He was known as the “Grim Reaper.”
And in the world in which he lived, this was considered a positive.
Gregory Scarpa was a capo in the Colombo crime family and a major player in the brutal internecine power struggle that wracked the organization in the early 1990s. He was also a top-echelon FBI informant and, like Whitey Bulger in Boston, there is some question about whether Scarpa was being used by the feds or the feds, in particular the agent assigned to “handle” him, were being used by Scarpa.
That was in the 1990s.
But in the 1960s, when Scarpa began cooperating, there was no question about who was running the show. Scarpa got in bed with the FBI and the agency was apparently very happy to use his “special skills.”
It was a classic story of the ends justifying the means and one of more than a dozen detailed in Eric Dezenhall’s fascinating new book, WISEGUYS AND THE WHITEHOUSE: Gangsters, Presidents and the Deals They Made released this month.
From FDR’s Naval Intelligence agency using Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano to protect the docks during World War II to Donald Trump’s dealings with mob-linked companies in New York and Atlantic City, Dezenhall offers a political primer of the darker side of the business of government.
Politics does, indeed, make strange bedfellows.
Harry Truman’s ties and dependence on the corrupt and mob-tainted Pendergast machine in Missouri, Joseph Kennedy’s reaching out to the mob to help his son get elected and Richard Nixon’s alliance with the Teamsters and Jimmy Hoffa are all part of a history lesson that you won’t read in American Civics 101.
The stories are eye-opening and feed into the cynicism about government that is now in vogue. But in terms of wanton brutality and blatant abuse of power, nothing compares to the Scarpa story.
“Scarpa had become an FBI informant on the heels of a hijacking arrest in 1959,” Dezenhall writes. “Likely the charges against him were dropped in exchange for him becoming a confidential informant in 1960.”
This was, of course, the time when Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general and brother of the president, launched his war on organized crime and Joe Valachi, the Genovese crime family soldier, went on television as the first major Mafia snitch, detailing the workings of Cosa Nostra for all to see.
Valachi got the rep, but Scarpa was already in the game.
“Gregory Scarpa was one of the original whales in the snitch department,” Dezenhall writes, “even though nobody knew about it for thirty years. One can debate which does more damage, snitching before the world or snitching behind closed doors.”
Staying behind closed doors made Scarpa a potential asset and by 1964 the FBI put him in play. His reputation for ruthlessness – he would later be described in the underworld and law enforcement circles as the equivalent of a serial killer – made him just the kind of operative the bureau needed.
At the time, President Lyndon Johnson was facing a major crisis after three civil rights workers had “disappeared” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a hotbed of racial unrest. Johnson was under pressure to find out what had happened. The supposition was that they had been killed. Civil rights advocates were demanding a major investigation.
The FBI correctly figured that members of the local KKK were responsible and that the Klan knew where the bodies were buried. But getting any Klansmen to cooperate was next to impossible.
Enter Gregory Scarpa.
He was flown down to Mississippi with his girlfriend and was told who the local KKK leaders were.
Dezenhall writes that there are two different versions of what happened next.
In one, armed with a government-issued handgun, Scarpa kidnaps a Klansman, shoves the gun in his mouth and demands answers which were quickly forthcoming. In the other, Scarpa confronts and assaults the Klansman who gives him faulty information. When Scarpa learns from the FBI that he has been lied to, he returns to confront the Klansman a second time, but this time his weapon of choice is a straight razor.
Scarpa, according to Dezenhall, “held it between the man’s legs and suggested he would soon be singing falsetto.” This time he gave up the location where the bodies of the murdered civil rights workers had been dumped.
Scarpa’s role in the civil rights case surfaced years later, long after his reputation as a ruthless underworld hitman had been established. It was part of the Mississippi Burning story that had never been disclosed and raised questions about the ends justifying the means when law enforcement is involved.
A New York State Supreme Court judge, Dezenhall notes, later called it “a shocking demonstration of the government’s unacceptable willingness to employ criminality to fight crime.”
There is a lot of that in WISEGUYS AND THE WHITEHOUSE.
Operation Mongoose, the CIA-backed plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, saw the government in bed with major crime figures like Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante Jr. and Carlos Marcello, all of whom wanted Castro out of the way so that the mob could re-establish its casino holdings in Havana.
The negative repercussions from that bungled operation led to one crisis after the other – the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis and, some would argue, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Dezenhall doesn’t go quite that far. He subscribes to the Lee Harvey Oswald lone gunman theory and also argues that there were other ways to control and compromise President Kennedy whose sexual escapades were well known to the mobsters and could have been used to blackmail JFK.
“Gangsters were angry with the Kennedys, but it didn’t mean they were going to kill the president,” he writes, “given that the full wrath of the federal government would have descended upon them.”
He backs this up with an anecdote about Philadelphia mob boss Angelo Bruno who had been picked up on tape discussing an incident with other mobsters about an FBI agent who had been assaulted by a crime family member. The FBI responded “off the books,” Bruno said, brutally beating the gangster who had assaulted the agent.
They “almost killed him,” Bruno said,
The point being, how would the feds respond had the mob assaulted the president? (Conspiracy theorists might argue that had the FBI or CIA been involved in the assassination, there would have been no response at all. But that’s a story for another day.)
There will continue to be theories and speculation about the murder of JFK who, as much as or more than any other president written about in WISEGUYS AND THE WHITEHOUSE, had dealings directly and indirectly with organized crime figures.
Politics does in fact make for strange alliances, and from Dezenhall’s detailed account of presidents and mobsters, it appears goodfellas have always been bedfellas.
