Attorneys representing Winnebago County’s interests in the nearly concluded federal jail lawsuit have already been paid $356,865 for legal services by the county from 2001 to 2007.
Attorney Paul R. Cicero of Cicero and France, P.C., also represented the county during Winnebago County’s first jail lawsuit, which spanned from 1994 to 1997. Figures regarding how much the firm was paid for the first jail lawsuit were not available at time of publication.
According to a source familiar with the selection process, Cicero was chosen to represent the county in the current jail lawsuit because of their “expertise,” and due to a lack of adequate staffing, time and resources in the county’s civil litigation division. The source wished to remain anonymous, due to their present occupation.
The source also said no county officials examined Cicero and France’s invoices before payment was made to verify the accuracy of the billings.
Clout counts?
In addition to expertise and lack of staff, clout may have also been a factor in the selection of Cicero as the county’s attorney in the two jail lawsuits.
According to the FBI file for Mob advisor Joseph Zito, Zito likely had interests in restaurant and bar known as the Playroom Lounge at 206 N. Church St. Cicero’s father, Mathew P. Cicero, who was also an attorney, was vice president and secretary of YDZ Corporation, which operated the Play Room.
Zito died in 1981. His funeral was attended by Chicago Mob boss Joseph Aiuppa, who died in 1997.
A July 17, 1969 article in the Rockford Morning Star indicated, Mat Cicero represented Anthony F. Calcione “in legal battles to keep the Play Room open after [former Rockford Mayor Benjamin] Schleicher refused to re-issue the lounge’s city license...until it obtain[ed] a state license.” The article indicated that YDZ’s corporation office was listed as Mat Cicero’s law office.
A different source familiar with the Rockford Mob structure alleged Calcione was a Mob associate who once operated two brothels in the Rockford area in the 1940s. Calcione died March 8, 1993 at age 79. A news article from the June 11, 1949 Rockford Register Republic regarding one of the brothels supports the sources’ assertion.
Paul Cicero did not respond to a question left at his office with his receptionist regarding why he believed the county chose him as their attorney. The receptionist said jail lawsuit questions are normally answered by the Winnebago County State’s Attorney’s office.
Thanks to Jeff Havens. Mr. Havens is a former staff writer and award-winning reporter for The Rock River Times, a weekly newspaper in Rockford, Ill.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Jail Lawsuit Attorney Submits Suspect Invoice
Rockford, Ill. attorney bills taxpayers for call that never occurred—others impossible to independently verify
By Jeff Havens
As the nearly eight-year federal jail lawsuit comes to a close, scrutiny of attorney invoices raises serious questions for which taxpayers and government officials may want answers.
Specifically, one bill, on line 10 of invoice 4813, may be a window into questionable billing practices by attorney John F. Heckinger Jr.—lead attorney in the 2000 jail lawsuit, which resulted in a significant local sales tax hike and construction of a new $160 million jail.
As the nearly eight-year federal jail lawsuit comes to a close, scrutiny of attorney invoices raises serious questions for which taxpayers and government officials may want answers.
Specifically, one bill, on line 10 of invoice 4813, may be a window into questionable billing practices by attorney John F. Heckinger Jr.—lead attorney in the 2000 jail lawsuit, which resulted in a significant local sales tax hike and construction of a new $160 million jail.
Heckinger and his lawsuit partner, attorney Thomas E. Greenwald, seek an additional $185,711 to the $152,707 they have already been paid by Winnebago County. If granted by the federal court, Heckinger and Greenwald will have received at least $343,418 for this second of two jail lawsuits in the past 13 years (see timeline online at www.rockrivertimes.com).
Mysterious 36 minutes
The bill in question for 36 minutes in legal services regards an alleged Nov. 14, 2005, telephone call from The Rock River Times. Heckinger claimed the call concerned the Winnebago County Jail and other undisclosed issues. For that time, Heckinger has asked to be paid $90.
However, a thorough examination of files and interviews with this newspaper’s staff indicates no such call or contact was ever made on that date or dates soon after or before the alleged call.
Two days after the alleged call, The Rock River Times published an article Nov. 16, 2005, in which Heckinger’s name was mentioned. However, Heckinger’s comment was not needed for the article, since the story was about how county officials prioritized spending jail tax money.
Had Heckinger’s comment been needed, the newspaper would have documented the date the call was made, whether there was an interview, or whether a message was left requesting comment. But no such documentation exists with The Rock River Times.
In addition, the Nov. 16, 2005, article titled “Jail tax spending priorities questioned” would have indicated whether Heckinger’s comment was sought for the article, regardless of whether he was available for an interview.
Heckinger avoids interview
Up until Oct. 29, 2007, Heckinger had never returned messages left at his office for comment about articles published during the past several years. Heckinger continued that trend for this article.
Despite numerous phone calls to Heckinger’s office and his receptionist’s indication that Heckinger wanted to interview, he was never available and never returned messages.
Lawsuit partner: 'I'm not going to comment'
When asked whether he examined all the invoices submitted in court, Greenwald responded that he had, and that he “totaled them up.”
However, he had no comment regarding invoices Heckinger submitted for payment. “I’m not going to comment on any invoices [submitted by] attorney Heckinger,” Greenwald said. “You would have to speak with him regarding that. ... I’m not going to comment on anything on his bills.”
Vague billing
When compared to Greenwald’s description of billings, Heckinger’s invoices are non-descript and impossible to verify without directly contacting Heckinger.
For example, for Nov. 1, 2005, Heckinger wrote: “Prep for settlement confer re. jail population issues.”
For the same day, Greenwald wrote: “Settlement conference; preparation for settlement conference, including review of jail population reports; conference with J.F. Heckinger.”
In another example, for Nov. 9, 2005, Heckinger wrote: “Letter from media and inmates re. overcrowding.”
There is no indication as to what news organization or inmates supposedly sent the letter.
In a similar bill regarding a letter, Greenwald wrote for March 15, 2004: “Review letter of Paul Cicero regarding accelerated program; memo to file.”
Plaintiff outraged
In addition to Heckinger submitting a bill allegedly regarding The Rock River Times, Greenwald, too, is seeking a similar payment for reading an article published earlier this year.
Greenwald is billing taxpayers $141 for the one hour he read an article Feb. 7, 2007, concerning Timothy Chatmon—lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit. The article, “Jail lawsuit plaintiff likely to receive nothing,” was published the same day Greenwald billed taxpayers.
Chatmon expressed outrage at the prospect of Heckinger and Greenwald receiving more money in a recent court filing. In the 12-page motion filed Oct. 19, Chatmon accused the court of abandoning its responsibility in the matter, racism, and for the federal court in Rockford to “recuse itself” from approving further payments to attorneys connected to the lawsuit.
Chatmon said the lawsuit was never about alleged jail overcrowding, as his attorneys asserted. Chatmon said the primary purpose of the lawsuit was to address adverse public health conditions in the facility—something he said could have, and should have, been easily addressed without constructing a new jail.
According to Chatmon, the primary issue he wished to address in the lawsuit included multiple use of shaving razors and toothbrushes by different inmates. The razors and toothbrushes were allegedly provided by jail staff.
If this were a routine practice, as Chatmon stated in his June 17, 2002, court deposition, the action could have transmitted disease-causing viruses and bacteria from one infected inmate to non-infected inmates—diseases such as hepatitis C, which Chatmon believes he contracted in jail. Chatmon’s alleged acquisition of hepatitis C while in jail is the basis for his personal claim that was once part of the lawsuit. But Chatmon’s personal claim was dropped from the lawsuit earlier this year. This comes in spite of promises made by Heckinger in a 2004 letter in which Heckinger said the issue of compensation would be addressed after the case concluded “in 2007 or later.”
Chatmon said in 2004 he wasn’t aware, and would have never approved of the 2003 agreement that called for building the new 588,000-square-foot jail. Chatmon described the lawsuit as fraudulent and deceptive.
Law license suspended
Questionable law practices are not new to Heckinger. Some of those practices led to Heckinger’s law license suspension for 60 days in 2004.
Heckinger was charged by the state in 2003 with “unauthorized” use of his clients’ money “for his own business or personal purposes,” and commingling one of his clients’ funds.
The Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) charged Heckinger with five counts of alleged unauthorized use of his clients’ funds totaling $12,634.92 from 1996 to 1999.
Heckinger was also charged with one count of failure to separate his money from his clients’ funds, which totaled $199,044. ARDC’s complaint also alleged Heckinger “used the [$199,044] funds...for personal and business purposes which were both related and unrelated to Respondent’s practice of law.”
Link to Mob-connected business
Like Heckinger’s invoices and handling of clients’ money, similar questions can also be asked about two of Heckinger’s real estate transactions. In 2003, Heckinger purchased two properties from Buckley Partners, LLC. The properties housed state offices for the Illinois attorney general and University of Illinois.
Specifically, the Illinois attorney general’s office leased office space from Buckley that in 1999 listed an alleged Mob soldier as one of its three “members.”
Buckley leased the property at 7230 Argus Drive on Rockford’s east side to the state’s top law enforcement agency beginning in 1999. Buckley also leased property at 417 Ware Ave., to one of the state’s top education institutions, the University of Illinois, starting in 1998.
Both properties were owned by Buckley from at least 1999 to November 2003, when they were sold to Heckinger for $4.35 million.
According to a disclosure statement Buckley filed with the state in 1999, one of the “members” of Buckley Partners was Salvatore “Sam” G. Galluzzo, who was identified in 1984 as a “mob soldier” in a Rockford Register Star article. Galluzzo’s name and photo were also the subject of exhibits in the recent “Operation Family Secrets” Mafia trial in Chicago (see “Former Rockford Cop Testified at ‘Family Secrets’ Mob Trial”).
Thanks to Jeff Havens. Mr. Havens is a former staff writer and award-winning reporter for The Rock River Times, a weekly newspaper in Rockford, Ill.
By Jeff Havens
As the nearly eight-year federal jail lawsuit comes to a close, scrutiny of attorney invoices raises serious questions for which taxpayers and government officials may want answers.
Specifically, one bill, on line 10 of invoice 4813, may be a window into questionable billing practices by attorney John F. Heckinger Jr.—lead attorney in the 2000 jail lawsuit, which resulted in a significant local sales tax hike and construction of a new $160 million jail.
As the nearly eight-year federal jail lawsuit comes to a close, scrutiny of attorney invoices raises serious questions for which taxpayers and government officials may want answers.
Specifically, one bill, on line 10 of invoice 4813, may be a window into questionable billing practices by attorney John F. Heckinger Jr.—lead attorney in the 2000 jail lawsuit, which resulted in a significant local sales tax hike and construction of a new $160 million jail.
Heckinger and his lawsuit partner, attorney Thomas E. Greenwald, seek an additional $185,711 to the $152,707 they have already been paid by Winnebago County. If granted by the federal court, Heckinger and Greenwald will have received at least $343,418 for this second of two jail lawsuits in the past 13 years (see timeline online at www.rockrivertimes.com).
Mysterious 36 minutes
The bill in question for 36 minutes in legal services regards an alleged Nov. 14, 2005, telephone call from The Rock River Times. Heckinger claimed the call concerned the Winnebago County Jail and other undisclosed issues. For that time, Heckinger has asked to be paid $90.
However, a thorough examination of files and interviews with this newspaper’s staff indicates no such call or contact was ever made on that date or dates soon after or before the alleged call.
Two days after the alleged call, The Rock River Times published an article Nov. 16, 2005, in which Heckinger’s name was mentioned. However, Heckinger’s comment was not needed for the article, since the story was about how county officials prioritized spending jail tax money.
Had Heckinger’s comment been needed, the newspaper would have documented the date the call was made, whether there was an interview, or whether a message was left requesting comment. But no such documentation exists with The Rock River Times.
In addition, the Nov. 16, 2005, article titled “Jail tax spending priorities questioned” would have indicated whether Heckinger’s comment was sought for the article, regardless of whether he was available for an interview.
Heckinger avoids interview
Up until Oct. 29, 2007, Heckinger had never returned messages left at his office for comment about articles published during the past several years. Heckinger continued that trend for this article.
Despite numerous phone calls to Heckinger’s office and his receptionist’s indication that Heckinger wanted to interview, he was never available and never returned messages.
Lawsuit partner: 'I'm not going to comment'
When asked whether he examined all the invoices submitted in court, Greenwald responded that he had, and that he “totaled them up.”
However, he had no comment regarding invoices Heckinger submitted for payment. “I’m not going to comment on any invoices [submitted by] attorney Heckinger,” Greenwald said. “You would have to speak with him regarding that. ... I’m not going to comment on anything on his bills.”
Vague billing
When compared to Greenwald’s description of billings, Heckinger’s invoices are non-descript and impossible to verify without directly contacting Heckinger.
For example, for Nov. 1, 2005, Heckinger wrote: “Prep for settlement confer re. jail population issues.”
For the same day, Greenwald wrote: “Settlement conference; preparation for settlement conference, including review of jail population reports; conference with J.F. Heckinger.”
In another example, for Nov. 9, 2005, Heckinger wrote: “Letter from media and inmates re. overcrowding.”
There is no indication as to what news organization or inmates supposedly sent the letter.
In a similar bill regarding a letter, Greenwald wrote for March 15, 2004: “Review letter of Paul Cicero regarding accelerated program; memo to file.”
Plaintiff outraged
In addition to Heckinger submitting a bill allegedly regarding The Rock River Times, Greenwald, too, is seeking a similar payment for reading an article published earlier this year.
Greenwald is billing taxpayers $141 for the one hour he read an article Feb. 7, 2007, concerning Timothy Chatmon—lead plaintiff in the class-action lawsuit. The article, “Jail lawsuit plaintiff likely to receive nothing,” was published the same day Greenwald billed taxpayers.
Chatmon expressed outrage at the prospect of Heckinger and Greenwald receiving more money in a recent court filing. In the 12-page motion filed Oct. 19, Chatmon accused the court of abandoning its responsibility in the matter, racism, and for the federal court in Rockford to “recuse itself” from approving further payments to attorneys connected to the lawsuit.
Chatmon said the lawsuit was never about alleged jail overcrowding, as his attorneys asserted. Chatmon said the primary purpose of the lawsuit was to address adverse public health conditions in the facility—something he said could have, and should have, been easily addressed without constructing a new jail.
According to Chatmon, the primary issue he wished to address in the lawsuit included multiple use of shaving razors and toothbrushes by different inmates. The razors and toothbrushes were allegedly provided by jail staff.
If this were a routine practice, as Chatmon stated in his June 17, 2002, court deposition, the action could have transmitted disease-causing viruses and bacteria from one infected inmate to non-infected inmates—diseases such as hepatitis C, which Chatmon believes he contracted in jail. Chatmon’s alleged acquisition of hepatitis C while in jail is the basis for his personal claim that was once part of the lawsuit. But Chatmon’s personal claim was dropped from the lawsuit earlier this year. This comes in spite of promises made by Heckinger in a 2004 letter in which Heckinger said the issue of compensation would be addressed after the case concluded “in 2007 or later.”
Chatmon said in 2004 he wasn’t aware, and would have never approved of the 2003 agreement that called for building the new 588,000-square-foot jail. Chatmon described the lawsuit as fraudulent and deceptive.
Law license suspended
Questionable law practices are not new to Heckinger. Some of those practices led to Heckinger’s law license suspension for 60 days in 2004.
Heckinger was charged by the state in 2003 with “unauthorized” use of his clients’ money “for his own business or personal purposes,” and commingling one of his clients’ funds.
The Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission (ARDC) charged Heckinger with five counts of alleged unauthorized use of his clients’ funds totaling $12,634.92 from 1996 to 1999.
Heckinger was also charged with one count of failure to separate his money from his clients’ funds, which totaled $199,044. ARDC’s complaint also alleged Heckinger “used the [$199,044] funds...for personal and business purposes which were both related and unrelated to Respondent’s practice of law.”
Link to Mob-connected business
Like Heckinger’s invoices and handling of clients’ money, similar questions can also be asked about two of Heckinger’s real estate transactions. In 2003, Heckinger purchased two properties from Buckley Partners, LLC. The properties housed state offices for the Illinois attorney general and University of Illinois.
Specifically, the Illinois attorney general’s office leased office space from Buckley that in 1999 listed an alleged Mob soldier as one of its three “members.”
Buckley leased the property at 7230 Argus Drive on Rockford’s east side to the state’s top law enforcement agency beginning in 1999. Buckley also leased property at 417 Ware Ave., to one of the state’s top education institutions, the University of Illinois, starting in 1998.
Both properties were owned by Buckley from at least 1999 to November 2003, when they were sold to Heckinger for $4.35 million.
According to a disclosure statement Buckley filed with the state in 1999, one of the “members” of Buckley Partners was Salvatore “Sam” G. Galluzzo, who was identified in 1984 as a “mob soldier” in a Rockford Register Star article. Galluzzo’s name and photo were also the subject of exhibits in the recent “Operation Family Secrets” Mafia trial in Chicago (see “Former Rockford Cop Testified at ‘Family Secrets’ Mob Trial”).
Thanks to Jeff Havens. Mr. Havens is a former staff writer and award-winning reporter for The Rock River Times, a weekly newspaper in Rockford, Ill.
No Visits from Wife Can't Stop Mafia Boss from Fathering Child While in Jail
A notorious Italian mafioso has fathered a child from behind bars despite being denied private visits from his wife.
Raffaele Cutolo's daughter was born after he won a legal battle to become a father through artificial insemination.
He married his wife, Immacolata, in jail in 1983. The couple never consummated their marriage.
Cutolo, a former head of Naples' Camorra Mafia, is serving several life sentences for multiple murders. In an interview with La Repubblica newspaper last year, the 64-year-old mafioso said: "I'll die in prison. My last wish is to give my wife a child."
Cutolo's lawyers spent six years arguing with the justice ministry for his right to have access to artificial insemination techniques.
His baby daughter was born on Tuesday at a hospital in Naples.
Cutolo's wife, 43, told La Repubblica she would keep her child away from the Camorra. "I want her to never even hear that word pronounced, because it is synonymous with pain for everybody," she said.
Cutolo's son from a previous marriage was shot dead, aged 25, in gang violence.
Thanks to BBC
Raffaele Cutolo's daughter was born after he won a legal battle to become a father through artificial insemination.
He married his wife, Immacolata, in jail in 1983. The couple never consummated their marriage.
Cutolo, a former head of Naples' Camorra Mafia, is serving several life sentences for multiple murders. In an interview with La Repubblica newspaper last year, the 64-year-old mafioso said: "I'll die in prison. My last wish is to give my wife a child."
Cutolo's lawyers spent six years arguing with the justice ministry for his right to have access to artificial insemination techniques.
His baby daughter was born on Tuesday at a hospital in Naples.
Cutolo's wife, 43, told La Repubblica she would keep her child away from the Camorra. "I want her to never even hear that word pronounced, because it is synonymous with pain for everybody," she said.
Cutolo's son from a previous marriage was shot dead, aged 25, in gang violence.
Thanks to BBC
A Mafia Mistress' Tale Tales
Linda Schiro, the key prosecution witness in the startling murder trial of former FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, took the stand Monday, and it was hard not to find her deadly story convincing.
In a soft voice and a strong South Brooklyn accent, Schiro, 62, nervously but soberly laid out how Lin DeVecchio had regularly visited the homes she shared in Bensonhurst with the love of her life, a swaggering Mafia soldier and secret government informant named Greg Scarpa Sr. On four of those visits, Schiro said, DeVecchio had provided Scarpa with the lethal information that her gangster lover then used to murder four people.
To hear Schiro tell it, there wasn’t much difference between the gangster and the FBI agent. “You know, you have to take care of this, she’s going to be a problem,” she quoted DeVecchio as saying prior to the 1984 murder of a beautiful girlfriend of a high-level member of Scarpa’s Colombo crime family who was allegedly talking to law enforcement.
She had the agent, a smirk on his face, talking the same way in 1987 about a drug-addled member of Scarpa’s crew. “You know,” Schiro said DeVecchio told Scarpa, “we gotta take care of this guy before he starts talking.” The crew member was soon dead as well.
When Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach called the first break of the day, reporters polled one another as to whether this crucial witness was believable. “If I was him,” said one old hand, pointing at the defendant, “I’d be getting on the A train right now, headed for JFK and a plane someplace far away. He’s dead.” A veteran reporter sitting next to him nodded in agreement.
The first time I heard Linda Schiro, she also sounded convincing.
That was 10 years ago, when Schiro sat down to talk with me and Jerry Capeci, then and now the city’s most knowledgeable organized-crime reporter. But the story she told us then is dramatically different from the one she has now sworn to as the truth.
Which puts us in no small bind.
The ground rules when we spoke to Schiro in 1997 were that the information she provided would only be used in a book—not in news articles. She also exacted a pledge that we would not attribute information directly to her. And in a cautious but not unreasonable demand for a woman who spent her life married to the mob, she required a promise—however difficult to enforce—that we not cooperate in any law-enforcement inquiries stemming from said book’s publication.
Sadly, no book ever emerged. The law-enforcement inquiries, however, did. They have taken on a life of their own, and it is Schiro, having shed her former concerns about confidentiality, who has now become the cooperator.
In the eight days of testimony before Schiro took the stand, a parade of mob cooperators and investigators testified about their suspicions concerning DeVecchio’s and Scarpa’s relationship. A trio of FBI agents said they believed that their colleague had steadily tilted in Scarpa’s favor, possibly passing crucial information to him. But suspicion is all anyone offered. Not a single witness, prior to Schiro, was able to put the former agent in any of the four murders for which he was indicted more than a year ago. That’s Schiro’s task. The D.A.’s case appears to rest on her.
If convicted, DeVecchio, 67, faces life in prison.
Those are the kind of high stakes that take precedence over contracts and vows of confidence, no matter how important they may be to the business of reporting, and regardless of how distasteful it may be to violate them. The threat of a life sentence trumps a promise.
Lin DeVecchio may be guilty, or he may be innocent. But one thing is clear: What Linda Schiro is saying on the witness stand now is not how she told the story 10 years ago concerning three of the four murder counts now at issue.
Schiro told us then, as she did the court this week, that Scarpa hid nothing from her, letting her share in both his Mafia secrets and his precarious position as an FBI informant. In the 1984 murder of Mary Bari, the glamorous young woman who was dating a Colombo crime family figure, Schiro told how Scarpa and his gang had lured her to a mob social club and then shot her in the face. She told the ghoulish story—one she later learned was apocryphal—about how a pet boxer had sniffed out an ear from the victim that, unbeknownst to her killers, had been shot away during the grisly murder. But Schiro said she knew little as to the why of the slaying.
“All I know is they had word she was turning; she was gonna let information out,” Schiro told us then. Back then, she made no mention of DeVecchio at all in connection with the slaying. But in court this week, she said the one who claimed that Mary Bari was an informant was DeVecchio, describing her as “a problem” to be “taken care of.” After the murder, she testified, DeVecchio had returned to the home she then shared with Scarpa on Avenue J and joked about the way Bari’s body had been dumped just a couple of blocks away.
“Why didn’t you just bring the body right in front of the house?” she said DeVecchio laughed to Scarpa.
Schiro said in our interviews that, as far as she knew, DeVecchio had nothing to do with the 1987 murder of a longtime Scarpa pal, a Colombo soldier named Joe DeDomenico, who went by the nickname of “Joe Brewster.”
Scarpa, she said, was so close to DeDomenico that he had been the best man at DeDomenico’s wedding and had stood as godfather to his friend’s son. But by 1987, Schiro told us, “Joe Brewster had started getting a little stupid.” She recalled a visit by DeDomenico to the couple’s home. “He was kind of drooling,” she said. “He was starting to use coke.” Schiro told us that Scarpa was also disturbed because he had asked his friend to “do something”—an unspecified crime—and been refused by DeDomenico, who said he was becoming a born-again Christian, an awkward creed for a mobster.
“Yeah, Greg had him killed,” Schiro said, naming Scarpa’s son Gregory Jr. and two of Scarpa’s crew members as the assassins. “They told him he had to go someplace, and they got all dressed up and they killed him.”
That interview took place on March 1, 1997, the day after agent DeVecchio had himself been forced to take the witness stand in Brooklyn federal court, where he was grilled by attorneys for a pair of Colombo crime family members seeking to have their convictions overturned. Their claim was that they were the victims of the FBI’s misbehavior with Scarpa, its prized informant.
Brewster’s name had been raised by one of the defense attorneys, who asked DeVecchio if he’d ever given Scarpa information about him. DeVecchio angrily denied it.
Having heard that exchange, we asked Schiro whether Lin DeVecchio had had anything to do with the death of Joe Brewster. She seemed briefly confused by the question. “No,” she said. “He never met Joe Brewster.”
Schiro said then that she had been puzzled, along with members of Scarpa’s crew, at Scarpa’s insistence that his old friend had to go. “I liked Joe Brewster too. I couldn’t understand. Bobby and Carmine couldn’t understand,” she said, referring to a pair of Scarpa’s cronies, one of whom, Carmine Sessa, testified last week in DeVecchio’s trial.
Most of our conversations with Schiro were tape-recorded. Some tapes have long since gone missing. Audibility is a problem in others. But the conversation about the murder of Joe Brewster has survived. So has Schiro’s story about another killing, that of Lorenzo Lampasi, a Colombo soldier gunned down by Scarpa and his gang during the crime family’s bloody civil war in the early 1990s.
Lampasi was murdered at 4 a.m. on May 22, 1992, just as he was leaving his Brooklyn home to go to work at the school bus company he operated with another Colombo wiseguy. The D.A. has charged DeVecchio with tipping Scarpa to Lampasi’s schedule and whereabouts.
On the witness stand Monday, Schiro said that was exactly what had happened. She said that Scarpa had been furious about a note Lampasi had sent him, one that said “there was talk on the street” that Scarpa was an informant. “This fucking Larry Lampasi,” she quoted Scarpa as telling DeVecchio, “he started rumors I am an informer, that I’m a rat.”
She said Scarpa asked DeVecchio to find out “exactly where Lampasi lives and what time he leaves in the morning.” A few days later, she testified, the agent returned with the information. “I was in the kitchen, and Lin gave him the address and told him he leaves the house at 4 a.m.” The agent had also filled in the gangster, she testified, about a balky gate that Lampasi had to open and close.
After Lampasi’s murder, she testified, DeVecchio had returned to the house, that same smirk on his face. “That was good information,” she said Scarpa told his FBI handler.
In 1997, however, Schiro repeatedly insisted to us that DeVecchio had nothing at all to do with the Lampasi homicide. Schiro raised the subject herself back then. “There’s another thing too, with Larry Lampasi,” she told us. “See, when Lin is right, I give him right. He didn’t tell Greg about Larry Lampasi.”
What had happened, she explained, was that she and Scarpa had been at a family dinner in New Jersey in late 1991. “I think it was around Thanksgiving,” she said. Whenever the date, the dinner was hosted by Scarpa’s sister. At the table, Scarpa’s niece Rosemarie, a school bus driver, had complained to her powerful uncle that Lampasi was treating her badly.
“And I remember we were there, and she was crying to Greg they are giving her these crazy routes in bad neighborhoods,” Schiro told us. Lampasi wouldn’t let the niece, who lived on Staten Island, take her bus home with her, she said. “And she told Greg the times he gets in, the times he leaves. And Greg said, ‘I’ll take care of it for you.’ ”
As Schiro put it, Scarpa later “did what he did.” With Lampasi out of the picture, the new manager of the bus company gave the mobster’s niece what she wanted, Schiro said. “She does the best neighborhood in Staten Island. And she takes the bus home. So that Lin didn’t do,” Schiro told us. She added: “I know that for a fact.”
So this man died because of a fight over a job assignment? Schiro said that was beside the point. At the time, Scarpa was suffering from AIDS, which he contracted after receiving tainted blood in a transfusion. “Greg’s attitude at this time,” she told us, “was he was going to fuck everybody. He don’t give a fuck who he kills.”
But DeVecchio had nothing to do with it, she insisted. “We were sitting there when she told Greg all about Larry Lampasi,” she said. “Lin did not tell.”
A week later, we raised the Lampasi murder again after his name came up in a court hearing. Had she ever heard anything about a note that Lampasi had supposedly sent Scarpa, one that accused Scarpa of being a rat? “No,” she said. “I told you about Greg’s niece.”
It’s possible, as prosecutors have suggested, that Linda Schiro previously hid her knowledge of DeVecchio’s role in these murders simply because she was frightened of him. The agent is a big man who served 33 years with the bureau, where he made powerful friends. Moreover, DeVecchio had already escaped punishment after an internal Justice Department probe of his handling of Scarpa. But if she was scared of him—and she never said so on the stand Monday—Schiro showed no sign of it in 1997. When she talked with us about the FBI agent, she sounded unconcerned. “I was friendly with Lin,” she said at one point. She even put him in lesser crimes, claiming that Scarpa had sometimes passed cash to DeVecchio and, on one occasion, gave the agent a couple of baubles from a jewelry heist. And if fear made her hide the agent’s role in the murders of Bari, DeDomenico, and Lampasi, it seems strange that she didn’t hesitate at the time to put DeVecchio directly into another murder, that of Patrick Porco, the teenager who had been her son Joey’s best friend until Greg Scarpa decided he was a threat who needed to stop breathing.
On the witness stand Monday, Schiro said she has told the sad story of Porco’s murder—and DeVecchio’s role—to several writers. “It’s because I love Patrick,” she said. “He was like a son to me.”
Porco was just 18 when he was shot to death on May 27, 1990. His mistake had been to spend the previous Halloween cruising the Bensonhurst streets in a white stretch limo with Joey Schiro and two other pals. Along the way, they’d been pelted with eggs by a rival gang of kids. The teens decided to imitate their adult role models. They returned with a shotgun and blew away a 17-year-old standing on the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe Roman Catholic Church.
Greg initially ordered Joey and his friend to get out of town, sending them to a New Jersey farm owned by relatives. Bored, the boys returned to Brooklyn. Police soon brought Porco in for questioning about the homicide.
Last week, at the DeVecchio trial, a prosecution witness named Rey Aviles, who was present at the Halloween shooting, testified that it was Porco himself who told Joey Schiro and his old man about his encounter with the cops. But Linda Schiro told us in 1997—and testified on the stand this week—that the information came from DeVecchio. “Lin called, he said the kid was going to tell the detectives what happened,” Schiro told us. She remembered that the agent was unusually secretive. Usually, she said, DeVecchio was willing to chat on the home phone with his informant. This time, Schiro said, he insisted that Scarpa call him back from an outside line. “I drove him to the pay phone,” Schiro said. They used what she said was a special, untraceable number to call DeVecchio. “Greg got back in the car and told me that this kid Patrick was going to rat on Joey,” said Schiro.
Scarpa initially wanted one of his crew members, a man named Joe “Fish” Marra, to do the job on his son’s friend. But Joe Fish’s car broke down, and Schiro said Scarpa didn’t want to waste any time. He ordered Joey, along with Schiro’s cousin, John Sinagra, to do it themselves.
Schiro said Joey pleaded with his father. “Joey was saying, ‘Dad, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Patrick wouldn’t do that.’ ”Schiro said Scarpa refused to listen. She said Scarpa slammed his hand on the table. “Joey, listen what I’m telling you,” she quoted Scarpa as saying.
When her son came back home after the murder, she said, he told his father that he’d pulled the trigger. “But I don’t know if Joey had it in him to do that,” she said. “They left his body by the Belt Parkway.”
After the slaying, Schiro said, her son stayed in his room, refusing to go to the wake. “Joey was sick about it,” said Schiro. “He loved the kid.” Scarpa, however, ordered Linda to go. “I says, ‘I have to go to the wake?’ Here I am, sitting in the funeral parlor, and the mother comes out—she knows how close [her son] was to Joey—and she’s hysterical, crying. I get the chills just thinking about it.”
On the witness stand, Schiro added a chilling coda to the story when she testified that DeVecchio had later brushed off Scarpa’s lament that his son was inconsolable over his friend’s murder. “Better he cries now than he goes to jail,” Schiro said the agent replied. Despite our questioning, she somehow never mentioned that memorable comment to us.
Greg Scarpa Sr. died in prison in 1994, jailed for his participation in multiple murders during the Colombo civil war. Ravaged by AIDS, the body that federal prison authorities sent home to Schiro weighed just 56 pounds.
Nine months later, her Joey was dead as well, murdered in a drug deal gone wrong.
According to the D.A.’s office, it was the cop who solved that case, Detective Tommy Dades, who eventually convinced Linda Schiro to finally tell about how the FBI agent who was supposed to be harvesting secrets from his top informant traded back murderous secrets of his own.
At the trial’s opening, DeVecchio’s defense attorneys, Doug Grover and Mark Bederow, offered their own explanation for Schiro’s decision to talk. They said she’s trying to sell a book.
Thanks to Tom Robbins
In a soft voice and a strong South Brooklyn accent, Schiro, 62, nervously but soberly laid out how Lin DeVecchio had regularly visited the homes she shared in Bensonhurst with the love of her life, a swaggering Mafia soldier and secret government informant named Greg Scarpa Sr. On four of those visits, Schiro said, DeVecchio had provided Scarpa with the lethal information that her gangster lover then used to murder four people.
To hear Schiro tell it, there wasn’t much difference between the gangster and the FBI agent. “You know, you have to take care of this, she’s going to be a problem,” she quoted DeVecchio as saying prior to the 1984 murder of a beautiful girlfriend of a high-level member of Scarpa’s Colombo crime family who was allegedly talking to law enforcement.
She had the agent, a smirk on his face, talking the same way in 1987 about a drug-addled member of Scarpa’s crew. “You know,” Schiro said DeVecchio told Scarpa, “we gotta take care of this guy before he starts talking.” The crew member was soon dead as well.
When Supreme Court Justice Gustin Reichbach called the first break of the day, reporters polled one another as to whether this crucial witness was believable. “If I was him,” said one old hand, pointing at the defendant, “I’d be getting on the A train right now, headed for JFK and a plane someplace far away. He’s dead.” A veteran reporter sitting next to him nodded in agreement.
The first time I heard Linda Schiro, she also sounded convincing.
That was 10 years ago, when Schiro sat down to talk with me and Jerry Capeci, then and now the city’s most knowledgeable organized-crime reporter. But the story she told us then is dramatically different from the one she has now sworn to as the truth.
Which puts us in no small bind.
The ground rules when we spoke to Schiro in 1997 were that the information she provided would only be used in a book—not in news articles. She also exacted a pledge that we would not attribute information directly to her. And in a cautious but not unreasonable demand for a woman who spent her life married to the mob, she required a promise—however difficult to enforce—that we not cooperate in any law-enforcement inquiries stemming from said book’s publication.
Sadly, no book ever emerged. The law-enforcement inquiries, however, did. They have taken on a life of their own, and it is Schiro, having shed her former concerns about confidentiality, who has now become the cooperator.
In the eight days of testimony before Schiro took the stand, a parade of mob cooperators and investigators testified about their suspicions concerning DeVecchio’s and Scarpa’s relationship. A trio of FBI agents said they believed that their colleague had steadily tilted in Scarpa’s favor, possibly passing crucial information to him. But suspicion is all anyone offered. Not a single witness, prior to Schiro, was able to put the former agent in any of the four murders for which he was indicted more than a year ago. That’s Schiro’s task. The D.A.’s case appears to rest on her.
If convicted, DeVecchio, 67, faces life in prison.
Those are the kind of high stakes that take precedence over contracts and vows of confidence, no matter how important they may be to the business of reporting, and regardless of how distasteful it may be to violate them. The threat of a life sentence trumps a promise.
Lin DeVecchio may be guilty, or he may be innocent. But one thing is clear: What Linda Schiro is saying on the witness stand now is not how she told the story 10 years ago concerning three of the four murder counts now at issue.
Schiro told us then, as she did the court this week, that Scarpa hid nothing from her, letting her share in both his Mafia secrets and his precarious position as an FBI informant. In the 1984 murder of Mary Bari, the glamorous young woman who was dating a Colombo crime family figure, Schiro told how Scarpa and his gang had lured her to a mob social club and then shot her in the face. She told the ghoulish story—one she later learned was apocryphal—about how a pet boxer had sniffed out an ear from the victim that, unbeknownst to her killers, had been shot away during the grisly murder. But Schiro said she knew little as to the why of the slaying.
“All I know is they had word she was turning; she was gonna let information out,” Schiro told us then. Back then, she made no mention of DeVecchio at all in connection with the slaying. But in court this week, she said the one who claimed that Mary Bari was an informant was DeVecchio, describing her as “a problem” to be “taken care of.” After the murder, she testified, DeVecchio had returned to the home she then shared with Scarpa on Avenue J and joked about the way Bari’s body had been dumped just a couple of blocks away.
“Why didn’t you just bring the body right in front of the house?” she said DeVecchio laughed to Scarpa.
Schiro said in our interviews that, as far as she knew, DeVecchio had nothing to do with the 1987 murder of a longtime Scarpa pal, a Colombo soldier named Joe DeDomenico, who went by the nickname of “Joe Brewster.”
Scarpa, she said, was so close to DeDomenico that he had been the best man at DeDomenico’s wedding and had stood as godfather to his friend’s son. But by 1987, Schiro told us, “Joe Brewster had started getting a little stupid.” She recalled a visit by DeDomenico to the couple’s home. “He was kind of drooling,” she said. “He was starting to use coke.” Schiro told us that Scarpa was also disturbed because he had asked his friend to “do something”—an unspecified crime—and been refused by DeDomenico, who said he was becoming a born-again Christian, an awkward creed for a mobster.
“Yeah, Greg had him killed,” Schiro said, naming Scarpa’s son Gregory Jr. and two of Scarpa’s crew members as the assassins. “They told him he had to go someplace, and they got all dressed up and they killed him.”
That interview took place on March 1, 1997, the day after agent DeVecchio had himself been forced to take the witness stand in Brooklyn federal court, where he was grilled by attorneys for a pair of Colombo crime family members seeking to have their convictions overturned. Their claim was that they were the victims of the FBI’s misbehavior with Scarpa, its prized informant.
Brewster’s name had been raised by one of the defense attorneys, who asked DeVecchio if he’d ever given Scarpa information about him. DeVecchio angrily denied it.
Having heard that exchange, we asked Schiro whether Lin DeVecchio had had anything to do with the death of Joe Brewster. She seemed briefly confused by the question. “No,” she said. “He never met Joe Brewster.”
Schiro said then that she had been puzzled, along with members of Scarpa’s crew, at Scarpa’s insistence that his old friend had to go. “I liked Joe Brewster too. I couldn’t understand. Bobby and Carmine couldn’t understand,” she said, referring to a pair of Scarpa’s cronies, one of whom, Carmine Sessa, testified last week in DeVecchio’s trial.
Most of our conversations with Schiro were tape-recorded. Some tapes have long since gone missing. Audibility is a problem in others. But the conversation about the murder of Joe Brewster has survived. So has Schiro’s story about another killing, that of Lorenzo Lampasi, a Colombo soldier gunned down by Scarpa and his gang during the crime family’s bloody civil war in the early 1990s.
Lampasi was murdered at 4 a.m. on May 22, 1992, just as he was leaving his Brooklyn home to go to work at the school bus company he operated with another Colombo wiseguy. The D.A. has charged DeVecchio with tipping Scarpa to Lampasi’s schedule and whereabouts.
On the witness stand Monday, Schiro said that was exactly what had happened. She said that Scarpa had been furious about a note Lampasi had sent him, one that said “there was talk on the street” that Scarpa was an informant. “This fucking Larry Lampasi,” she quoted Scarpa as telling DeVecchio, “he started rumors I am an informer, that I’m a rat.”
She said Scarpa asked DeVecchio to find out “exactly where Lampasi lives and what time he leaves in the morning.” A few days later, she testified, the agent returned with the information. “I was in the kitchen, and Lin gave him the address and told him he leaves the house at 4 a.m.” The agent had also filled in the gangster, she testified, about a balky gate that Lampasi had to open and close.
After Lampasi’s murder, she testified, DeVecchio had returned to the house, that same smirk on his face. “That was good information,” she said Scarpa told his FBI handler.
In 1997, however, Schiro repeatedly insisted to us that DeVecchio had nothing at all to do with the Lampasi homicide. Schiro raised the subject herself back then. “There’s another thing too, with Larry Lampasi,” she told us. “See, when Lin is right, I give him right. He didn’t tell Greg about Larry Lampasi.”
What had happened, she explained, was that she and Scarpa had been at a family dinner in New Jersey in late 1991. “I think it was around Thanksgiving,” she said. Whenever the date, the dinner was hosted by Scarpa’s sister. At the table, Scarpa’s niece Rosemarie, a school bus driver, had complained to her powerful uncle that Lampasi was treating her badly.
“And I remember we were there, and she was crying to Greg they are giving her these crazy routes in bad neighborhoods,” Schiro told us. Lampasi wouldn’t let the niece, who lived on Staten Island, take her bus home with her, she said. “And she told Greg the times he gets in, the times he leaves. And Greg said, ‘I’ll take care of it for you.’ ”
As Schiro put it, Scarpa later “did what he did.” With Lampasi out of the picture, the new manager of the bus company gave the mobster’s niece what she wanted, Schiro said. “She does the best neighborhood in Staten Island. And she takes the bus home. So that Lin didn’t do,” Schiro told us. She added: “I know that for a fact.”
So this man died because of a fight over a job assignment? Schiro said that was beside the point. At the time, Scarpa was suffering from AIDS, which he contracted after receiving tainted blood in a transfusion. “Greg’s attitude at this time,” she told us, “was he was going to fuck everybody. He don’t give a fuck who he kills.”
But DeVecchio had nothing to do with it, she insisted. “We were sitting there when she told Greg all about Larry Lampasi,” she said. “Lin did not tell.”
A week later, we raised the Lampasi murder again after his name came up in a court hearing. Had she ever heard anything about a note that Lampasi had supposedly sent Scarpa, one that accused Scarpa of being a rat? “No,” she said. “I told you about Greg’s niece.”
It’s possible, as prosecutors have suggested, that Linda Schiro previously hid her knowledge of DeVecchio’s role in these murders simply because she was frightened of him. The agent is a big man who served 33 years with the bureau, where he made powerful friends. Moreover, DeVecchio had already escaped punishment after an internal Justice Department probe of his handling of Scarpa. But if she was scared of him—and she never said so on the stand Monday—Schiro showed no sign of it in 1997. When she talked with us about the FBI agent, she sounded unconcerned. “I was friendly with Lin,” she said at one point. She even put him in lesser crimes, claiming that Scarpa had sometimes passed cash to DeVecchio and, on one occasion, gave the agent a couple of baubles from a jewelry heist. And if fear made her hide the agent’s role in the murders of Bari, DeDomenico, and Lampasi, it seems strange that she didn’t hesitate at the time to put DeVecchio directly into another murder, that of Patrick Porco, the teenager who had been her son Joey’s best friend until Greg Scarpa decided he was a threat who needed to stop breathing.
On the witness stand Monday, Schiro said she has told the sad story of Porco’s murder—and DeVecchio’s role—to several writers. “It’s because I love Patrick,” she said. “He was like a son to me.”
Porco was just 18 when he was shot to death on May 27, 1990. His mistake had been to spend the previous Halloween cruising the Bensonhurst streets in a white stretch limo with Joey Schiro and two other pals. Along the way, they’d been pelted with eggs by a rival gang of kids. The teens decided to imitate their adult role models. They returned with a shotgun and blew away a 17-year-old standing on the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe Roman Catholic Church.
Greg initially ordered Joey and his friend to get out of town, sending them to a New Jersey farm owned by relatives. Bored, the boys returned to Brooklyn. Police soon brought Porco in for questioning about the homicide.
Last week, at the DeVecchio trial, a prosecution witness named Rey Aviles, who was present at the Halloween shooting, testified that it was Porco himself who told Joey Schiro and his old man about his encounter with the cops. But Linda Schiro told us in 1997—and testified on the stand this week—that the information came from DeVecchio. “Lin called, he said the kid was going to tell the detectives what happened,” Schiro told us. She remembered that the agent was unusually secretive. Usually, she said, DeVecchio was willing to chat on the home phone with his informant. This time, Schiro said, he insisted that Scarpa call him back from an outside line. “I drove him to the pay phone,” Schiro said. They used what she said was a special, untraceable number to call DeVecchio. “Greg got back in the car and told me that this kid Patrick was going to rat on Joey,” said Schiro.
Scarpa initially wanted one of his crew members, a man named Joe “Fish” Marra, to do the job on his son’s friend. But Joe Fish’s car broke down, and Schiro said Scarpa didn’t want to waste any time. He ordered Joey, along with Schiro’s cousin, John Sinagra, to do it themselves.
Schiro said Joey pleaded with his father. “Joey was saying, ‘Dad, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Patrick wouldn’t do that.’ ”Schiro said Scarpa refused to listen. She said Scarpa slammed his hand on the table. “Joey, listen what I’m telling you,” she quoted Scarpa as saying.
When her son came back home after the murder, she said, he told his father that he’d pulled the trigger. “But I don’t know if Joey had it in him to do that,” she said. “They left his body by the Belt Parkway.”
After the slaying, Schiro said, her son stayed in his room, refusing to go to the wake. “Joey was sick about it,” said Schiro. “He loved the kid.” Scarpa, however, ordered Linda to go. “I says, ‘I have to go to the wake?’ Here I am, sitting in the funeral parlor, and the mother comes out—she knows how close [her son] was to Joey—and she’s hysterical, crying. I get the chills just thinking about it.”
On the witness stand, Schiro added a chilling coda to the story when she testified that DeVecchio had later brushed off Scarpa’s lament that his son was inconsolable over his friend’s murder. “Better he cries now than he goes to jail,” Schiro said the agent replied. Despite our questioning, she somehow never mentioned that memorable comment to us.
Greg Scarpa Sr. died in prison in 1994, jailed for his participation in multiple murders during the Colombo civil war. Ravaged by AIDS, the body that federal prison authorities sent home to Schiro weighed just 56 pounds.
Nine months later, her Joey was dead as well, murdered in a drug deal gone wrong.
According to the D.A.’s office, it was the cop who solved that case, Detective Tommy Dades, who eventually convinced Linda Schiro to finally tell about how the FBI agent who was supposed to be harvesting secrets from his top informant traded back murderous secrets of his own.
At the trial’s opening, DeVecchio’s defense attorneys, Doug Grover and Mark Bederow, offered their own explanation for Schiro’s decision to talk. They said she’s trying to sell a book.
Thanks to Tom Robbins
How to Love a Mobster
Nobody had a ready explanation for the origin of “moll,” the slang term applied to women of the Mafia. In a courtroom filled with marquee crime writers, men identifying themselves as interested parties from Bensonhurst, retired federal agents and at least one éminence grise of the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, the best etymology offered was: “It goes back to the ’20s.”
Still, the morning’s tabloid newspapers had promised a legendary moll in Brooklyn Supreme Court yesterday, and Linda Schiro did not disappoint. As the star witness in the murder case against a onetime Federal Bureau of Investigation supervisor, she entered the courtroom from the back, shielded from the gang of cameramen and photographers staked out in the hall.
Her testimony was billed as the pillar of a sensational trial. The defendant, R. Lindley DeVecchio, has been charged with helping a prized informant commit four killings in the 1980s and early 1990s by revealing confidential information.
The accusations had lain dormant for more than a decade, ever since an internal federal investigation failed to turn up sufficient evidence. Ms. Schiro’s newfound willingness to testify gave state prosecutors the means to secure an indictment.
After two weeks of testimony meant to establish her credibility, Ms. Schiro was finally summoned to the stand yesterday, a sunken beauty in a plain suit and a gold pendant, thinning hair draped to the jaw.
Right away, she began to recount famed passages of Mafia lore from the moll’s vantage. She told of life with Gregory Scarpa, a notorious Colombo crime family capo known as the Grim Reaper, beginning with a trip to Mississippi in the 1960s.
There, she said, Mr. Scarpa began his work for the F.B.I., threatening a member of the Ku Klux Klan with a gun and learning the whereabouts of three slain civil rights workers. Though the tale had made the rounds in published accounts for years, it sounded fresh coming from Ms. Schiro in open court.
After that dizzying start, a prosecutor, Michael F. Vecchione, slowed Ms. Schiro down. Under his questioning, she recounted her path to Mafia association: As a teenager living with her parents, she married a man named Charlie Schiro. “I wanted children, and Greg was married, so I married Charlie,” Ms. Schiro said, adding, “to have Greg’s kids.”
Giving birth out of wedlock, she explained, was considered unacceptable at the time. The marriage ended when Mr. Schiro learned its full dimensions. Ms. Schiro later moved in with Mr. Scarpa, who by all accounts tolerated her affairs, including one with a grocery worker. “I just told Greg there was this really nice delivery boy, and you know.” Ms. Schiro said, her voice trailing off for a second. “We had this relationship where whatever made me happy. ...”
Mr. Scarpa, she said, spoke openly of crimes including murder, loan-sharking and bank robbery, and let her attend meetings with Mr. DeVecchio.
The judge overseeing the case, Gustin L. Reichbach, questioned that account. “What was your initial reaction, having grown up in this environment, when he told you he was an informer for the F.B.I.?” Justice Reichbach asked.
Ms. Schiro replied: “He didn’t say he was an informer. He said he worked for the F.B.I. I said, ‘What, do you mean you’re a rat?’ He said, ‘I just work for them.’ So I was surprised at first.”
She told of cash payments to Mr. DeVecchio, supplemented by gifts of wine, jewelry, a Cabbage Patch doll (this was the 1980s) and meals. To prepare for his visits, she said, she would draw the blinds and lock the doors.
In 1984, she said, Mr. DeVecchio identified a woman who had been dating a member of the Colombo family as an informer, prompting Mr. Scarpa to kill the woman. In 1986, she said, Mr. DeVecchio raised concerns about one of Mr. Scarpa’s closest friends, a Mafia associate who had become a born-again Christian. “Lin said, you know, ‘We can’t keep a guy around like this,’” Ms. Schiro said, “‘because he’s going to end up to start talking.’”
After a failed effort to “smarten him up,” Ms. Schiro said, Mr. Scarpa killed that man, too. A similar end befell the best friend of one of Mr. Scarpa’s sons, she said.
During the war for control of the crime family in 1992, Ms. Schiro said, Mr. DeVecchio provided the address of a rival, whom Mr. Scarpa also killed. Mr. Scarpa himself died in 1994 after contracting H.I.V. from a blood transfusion.
In the intervening years, Ms. Schiro passed up several opportunities to recount her knowledge of the killings. Several writers interviewed her for book proposals, and federal investigators questioned her during their unsuccessful inquiry. Until now, Ms. Schiro said, she had kept silent about Mr. DeVecchio.
“If I had a problem, I could always call Lin,” she said, “because he was my friend.”
Thanks to Michael Brick
Still, the morning’s tabloid newspapers had promised a legendary moll in Brooklyn Supreme Court yesterday, and Linda Schiro did not disappoint. As the star witness in the murder case against a onetime Federal Bureau of Investigation supervisor, she entered the courtroom from the back, shielded from the gang of cameramen and photographers staked out in the hall.
Her testimony was billed as the pillar of a sensational trial. The defendant, R. Lindley DeVecchio, has been charged with helping a prized informant commit four killings in the 1980s and early 1990s by revealing confidential information.
The accusations had lain dormant for more than a decade, ever since an internal federal investigation failed to turn up sufficient evidence. Ms. Schiro’s newfound willingness to testify gave state prosecutors the means to secure an indictment.
After two weeks of testimony meant to establish her credibility, Ms. Schiro was finally summoned to the stand yesterday, a sunken beauty in a plain suit and a gold pendant, thinning hair draped to the jaw.
Right away, she began to recount famed passages of Mafia lore from the moll’s vantage. She told of life with Gregory Scarpa, a notorious Colombo crime family capo known as the Grim Reaper, beginning with a trip to Mississippi in the 1960s.
There, she said, Mr. Scarpa began his work for the F.B.I., threatening a member of the Ku Klux Klan with a gun and learning the whereabouts of three slain civil rights workers. Though the tale had made the rounds in published accounts for years, it sounded fresh coming from Ms. Schiro in open court.
After that dizzying start, a prosecutor, Michael F. Vecchione, slowed Ms. Schiro down. Under his questioning, she recounted her path to Mafia association: As a teenager living with her parents, she married a man named Charlie Schiro. “I wanted children, and Greg was married, so I married Charlie,” Ms. Schiro said, adding, “to have Greg’s kids.”
Giving birth out of wedlock, she explained, was considered unacceptable at the time. The marriage ended when Mr. Schiro learned its full dimensions. Ms. Schiro later moved in with Mr. Scarpa, who by all accounts tolerated her affairs, including one with a grocery worker. “I just told Greg there was this really nice delivery boy, and you know.” Ms. Schiro said, her voice trailing off for a second. “We had this relationship where whatever made me happy. ...”
Mr. Scarpa, she said, spoke openly of crimes including murder, loan-sharking and bank robbery, and let her attend meetings with Mr. DeVecchio.
The judge overseeing the case, Gustin L. Reichbach, questioned that account. “What was your initial reaction, having grown up in this environment, when he told you he was an informer for the F.B.I.?” Justice Reichbach asked.
Ms. Schiro replied: “He didn’t say he was an informer. He said he worked for the F.B.I. I said, ‘What, do you mean you’re a rat?’ He said, ‘I just work for them.’ So I was surprised at first.”
She told of cash payments to Mr. DeVecchio, supplemented by gifts of wine, jewelry, a Cabbage Patch doll (this was the 1980s) and meals. To prepare for his visits, she said, she would draw the blinds and lock the doors.
In 1984, she said, Mr. DeVecchio identified a woman who had been dating a member of the Colombo family as an informer, prompting Mr. Scarpa to kill the woman. In 1986, she said, Mr. DeVecchio raised concerns about one of Mr. Scarpa’s closest friends, a Mafia associate who had become a born-again Christian. “Lin said, you know, ‘We can’t keep a guy around like this,’” Ms. Schiro said, “‘because he’s going to end up to start talking.’”
After a failed effort to “smarten him up,” Ms. Schiro said, Mr. Scarpa killed that man, too. A similar end befell the best friend of one of Mr. Scarpa’s sons, she said.
During the war for control of the crime family in 1992, Ms. Schiro said, Mr. DeVecchio provided the address of a rival, whom Mr. Scarpa also killed. Mr. Scarpa himself died in 1994 after contracting H.I.V. from a blood transfusion.
In the intervening years, Ms. Schiro passed up several opportunities to recount her knowledge of the killings. Several writers interviewed her for book proposals, and federal investigators questioned her during their unsuccessful inquiry. Until now, Ms. Schiro said, she had kept silent about Mr. DeVecchio.
“If I had a problem, I could always call Lin,” she said, “because he was my friend.”
Thanks to Michael Brick
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