Lindley DeVecchio was the CIA and NY Mafia's Bag Man in the NY FBI. Accused of four counts of murder by the Brooklyn DA, the case fell apart in court.

Smells like someone…took a…

DIVE TO THE MAT.

Today, DeVecchio is still at large in Florida.
We ask why.

A Dive to the Mat:

Why Did the Trial of the Mafia’s Mole in the New York FBI Fall Apart? 

by Sander Hicks

I got excited when the Brooklyn DA indicted former FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio on four counts of murder. The year was 2006, and DeVecchio was a Mob-connected FBI supervisory agent, a bigwig deeply connected to the cover-up of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and to the Iran-Contra network. He had worked for the CIA to set up and take down the “rogue” CIA agent Edwin Wilson, who had been caught doing the CIA’s dirty laundry in Libya. 

DeVecchio’s name had popped up regularly in the books of Peter Lance. Lance himself is something of an enigma: a Santa Barbara writer who has published three books on the 9/11 cover-up, yet is not a 9/11 truther, per se. In Cover-Up, Thousand Years for Revenge, and Triple Cross, Lance masterfully reported on the documented relationship between the U.S. government and terrorist assets like Ali Mohamed and Ramzi Yousef. But as a professional writer, he can be a tempestuous creative mind, as I have seen through personal experiences. But let’s not focus on the negative. 

I owe Mr. Lance a debt of gratitude for yelling into the phone at me that day, March 23, 2006. “Get your butt over to the Brooklyn Supreme Court,” he said, so we could watch DeVecchio’s “perp walk.” DeVecchio had been indicted on four counts of murder while working for the Mob. He would be paraded through a column of media but protected by a horde of his violent and pissed-off FBI agent friends from the New York office. We might get a chance to ask questions. I got on my bike and rode a couple miles up from the Vox Pop coffeehouse.

Charles Hynes, the Brooklyn DA, called this one of the “worst law enforcement corruption cases in U.S. history.” But no one in the New York media reported the full story on exactly how the boxers from the DA’s office eventually took a dive early in round two. The trial would quickly and quietly collapse, in the fall of 2007. DeVecchio’s story shows that cozy networking with the Mafia means a lot when that network also includes the CIA, the Bush family, black-market financiers, and narcotics traffickers.

DeVecchio had been Mr. Organized Crime—the head of the Colombo crime squad, working against 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. Even the final episode of The Sopranos includes a line based on something DeVecchio said while at the FBI. Tony Soprano’s “we’re going to win this thing” is what DeVecchio proclaimed victoriously to the FBI’s Chris Favo when Mafia don Scarpa’s rival was blown away. Favo grew alarmed at the time, and his concern prompted an internal probe. But within the insular FBI, the FBI’s own internal Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) probe went nowhere. 

In 2011, DeVecchio published a book and actually titled it We’re Going to Win This Thing!. The book is not as bad as one would expect; with help from a cowriter, DeVecchio comes across as a real human being. But his personal knowledge of the murders he supposedly was “innocent” of participating in is rather eerie. He gives a detailed retelling of the killing of cocktail waitress Mary Bari, and at one point refers to himself as a “bad cop.”

The bad cop’s trial halted abruptly in November 2007, when the Village Voice’s Tom Robbins produced eleven-year-old audiotapes of mobster Greg Scarpa’s ex-girlfriend Linda Schiro. Schiro had been the prosecution’s star witness. She had intimate knowledge of Scarpa’s misdeeds and DeVecchio’s role in them. The New York Times reported that these tapes “exonerated” DeVecchio; this idea is debatable. On the tapes, Linda Schiro details DeVecchio’s role in the killing of young Patrick Porco. Schiro had in the past denied that DeVecchio played a role in some of the killings. Emphasis on “some.”

Lead prosecutor Michael Vecchione told Peter Lance 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 its 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? I called up Tom Robbins at the Village Voice office. In his combative interview with me, he also expressed some shock that the prosecution would 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 laughed, rather than answering my question about whether he believed DeVecchio was guilty or innocent. 

The New York Times botched the facts about the tapes, reporting that they showed “Mr. DeVecchio had not been involved in the murders.” Robbins himself said that that was not accurate. 

“[Schiro] did in fact put DeVecchio into one murder,” Robbins said—the killing of nineteen-year-old Patrick Porco. Porco had witnessed a Scarpa family hit on Halloween 1989. Lin DeVecchio told Scarpa, Sr., that Porco was likely to rat. “Come on, Dad, what are you, crazy?” the Mafia don’s son 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 said in one of his better quips. “It grabs at your heart. He was a kid.” 

Robbins, however, became notably anxious when asked about his former writing partner, Jerry Capeci, who shared bylines with him at the Daily News back in the ’90s. Capeci today writes about the Mafia for his column, “Gang Land News.” I brought up the popular 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.” 

But, Tom, I wasn’t asking you about your sources, I was asking you about your Mafia-centric writing partner. 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 Capeci’s column, which ran on Tuesdays.

“I have no idea whether or not that’s true,” Robbins bellowed. “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. Okay? 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 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.

CIA Connections 

Edwin Wilson is a fifteen-year veteran of the CIA, released from prison in 2005, when a Houston judge redacted Wilson’s conviction on smuggling charges. When I tracked him down on the phone, he was happy to comment on the DeVecchio case.

“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. For his “perp walk” out of court that day, DeVecchio enjoyed the escort of a phalanx of about forty-five angry FBI agents and retirees. They punched photographers and bragged on their website about “body-checking” reporters. (In high New York irony, Robert Stolarik, the New York Times photographer who was punched in the face that day, eventually sold one of his pictures to the publisher of DeVecchio’s book. It graces the front cover.) 

Edwin P. Wilson was a working-class kid from Idaho who showed bravery with the Marines in the Korean War. He worked for the CIA for fifteen years and then the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). His specialty was setting up “front companies” to clandestinely ship materials for CIA operations, under the cover of legitimate businesses. Under the direction of Ted Shackley, Wilson worked with the CIA to monitor terrorist Carlos the Jackal. 

But at some point, something went wrong. The CIA turned on Wilson and lured him out of Libya to be arrested on arms-smuggling charges in the Caribbean. The CIA claimed that he had not worked for them since his retirement.

The FBI’s Lin DeVecchio was tapped to go into prison and record Wilson, who allegedly wanted to put out a hit on his prosecutors. Wilson had been sentenced to fifty-two years behind bars. Lin DeVecchio was a witness against Edwin Wilson at a 1983 trial, when the media, CIA, and law enforcement turned against the CIA “rogue.” But after Wilson had served twenty-seven years in prison, attorney David Adler found eighty points of evidence showing that Wilson had been working for the CIA. Wilson was set free.

“Bad Cop” DeVecchio was on the side of the bad guys once again. The Friends of DeVecchio Trust points out that DeVecchio “saved” the life of a federal prosecutor. But it was never proven that the voice on the tapes had been Wilson’s.

“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, in his eighties, would still be in prison today if it weren’t for a series of dogged Freedom of Information Act requests. Wilson proved that at his original trial, for selling explosives to Libya, the CIA lied in federal court.

1993 WTC Bombing 

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. As mentioned in the previous chapter, in 1990, radical Islamist Omar “Blind Sheikh” Abdel-Rahman was pulled into the United States, despite being on the State Department’s “terrorist watch list.” Abdel-Rahman had been helpful to U.S.-CIA interests in the fight against the USSR in Afghanistan. He was also the 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 Ali Mohamed, the Special Forces– and Fort Bragg–connected Al Qaeda soldier who was bin Laden’s head of security. Another 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 the terrorists had “built the bomb with the supervising supervision of the FBI.” 

It was the New York FBI that was in charge of “tracking” bin Laden.  But just like Blind Sheikh Abdel-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 and had stories that involved DeVecchio. 

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’s planning new attacks on the World Trade Center five years before 9/11. 

Or that Yousef was just a scapegoat, the patsy to blame for planning 9/11. 

The Taus Railroading 

Was DeVecchio indeed working for the CIA when he was involved in the case against Wilson? It seems certain when you talk to someone who worked for DeVecchio at that time. Richard Taus is an ex–FBI special agent incarcerated inside Clinton Correctional Facility, in far-upstate New York. In our interview, Taus seemed healthy, unbeaten, and unbowed. 

“How can you tell if someone is working for the CIA?” I asked. 

“If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and looks like a duck, guess what it is?” he said with a tired smile.

Taus tells of observing Oliver North and New York–area CIA assets in Florida, moving narcotics as a part of a clandestine, illegal international operation in 1983. It was Iran-Contra, years before Iran-Contra became a household name. 

At New York FBI, DeVecchio stepped in and tried to keep Taus quiet. When Taus refused, he was harassed and then arrested. Taus found himself sentenced to thirty-three to ninety years for pedophilia, in a lightning-fast Nassau County trial. The prosecution used no expert witnesses, and no parents of “victims” testified. Habeas corpus complaints Taus filed pointed out that his jury was tainted: The jurors were reading sensational newspaper accounts during the proceedings, and one was even a cousin of the DA.

“All of those guys, they start to believe their own bullshit. They put people away, they hide evidence, in order to get convictions,” CIA vet Edwin Wilson told me on the phone from his basement apartment in a suburb of Seattle. “DeVecchio involved a lot of people.”

The case had originally 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 silence on the trial’s collapse with this comment:

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 DA 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 my set of questions. But if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, what is it?