.
The New York Times
misstated that the Robbins tapes showed that “Mr. Devecchio had not been
involved in the murders.” Robbins himself said that that was not accurate. “She
did in fact put Devecchio into one murder.” he said.
Linda Schiro implicated Devecchio in the
killing of Patrick Porco, who witnessed a Scarpa family hit on Halloween, 1989.
Lin Devecchio told Scarpa, Sr. that Porco was likely to rat about it. “Come on,
Dad, what are you crazy?” Joey Scarpa pleaded with his father. “Patrick would
never do that.”
“He got killed for doing nothing else
really except for hanging out with a bunch of numb-nuts.” Robbins told the
Megaphone “It grabs at your heart. He was a kid.” Porco was 19.
Robbins became notably anxious when asked
about his former writing partner, Jerry Capeci, who shared bylines with him at
The Daily News back in the 90’s. Capeci now writes about the Mafia for his New
York Sun column “Gangland.” The Megaphone asked Robbins about the rumors that
Capeci was being fed information by Lin Devecchio himself at the time.
“You’re backing something I know nothing
about. But look, Sander, let me tell you something about etiquette. You don’t
ask other reporters who their sources are.”
FBI Special Agent Chris Favo accused
Devecchio of feeding Capeci Mafia-related information. Favo said that he
stopped talking to Devecchio on Mondays so that FBI intelligence would stop
appearing in Jerry Capeci’s column on Tuesdays.
“I have no idea whether or not that’s
true. You’re calling me and asking me a question, all right, and I can tell you
this, all right, what I did and what I wrote, had nothing to do with anything
that Lin Devecchio may have done for or against me, or anyone I know. OK? I did
it because I found some tapes, in a closet, that went directly to the chief
witness in this case. And I didn’t see how I could sit on that, since the guy
was facing life in prison. So I went public with it.”
As reporters, Robbins and Capeci shared
bylines on important news stories regarding Greg Scarpa, Sr. They broke the
bizarre, controversial pieces that revealed that Greg Scarpa, Sr. had himself
worked for the FBI in Mississippi in 1964, to expose who murdered four civil
rights workers. Together, Capeci and Robbins wrote about the tainted blood
transfusion that infected Scarpa with HIV and killed him.
Edwin Wilson is a 15-year veteran of the
CIA, released from prison three years ago, when a Houston judge redacted
Wilson’s conviction on smuggling charges. He told The New York Megaphone. “I
thought it was kind of interesting how the FBI guys all hung around [
Devecchio] real close to give him bail money and all this kind of stuff. Which
really told me that there was a lot involved in this, and they were sweating
like hell.”
Wilson is referring to the FBI friends
who paid Devecchio’s bail. Devecchio’s support group, The Friends of Devecchio
Trust, included FBI heavyweights like James Kallstrom, the former head of the
FBI in New York. Devecchio’s “perp walk” out of court that day enjoyed the
escort of a phalanx of about 45 angry FBI agents and retirees. They punched
photographers and bragged on their website about “body-checking” reporters.
Lin Devecchio had been a witness against
Edwin Wilson at a 1983 trial, when the media, CIA and law enforcement turned on
Wilson. The CIA “rogue” was sentenced to 52 years behind bars.
From the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,
to 9/11, to the present, the FBI’s New York Office (NYO) has always had a
bizarre relationship with terrorists. In 1990, radical Islamist “Blind Sheikh”
Omar Abdel-Rahman was pulled into the USA, despite being on the State
Department’s “terrorist watch-list.” Rahman had been helpful to US/CIA
interests in the fight against the USSR in Afghanistan. He was spiritual leader
of the “Jersey City Mosque” whose members took the blame for the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing.
The New York FBI, of course, had
informants inside the Jersey City Mosque. One was named Emad Salem. As the
Jersey City terrorists planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Salem made
audio recordings of his conversations, including one with John Anticev, his FBI
handler. After the attack, Salem told Anticev, on tape, that they had “built
the bomb with the supervising supervision of the FBI.”
It was NY FBI who were in charge of
“tracking” Bin Laden, as the Bin Laden “office of origin.” But just like Blind
Sheikh Rahman, Bin Laden had been a key figure in the CIA’s proxy war against
the USSR in Afghanistan. His CIA code name had been “Tim Osman.”
The son of Devecchio’s Mafia informant,
Greg Scarpa, Jr. became an FBI informant himself when he was incarcerated next
to Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the ’93 World Trade Center bombing. Greg
Scarpa, Jr. had been involved in murders with his father. He claimed Devecchio
was intimately involved. So why, then, did Greg Scarpa, Jr., currently
incarcerated in Colorado, not get called as a witness in the Devecchio trial?
Perhaps because the raw intelligence Scarpa Jr. provided the FBI in 1996 showed
that the FBI knew about terrorist “mastermind” Ramzi Yousef planning new
attacks on the World Trade Center five years before 9/11/01.
The Friends of Devecchio Trust has often
pointed out that Devecchio “saved” the life of a Federal prosecutor Larry
Barcella. In 1983, Edwin Wilson had been doubled-crossed by the CIA, and was
stewing in jail. According to Devecchio, an angry Wilson said he wanted to hire
a hit man to kill prosecutor Barcella. Wilson claims this is a lie. “It was
just a railroad job, it really was. They wanted to put me away, in a way that,
for sure I would never get out.” Wilson, who just turned 80, would still be in
prison today if it weren’t for a series of dogged Freedom of Information Act
requests and a good attorney. Wilson proved he did have a relationship with the
CIA, after his official retirement. He was able to prove that, at his original
trial for selling explosives to Libya, the CIA lied in Federal court.
Is it possible that Devecchio might have
been involved in a 1983 CIA set-up of Wilson? It becomes likelier when you talk
to someone who worked for Devecchio in 1983—like Richard Taus, an ex-FBI
Special Agent incarcerated inside Clinton Correctional. In our interview, Taus
seemed healthy, unbeaten and unbowed. Taus tells of observing Oliver North and
NY-area CIA assets moving narcotics as a part of a clandestine, illegal
international operation in 1983, years before “Iran/Contra” became a household
name. Devecchio tried to keep Taus quiet, but when Taus refused, he was
harassed, and then arrested. Eventually, Taus was sentenced to 33 to 90 years
for pedophilia.
“All of those guys, they start to believe
their own bullshit. They put people away, they hide evidence, in order to get
convictions,” Edwin Wilson told the Megaphone from his basement apartment in a
suburb of Seattle. Devecchio involved a lot of people.”
The case originally had been recommended
to the DA’s office by a member of Congress, based on the work of New Jersey
forensics expert Angela Clemente. Clemente broke her media silence on the
trial’s collapse with this comment to the Megaphone:
“Mr. Devecchio and his supporters,
representing our nation’s top law enforcement officials, have demonstrated a
public display of disgusting arrogance and utter disregard for the rules of
law. The Federal Bureau of Investigation should be ashamed.”
The Brooklyn D.A. took a dive to the mat.
Who pressured them to take that dive, so early in the fight? The DA’s office
refused to answer a set of questions from the New York Megaphone.
SIDEBAR:
Government By Mafia
Is the
Devecchio/Scarpa collusion a freak anomaly? Or are there historical precedents?
Three experts weigh in.
Plane Crash Links Electronic Voting
with Drug Trafficking, Mafia, and CIA
By Daniel Hopsicker
Eight people died in the mysterious crash
of a twin-engine Piper Navajo outside Caracas, Venezuela on April 28. The
disaster claimed the life of Alfredo Anzola, 34, the Venezuelan co-founder of
election machine company Smartmatic.
The plane crashed while attempting to
leave the international airport at Maiquetía. Intrigue surrounded the crash
site immediately, as it was commandeered by Venezuelan military police. The plane
was linked to a Houston company, Aircraft Guaranty and Trust (AGC), a firm who
many allege serves as a CIA front company.
“According to the Federal Aviation Agency
in the United States, the aircraft is owned by Aircraft Guaranty & Trust of
Houston,” The Miami Herald reported.
Not exactly. The downed plane was not
owned but registered to Aircraft Guaranty. This arrangement was created by AGC
President Connie Wood, a former senior FAA official who owns the Houston
company. According to a year 2000 Federal Court filing, AGC’s “principal
business is providing title servicing and management services to non-U.S.
citizens who want to own U.S. registered aircraft.” Despite Aircraft Guaranty’s
tiny size, it purports to “own” a “ghost fleet” of more than six hundred
American aircraft, all of which are registered to the firm.
The flight’s pilot, Mario Donadi, was
close to the Venezuelan state and had made regular flights for the Venezuelan
government’s top law enforcement group. He did three years in a U.S. prison on
a 1999 drug trafficking conviction in Miami. On the day of the flight, he was
supposed to be in a Venezuelan prison, serving an eight-year stretch for
narcotics. The flight was on its way to the island of Curaçao just off the
coast of Venezuela, an international money-laundering haven and crossroads of
the drug trade.
Smartmatic itself, as a Miami Herald
investigation first revealed, is a firm owned by a trust in Amsterdam, which is
owned by an entity in the Netherlands Antilles, which itself is owned by a
private foundation in Geneva, Switzerland. Smartmatic had purchased the
much-larger Sequoia Pacific several years ago, but relinquished the firm in
November of 2007, after a US Treasury investigation accused the company of ties
to leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
The crash is just one more incident in
the sordid history of Sequoia Pacific, of Jamestown, NY. The City of New York
wasted seven years and $17 million, before finally ditching its $60 million
Sequoia electronic voting system contract in 2000. Originally, Gambino family
lieutenant Salvatore Reale lobbied the City of New York to buy the system. This
is the same Gambino heavyweight who, according to the sworn deposition of CIA
pilot Richard Brenneke, ran cocaine with CIA help during the Iran/Contra
scandal. Cocaine was flown in and guns were flown out by CIA pilots as part of
a secret war against the socialist government of Nicaragua.
So, may we ask? What was a convicted
Vennezulan drug pilot doing ferrying around a major electronic voting VIP
executive, in an airplane registered to a company known to shield CIA aircraft?
Or is that the kind of question you are not supposed to ask in an election
year? Our investigations at The Megaphone continue.
Daniel Hopsicker is a
florida-based investigative reporter, and author of Barry and the Boys: The
CIA, the Mob and America’s Secret History (2001) and Welcome to Terrorland:
Mohamed Atta & the 9-11 Cover-Up in Florida (2006).
Who Killed the Kennedys?
By Jim Fetzer
The Mafia and CIA played a major role in
the killing of the Kennedys, and the paper trail is quite rich. Noel Twyman, in Bloody Treason, identified mob bosses
Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Sam Giancana as three prominent figures
who talked about the assassination before or after the event. In Double Cross
author Chuck Giancana has some interesting conversations with his brother,
Chicago mob boss Sam Giacana. “The entire conspiracy went right up to the top
of the CIA,” Sam said. He claimed that some of its former and present leaders
were involved, as well as a “half-dozen fanatical right-wing Texans, Vice
President Lyndon Johnson, and Bay of Pigs Action Officer under Eisenhower,
Richard Nixon.” Collusion between the CIA and the Mafia was common at the time,
including two dozen unsuccessful efforts to take out Castro. The more Chuck
Giancana understood what his brother Sam was telling him, the more apparent it
became that “there were few, if any, lines of demarcation between the Outfit
and the CIA.”
Jim Fetzer edited
Assassination Science (1998), Murder in Dealey Plaza (2000), and The Great
Zapruder Film Hoax (2003).
Mafia and FBI Role in Killing of Rev.
Martin Luther King
By William Pepper
As the evidence in the King case clearly
indicated, American intelligence collaborated with the Marcello mafia
organization and its working members in Memphis to organize the assassination
of Dr. King on the ground. This kind of working relationship provided the
ever-necessary plausible deniability, though there was a military back up prepared
to intervene if the civilian sniper failed. He did not. The FBI, in
collaboration with American military, intelligence and local law enforcement
officials, ensured that the crime was covered up. The Bureau had profiled the
patsy James Earl Ray and arranged his escape from prison. They made him
available for the fall.
William F. Pepper is
author of An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King and is active in
the NYC Ballot Initiative for an independent investigation into the 9/11
attacks. He was a friend of the late Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
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