As a kid growing up in New York, Linda Scarpa had no idea her father Gregory “The Grim Reaper” Scarpa was the Colombo crime family’s most feared and vicious enforcer. But when she started dating, Linda learned the truth the hard way!
In her book “The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter,” Linda
, now 46, details how her father and his wiseguy pals tracked down her first boyfriend, Greg Vacca, after she came home from a date stoned on marijuana.“They just friggin’ pulverized me,” said Greg, who wound up with a broken nose, a concussion and two fractured ribs. “My head was so swollen, I looked like the Elephant Man.”
Daddy’s wrath proved more deadly after cab driver Jose Guzman attacked Linda when she was 16. “He ripped my shirt open,” recalled Linda. Scarpa and his crew tracked down Guzman and shot him. Afterward, Scarpa told his daughter he’d actually saved other girls from being raped.
If “you hurt his family or anyone he cared about” or violated Mafia rules, “it was his job to bring you death,” said Linda. But sometimes Scarpa — who stopped counting his murders after he iced his 50th victim — landed on the wrong side of a gun.
Once, Linda and her 8-month-old son were caught in a shoot-out as “men in black ski masks” opened fire on her father’s car and hers while they were pulling out of the family’s driveway. A gunman stopped the onslaught when he saw the baby in Linda’s car. “You saved my life,” the unharmed Scarpa told his daughter.
However, his luck didn’t last. He was eventually convicted of a slew of crimes and died in jail in 1994.
His son, Joey, was whacked by rival racketeers in 1995, said Linda.
“I’ve often thought about the people my father murdered and the families he destroyed, and it’s very painful and disturbing,” Linda wrote. “I knew what that felt like because my brother was murdered, too!”
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