Greg Scarpa: The Grim Reaper’s Double Life

In this gripping episode of Gangland Wire, retired intelligence detective Gary Jenkins sits down with author Jonathan Dyer to explore one of the most complex and dangerous figures in Mafia history—Greg Scarpa, the Colombo family enforcer known as The Grim Reaper.
Dyer, whose career spans military intelligence, law, and education, brings deep insight into Scarpa’s remarkable—and chilling—dual role as both a ruthless mob killer and a prized FBI top echelon informant. Together, Gary and Jonathan unpack the moral ambiguities, betrayals, and calculated violence that defined Scarpa’s career in the turbulent world of organized crime.
Listeners will hear:
How Scarpa balanced loyalty to the mob with his covert cooperation with the FBI.   The structured, almost corporate way his crew operated—and how he enforced discipline with fear and bloodshed.
The darker corners of his personal life, including family ties, marriages, and the impact of his choices on his children.
The violent episodes, such as the murder of Mary Bari, underscore his brutality and the Mafia’s code of protection.
From Cold War–era law enforcement collusion to the inner workings of New York’s underworld, this episode reveals how Scarpa manipulated both sides of the law to maintain power.
Jonathan Dyer’s latest book, Greg Scarpa: Legendary Evil, offers the foundation for a conversation that will leave you questioning where law enforcement ends and organized crime begins.

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Transcript
[0:00] Well, hey, welcome all you wiretappers. Good to be back here in the studio of

[0:03] Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, an entire Kansas City, Missouri police detective. Worked at the Organized Crime Unit or the Intelligence Unit for many years. And now I’ve got a podcast and we’re all about the organized crime. As you guys know, all you regular guys and for new people, it’s all about organized crime, particularly the Italian mafia in the United States. Now, I have an author here today, Jonathan Dyer. And Jonathan, I really am excited about having you on here because you have a different take about a much cussed and discussed subject or person, Gregory the Grim Reaper Scarpa. So welcome, Jonathan. Thanks, Gary. Thanks for having me. So tell the guys a little bit about yourself, a little bit about your background. Where’d you come from other than Marshall? We found out we have similar backgrounds, Marshall, Missouri, rural Missouri, farm life and Kansas City. So tell the guys a little bit about yourself. Well, in 1981, Gary, I joined the Army and spent about a year and a half in Monterey Defense Language Institute learning Russian.

[1:10] After that, I went to Goodfellow Air Force Base for some cryptologic training. And then after that, I went to the National Security Agency in Fort Meade for some more training and then shipped overseas to Berlin for three years trying to keep tabs on the Soviet Army during the Cold War. After the Army, I entered law school at UC Davis in California. And after law school, I practiced law for about 10 years as a civil litigator. And then in 1999, I switched careers and became a teacher and taught government and U.S. History and criminal law and retired during the pandemic. And now I live in central Texas. Interesting.

[1:52] This is off the subject a little bit, but I’ve always been curious about that language school. FBI agents go to that and military people go to it. I have tried to learn Spanish. You know, I’m a pretty good tourist. I’ve tried to learn French most recently. I haven’t been there yet after I’ve worked on it with Duolingo, the new app to help you learn a language. But it’s so hard to learn a foreign language. It is so hard. Do they have some tricks or techniques? I mean, did you really learn to converse in Russian or were you just like, you know, able to order a pizza or something? Well, the basic course in the Russian, at least back in the early 1980s, was 47 weeks long. And Gary, they’ve been at it for a while. So I think they have a pretty good plan. And it’s intense. You’re in a classroom six hours a day, and then you have about two or three hours of homework at night. So you’re not just like I would do now, just kind of dabbling in it a little bit, looking at the sticks. And then after that first year, and it’s going to sound like I’m patting myself on the back here, but I don’t mean to do that. If you do well, you can take another six months right away. And at the end of that year and a half, I was certainly conversant in Russian. I was reading Russian. It was a good deal of fluency.

[3:16] But I haven’t really worked on it since then. So, frankly, it’s mostly disappeared. But I think it’s back in there somewhere. And if I needed to call up on it, I think I could bring it up. It would be if you went into a conversation with somebody who was a Russian speaker only, I guarantee, uh, you would slip back into it pretty shortly if you went to Russia. Now, was that full immersion? Did you like, we’re not allowed to speak English any other time and didn’t, you weren’t with any other English speakers or were they that rigorous?

[3:45] No, it wasn’t. I mean, particularly in the beginning, there’s no way to exist or survive without being able to speak English. And there was the classroom work in that second six months that I talked about was entirely in Russian, except for the military portion of it. We had some military senior NCOs who were also our instructors and they would flip back and forth between English and Russian. But our teachers in general were native Russian speakers. And again, during that last six months of the year and a half of training, it was, at least in the classroom, exclusively in Russian. Yeah. Wow. In order to pick up the nuances, if you’re doing an overhear or looking at documents or whatever, in order to pick up the nuances of the country, if you will, that’s another thing. You really have to know the language well.

[4:48] Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I’ve heard that indicates fluency is if you understand the sense of humor of a foreign language. And I think I got to that point. Oh, we’re good. And certainly the Russian sense of humor is different from the American sense of humor, but, um, again, um, not really doing much with it since my discharge from the army. Uh, even that I think is probably, uh.

[5:14] Difficult to access at this point to be fine. Yeah. Interesting. Well, I just, uh, sorry to digress guys, but I just always found this fascinating learning a foreign language. I’ve always found that fascinating as hell. I went to Mexico and I spent two weeks living with a family down there. And that was the, that’s why I asked that question. That was a rule. You were not supposed to speak English and they were not supposed to speak English with you. Although we, we had to cheat a little bit, but it was true. It’s hard boy, but that full immersion, uh, that, That’ll really amp up your ability to speak. Yeah, there’s a very steep learning curve, and that’ll do it. Jonathan Dyer is the author of 12 books, including six on Cold War espionage, a thriller series, The Nick Temple Files, which sounds interesting as hell. So, guys, I’ll have a link to his author page on Amazon in order to find some of these other books that he’s written. And it sounds like you’ve got a little inside track on the espionage thriller genre for what you did for a living, kind of like Ian Fleming and his James Bond series. Right.

[6:22] But what we’re here today to talk about is organized crime in the mafia. Jonathan wrote a book called Greg Scarpa, Legendary Evil. Now, a lot of you guys know Greg Scarpa. Greg Scarpa. There’s our man himself, the many faces of mafia killer. And I guess my first question would be, he’s been covered quite a little bit. And I was reading your book and you really have some interesting takes on this guy. But what got you interested in Greg Scarpa? Well, a writing partner and I were working on some scripts for a possible streaming series. And it was about the Brooklyn Mafia during the late 1970s and into the 1980s. And of course, Scarpa was the main character in that whole drama. And so my writing partner suggested I write a Scarpa biography. And at first I said, no, thanks. I’ve written fiction and I hadn’t written a book-length piece of nonfiction. You know, in graduate school, law school, you write nonfiction, but nothing like this. And he kept pushing, gently but pushing, and finally I relented and said, okay, I’ll do it, and started researching it. And that’s how I got to writing a biography of Scarlett.

[7:46] What did you find about Scarpa that, you know, why would his story be of interest in 2025?

[7:55] Yeah, I think the duality of Scarpa’s nature, the fact that he was both a mafia good fellow and at times a capo and also an FBI informant is just absolutely fascinating. You know, the stories about law enforcement and the mafia sometimes are very, they’re intertwined as law enforcement attempts to get a handle on the mafia. And sometimes there’s a closeness between them that is fascinating. And that’s certainly the case with Scarpa and his 25 out of 30 years being a top echelon criminal informant to the FBI. So I think that’s fascinating for people. And his personal life is fascinating, too. Yeah, it is. It is really fascinating. And there’s been so much that’s come out about him. It’s amazing. You know, another thing I found really interesting is I noticed that you looked at this book, Brick Agent, Tony Villano, who was an FBI agent, who was Scarpa’s, maybe it was very first handler. I’m not too sure. He goes pretty far back as a young man, slipping little tidbits to the FBI. So tell me about that.

[9:18] What do you remember about how you covered that and his different Villano’s view of Scarpa? Yeah.

[9:26] Yeah, I think there was a real challenge there, Gary, because Villano’s book, as I recall, came out in 77. And my guess was, and I put this in the book, is that his use of aliases for Scarpa was an attempt to try to protect Scarpa, continue to protect him after Villano was no longer in the FBI. And I think that as a result of that, some of the items that he has attributed to Scarpa, I think, are overblown for dramatic purposes. So trying to sort that out.

[9:59] And that was, Daria, obviously what a lot of this book ended up being, trying to sort out what is out there about Scarpa, what’s real, what’s not, what’s legend at this point. And that was certainly the case with, uh, Volano’s book, particularly when Volano was referencing what Scarpa did in Mississippi. Yeah. I noticed that it was like, yeah, he really used two different names for two different situations down in Mississippi. And, and a lot of it didn’t really align with what we’ve learned since then, what, uh, Delvecchio, DiVecchio reported in his book. So, which is a whole nother story, which we’ll get to in a little bit. But it was really interesting. Yeah, you’re right. There are three main Mississippi stories that have been attributed to Scarpe and his efforts for the FBI. And as readers of the book will find out, my conclusion was there really is no good evidence that he was involved in solving Medgar Evers’ murder. And there’s reasonably good evidence that he was involved in locating the bodies of the three civil rights workers. and also in 1966 of helping solve the Vernon Dahmer murder. Interesting. Yeah, he had a way of interrogating people when he went down there.

[11:20] Enhanced interrogation, I think we call it now. Enhanced interrogation techniques. Oh, my God. It was way ahead of his time. Way ahead of his time.

[11:32] You got a sense of humor, too, Jonathan. That’s a good one.

[11:37] And I tell you, when you work with these guys, you better have a sense of humor because some of us are a black sense of humor because some of the things they do are so horrid. And this guy was. He was a stone killer. He didn’t have an ounce of empathy that I could see in his body when it came to work. But his family was a whole different deal, wasn’t it? Yeah, you know, his family is plural, right? I mean, he was married to Connie Forrest, Conchetta Faraci, but anglicized to Connie Forrest. And they had four children, the oldest of which was Gregory, who followed his father into the life. And while he was still married to Connie, he was shacking up, as we say, with Linda Shiro, who he met when Linda was a teenager. And while he was still married to Connie and shacking up with Linda, he got married again to Lily Deshauny, an Israeli beauty queen contestant, and also apparently a purveyor of diamonds. So he was technically a bigamist. And what is kind of interesting is in the FBI documents, he drops a little note about how he thinks Joe Colombo is a bigamist. And this was something that Scarpo himself was guilty of. He’s often projecting in those interviews.

[13:02] It’s really interesting. You know, his personal life, there’s one story about the molestation of his daughter, Linda. And I didn’t really remember this. I had not heard this before. But tell us about that. Yeah, Linda was on her way to high school. She was about 16 years old. And normally she rode with her brother, her little brother, Joey. And, um, but Joey was not feeling well that day. So the limo driver who would take them to work every, or excuse me, to school every day, um, um, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, decided he was going to try to molest Linda. And so instead of driving to the school, he drove to a place in the woods near the school, started to molest her. Linda was obviously shocked, but to her credit, she kept her head and said, hey, we don’t have to do it like this. Let’s meet up later. And he fell for that. And he took her to school. She called her mom, said, you got to pick me up um i just got molested and uh you know molestation is bad enough as it is but molesting greg scarpa’s daughter that is about as dumb as it gets right yeah and so eventually know who it was that uh did did he know who that was or was he just some limo driver they called on the phone and hired a car service.

[14:25] Yeah, I think that he was part of a car service. And I think that he was generally the driver. She didn’t indicate that, hey, you’re a new driver. Who are you?

[14:36] But he was part of a car service. And so she would have been comfortable seeing him. In fact, when he picked her up and she told him that Joey wasn’t coming along, he said, well, why don’t you sit up front with me? She didn’t think anything of it. And so, anyway, Scarpa’s crew gave him what Larry Mazza referred to as just a savage beating. And then eventually, his name was Jose Guzman. Eventually, he was killed.

[15:04] Well, that’s a guy. He did care about his family. He did protect his family. I mean, you could say care about it in a certain way, in a certain mafia don. Yeah. The king of his little world way and, you know, what he said goes. And he certainly, I guess, in that world, you know, he brought his son, Greg Jr., right into the life. It was just amazing. You know, I think, Gary, without getting too deep in terms of psychological analysis, I think that his family and his families were also trophies for Scarpa. And so if you violated something with respect to his families, I think that deep down, Scarpa felt it reflected poorly on him. And so his family just became, at least in my view, another trophy, another thing to say, look, look what I’ve done here. But, you know, that’s me guessing. But, yeah, Greg Scarpa Jr., um, followed his father into the life. And fairly early on when he was about 16, he started being groomed for that.

[16:17] Well, you know, that is interesting that they, that they reflected on him, uh, his family and, and, and, uh, story that, uh, Vincent, the chin gigante was talking with John Gotti. I think this, maybe it was even on a wire or a bug or something. And he’s talking about Gotti was bragging about how he made, he had his son made.

[16:38] And Gigante said something to the effect of, you know, well, that’s too bad. You know, it’s like, you know, that’s, you know, but to Gotti, that was a big deal. You know, hey, I’m my son, he’s made, you know, and he really, best I could tell, he just like made him, you know, he wouldn’t, didn’t earn anything. He didn’t work his way up. He just made him. And, but that’s how it reflected on him. They want this, I guess they want to want to be this mob dynasty and everybody wants to have a dynasty, I guess.

[17:05] Yeah, you know, I came to the conclusion that Greg Jr. really never had a chance. You know, you probably remember the story if you read it in the book that he came home from a fight in high school and had a pretty good-sized lump on his head. And his dad said, you know, what happened? And Greg told him he got in a fight. The guy got a lick in, fair and square. Greg Jr. was pretty good with his fists. He did some Golden Gloves boxing and was a fair fighter. And his father said, well, you go back there tomorrow and you put that kid in the hospital or don’t come home. And Greg Jr. tried to talk him out of it and say, look, dad, it wasn’t a big deal. The cops came, they broke it up. It was a fair fight. But his father insisted. And of course, Greg did it. His father meant everything to him, as he has said. And he got expelled. And so at the age of 16, Now, what do you do? Yeah. And fast forward from that to the Mary Berry murder. I mean, in that thing, they had this woman who’s basically an innocent woman. I mean, maybe she would have, she didn’t know enough, really enough to snitch on anybody, I don’t think. But she knew a little bit or something. And she was, you know, Persico wanted her gone. And Greg Sharper Jr. was one of the first ones to grab her and make sure that she was taken down. while his, I guess it was his dad killed her. It was just, I mean, talk about cold-blooded.

[18:30] Yeah, just a horrible, horrible story. And my view is that Mary Barry had no idea where Alley Boy Persico was. And Persico’s family didn’t even know where Alley Boy was, except maybe somewhere in Connecticut. As you know, they had this sort of underground railroad thing going on for lobsters on the lam. I did find an interesting bit from a U.S. Marshal who asked the FBI if he could speak to Mary Barry. And the FBI’s response was, we have a relationship with her. And so from that, I think it’s not unreasonable to conclude that Scarpa may have found out about that relationship. And Scarpa wasn’t so much going to revenge on someone for being a rat. I think he was more worried that she might be able to tell the FBI or someone through her that might get out that Scarborough was an informant. And, yeah, the killing of Mary Barry is just an awful, awful moment. And, Gary, even as Peter Lance pointed out, and then I…

[19:42] Quoted, the guys around Scarpa said, we’re going to hell for this one. So even they felt that this was really beyond the rabbit-proof fence. What about this story where he supposedly used 666 as a calling card? What’s the deal behind that? Did you get money? Yeah, I think that was back when people had pagers. And so we’re a couple of generations beyond that. But he would use 666 six as a way of saying mission accomplished. So if there was something that he was supposed to be doing, particularly with a hit, then he would page out to people, whoever’s on the other end of these things, six, six, six. And a bit of really dark humor there about being the devil. As Peter Lance referred to him in his book, Deal with the Devil, talking about Linda Vecchio, And even Larry Maza’s grandmother referred to him as the devil and sort of a federal judge referred to him as the devil. And apparently Scarpa wasn’t all that unhappy with that moniker.

[20:56] I think I read someplace, maybe it was Peter Lance’s book about how he really liked to be called the Grim. Was it the Grim Reaper? He had another name like that for himself that he’d rather be called i don’t remember what it was now yeah everybody the mad hatter the mad hatter yeah i mean he was just i guess he thought he was anastasia the the lore of albert anastasia lives on through gregory scarpa he had a sense of history at least yeah and he certainly had a clear idea of self-promotion within those ranks He knew it didn’t hurt his cause at all to be feared by the people around him. Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen that. I’ve seen people do that. They can do that pretty slick and real obtuse ways. So you could never really say, well, is that what you mean? What do you mean by that? But generate that fear out there. You know, he survived a long time as an informant and was a valuable member. I think it’s because he was able to live such a double life. I don’t know. What would be your take on that after studying this guy’s life? How did he pull that off?

[22:09] Well, you know, it’s interesting, Gary, because there were some people that suspected that he was talking to law enforcement. And Carlo Gambino in 1972, and this is in the FBI files, said to his men, his crews in the Gambino family, stay away from Scarpa, he’s got a big mouth. And that was 1972. I think that one of the ways he was able to either hide the fact that he was an informant or downplay the whole thing is because he was so vicious. And I think people would rightly question, would the FBI continue to be in bed with this guy while he’s committing murders? And the answer, unfortunately, was yes. And I think that the way he carried himself and the things that he did made a lot of people just think, there’s no way. And also, as I point out in the story about Donny Soma, people that accused Greg of being a rat weren’t around long. They were, yeah. And so it was a dangerous thing to do. And, um, people, uh, around SCARP and around others would warn people that if you’re going down that road, it’s not a safe road to go down. And so, um, I, I think that the.

[23:31] The possibility of really a very quick execution can focus the mind. And I think that’s what Scarlett, through his actions, that helped him remain an informant for all those years. Yeah. And, you know, and the FBI, that’s a good point that people in life just like they couldn’t believe that somebody that was that much of a killer could also be on the payroll or, you know, be with the FBI. I have a friend here in Kansas City who got transferred back from New York. And my last stint in intelligence was in 92. And he worked organized crime in Kansas City. but he was with the Columbo squad and he knew Devecchio. He said he was a nice guy. He said, but, you know, he said he did. I’d hear him get on the phone and he would, you know, he kind of talked like a mobster when he would talk to these guys. So, you know, and I understand that you kind of, you want to go to their level. I’ve done that myself. You kind of go to their level and don’t let anything that they may be doing away from you shock you because then they won’t trust you anymore. You need them to trust you. So what do you think about that, the FBI? Did that change the way, has that started coming out, the way that they dealt with informants?

[24:55] What’s your opinion on that? Well, I think there was an evolution there. You know, from 1962 when the FBI knew virtually nothing about organized crime and about the Italian mafia and how it operated.

[25:10] Through into the 70s and the 1980s when, I mean, the stories of the control that organized crime had over New York were just phenomenal. And the amount of control they had over everything, garbage, construction, you name it. And so I think the FBI who was charged with fighting this, this criminal threat, um, I think that they found themselves in a tough position and at times they had to say, yeah, yeah, I know these are the rules and that looks great on paper, but, um, these are dangerous people. And sometimes we’re going to have to, um, go a little deeper. And, uh, and I also think there’s a, a, an aspect of particularly with Linda Vecchio and he admits this in his book that he actually likes Scarpa. You know, he worked with him for a long time. He liked the guy. DeVecchio says, I’ve warned him many times about a line he shouldn’t cross, but he’s also quite frank about, hey, you got to admire the guy. I consider Greg Scarpa my friend. And that’s a dangerous position to be in when you’re trying to, at the same time, control the life that Scarpa lives in.

[26:30] Well, interesting. Yeah. This agent told me that, uh, that oftentimes DeVecchio, he was single and DeVecchio would ask him for a key, if he could have a key and he wanted to use his apartment during the day. He said, he said, now in retrospect, I figured he would probably meet in Scarpa over there in my apartment because it’d be a safe off the street place to meet. Yeah, that sounds about right. I mean, although DeVecchio did, and there are a couple of stories where DeVecchio actually went to Scarpa’s house in Brooklyn, particularly during the Third Colombo War, and had discussions with him. So, you know, this, you know, Peter Lance’s book covers the DeVecchio relationship really thoroughly. And that wasn’t really one of the goals that I had here. But, of course, DeVecchio plays a big role in half of the book as he was his handler from 1980 on. And the trial that DeVecchio went through in 2007 until it was dismissed mid-trial, and those items, as far as the detail goes, those really weren’t subjects of this book, but they are certainly subjects for people to be wondering about and figuring out how that all turned out.

[27:45] Yeah, and that whole relationship with Linda Shiro and Larry Mazza and, And we got Larry Mazza out there. Here he is. He was his protege for all those years. Now he’s out here doing podcasts. And I don’t know what all he’s doing exactly. I’ve been told, oh, you need to get that Larry Mazza on. I’ve never, I don’t know. I don’t go out of my way to find mob guys for some reason. But I’ll take them if they come. But that’s a fascinating relationship. Yeah, very, very unusual. And there’s a moment when Mazza thinks that Scarf is going to kill him. Because he’s found out about this relationship he’s having with Scarpa’s Goumar, Linda Shiro. And the way Scarpa handles that in terms of, we’ve got to keep this secret between ourselves, otherwise we’re both going to be killed. It’s just such a master piece of manipulation to bring Mazza not only closer to him, but really make Mazza dependent upon him for his continued life.

[28:50] And this is something else I’ve brought up in a number of different contexts, and that is that Scarpa, who barely finished high school, managed to manipulate a whole building full of college-educated people, very smart and very wise people. He manipulated them for years. And I think it goes to some of Scarpa’s, what is not book smarts, but innate intelligence. Right. Street smarts, just native intelligence. And I’ve worked with guys like this and know guys like this on the streets that they just, like I said, they can barely read a sentence when it comes to reading a book. But they’ve got that native intelligence, that survival instinct, and able to put things together. And Scarpa must have been a master at that. He must have really, really been able to see plots and see connections much beyond what the normal person could see.

[29:53] Yeah, another good example of that is Carmine Persico. At the end of his trial, the judge said, You’re one of the smartest people that’s ever come into this courtroom. It’s just such a shame that this is the path he went down. But a federal judge complimenting Carmine Persco like that tells you something. He must have been impressed. Yeah. Yeah. I, uh, I, I told a guy that once I said, you know, why don’t you give all this car theft stuff up and, and go do some kind of legitimate business. You’re really bright and you could do it. He said, ah, that wouldn’t be fun in that. They, they like that action. I think is in my opinion, he’s like the action.

[30:32] And Scarpa, he was such a cold-blooded killer. What are the kind of businesses that he had? Did he have like a whole book of loan shark money out there on the street? Yeah, he was into what all the fairly standard mafia organized crime book of business. You know, loan sharking, running numbers, gambling, you know, setting up games, having gambling games, hijacking trucks, particularly hijacking goods from Kennedy Airport, armed robbery. And Scarpa and his crew and some of the people that were in his orbit were very skilled at burglarizing banks, particularly Joe Brewster. And that was a very lucrative business for them, burglarizing banks back in the day when a little alarm was about all that was protecting that bank. Yeah. So the whole book, Gary, absolutely.

[31:36] I guess being a maid guy, I wonder how many associates he had underneath him that were then, you know, he set up a deal or he’d help fence stuff and all that kind of thing. He must have had 20 or 30 people underneath him that were out doing scams every day or doing some kind of crime. Yeah, that’s something that I think, I know you understand it, but I think a lot of people don’t understand that Scarpa for many of those years was a good fellow. And so his crew were associates, because if any member of his crew got his button, they’d be assigned to a capo. And this is actually why Scarpa became a capo during the Third Colombo War, because when Larry Maz and Jimmy Del Masto got their buttons, they would have had to assign them to another capo. But the Scarpa del Masto Maza team was such a good killing machine, they said, okay, we’re going to make Scarpa a capo and then assign you guys to him. But anyway, these associates, and the numbers can vary, but there are far more associates that are working for the mafia, at least during the time we’re talking about, than there were Goodfellas members.

[32:57] So yeah, they did have several people out on the street doing all those sorts of things that we just talked about. I’m trying to remember, do you have a social club that was kind of like his, where his crew all met? I can’t remember now.

[33:12] Yeah, yeah, the Wimpy Boys Social Club. Oh, that’s right, okay. What an ironic name, right? It used to be at Jim’s, but these social clubs were all over Brooklyn. And, I mean, you know, Carmine Sessa’s social club where Mary Barry was killed, Sessions. But anyway, these clubs were all over Brooklyn, and Scarpa had an office in the back of the Wimpy Boys Social Club. And this is another interesting thing, and I point out right away in the book that Scarpa insisted that his men come to work on time, dress nicely every day, you know, like a CEO. And he ran a kind of a tight ship. And Larry Mazza one day showed up and he’d just been at the beach and he showed up in swim trunks and Scarpa told him to go home and change. And that was the last time Larry did that. But, um, and, and Larry referred to Scarpa as somewhat of a CEO, you know, a guy who’s running a business and not in a way that most CEOs do, but in the way that was, um, familiar to him and his world. Yeah. And, and that’s, uh, it was probably more rigor than some of the rigors than some of the others, but even here in Kansas city, you know, our boss had, had certain rules, you know, you, you’d kind of dress the same Sansa belt slacks and a leather coat and polo shirts. They all look the same and no facial hair.

[34:37] So, uh, and, and they were pretty regular going down to the social club. So it’s, uh, so I just interested about the mafia and, and, uh, the structure and, and how businesslike the really good ones were the ones that made money. They were really businesslike.

[34:55] Yeah, and I think that was part of the problem for the, you know, J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s. He said there was no such thing as the mafia in the United States. And then when Scarpy became an informant in 1962, he was just spilling his guts on the organization of the mafia. And I think they were just stunned by how organized, how many rules there were, that this was not just, you know, the gang that couldn’t shoot straight or just some guys with Brooklyn accents beaten on people. people. This was a highly organized, very deep, very lucrative organization.

[35:32] And pretty sophisticated. I mean, with the union racketeering and those kinds of things and extortion from the businessmen, especially New York City. I mean, Kansas City, we had the Teamsters and the skimming from Las Vegas, but in New York City, they had the concrete club and all that business ever building and went up in Manhattan at one time. The mob got a big piece of it in some manner oh yeah yeah you couldn’t you couldn’t build in manhattan without dealing with what you just called the concrete club which was the uh euphemism that came for these guys they just they had a stranglehold on that and if you wanted to build something you had to deal with these guys and uh you know giuliani came along and broke a lot of that up by um put putting the heads of the families um using rico um and putting these guys away um but uh for a while there as i was saying earlier these guys were just running new york city the five families yeah well he um i counted i think eight maybe nine different times when he told his handler that carmine persco was was uh responsible for a murder and uh yeah and this is one of the reasons gary that i i come out, um when people talk about that third colombo war they talk about the vicarina side and then the personal loyalists. And I don’t see Scarpa as a personal loyalist. I see him as a Scarpa loyalist.

[36:55] And he provided information to the FBI that led to the arrest of Joe Colombo Jr. and Joe Colombo Sr.

[37:04] And even though he was part of this inner circle of Joe Colombo Sr., he gave the FBI enough information to arrest Joe Colombo. So, yeah, I think Scarpa was instrumental in at least the investigations that Giuliani and the Southern District of New York’s U.S. Attorney’s Office was conducting. And I found in a Senate report a.

[37:33] A quotation that pretty much said that Scarpa was responsible for giving singular information that led to, I think it was over 60 wiretap authorizations and then re-upping those wiretap authorizations. And that language, they didn’t put Scarpa’s name in the report, but that language in the report is almost identical to the language that appears in the FBI documents. So that led me to conclude, they’re talking about Scarpa there. And that was both Five Star and Stark was those two big investigations. Wow. Well, I was wrong about that. But he was always getting rid of competition and that kind of a thing is what I think of with Greg Scarpa. Yeah. Yeah. He did not.

[38:28] Like competition. And, you know, especially once the drug money started becoming really big in the 1980s, it became dangerous to find yourself in competition with Greg Scarpett Jr. And with Greg Scarpett and the drug dealing in various places in New York. Yeah. I tell you, that guy, he operated under his own set of rules, didn’t he? He did not operate under other people’s sets of rules, didn’t appear to be like. Yeah, yeah, he did. But these were rules that weren’t exclusively his. You know, he was operating under the mafia’s rules. And for them, it was this idea of territory was really important. This idea of who’s going to get the cash, the money that flows from these kind of activities. And as you know, Gary, for a long time, the mafia was taking the position that you can’t be involved in drugs. Can’t be involved in drugs narcotics can’t be involved in prostitution uh but the money was so lucrative um starting in the late 1970s um that that eventually those warnings just fell on deaf ears okay yeah don’t ask don’t tell wasn’t after a while the money got big enough.

[39:52] Yeah it’s you know it’s uh um one of those things uh that the um these absolute rules of the mafia um scarper broke every one of them he you know he the number one being loyalty on penalty of death and um he was pretty early in his career he’d been a button man for about 10 years when he broke that oath. And of course, just about everything else he did, every oath he ever took, he broke. And that includes whatever these rules were in the mafia were very convenient for him when he wanted to use them and he ignored them when he didn’t. Yeah, interesting. Well, Jonathan Dyer, this has been great. The name of the book is, let’s put that book back up there, is, I said, uh, I said, sometimes I, uh, my mind goes blank. Jonathan, you wouldn’t know anything about that. Would you? There we go.

[40:54] Many, uh, Legendary Evil, The Many Faces of a Mafia Killer. Jonathan, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Gary, thanks for having me. It’s been fun talking to you and talking a little bit about Kansas City and Missouri, too. All right. Thanks a lot, Jonathan. All right. Thank you, sir. Bye-bye. Bye. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles. So when you’re out on the streets there and you’re a big F-150, watch out for those little motorcycles when you’re out. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to the VA website. They’ll help with your drugs and alcohol problem if you got that problem or gambling. If not, you can go to Anthony Ruggiano. He’s a counselor down in Florida. He’s got a hotline on his website. If you got a problem with gambling, most states will have, if you have gambling, most states will have a hotline number to call. Just have to search around for it. You know, I’ve always got stuff to sell. I got my books. I got my movies. They’re all on Amazon, just going. I got links down below in the show notes and just go to my Amazon sales page and you can figure out what to do. I really appreciate y’all tuning in and we’ll keep coming back and doing this. Thanks guys.