Gregory Scarpa Sr. was a captain in the Colombo crime family in Brooklyn and, for most of two decades, a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In February 1993 a federal indictment in the Eastern District of New York charged him with three murders, a murder conspiracy and a further offense, all arising from the Colombo family's internal war of 1991 and 1992. On May 6, 1993, he pleaded guilty to two counts of that indictment, one of them involving the murder of Vincent Fusaro. On December 15, 1993, he was sentenced to ten years in prison and five years of supervised release. He died in federal custody in Minnesota in June 1994.
His conviction is narrow beside the litigation that surrounds it. The Colombo family war produced a series of prosecutions in Brooklyn, and the defendants in those cases argued for years that the government had withheld what it knew about Scarpa and about the FBI agent who handled him. Federal judges in the Eastern District and the Second Circuit ruled on those arguments from 1997 to 2013. A New York State prosecution of the former agent was brought in 2006 and ended in 2007 without a verdict.
Scarpa was born in 1928. The court opinions describe him as a life-long associate of organized crime. By the early 1980s he was a made member of the Colombo family, running a crew in Brooklyn whose business, as the courts later summarized it, was credit card fraud, extortion, gambling, narcotics trafficking and loansharking. One federal judge wrote that he operated a criminal enterprise with departments specializing in gambling, narcotics and loansharking.
His contact with law enforcement began early. Former law enforcement officials have said that in 1961 he told FBI agents how the mob operated, two years before Joe Valachi testified in public. In 1971 he appeared before the United States Senate racketeering committee chaired by John McClellan and invoked the Fifth Amendment. The same former officials said the FBI recruited him in 1964 to help with its Mississippi inquiry into the killings of the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and that an FBI memo of January 1966 sought permission to use him again. A state judge repeated a version of that account in 2007, basing it on testimony at the trial of the former agent. None of this was tested in a case against Scarpa himself.
In 1986 he was the subject of a federal indictment for possessing and trafficking in false credit cards. He had signed a plea agreement under which he could have received up to seven and a half years in prison and a $250,000 fine. He was sentenced only to probation and a $10,000 fine.
The FBI's own files, in the form of informant reports known as Form 209s, show that Scarpa was cooperating with the Bureau from at least 1980. Rumors placed the start of the relationship in the early 1960s. The Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General, reviewing the file in 2005, recorded that he had approached an agent in the 1970s and possibly the 1960s, that the contact lapsed, and that in December 1980 an agent named in the court opinions renewed his status. He was classed as a "top echelon" source, a category the FBI created in 1961 to develop live sources inside organized crime. The courts found that he was paid well for what he gave and that he expected leniency if he was ever convicted.
That agent was Scarpa's sole handler from December 1980 until the Bureau ended the relationship in 1992. FBI protocol called for two agents to handle an informant. The Attorney General's Informant Guidelines also required agents to report any knowledge of an informant committing violent crimes, and called for suitability reviews at the start and then every year.
In the early months of the war, Scarpa's reports to the FBI covered both factions: the killings, the strategies and the failed attempts at a truce. On March 3, 1992, the Bureau closed him as an informant after an assistant special agent in charge found credible allegations that he was involved in planning violent criminal activity. The handler was reportedly adamant that Scarpa was not involved in violence. On April 8, 1992, the Bureau authorized reopening him pending a suitability inquiry, and on April 22 the handler told headquarters that the inquiry was complete and that Scarpa was suitable. The relationship ended for good that year.
For most of the 1980s the Colombo family was led by Carmine Persico and Gennaro Langella. Both were sentenced to long prison terms, in November 1986 and January 1987. In May 1988 Persico named Victor Orena as acting boss. A rift then opened between those loyal to the jailed boss and those who followed Orena, and it became what the courts called a violent internal war for control of the family. Judge Jack B. Weinstein put the period of open fighting between the fall of 1991 and the spring of 1992.
Scarpa was an acting captain in the Persico faction. A truce arranged by other families after June 1991 ended on November 18, 1991, when members of the Orena faction made an attempt on Scarpa's life. In a related appeal, defense lawyers called the conflict a "Scarpa/Sessa war" and Scarpa a "loose cannon." The courts recorded that he took part in several murders and attempted murders of other members of the family while he was an informant.
Judge Weinstein wrote in 1997 that during the war Scarpa had taken part in three killings in particular. In early December 1991, he wrote, Scarpa participated in the murder of Vincent Fusaro, an associate of the Orena faction. The Orena side learned of the death on December 6, 1991. In early January 1992 he helped murder Nicholas Grancio, and in late May 1992 he assisted in the murder of Larry Lampesi. A second federal judge, in 2011, listed the murder of Nicholas Grancio among the killings in which Scarpa took part, together with an attempt on Joseph Campanella and a conspiracy to murder William Cutolo, a captain allied with Orena.
The deaths of Nicholas Grancio and Larry Lampesi are attributed to him in court opinions and were never the subject of a verdict.
In August 1992 the Kings County District Attorney arrested Scarpa on a state charge, and the FBI arrested him on a federal charge of conspiracy to murder William Cutolo. He was released on bail with strict conditions of confinement. In late December 1992 the bail was revoked because of his involvement in an incident that month, and he was returned to custody.
On February 4, 1993, a federal indictment was filed in the Eastern District of New York charging him with his role in three murders, a murder conspiracy and a further offense. On May 6, 1993, he pleaded guilty to two counts. One of them involved the murder of Vincent Fusaro.
On December 15, 1993, he was sentenced to ten years in prison and five years of supervised release.
Scarpa died in federal custody in Minnesota in June 1994. He never testified against any of the men who were tried in the Colombo cases. Judge Weinstein noted in 1997 that Scarpa's death left no one able to give his account of the contested facts.
Concerns about the handler's dealings with Scarpa surfaced inside the Bureau shortly after the plea. In January 1994 agents reported their worries and the matter was referred to the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, which found the handler was appropriately a subject of investigation. In September 1996 the Public Integrity Section of the Justice Department declined prosecution and the inquiry closed. The agent retired in October 1996.
The courts did not find that the agent had conspired with Scarpa. Judge Weinstein found that the agent "proved a far less credible witness" and had "largely inadvertently fallen under Scarpa's spell," but that he had not conspired with Scarpa or stirred up the war. In 2013 the Second Circuit described the agent's handling of Scarpa as "extremely careless, perhaps criminally so." The court put it this way: "these administrative controls failed to work."
The opinion of March 1997 concerned two men, Victor Orena and Pasquale Amato, who had been convicted in separate trials of Colombo family crimes and had received life sentences. They asked for dismissal of their indictments or new trials, arguing that the government had suppressed evidence of the relationship between Scarpa and his handler. The court found that the material should have been made available to the defense, and also found that it was not material to the outcome, because the relationship was irrelevant to the events and evidence the government relied on. The motions and petitions were denied.
In the Russo case, a trial court granted new trials after finding that the government had held back impeachment evidence about Scarpa. The Second Circuit reversed on June 3, 1998. It held that the withheld material was not material, that the inference drawn from Scarpa's lies to the FBI about other murders was too weak, and that the defense already had strong evidence attacking his credibility. In July 2001 the court of appeals decided the Monteleone appeal, with Judge Calabresi dissenting, in a case where the defense again portrayed the conflict as a war of Scarpa's making. In the opinion issued on March 29, 2013, the panel of Judges Newman, Lynch and Lohier affirmed the denial of a new trial for Michael Sessa, whose own conviction dated from 1992. That motion rested on the claim that new information about Scarpa and the agent had come to light.
The Scarpa cases turned on two sets of rules. The first governed the FBI's own handling of informants under the Attorney General's guidelines: two handling agents, written suitability reviews, and a duty to report an informant's violent crimes to supervisors and to the United States Attorney. The Justice Department's Inspector General reviewed the Scarpa file in 2005 and recorded the court's finding that the agent was not properly supervised locally; many informant files also lacked the required suitability paperwork.
The second set governed what prosecutors must give to defendants. The Weinstein opinion and the Second Circuit decisions applied the rule of Brady, which requires the government to disclose favorable evidence, to the Scarpa relationship. In the Russo case prosecutors knew before trial of Scarpa's status as an informant and of an internal FBI investigation, and did not disclose them, believing the information was not material. The appeals court agreed with the government on materiality, and the convictions stood.
The number of people Scarpa killed is not settled. Court opinions describe him as having committed numerous murders and attempted murders, and Judge Weinstein's opinion describes him as alleged to have killed at least eight people before the war. Only the two counts of the 1993 plea ended in a conviction. The district court in the Russo litigation treated certain murders as indisputably committed, a point the government did not contest. In the same case, however, the Second Circuit held that nothing showed Scarpa committed the killings of John Minerva and Michael Imbergamo on March 25, 1992, and found the inference that he might have too weak to support a new trial.
The state prosecution of the handler remains unproven. In March 2006 a New York State grand jury indicted the former agent on four counts of murder in the second degree. The charges rested on the theory that Scarpa had used information from the agent to commit and arrange killings of Colombo rivals. In November 2007, during the trial, prosecutors asked to drop the case. Justice Gustin Reichbach of State Supreme Court in Brooklyn approved the request, and double jeopardy bars a retrial. The agent consistently denied the charges, and no verdict was returned.
At the end of the proceeding Justice Reichbach criticized the FBI's long relationship with Scarpa, saying the Bureau had broken its own rules by keeping a known killer as an informant for well over a decade. Those remarks were a judge's assessment of the government's conduct, not a verdict on any person.
1928: Gregory Scarpa Sr. is born.
1961: Tells FBI agents how the mob operates, former law enforcement officials later said.
1964: The FBI recruits him for the Mississippi inquiry, the same former officials said.
1971: Appears before the Senate racketeering committee and invokes the Fifth Amendment.
December 1980: The FBI renews his informant status; his handler stays his only handler until 1992.
1986: Federal indictment for possessing and trafficking in false credit cards; sentenced to probation and a $10,000 fine.
November 1986 and January 1987: Carmine Persico and Gennaro Langella are sentenced to long prison terms.
May 1988: Victor Orena is named acting boss.
November 18, 1991: The truce between the Colombo factions ends after an attempt on Scarpa.
Early December 1991: Vincent Fusaro dies; Scarpa is later found by a court to have participated.
Early January 1992: Nicholas Grancio dies; court opinions attribute a part to Scarpa, with no verdict.
March 3, 1992: The FBI closes Scarpa as an informant.
April 8, 1992: The FBI authorizes reopening him; on April 22 the handler reports him suitable.
Late May 1992: Larry Lampesi dies; court opinions attribute a part to Scarpa, with no verdict.
August 1992: Arrested on a state charge and on a federal conspiracy charge.
Late December 1992: Bail revoked.
February 4, 1993: Federal indictment for three murders, a murder conspiracy and a further offense.
May 6, 1993: Pleads guilty to two counts.
December 15, 1993: Sentenced to ten years in prison and five years of supervised release.
June 1994: Dies in federal custody in Minnesota.
January 1994 to October 1996: FBI and Justice Department inquiry into the handler; the agent retires.
March 10, 1997: Judge Weinstein denies new trials in the Orena and Amato cases.
June 3, 1998: The Second Circuit reverses the new-trial order in the Russo case.
March 2006: State indictment of the former agent.
November 2007: The state case is dropped during trial.
March 29, 2013: The Second Circuit affirms the denial of Michael Sessa's motion for a new trial.