August 15, 2025 • 54 mins
Goodfellow, capo, killer, thief. A man so diabolically evil that he ordered his eldest son to murder his closest associate, and his youngest son to murder his best friend. When Greg Scarpa was in his early twenties, he became a goodfellow in the Profaci family by swearing a blood oath to the Mafia, at the time the country’s largest organized-crime syndicate. And for 25 years, he betrayed that oath and the men closest to him by acting as a paid informant for the FBI. He fed America’s premier law enforcement agency a steady stream of self-serving information accusing the men who trusted him with their lives of every crime he was himself committing. During those 25 years of treachery, Scarpa was a one-man crime wave who spent only 30 days behind bars thanks to his status as the FBI’s ultimate Mafia insider. His standing as a prized informant freed him to engage in mayhem and murder knowing he had a virtual license to kill with reckless abandon. Greg Scarpa, Legendary Evil is a deep dive that provides fresh insight into Scarpa’s malignant personality. Dyer peels back the layers of myth and misdirection to paint as complete and accurate a picture as possible of a man who murdered his enemies and betrayed his friends, of a bigamist who loved only money, of a feared and reviled man whose destructive appetites knew no bounds
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
It's the Opperman Report, and now here is investigator in Opperman.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Okay, welcome to the Opperman Report. I'm your host, private
investigator Ed Opperman. You can get a hold of me
at Opperman Investigations and Digital France and Consulting if you
reach out to me through my email Opperman Investigations at
gmail dot com. Otherwise, if you like our show, be
sure to check out our Patreon, The Operaman Report Patreon.
Like I've been saying lately, we have a blockbuster lineup
(00:32):
on Patreon these days. Craig Aunger about the October surprise.
We have a Gyorgay Scalazza who is the Russian felt
it's Georgian. But he was in those Muller text messages
with Michael Cohen about the pe tapes. We stopped the
flow of tapes. Got an interview with him. Exclusive hasn't
done an interview since his testiphoning for the Mueller Grand Jury.
(00:56):
SOT pretty proud of that. Tessa Dick, who is the
widow of Philip K. Dick, and a lot of great stuff.
A couple of interviews I did myself with the BBC
and with the Clyde Lewis on a ground zero AMFM radio.
So check out the Opperaman Report Patreon. Everything you hear
(01:16):
Monday a Friday ed free and early before you can
hear it on the radio. Otherwise, if I'm at speaker
dot com Friday night to a live show and in
two hours a brand new podcast content every single Friday
night at spreaker dot com. Our guest today is Jonathan P. Dyer.
(01:37):
Now you could find him. He's got this website called
the jonathandireauthor dot Com. He's also on Blue Sky. If
you want to tell him how greatest books are, you
can reach him out over there. Today we're talking about
a good old Colombo crime family, Greg scarpa legendary evil,
the many faces of a mafia killer. Mister Jonathan Dyer,
(01:59):
are you there? I am, Thank you so much. Before
we get into the book here about Greg Scarpaugh, I
tell us about yourself. Who is Jonathan Dyer.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Well, let's see back in nineteen eighty one, a couple
of years out of high school, I joined the army
and became a Russian linguist. After training at the Presidio
of Monterey's Defense Language Institute and some more training of
the National Security Agency, and then was shipped over to Berlin,
(02:30):
where I spent three years doing intercept communications intercept of
what was at the time the Soviet Union, and there
are forces in East Germany. After my honorable discharge, I
went to law school. I finished college while I was
in the Army. I went to law school and at
(02:52):
University California Davis. Practiced law for about ten years and
then switched careers to teaching. I taught criminal law and
US history and government for a little over twenty years,
and then during the pandemic, I decided it was time
to retire. And since then I've moved to Texas and
(03:13):
I've been writing and just recently finished the book that
you just mentioned about Greg Scarpa.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
When you were practicing attorney, did you practice criminal defense.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
I didn't practice criminal defense. I was a litigator doing
civil litigation. But I also had a criminal appellate practice
through a group called the First First DIFFERCT Repellent Project
in San Francisco, and that practice consisted of writing appellates
briefs on appeal for indigen people who are incarcerated. And
(03:49):
while I was in law school, I worked one summer
for the Attorney's General's Office in their criminal division, and
I also worked as an extern in the Public Defender's Office,
so I had some criminal law practice experience, but the
bulk of my practice was civil litigation.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Gotcha And so now the Great Scarp, legendary evil, the
many faces of a mafia killed. This is your first
true crime book.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, it is. It's my first book length nonfiction. You know,
I've written a lot of nonfiction, of course in graduate school,
and then I wrote a number of pieces for a
Baseball Log a few summers back. But this is my
first book length effort at nonfiction.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
And you were telling me off there about this series
of thrillers you've done, about the Nick Temple File. What's
the story with that?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, those were some books that were based primarily on
my own experiences working in the intelligence field in Berlin,
and it's the series predates my time, so it's not
a complete parallel of what I was doing. And you know,
it just sort of started as a lark. My wife
(05:03):
was saying, why don't you write something that's fun that
you enjoy thinking about. And I've studied the Cold War
and studied the Soviet Union, and as I said, served
in the army as a Russian linguist. So I started
writing those and they just kept kind of coming out,
and I've got six done and I had another one
(05:23):
on the way when I got sidelined and started writing
the Scarpa book.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And what made sure? What were your interest to Greg Scarpa.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Well, I was doing some projects with a writing partner,
a guy I have known actually since high school. And
my understanding is that he had the purchased the rights
to the life story of Larry Maza, who was one
of Scarpa's lieutenants, and so we were looking at Masa's
book The Life, which is a fascinating book. It's a
(05:53):
memoir that Larry wrote, and we were thinking about some
scripts maybe for a s is just just kind of
kicking that around, and then Joe Joe Palletto, my writing partners,
shuggested that I write a Scarpa biography. And you know, honestly,
at first I kind of balked. I hadn't written a
(06:15):
book length piece of non fisher, but Joe kind of
kept gently pushing, and pushing is probably the wrong word,
just more nudging and saying, yeah, yeah, you should do it,
you should do it. So I decided I was going
to do it, and I rolling my sleeves and got
into it.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, it's kind of funny because when I was looking up,
you know, i'd pull up the book before I do
an interview, you know, to get a little familiar with
the book, and okay, Greg Scarper, you know. And I
was surprised to see there's a couple of books and
a couple of TV shows about Greg Scarpa, where I
never considered Greg Scarper or his son to be that's it,
no notoriety, you know. I didn't think that they were
(06:51):
that well known and even that well considered as far
as the organized crime fans.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Yeah, I think that I think you're right about that. Frankly,
I think that there's a group of people that are
fairly familiar with Scarpa and his story. But you know,
he's not a Paul Castellano, He's not a chin Gagante.
He was never a boss. He was a captain on
and off briefly. But I think the distinguishing feature is
(07:23):
his work for the FBI and the fact that he
was a respected member of the mafia and also a
feared member of the mafia at the same time he
was working for the FBI. I think that's what makes
his story particularly compelling.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Well, so why don't right, I've heard the story about
that he was an informant, okay, and then I heard
it followed up a little bit more about it today,
So why don't you give us little background on what
was his activity as an informant? And how common is
that do you find in organized crime figures?
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Well, I'm not sure how common it is now. It
was very uncommon when he started, and he was approach
in nineteen sixty the FBI was actually searching for his
brother Sal and went to Greg Scarpa and wanted his
help and finding locating Sal and Greg said, you know,
essentially forget it. He was polite about it. He said,
I can't talk to you guys. If I'm seen talking
(08:15):
to you guys, it's putting my life in danger. So
please leave me alone. And they honored that, and then
Scarpa a few months later decided I'm going to talk
to these guys. And again in nineteen sixty two, it
was very unusual. The FBI knew almost nothing about the
mafia at the time, and in fact, just backing up
(08:36):
a little, in the nineteen fifties, Jed Drew Hoover was
pretty much in denial about any sort of organized crime
in the United States. He said it didn't exist, and
he was wrong, of course. And then when Kennedy gets elected,
Kennedy does a one et and Kennedy knows there's organized
crime out there. He's got his brother, Bobby Kennedy as
the Attorney General, and they get very aggressive. So BI
(09:01):
has to get on board and they start trying to
develop these confidential informants. Peci's top echelon consident confidential informance,
which Scarper was. But at the time it was very unusual.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
And how did he come about to Did they approach him,
did he approach them? Did he have a case and
open case and he needed to work off? How did
he become an informant?
Speaker 1 (09:29):
It was a combination of both. They approached him initially,
and as I mentioned, he pretty much told them, hey,
leave me alone, and then he had to change your heart.
He decided I think he decided, this is a possibility
for me to earn some money, and he was right
about that. The FBI was paying for the information and
(09:50):
Scarp's main love for most of his life was money,
and so he saw this as an opportunity, and I
think he also saw as an opportunity to to shield
himself from potential incarceration investigation at least have a card
to play if he got into some sort of legal trouble.
So they approached him. First initially he said no thanks,
(10:14):
and then a few months later he gave him a
call and said, I'm.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Interested, but just to make money, not to get out
of a case.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Yeah, yeah, to make money. And then I think in
the back of Scarper's mind was this will be this
could be a get out of jail free card the
next time around.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
And it really literally is they give you a card
you get pulled over, the COFFS card, he say, call
up this guy or call my provation. It really is
that card, you know. And I was shocked for that. Yeah, right,
if people only knew, you know, how informants make the
whole criminal justice system out and work. You know. It's
just I was just off the air before we started
(11:01):
this interview. But now what shocked me. And I didn't
find it from your book. I found it from Wikipedia
that he was involved in the murders of Cheney, Goodman
and Schorner. He worked for the FBI undercover for them
digging up information.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah, that's an incredible story. They're actually and I cover
this in the book. There are three cases down in
Mississippi that scarp has been tied to, and I think
that some of them, at least one of them, is exaggerated,
and I don't think scarp had anything to do with it.
And as I kind of swared through all the possibilities
on the other two cases in my book and come
(11:37):
to some conclusions, but yeah, he was. He was allegedly
the guy that was able to extract the information about
where those three young men were buried. Everybody knew they
were missing and presumed that they were dead, but they
couldn't find the bodies, an enormous amount of pressure on
the FBI and on the Department of just and scarpa
(12:02):
who by then had been working as an informant for
a couple of years, is alleged to have gone down
to Mississippi and with his girlfriend Linda Schiro and extracted
the information through what would today be called enhanced interrogation.
And then subsequent to that, there's another case of Vernon Dahmer,
(12:25):
who was a member of the NAACP and in nineteen
sixty six, he was registering African Americans to vote and
he was assassinated and Scarpa was Again the story is
that Scarpa was in on finding out who was responsible
for that, and that one looks pretty solid to me.
(12:47):
But again, Ed, I've got a whole chapter on Scarpa,
as I mean, it's an incredible right, a civil rights icon.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Especially spise guys are so racist. That's the last that you.
I think they have to with the Wimpie Boys, a
social club daddy, those characters. Right, Yeah, but no, but
what what Why picked Greg scarp But he must have
stuck out like a sore thumb down there in Mississippi
in the eighties, you know, right or the yeah, I
mean sixties, we're talking about nineteen sixty four. He must
(13:18):
have stuck out like a sore thumb.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah, absolutely, you know he's he's coming down there, he's
dressed like a Masi guy from Brooklyn. He's they're not
you know, they don't have a lot of good fellows
and button men walking around Jackson, Mississippi, or any of
those places. And so the yeah, he absolutely would stick
out like a sore thumb. But he was at least
(13:43):
the references that I've seen, and the stories that I
think are credible about his appearance down there. He was
it was very quick, he was in and out. He
used you know, he used some physical force to obtain
some information from some people, and the information turned out
to be accurate. I think that's what's important here, because
(14:04):
they're you know, one of the objections to an enhanced
interrogation technique is that the person that's being interrogated will
tell you anything to make a stop. Right. And but
the information that Scarpa allegedly got, both as to the
Vernon Dahmer issue and also as to the civil rights
(14:26):
workers issues, turned out to be credible and was an
enormous help to the FBI. So, yeah, very that's a
very unusual thing to see in the resume of any
member of.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
The Yeah, civil rights active. Now, what about did he
have any He said he went down there with his girlfriend,
But did he have any help in town? And you know,
he did this on his own. He was that tough
that he just pull up and torture them by himself.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Well, he he met some FBI agents down there. There were,
as you probably know, there were FBI agents and federal
law enforcing people down there trying to enforce things like
the Voting Rights Act and trying to protect African Americans
who are being denied access to the polls. And a
(15:19):
lot of that is portrayed in the movie Mississippi Burning.
So there are federal agents down there that have been
sent down by Kennedy and then Johnson to assist with
this program, and particularly by Lyndon Johnson because he would
have been president by sixty four, so he had some
help from the from agents that were already down there.
(15:39):
And although it's not entirely clear from the documents, I
think we can presume that the New York Office got
in touch with the people down in Mississippi and vice
versa said, we've got a guy here might be able
to help you. And you know part of that and
I think was driven by we've got a guy here
(16:00):
be able to help you, and we can we can
stay clean. We don't have to hammer these guys. We
don't have to be the ones to come down on them.
This guy will do the heavy lifting for us, and
and maybe we can solve this. Because, again, particularly with
the civil rights workers, there was an enormous amount of
(16:23):
national pressure. There were marches in Chicago and New York
a lot of other cities. The government was feeling the
heat and they were they had come up empty handed,
and so I think that's, you know, somebody decided let's
get a little creative here.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
And do we know, like, did they hook him up
with some tough guys down there to help him out
or some other informing types down there, or did he
do this on his own, like kidnapping guys and taking
them back to someplace in torture.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Well, there's there's There are a couple of different stories
about it, and one is that he friended, particularly on
the Vernon Dahmer story, he befriended someone who was a
local clan big shot. And the FBI knew who these
guys were, they just couldn't get the information out of him.
So he defended this, not befriended. Excuse me. The local
(17:16):
clan big shot in the Vernon Dahmer case owned a
TV appliance store and so Scarford goes in and says,
I want to buy this TV. And then while the
guys loading the TV and this car, the story is
that Scarpo whacked them, stuffed him in the back seat,
and then drove him out, drove him out to a
place that the FBI had already identified, drove him at
(17:39):
his place to interrogate him while the FBI was waiting outside.
And so he in addition to having these contacts with
the FBI in Mississippi, the agents on the ground in
Mississippi knew who the main players were. They knew who
the main actors were were, and they they assisted certainly
(18:04):
assisted Scarpa in having the tools necessary to you know,
like a car like these interrogation, this interrogation place, and
putting together a plan I think is the best conclusion.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Well, then then, as an attorney, how do you put
together a case? How do you go to court with
this this uh tortured questions, you know, and this stuff
has to come up in court somehow? How do you
do pull that off?
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Well, the on the three civil rights workers, the main
focus of that investigation at the time was we got
to find these bodies because they couldn't find the bodies.
They knew generally what had happened, and there are witnesses
to these guys being taken to jail, being spirited out
(19:00):
of jail at night, and then they go missing. And
so they had enough evidence to put together that these
guys were the subject of foul play by the local
sheriff and his deputies, but they didn't have the bodies,
and so that was an absolute key. And so it
(19:21):
wasn't so much, at least in that case, beating a
confession out of someone. It was more beating getting some
evidence out of someone through this enhanced interrogation. And you know,
there's a credible argument that he was acting as an
agent of the government at the time, and so that
(19:42):
the information would have been subject to what used to
be called the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, and
that is, it was the information that the FBI used
was bad in the first instance because of the way
this guy got it. But I think that for the
(20:03):
political side of it, the most important thing was to
actually find the bodies. On the Vernon Dahmer case, the
guy that was that was interrogated was kind of a
bit player in the whole thing, and the people that
actually killed Dahmer were tried based on that information and
(20:25):
then and that guy also found himself in some deep trouble.
But later the person who was kind of the lynchkin
on the Dahmer operation in terms of killing him, appealed
his conviction on the grounds that the guy that had
(20:47):
ratted him out had had his civil rights violated, and
that theory of sort of connecting his civil rights to
this other guy was rejected by the courts, and it
was rejected by the Mississippi court to begin with, and
then by the federal courts, and he ended up dying
in prison. So that argument was made in that case.
(21:08):
Certainly a clever.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Argument would think it ended. Now, what about he's down
there and I'm looking on Wikipedia again says he made
one hundred and fifty k down there from the FBI
doing this job for him down there? What about his
buddies back in Brooklyn. He's gone for all these months,
so this time he comes back with all this extra money.
Any suspicion that he was working for the cops.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, he wasn't down there very long ed. It was
like I said, it was kind of in and out.
And the one hundred and fifty grand that he made
was really over a period of time. For all the
information you provided the FBI up until about nineteen seventy five,
during this first period of Scarpa being handled by this
(21:49):
guy Anthony Vellano, who was working out of the New
York office, So you know, they he and his girlfriend
went to Florida on their way to Mississippi to kind
of established that we're just going down to Florida, relaxed.
That was not unusual for these guys back then. In fact,
Scarpa eventually had a condominium in Florida. So the Brooklyn
(22:15):
mob guys, if if somebody said, Hey, I'm going to
Florida with my girlfriend for a couple of weeks, it
wouldn't have raised any eyebrows, gotcha.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
And then what about his other work as an informant?
Did he ever actually rat out his friends in Brooklyn?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Oh? Yeah, he He was absolutely key in the arrest
of Joe Columbo Junior and Joe Columbo Senior. He he uh,
and yeah, he absolutely did. He had no hesitation to
rat out people too that were close to him. And
(22:52):
you know, Joe Columbo was the boss of the family,
and this is a pretty serious manner. And as Gregory
Scarper Junior explained to me, his dad was one of
about a handful of guys, about five guys that were
very close to Joe Colombo. And even though they weren't
compos they they had more power than the Coppos because
(23:13):
of their closeness to Joe Colombo and Scarpo. Scarpa informed
on him and his son, and Scarpa was also instrumental,
and you may remember this from living in New York
as the big cases that Rudy Giuliani prosecuted during the
mid nineteen eighties, the Scarpa in the FBI files is
(23:38):
clear that Scarpa was central to the some of the
information that was provided both to in the case against
Columbo family and Carmen Persco in particular, but also in
the cases against the five heads of the families to
the extent that Scarpa knew that information. And there's a
(24:00):
there's a Senate report that very much tracks the language
of the FBI's own file that makes it clear that
Scarf is information that he provided to the FBI was
enormously valuable in those prosecutions as well.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
But Scarf was never listed as a witness in those cases.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Yeah, well, they you know, that's that's part of the.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
You're still working for the cops during those trials.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
He was, Oh, yeah, he was. He was working all
all the way up until nineteen ninety two. Yeah, so
he was, and they can't ever bring these top echelon
confidential informants in as witnesses because that then their their
(24:52):
either their life is over or they've got to go
into witness protection or something. But they they they will
have other types of witnesses that they define and who
can testify in court, and they what they'll try to
do is build a case where they can they don't
(25:12):
have to rely on the on the testimony the top
echelon criminal informant because again that once once they're exposed,
it's over now.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
So one of your sources that you've interviewed for this
book is Greg Junior.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah. I talked to Greg briefly, and I actually sent
him some questions and asked him to respond to those questions.
And you know, Greg has also been on the interview circus,
So there are a lot of interviews. Are there some
podcasts that are available out there? And then there was
a book by author Sandral Harmon about Greig Scorpa and so,
(25:56):
and then there's other information in other books and other places.
But yeah, I interviewed Greg. Wasn't an extensive interview because
there's all already a lot of information that he's made
available out there, But yeah, we talked.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
That's interesting because I tried to interview his sister years
ago and when I and I said, I wanted to
talk about Greg and his marijuana business on Staten Island
at the College of Stanton Island and wolf Pone and stuff,
and she's I'm not talking about my brother. Talked about
their brother at all. But now, what about Gwen. When
he was a young man, did he know that these
stories about his father being an informant?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, he I mean it, it was one of those things.
Eventually they figured out and Greg's talked about this that
when they were growing up, you know, it was a
little bit different they and they weren't really sure what
their dad did. And then when he was pretty young,
he is one of his sister's Debbie, I believe it was,
(26:52):
he came to him and said, I think our dad's
in the mafia. And I think Greg's response was, if
he's in the mafia, then that's not a bad thing.
And you know, they these guys that Scarpa worked would
would come to the Scarpa house and they would bring
(27:13):
duffel bags full of jewelry and goods and everything else
on the table. So Eventually the kids figured it out,
and then Gregory got into the life himself. As you know,
he became a coppo in the Columbo family.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
I forgot I was gonna answer it. You also mentioned
the HIV. That's what I was going to say. The AIDS. Okay,
right now, what was the origin of the AIDS.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Scarpa in nineteen eighty six was all of a sudden
coughing up blood. His skin was turned purple. He was
in bad shape, and he had been taking some painkillers
for a number of years asprin Also he was a
Scotch shrinker, and he had he needed emergency surgery on
his stomach and they ended up removing most of his
stomach and as part of that surgery, he needed blood.
(28:16):
He needed blood transfusions, and he didn't trust the hospital
and their blood supply. You know, this is right eighty six,
This is the age epandemic is really getting underway. People
don't know a lot about it generally, but they know
that it's a scary thing. And so what he did
(28:37):
was essentially he had his crew come down and had
them all tested and the matches they used for transfusions,
and one of the matches was this guy, Paul Mellie,
who was a weightlifter, and they had been injecting steroids apparently,
and he was his blood was HIV positive, but it
(28:59):
was tested before the scarpa got it. But shortly after
he left the hospital and was recuperating from that surgery,
he was informed that he had been given HIV positive
blood and that he himself at that point was HIV positive.
And you know, that was nineteen eighty six and he
didn't die until nineteen ninety four, and people by the
(29:23):
early nineties were predicting like, oh, he's got two months
to live, he'll be dead in six months. He don't
worry about him. He doesn't not have long to live.
And he outlived them all, and he out he fooled
them all. But he was HIV positive and it went
into full blown AIDS and that's what eventually killed him.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
But there weren't there some rumors of possible homosexuality or
was that because people later I found it was an informant,
they were just trying to smear them.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah, you know, I never I never ran across that,
so that's news to me. But if if there were
rumors like that, it wasn't at least common in the
literature that I saw, and it could have been an
effort to smear him.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
His son said that because in a sort of early
part of the whole age epidemic thing, he felt that
Greg Starpor felt that people were judging him when they
saw him, and they knew he was sick. And you know,
for years he said he was suffering from cancer, and
he even kept the secret hidden from his kids. But
(30:29):
his mistress, Linda Schiro knew, and you know, she tended
to him for years when he was highly contagious.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
And I'm curious what year did it come out that
he was in informing.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Well, it came out officially in early nineteen ninety three
when he was sentenced to a sentence for three murders
that he had been involved with during the Third Colombo War.
And during the sentencing hearing, he said, you know, I've
tried my best, I've tried to help your honor, and
(31:07):
the prosecuting attorney, the US assistant US attorney agrees, so
we know that mister Scarper has been a help to
the department. YadA, YadA, YadA. And so that's when it
officially came out. But there were a bunch of guys
that had some suspicions before that, but they never really
(31:28):
it didn't go any further than just some suspicions.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
And by then, I guess Greg Junior had already had
all those problems, but they were extorting those guys over
the marijuana, and so he was already doing time.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah. Greg was arrested in nineteen eighty seven and he
spent I believe thirty three years in prison before he
was released on a compassionate release.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
It seems like you and me about the same age.
My memory seems to be a lot more fuzzy than yours.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Okay, but well, I you know, I've been living this
stuff for the last three years.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, well, you don't believe it or not. It just
came to my memories talking to somebody I just recently
about running I had with those guys, and I was
telling a story, and then I did a solo show
it's available on Patreon, about my old marijuana days on
Standout in Dynamite Life. A lot of crazy stuff. But now,
what about when he was out there doing these murders
(32:24):
and doing all these hits and stuff like that. Now
he was he was an informant at that time.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, yeah, And in fact, I think I think that's
why he was closing as an informant in nineteen seventy
five the first time, because the FBI another informant told
the FBI that Scarpet had been involved in a murder
back in nineteen sixty four by this kid named Kochio.
I'm not sure what his first name was, but and
(32:52):
after that message and memo circuit in the FBI, he
was terminated pretty quickly after that because Scarper was told
back in sixty two or sixty three that that's the
line he can't cross. You can't cross that line, and
he told the FBI that he thought he was going
to be told to kill Joe Maglioco, who was going
(33:14):
to be Joe Perfacci's successor, and he reported that to
the FBI, and all sorts of alarm bells went off,
and the FBI said, you can't do that. That's you
can't be involved in murder. And so Scarpa, I think
he was probably just testing the waters to find out
what the limits were, and so they told him, you
can't do that. And then nineteen seventy five it came
(33:37):
to their attention that he had been involved and at
least one murder in sixty four and definitely more, but
one that they knew about. And he was terminated after that,
and I think that led to his termination. But then
all through the nineteen eighties, and I chronicles in the
book the murders that he committed in the nineteen eighties
while his second handler, Linda Vecchio was in charge of him.
(34:01):
And then of course the murders during the Third Columbo War,
all of those except one that he was finally indicted for,
and there were just three of them. All of those
happened while he was an informant for the FBI. He
was re upped in nineteen eighty and then again my
(34:24):
book chronicles the murders that he was responsible for during
the eighties and then during that Third Columbia War, and
all of those happened while he was an informant.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Any indication that the FBI was aware they had it
to be right, because those are words spreads like wildfire.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah, this is this is the one of the big
controversies about the FBI's handling of Scarpa. And one of
the sources that I relied upon was Peter Lance's book
about Scarper's relationship with this handler, Linda Vecchio, and excuse me,
(35:05):
Lance does a great job of kind of parsing that
out and looking at all the possibilities, and Lance concludes
that de Vecchio was aware of some of these things.
And Linda Vechio wrote a book kind of in his
own defense, and they're both kind of polemics, both of
these books. And Vecchio at one point says, in my
(35:26):
heart of heart, I knew he was still doing hits.
And I don't think that the the leadership of the
FBI was necessarily aware, but I think maybe at the
special agent level, it appears that they had to know.
(35:49):
And but to what extent is not clear. And I
must say Linda Vechio was charged with being essentially an
accomplished in some of these murders by providing Scarp with
certain information that trial. During that trial, the prosecutor moved
(36:10):
for a dismissal when the star witness was presumed to
have been lying, and the judge granted that dismissal, and
that dismissal acts as what lawyers referred to as race judicatta.
The matter has been adjudicated. So Linda Vechio was essentially
that's a finding of not guilty. So on those matters
(36:32):
that actually got to a court, Linda Vechio can rightly
say I was the case was dismissed, and that acts
as the finding of not guilty.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
And what exactly were the charges against them?
Speaker 1 (36:48):
The charges were related to him providing information about the whereabouts,
the schedules, addresses, and also about the surveillance of three
different victims during the Third Columba War that Scarf was
(37:10):
able to use to execute these guys.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
So so then he had a very seriously intimate relationship
with Scarf.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
He you know, he's quite alive now, frank about that.
In his book, he's quite frank about it. He's he
he considered Scarf his friend. He admired Scarpa. He says
that in his book, you know, you got to admire
the guy and so. But he also tries to say
(37:42):
in his book at the same time that I let
him know that these were the boundaries that he couldn't cross.
And you know, we I think that reading the Vecchio's
book and then reading Lance's book, and knowing what I
know about out the whole scarp of story, I think
(38:04):
it was just I think he was too close. I
think he was too close to him. I think he
I think he did admire him, and I think it
probably clattered his judgment. But I'll let readers make that
determination on their own. My book isn't trying to resolve that.
Lance's book does an excellent job of trying to resolve
that issue. My book is more just here's what happened,
(38:26):
and you all make up your own mind.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
That's how I try and do it. So I just
take the statement just now. It's my experience to that.
Back in those days, like a lot of people that
worked NYPD Organized Crime Task Force and FBI and stuff,
after they would retire, then they would go become criminal
defense investigators and go go right back to work with
these same guys. Well, any of those people are on SCARPA,
did that happen with them?
Speaker 1 (38:50):
You know, nothing comes exactly to mind. There are a
couple of names of guys that were really involved in
this that like Tommy Dads was a New York Police
Department detective and he was actually a childhood friend of
Larry Moses, who's one of Scarpi's lieutenants. And Tommy Dads
he was, you know, straight guy, straight irow all the
(39:12):
way hardworking New York Police Department, and you know, from
the neighborhoods. So we understood these guys who knew a
lot of them. And as far as I know he
that was the career he finished out with. And he's
probably retired by now. So you know, the phenomenon you're
talking about. You also see it in terms of attorneys
(39:35):
who are prosecutors and then they retire and all of
a sudden, you know they're lawyers for the mob.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Well, there's really no money to stay in a prosecutor's office,
you know, it's just like a stepping stone. Yeah, that's
where the money is, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, I mean there's certainly plenty of people that are
prosecutors that do it because I think it's an important job.
But if you're looking to make a of money as
a lawyer, you're not going to make it as a prosecutor.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Now, as Greg Scarpus, we know he was an informant
in different cases of silver ete cases and then these
other kind of cases. Well, his son too took after
his father's steps footsteps, and he also became informed for
the FBI.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Well, Craig Scarpa junior, he provided some information to the
FBI based on things he heard while he was incarcerated,
and and that's covered pretty well and both Lance's book
and also Sandra Harmon's book about some people that he
(40:39):
became close to, like Terry McNichol, who is one of
the Oklahoma bombers, Oklahoma City bombers, and then also some
others that were involved in some of New York terrorism
and so. And he provided that information that he he
(41:00):
got to law enforcement two the prison authorities as well.
But Gregory's information that he provided was was not really
this is what the mob was doing. He wasn't the
informant like Scarpa was. He certainly wasn't an informant while
(41:24):
he was working as a coppo in the Colombo family
up until his arrest. He was a very stand up
loyal guy as far as the Mob was concerned.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
It's interesting, I've done so many shows about the Oklahoma
City bombing and I was never aware that what was
Scarpa actually tipped them off about more explosives that were
under Terry nichols house. Is that right, right?
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Right? And that that was one of the things they
were looking for for and for the evidence and they've
they so I think you're exactly right. They they found
them pretty much based exactly where scarpusit they were going
to be. And then what kind of scarpage Jr.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Sorry it's a great junior. And what kind of benefit
that in federal prison for giving him that kind of information?
Was he an extra meal? What does he get in
time off? What do he is?
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Well? I think he got nothing. Frankly, I think yeah.
I think a lot of they just thought, oh, this
is just a guy looking for, you know, some time
off or some of this out of the next thing.
But you know, Greg was going to spend the rest
of his life in prison, except that you know, he
had ended up with throat cancer, and they said, okay,
he's done thirty three years, he's renounced the mob. He
(42:37):
did all that stuff, he said, you know, in retrospect,
and I think his renouncing the mob was sincere. He
just came back and realized, oh my god, what this
life I was living was just awful, and I heard
so many people and so anyway, he did thirty three years,
and as I recall, at least four of those years
(42:57):
were in solitary. So and when he got sick, they
gave him a compassionate release, but they didn't release him
because of the information that he provided, right and.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
When this compassionate release is yeah, so now he Great
Junior would be just about my age. I think he
was a few years older than me. And it's so
true looking back, you know that that wasn't a an
admirable lifestyle. You know, I could see, especially spending time
in solitary. I for you's a lot of time to
look back on your life and say, boy, I made
(43:33):
some big mistakes, you know.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Is that what he said to Yeah, well he said
that in a couple of different contexts, and he you know,
he and it's not so much. I mean, he knows
that he personally his life could have been very different.
But I think one of the things that's admirable like
(43:56):
Greg Junior is also at least he has remorse, remorse
for the people that he hurt and the families that
he hurt, and and he's aware of that too, Whereas
you know, some of these guys are just just you know,
I feel bad because I need to say I feel
bad and otherwise I won't get what I want. But
(44:18):
I'm certain that Greg is sincere in his remorse and anyway,
he's yeah, he's he's he's older now and he's he's uh,
you know, I don't know how much longer he'll be around.
I hope it's I hope it's much longer, because I
think he being out of prison and just sort of
(44:41):
trying to find his way in life again has been
a challenge for him. But it's you know, at least
he's not a prisoner and solitary anymore.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Yeah. I have mixed emotions too about all these podcasts,
like you said, you know, either guesting or hosting and
so many. First of all, he's supposed to keep your
mouth shut. That was you went ind and and then
then the notoriety and the fan you know, the fan worship,
you know what I mean for these guys that when
(45:10):
you know they're pretty disgusting people, Well, what do you
think of all they've been doing a lot of You've
been doing some podcasts lately, right.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah, I think it's I have the same sort of
feeling about and some of it is I think that
on the receiving end, there are people out there that
are fascinated by this life, and they they fantasize about it,
or they were romanticized about it and some of these guys,
(45:39):
and you know, I think the two main guys that
I've had contact with on this book, Larry Masa and
Greg Scarper, are both genuinely remorseful for what they did
and have tried. And Larry Masa has been very successful
in terms of trying to lead a good life after
you know, Masa spent ten years in prison and he
(46:04):
got out of prison and he's, you know, he's he is,
he's leading a good life, and he's also telling a story.
And I think what happens is that people hear that
story and and they take it in a way that
I don't think Larry means it. He doesn't mean He's
not bragging, he's not trying to say like, hey look
at me. He's saying, here's the life I led, this was,
(46:27):
this is who I was. I'm not that guy anymore.
And so, but I absolutely get your point. I think
there are some people out there that are, you know, hey,
I was a tough guy. I was the mafia guy
the whole time, and uh, look at me. And but
that's I don't think that's either Greg or Larry Frankly.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Out there hamming it up for the microphones on top
of her.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yeah, you know, playing to the camera.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
We're talking to Jonathan Dyer and you can find him
at jonathandireauthor dot com. He's also on Blue Sky. He
was on Twitter for a while but took a run
in after the crazyes on Twitter. Greg Scarper Legendary Evil,
The Many Faces of a Mafia Killer. Is there anything
about Craig scarp I haven't asked you about that? You
want the audience to out?
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Well? I think that his final years are pretty interesting too.
You know, he tried to stay out of prison for
as long as he could, but he was also a
violent guy right up until the end. And there's a
there's a part in the book that he was up
in Minneapolis and Rochester, Minnesota. He's not Minneapolis, Rochester, Minnesota,
(47:37):
in a federal prison hospital up there, and he was
dying and he'd lost most of his body weight. He
was covered with sores, I mean it was full blown
aids and he was trying to get released. And so
the judge that was hearing his plea to be released
(47:59):
so that he could die at home, it looked like
he was going to release him, and then the district
attorney came in, or the prosecuting attorney came in and said, no,
don't release him. And he asked the doctor who was
testifying about Scarpu's physical condition, really a couple months before
(48:20):
he died. He said, does this essentially he said, does
his trigger finger still work? And the doctor said yes.
And his mistress, Linda Schiro, her response to that at
first was like, this is crazy. He's down to like
eighty pounds. He can't even get out of bed. And
then Linda Shira says, and then I thought about it,
(48:42):
and I thought, if he goes home, he might kill someone.
And she knew him as well as anyone, and I
think that speaks to who he was up until the
last minute. He was a dangerous man. And that's another
remarkable thing about Greg Scarpa.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
You know, it's so true, and in some ways you
really can't blame him. You live your whole life using
violence as a tool, as a resource, and some people
it's you. Your go to resource is the first option
you you that's how you've lived your whole life, that's
how you made a living. And it's just a muscle memory,
you know what I mean, It's just a Greg Scarf.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry anyway, that's a great point.
I make that point too. That was just that was
his go to solution. There's a problem, violence, violence is
a solution. You know you always hear you heard from
your teachers. Violence was not the answer. But for him,
violence was the answer. And that's that was part of
his DNA and it.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Worked for him, and he made a lot of money.
He got to the top of the Klemo family. You know,
he made a name for himself that he's doing that
that's what worked for him.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Absolutely, just by total coincidence. For the audience. If you
check out Patreon, the show I'm talking about, it's called
Last Man Standing, and it was I did that before
my memory came up a talking to somebody about these
guys trying to shake me down and uh off the
salm some dynamite. I had a couple of cops with
me too, So I tell that story. It's in the
(50:11):
Patreon and just total by coincidence. Days later, we get
a it's Wild Blue Press right as your publisher. Wild
Blue Yeah, yeah, Wild Blue Yeah. Jonathan Dyer wrote this
book about the Greg Scorpa. But Jonathan, before we go
because we do have a few minutes left now this
Nick Temple file. Now, first of all, you're telling me,
you know you're a linguistic translator kind of guy, but
(50:35):
you when the intelligence division of that, did you have
any kind of interesting adventures in that?
Speaker 1 (50:42):
Well? Yeah, I mean the whole thing was kind of
it was interesting from that. You know, we were in Berlin,
and as you know, Berlin was sixty miles into these Berlin,
so it was actually behind the Iron Curtain. And the
way I've described it to people, it was a lot
like guard duty. There was a lot of monotony, a
(51:03):
lot of just everyday thing. You know, you're you're you're
working as an intercept operator or a transcriber, and armies
do what armies do on a day to day basis.
And it was punctuated by moments of like, oh my god,
this is it World War three, We're starting And obviously
that never happened, but you know, you get a glimpse here,
(51:25):
a flicker there, and somebody talking over here, and you
add it up and you say, well, I'd better better
get this to my supervisor. And you know, I'm not
I know it may sound silly ed, but you know,
this is the and that was the nineteen eighties. But
I'm still not allowed to talk about the specifics of it,
but I think that was the general gist of it,
(51:47):
that that there was, you know, we did our jobs.
We were we use diligence and trying to keep track
of what the Soviet Union was up to, and every
now and then it was it was it was pretty scary.
Speaker 2 (52:04):
It looks like you wrote about seven books about this
Nick Temple. What kind of adventures does he get into?
Speaker 1 (52:10):
Well, he's you know, he's kind of a James Bond type,
although he's not he's not as as skilled as Bond.
He's a he's a CIA agent, and he gets into uh,
various positions where I've either and they adversary is usually
(52:31):
the Soviet Union because that's what the Cold War was
all about. And there's some plot is uncovered and Nick
has to uh do what he can to to afford
it and so and each book has got obviously a
different plot and a different attempt by the Soviet Union
and Nick is in there and he just keeps plugging
away and keeps fighting every time. He's you know, it's
(52:53):
like whack them all right, every time they raise their head.
He's he's got to be there.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
We've been talking once again. Jonathan Jonathan dyreauthor dot com.
You can find him on Blue Sky. The book is
called Greg Scarpo Legendary Evil, The Many Faces of a
Mafia Killer. And another weird coincidence that the p I
I worked for there in Brooklyn, that was that organized
crime investigator. He came out of Army and I think
it was Army Intelligence himself, so I know it's a treasure.
(53:23):
Pan Yeah, small world, Small world, my friend, Jonathan Jyer,
thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure talking to you,
and I'll look forward to seeing or listening to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
You got it. I'll definitely send you a copy. I
don't work.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Thank you, all right, take care of us. M.
It's the Opperman Report, and now here is investigator in Opperman.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
Okay, welcome to the Opperman Report. I'm your host, private
investigator Ed Opperman. You can get a hold of me
at Opperman Investigations and Digital France and Consulting if you
reach out to me through my email Opperman Investigations at
gmail dot com. Otherwise, if you like our show, be
sure to check out our Patreon, The Operaman Report Patreon.
Like I've been saying lately, we have a blockbuster lineup
(00:32):
on Patreon these days. Craig Aunger about the October surprise.
We have a Gyorgay Scalazza who is the Russian felt
it's Georgian. But he was in those Muller text messages
with Michael Cohen about the pe tapes. We stopped the
flow of tapes. Got an interview with him. Exclusive hasn't
done an interview since his testiphoning for the Mueller Grand Jury.
(00:56):
SOT pretty proud of that. Tessa Dick, who is the
widow of Philip K. Dick, and a lot of great stuff.
A couple of interviews I did myself with the BBC
and with the Clyde Lewis on a ground zero AMFM radio.
So check out the Opperaman Report Patreon. Everything you hear
(01:16):
Monday a Friday ed free and early before you can
hear it on the radio. Otherwise, if I'm at speaker
dot com Friday night to a live show and in
two hours a brand new podcast content every single Friday
night at spreaker dot com. Our guest today is Jonathan P. Dyer.
(01:37):
Now you could find him. He's got this website called
the jonathandireauthor dot Com. He's also on Blue Sky. If
you want to tell him how greatest books are, you
can reach him out over there. Today we're talking about
a good old Colombo crime family, Greg scarpa legendary evil,
the many faces of a mafia killer. Mister Jonathan Dyer,
(01:59):
are you there? I am, Thank you so much. Before
we get into the book here about Greg Scarpaugh, I
tell us about yourself. Who is Jonathan Dyer.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Well, let's see back in nineteen eighty one, a couple
of years out of high school, I joined the army
and became a Russian linguist. After training at the Presidio
of Monterey's Defense Language Institute and some more training of
the National Security Agency, and then was shipped over to Berlin,
(02:30):
where I spent three years doing intercept communications intercept of
what was at the time the Soviet Union, and there
are forces in East Germany. After my honorable discharge, I
went to law school. I finished college while I was
in the Army. I went to law school and at
(02:52):
University California Davis. Practiced law for about ten years and
then switched careers to teaching. I taught criminal law and
US history and government for a little over twenty years,
and then during the pandemic, I decided it was time
to retire. And since then I've moved to Texas and
(03:13):
I've been writing and just recently finished the book that
you just mentioned about Greg Scarpa.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
When you were practicing attorney, did you practice criminal defense.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
I didn't practice criminal defense. I was a litigator doing
civil litigation. But I also had a criminal appellate practice
through a group called the First First DIFFERCT Repellent Project
in San Francisco, and that practice consisted of writing appellates
briefs on appeal for indigen people who are incarcerated. And
(03:49):
while I was in law school, I worked one summer
for the Attorney's General's Office in their criminal division, and
I also worked as an extern in the Public Defender's Office,
so I had some criminal law practice experience, but the
bulk of my practice was civil litigation.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
Gotcha And so now the Great Scarp, legendary evil, the
many faces of a mafia killed. This is your first
true crime book.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
Yeah, it is. It's my first book length nonfiction. You know,
I've written a lot of nonfiction, of course in graduate school,
and then I wrote a number of pieces for a
Baseball Log a few summers back. But this is my
first book length effort at nonfiction.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
And you were telling me off there about this series
of thrillers you've done, about the Nick Temple File. What's
the story with that?
Speaker 1 (04:40):
Yeah, those were some books that were based primarily on
my own experiences working in the intelligence field in Berlin,
and it's the series predates my time, so it's not
a complete parallel of what I was doing. And you know,
it just sort of started as a lark. My wife
(05:03):
was saying, why don't you write something that's fun that
you enjoy thinking about. And I've studied the Cold War
and studied the Soviet Union, and as I said, served
in the army as a Russian linguist. So I started
writing those and they just kept kind of coming out,
and I've got six done and I had another one
(05:23):
on the way when I got sidelined and started writing
the Scarpa book.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
And what made sure? What were your interest to Greg Scarpa.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
Well, I was doing some projects with a writing partner,
a guy I have known actually since high school. And
my understanding is that he had the purchased the rights
to the life story of Larry Maza, who was one
of Scarpa's lieutenants, and so we were looking at Masa's
book The Life, which is a fascinating book. It's a
(05:53):
memoir that Larry wrote, and we were thinking about some
scripts maybe for a s is just just kind of
kicking that around, and then Joe Joe Palletto, my writing partners,
shuggested that I write a Scarpa biography. And you know, honestly,
at first I kind of balked. I hadn't written a
(06:15):
book length piece of non fisher, but Joe kind of
kept gently pushing, and pushing is probably the wrong word,
just more nudging and saying, yeah, yeah, you should do it,
you should do it. So I decided I was going
to do it, and I rolling my sleeves and got
into it.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
Yeah, it's kind of funny because when I was looking up,
you know, i'd pull up the book before I do
an interview, you know, to get a little familiar with
the book, and okay, Greg Scarper, you know. And I
was surprised to see there's a couple of books and
a couple of TV shows about Greg Scarpa, where I
never considered Greg Scarper or his son to be that's it,
no notoriety, you know. I didn't think that they were
(06:51):
that well known and even that well considered as far
as the organized crime fans.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Yeah, I think that I think you're right about that. Frankly,
I think that there's a group of people that are
fairly familiar with Scarpa and his story. But you know,
he's not a Paul Castellano, He's not a chin Gagante.
He was never a boss. He was a captain on
and off briefly. But I think the distinguishing feature is
(07:23):
his work for the FBI and the fact that he
was a respected member of the mafia and also a
feared member of the mafia at the same time he
was working for the FBI. I think that's what makes
his story particularly compelling.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Well, so why don't right, I've heard the story about
that he was an informant, okay, and then I heard
it followed up a little bit more about it today,
So why don't you give us little background on what
was his activity as an informant? And how common is
that do you find in organized crime figures?
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Well, I'm not sure how common it is now. It
was very uncommon when he started, and he was approach
in nineteen sixty the FBI was actually searching for his
brother Sal and went to Greg Scarpa and wanted his
help and finding locating Sal and Greg said, you know,
essentially forget it. He was polite about it. He said,
I can't talk to you guys. If I'm seen talking
(08:15):
to you guys, it's putting my life in danger. So
please leave me alone. And they honored that, and then
Scarpa a few months later decided I'm going to talk
to these guys. And again in nineteen sixty two, it
was very unusual. The FBI knew almost nothing about the
mafia at the time, and in fact, just backing up
(08:36):
a little, in the nineteen fifties, Jed Drew Hoover was
pretty much in denial about any sort of organized crime
in the United States. He said it didn't exist, and
he was wrong, of course. And then when Kennedy gets elected,
Kennedy does a one et and Kennedy knows there's organized
crime out there. He's got his brother, Bobby Kennedy as
the Attorney General, and they get very aggressive. So BI
(09:01):
has to get on board and they start trying to
develop these confidential informants. Peci's top echelon consident confidential informance,
which Scarper was. But at the time it was very unusual.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
And how did he come about to Did they approach him,
did he approach them? Did he have a case and
open case and he needed to work off? How did
he become an informant?
Speaker 1 (09:29):
It was a combination of both. They approached him initially,
and as I mentioned, he pretty much told them, hey,
leave me alone, and then he had to change your heart.
He decided I think he decided, this is a possibility
for me to earn some money, and he was right
about that. The FBI was paying for the information and
(09:50):
Scarp's main love for most of his life was money,
and so he saw this as an opportunity, and I
think he also saw as an opportunity to to shield
himself from potential incarceration investigation at least have a card
to play if he got into some sort of legal trouble.
So they approached him. First initially he said no thanks,
(10:14):
and then a few months later he gave him a
call and said, I'm.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Interested, but just to make money, not to get out
of a case.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
Yeah, yeah, to make money. And then I think in
the back of Scarper's mind was this will be this
could be a get out of jail free card the
next time around.
Speaker 2 (10:39):
And it really literally is they give you a card
you get pulled over, the COFFS card, he say, call
up this guy or call my provation. It really is
that card, you know. And I was shocked for that. Yeah, right,
if people only knew, you know, how informants make the
whole criminal justice system out and work. You know. It's
just I was just off the air before we started
(11:01):
this interview. But now what shocked me. And I didn't
find it from your book. I found it from Wikipedia
that he was involved in the murders of Cheney, Goodman
and Schorner. He worked for the FBI undercover for them
digging up information.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Yeah, that's an incredible story. They're actually and I cover
this in the book. There are three cases down in
Mississippi that scarp has been tied to, and I think
that some of them, at least one of them, is exaggerated,
and I don't think scarp had anything to do with it.
And as I kind of swared through all the possibilities
on the other two cases in my book and come
(11:37):
to some conclusions, but yeah, he was. He was allegedly
the guy that was able to extract the information about
where those three young men were buried. Everybody knew they
were missing and presumed that they were dead, but they
couldn't find the bodies, an enormous amount of pressure on
the FBI and on the Department of just and scarpa
(12:02):
who by then had been working as an informant for
a couple of years, is alleged to have gone down
to Mississippi and with his girlfriend Linda Schiro and extracted
the information through what would today be called enhanced interrogation.
And then subsequent to that, there's another case of Vernon Dahmer,
(12:25):
who was a member of the NAACP and in nineteen
sixty six, he was registering African Americans to vote and
he was assassinated and Scarpa was Again the story is
that Scarpa was in on finding out who was responsible
for that, and that one looks pretty solid to me.
(12:47):
But again, Ed, I've got a whole chapter on Scarpa,
as I mean, it's an incredible right, a civil rights icon.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Especially spise guys are so racist. That's the last that you.
I think they have to with the Wimpie Boys, a
social club daddy, those characters. Right, Yeah, but no, but
what what Why picked Greg scarp But he must have
stuck out like a sore thumb down there in Mississippi
in the eighties, you know, right or the yeah, I
mean sixties, we're talking about nineteen sixty four. He must
(13:18):
have stuck out like a sore thumb.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
Yeah, absolutely, you know he's he's coming down there, he's
dressed like a Masi guy from Brooklyn. He's they're not
you know, they don't have a lot of good fellows
and button men walking around Jackson, Mississippi, or any of
those places. And so the yeah, he absolutely would stick
out like a sore thumb. But he was at least
(13:43):
the references that I've seen, and the stories that I
think are credible about his appearance down there. He was
it was very quick, he was in and out. He
used you know, he used some physical force to obtain
some information from some people, and the information turned out
to be accurate. I think that's what's important here, because
(14:04):
they're you know, one of the objections to an enhanced
interrogation technique is that the person that's being interrogated will
tell you anything to make a stop. Right. And but
the information that Scarpa allegedly got, both as to the
Vernon Dahmer issue and also as to the civil rights
(14:26):
workers issues, turned out to be credible and was an
enormous help to the FBI. So, yeah, very that's a
very unusual thing to see in the resume of any
member of.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
The Yeah, civil rights active. Now, what about did he
have any He said he went down there with his girlfriend,
But did he have any help in town? And you know,
he did this on his own. He was that tough
that he just pull up and torture them by himself.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
Well, he he met some FBI agents down there. There were,
as you probably know, there were FBI agents and federal
law enforcing people down there trying to enforce things like
the Voting Rights Act and trying to protect African Americans
who are being denied access to the polls. And a
(15:19):
lot of that is portrayed in the movie Mississippi Burning.
So there are federal agents down there that have been
sent down by Kennedy and then Johnson to assist with
this program, and particularly by Lyndon Johnson because he would
have been president by sixty four, so he had some
help from the from agents that were already down there.
(15:39):
And although it's not entirely clear from the documents, I
think we can presume that the New York Office got
in touch with the people down in Mississippi and vice
versa said, we've got a guy here might be able
to help you. And you know part of that and
I think was driven by we've got a guy here
(16:00):
be able to help you, and we can we can
stay clean. We don't have to hammer these guys. We
don't have to be the ones to come down on them.
This guy will do the heavy lifting for us, and
and maybe we can solve this. Because, again, particularly with
the civil rights workers, there was an enormous amount of
(16:23):
national pressure. There were marches in Chicago and New York
a lot of other cities. The government was feeling the
heat and they were they had come up empty handed,
and so I think that's, you know, somebody decided let's
get a little creative here.
Speaker 2 (16:41):
And do we know, like, did they hook him up
with some tough guys down there to help him out
or some other informing types down there, or did he
do this on his own, like kidnapping guys and taking
them back to someplace in torture.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
Well, there's there's There are a couple of different stories
about it, and one is that he friended, particularly on
the Vernon Dahmer story, he befriended someone who was a
local clan big shot. And the FBI knew who these
guys were, they just couldn't get the information out of him.
So he defended this, not befriended. Excuse me. The local
(17:16):
clan big shot in the Vernon Dahmer case owned a
TV appliance store and so Scarford goes in and says,
I want to buy this TV. And then while the
guys loading the TV and this car, the story is
that Scarpo whacked them, stuffed him in the back seat,
and then drove him out, drove him out to a
place that the FBI had already identified, drove him at
(17:39):
his place to interrogate him while the FBI was waiting outside.
And so he in addition to having these contacts with
the FBI in Mississippi, the agents on the ground in
Mississippi knew who the main players were. They knew who
the main actors were were, and they they assisted certainly
(18:04):
assisted Scarpa in having the tools necessary to you know,
like a car like these interrogation, this interrogation place, and
putting together a plan I think is the best conclusion.
Speaker 2 (18:18):
Well, then then, as an attorney, how do you put
together a case? How do you go to court with
this this uh tortured questions, you know, and this stuff
has to come up in court somehow? How do you
do pull that off?
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Well, the on the three civil rights workers, the main
focus of that investigation at the time was we got
to find these bodies because they couldn't find the bodies.
They knew generally what had happened, and there are witnesses
to these guys being taken to jail, being spirited out
(19:00):
of jail at night, and then they go missing. And
so they had enough evidence to put together that these
guys were the subject of foul play by the local
sheriff and his deputies, but they didn't have the bodies,
and so that was an absolute key. And so it
(19:21):
wasn't so much, at least in that case, beating a
confession out of someone. It was more beating getting some
evidence out of someone through this enhanced interrogation. And you know,
there's a credible argument that he was acting as an
agent of the government at the time, and so that
(19:42):
the information would have been subject to what used to
be called the fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine, and
that is, it was the information that the FBI used
was bad in the first instance because of the way
this guy got it. But I think that for the
(20:03):
political side of it, the most important thing was to
actually find the bodies. On the Vernon Dahmer case, the
guy that was that was interrogated was kind of a
bit player in the whole thing, and the people that
actually killed Dahmer were tried based on that information and
(20:25):
then and that guy also found himself in some deep trouble.
But later the person who was kind of the lynchkin
on the Dahmer operation in terms of killing him, appealed
his conviction on the grounds that the guy that had
(20:47):
ratted him out had had his civil rights violated, and
that theory of sort of connecting his civil rights to
this other guy was rejected by the courts, and it
was rejected by the Mississippi court to begin with, and
then by the federal courts, and he ended up dying
in prison. So that argument was made in that case.
(21:08):
Certainly a clever.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
Argument would think it ended. Now, what about he's down
there and I'm looking on Wikipedia again says he made
one hundred and fifty k down there from the FBI
doing this job for him down there? What about his
buddies back in Brooklyn. He's gone for all these months,
so this time he comes back with all this extra money.
Any suspicion that he was working for the cops.
Speaker 1 (21:29):
Yeah, he wasn't down there very long ed. It was
like I said, it was kind of in and out.
And the one hundred and fifty grand that he made
was really over a period of time. For all the
information you provided the FBI up until about nineteen seventy five,
during this first period of Scarpa being handled by this
(21:49):
guy Anthony Vellano, who was working out of the New
York office, So you know, they he and his girlfriend
went to Florida on their way to Mississippi to kind
of established that we're just going down to Florida, relaxed.
That was not unusual for these guys back then. In fact,
Scarpa eventually had a condominium in Florida. So the Brooklyn
(22:15):
mob guys, if if somebody said, Hey, I'm going to
Florida with my girlfriend for a couple of weeks, it
wouldn't have raised any eyebrows, gotcha.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
And then what about his other work as an informant?
Did he ever actually rat out his friends in Brooklyn?
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Oh? Yeah, he He was absolutely key in the arrest
of Joe Columbo Junior and Joe Columbo Senior. He he uh,
and yeah, he absolutely did. He had no hesitation to
rat out people too that were close to him. And
(22:52):
you know, Joe Columbo was the boss of the family,
and this is a pretty serious manner. And as Gregory
Scarper Junior explained to me, his dad was one of
about a handful of guys, about five guys that were
very close to Joe Colombo. And even though they weren't
compos they they had more power than the Coppos because
(23:13):
of their closeness to Joe Colombo and Scarpo. Scarpa informed
on him and his son, and Scarpa was also instrumental,
and you may remember this from living in New York
as the big cases that Rudy Giuliani prosecuted during the
mid nineteen eighties, the Scarpa in the FBI files is
(23:38):
clear that Scarpa was central to the some of the
information that was provided both to in the case against
Columbo family and Carmen Persco in particular, but also in
the cases against the five heads of the families to
the extent that Scarpa knew that information. And there's a
(24:00):
there's a Senate report that very much tracks the language
of the FBI's own file that makes it clear that
Scarf is information that he provided to the FBI was
enormously valuable in those prosecutions as well.
Speaker 2 (24:20):
But Scarf was never listed as a witness in those cases.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
Yeah, well, they you know, that's that's part of the.
Speaker 2 (24:28):
You're still working for the cops during those trials.
Speaker 1 (24:31):
He was, Oh, yeah, he was. He was working all
all the way up until nineteen ninety two. Yeah, so
he was, and they can't ever bring these top echelon
confidential informants in as witnesses because that then their their
(24:52):
either their life is over or they've got to go
into witness protection or something. But they they they will
have other types of witnesses that they define and who
can testify in court, and they what they'll try to
do is build a case where they can they don't
(25:12):
have to rely on the on the testimony the top
echelon criminal informant because again that once once they're exposed,
it's over now.
Speaker 2 (25:24):
So one of your sources that you've interviewed for this
book is Greg Junior.
Speaker 1 (25:29):
Yeah. I talked to Greg briefly, and I actually sent
him some questions and asked him to respond to those questions.
And you know, Greg has also been on the interview circus,
So there are a lot of interviews. Are there some
podcasts that are available out there? And then there was
a book by author Sandral Harmon about Greig Scorpa and so,
(25:56):
and then there's other information in other books and other places.
But yeah, I interviewed Greg. Wasn't an extensive interview because
there's all already a lot of information that he's made
available out there, But yeah, we talked.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
That's interesting because I tried to interview his sister years
ago and when I and I said, I wanted to
talk about Greg and his marijuana business on Staten Island
at the College of Stanton Island and wolf Pone and stuff,
and she's I'm not talking about my brother. Talked about
their brother at all. But now, what about Gwen. When
he was a young man, did he know that these
stories about his father being an informant?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah, he I mean it, it was one of those things.
Eventually they figured out and Greg's talked about this that
when they were growing up, you know, it was a
little bit different they and they weren't really sure what
their dad did. And then when he was pretty young,
he is one of his sister's Debbie, I believe it was,
(26:52):
he came to him and said, I think our dad's
in the mafia. And I think Greg's response was, if
he's in the mafia, then that's not a bad thing.
And you know, they these guys that Scarpa worked would
would come to the Scarpa house and they would bring
(27:13):
duffel bags full of jewelry and goods and everything else
on the table. So Eventually the kids figured it out,
and then Gregory got into the life himself. As you know,
he became a coppo in the Columbo family.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
I forgot I was gonna answer it. You also mentioned
the HIV. That's what I was going to say. The AIDS. Okay,
right now, what was the origin of the AIDS.
Speaker 1 (27:51):
Scarpa in nineteen eighty six was all of a sudden
coughing up blood. His skin was turned purple. He was
in bad shape, and he had been taking some painkillers
for a number of years asprin Also he was a
Scotch shrinker, and he had he needed emergency surgery on
his stomach and they ended up removing most of his
stomach and as part of that surgery, he needed blood.
(28:16):
He needed blood transfusions, and he didn't trust the hospital
and their blood supply. You know, this is right eighty six,
This is the age epandemic is really getting underway. People
don't know a lot about it generally, but they know
that it's a scary thing. And so what he did
(28:37):
was essentially he had his crew come down and had
them all tested and the matches they used for transfusions,
and one of the matches was this guy, Paul Mellie,
who was a weightlifter, and they had been injecting steroids apparently,
and he was his blood was HIV positive, but it
(28:59):
was tested before the scarpa got it. But shortly after
he left the hospital and was recuperating from that surgery,
he was informed that he had been given HIV positive
blood and that he himself at that point was HIV positive.
And you know, that was nineteen eighty six and he
didn't die until nineteen ninety four, and people by the
(29:23):
early nineties were predicting like, oh, he's got two months
to live, he'll be dead in six months. He don't
worry about him. He doesn't not have long to live.
And he outlived them all, and he out he fooled
them all. But he was HIV positive and it went
into full blown AIDS and that's what eventually killed him.
Speaker 2 (29:41):
But there weren't there some rumors of possible homosexuality or
was that because people later I found it was an informant,
they were just trying to smear them.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah, you know, I never I never ran across that,
so that's news to me. But if if there were
rumors like that, it wasn't at least common in the
literature that I saw, and it could have been an
effort to smear him.
Speaker 2 (30:05):
You know.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
His son said that because in a sort of early
part of the whole age epidemic thing, he felt that
Greg Starpor felt that people were judging him when they
saw him, and they knew he was sick. And you know,
for years he said he was suffering from cancer, and
he even kept the secret hidden from his kids. But
(30:29):
his mistress, Linda Schiro knew, and you know, she tended
to him for years when he was highly contagious.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
And I'm curious what year did it come out that
he was in informing.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Well, it came out officially in early nineteen ninety three
when he was sentenced to a sentence for three murders
that he had been involved with during the Third Colombo War.
And during the sentencing hearing, he said, you know, I've
tried my best, I've tried to help your honor, and
(31:07):
the prosecuting attorney, the US assistant US attorney agrees, so
we know that mister Scarper has been a help to
the department. YadA, YadA, YadA. And so that's when it
officially came out. But there were a bunch of guys
that had some suspicions before that, but they never really
(31:28):
it didn't go any further than just some suspicions.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
And by then, I guess Greg Junior had already had
all those problems, but they were extorting those guys over
the marijuana, and so he was already doing time.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yeah. Greg was arrested in nineteen eighty seven and he
spent I believe thirty three years in prison before he
was released on a compassionate release.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
It seems like you and me about the same age.
My memory seems to be a lot more fuzzy than yours.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Okay, but well, I you know, I've been living this
stuff for the last three years.
Speaker 2 (32:04):
Yeah, well, you don't believe it or not. It just
came to my memories talking to somebody I just recently
about running I had with those guys, and I was
telling a story, and then I did a solo show
it's available on Patreon, about my old marijuana days on
Standout in Dynamite Life. A lot of crazy stuff. But now,
what about when he was out there doing these murders
(32:24):
and doing all these hits and stuff like that. Now
he was he was an informant at that time.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
Yeah, yeah, And in fact, I think I think that's
why he was closing as an informant in nineteen seventy
five the first time, because the FBI another informant told
the FBI that Scarpet had been involved in a murder
back in nineteen sixty four by this kid named Kochio.
I'm not sure what his first name was, but and
(32:52):
after that message and memo circuit in the FBI, he
was terminated pretty quickly after that because Scarper was told
back in sixty two or sixty three that that's the
line he can't cross. You can't cross that line, and
he told the FBI that he thought he was going
to be told to kill Joe Maglioco, who was going
(33:14):
to be Joe Perfacci's successor, and he reported that to
the FBI, and all sorts of alarm bells went off,
and the FBI said, you can't do that. That's you
can't be involved in murder. And so Scarpa, I think
he was probably just testing the waters to find out
what the limits were, and so they told him, you
can't do that. And then nineteen seventy five it came
(33:37):
to their attention that he had been involved and at
least one murder in sixty four and definitely more, but
one that they knew about. And he was terminated after that,
and I think that led to his termination. But then
all through the nineteen eighties, and I chronicles in the
book the murders that he committed in the nineteen eighties
while his second handler, Linda Vecchio was in charge of him.
(34:01):
And then of course the murders during the Third Columbo War,
all of those except one that he was finally indicted for,
and there were just three of them. All of those
happened while he was an informant for the FBI. He
was re upped in nineteen eighty and then again my
(34:24):
book chronicles the murders that he was responsible for during
the eighties and then during that Third Columbia War, and
all of those happened while he was an informant.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
Any indication that the FBI was aware they had it
to be right, because those are words spreads like wildfire.
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Yeah, this is this is the one of the big
controversies about the FBI's handling of Scarpa. And one of
the sources that I relied upon was Peter Lance's book
about Scarper's relationship with this handler, Linda Vecchio, and excuse me,
(35:05):
Lance does a great job of kind of parsing that
out and looking at all the possibilities, and Lance concludes
that de Vecchio was aware of some of these things.
And Linda Vechio wrote a book kind of in his
own defense, and they're both kind of polemics, both of
these books. And Vecchio at one point says, in my
(35:26):
heart of heart, I knew he was still doing hits.
And I don't think that the the leadership of the
FBI was necessarily aware, but I think maybe at the
special agent level, it appears that they had to know.
(35:49):
And but to what extent is not clear. And I
must say Linda Vechio was charged with being essentially an
accomplished in some of these murders by providing Scarp with
certain information that trial. During that trial, the prosecutor moved
(36:10):
for a dismissal when the star witness was presumed to
have been lying, and the judge granted that dismissal, and
that dismissal acts as what lawyers referred to as race judicatta.
The matter has been adjudicated. So Linda Vechio was essentially
that's a finding of not guilty. So on those matters
(36:32):
that actually got to a court, Linda Vechio can rightly
say I was the case was dismissed, and that acts
as the finding of not guilty.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
And what exactly were the charges against them?
Speaker 1 (36:48):
The charges were related to him providing information about the whereabouts,
the schedules, addresses, and also about the surveillance of three
different victims during the Third Columba War that Scarf was
(37:10):
able to use to execute these guys.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
So so then he had a very seriously intimate relationship
with Scarf.
Speaker 1 (37:19):
He you know, he's quite alive now, frank about that.
In his book, he's quite frank about it. He's he
he considered Scarf his friend. He admired Scarpa. He says
that in his book, you know, you got to admire
the guy and so. But he also tries to say
(37:42):
in his book at the same time that I let
him know that these were the boundaries that he couldn't cross.
And you know, we I think that reading the Vecchio's
book and then reading Lance's book, and knowing what I
know about out the whole scarp of story, I think
(38:04):
it was just I think he was too close. I
think he was too close to him. I think he
I think he did admire him, and I think it
probably clattered his judgment. But I'll let readers make that
determination on their own. My book isn't trying to resolve that.
Lance's book does an excellent job of trying to resolve
that issue. My book is more just here's what happened,
(38:26):
and you all make up your own mind.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
That's how I try and do it. So I just
take the statement just now. It's my experience to that.
Back in those days, like a lot of people that
worked NYPD Organized Crime Task Force and FBI and stuff,
after they would retire, then they would go become criminal
defense investigators and go go right back to work with
these same guys. Well, any of those people are on SCARPA,
did that happen with them?
Speaker 1 (38:50):
You know, nothing comes exactly to mind. There are a
couple of names of guys that were really involved in
this that like Tommy Dads was a New York Police
Department detective and he was actually a childhood friend of
Larry Moses, who's one of Scarpi's lieutenants. And Tommy Dads
he was, you know, straight guy, straight irow all the
(39:12):
way hardworking New York Police Department, and you know, from
the neighborhoods. So we understood these guys who knew a
lot of them. And as far as I know he
that was the career he finished out with. And he's
probably retired by now. So you know, the phenomenon you're
talking about. You also see it in terms of attorneys
(39:35):
who are prosecutors and then they retire and all of
a sudden, you know they're lawyers for the mob.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Well, there's really no money to stay in a prosecutor's office,
you know, it's just like a stepping stone. Yeah, that's
where the money is, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Yeah, I mean there's certainly plenty of people that are
prosecutors that do it because I think it's an important job.
But if you're looking to make a of money as
a lawyer, you're not going to make it as a prosecutor.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Now, as Greg Scarpus, we know he was an informant
in different cases of silver ete cases and then these
other kind of cases. Well, his son too took after
his father's steps footsteps, and he also became informed for
the FBI.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
Well, Craig Scarpa junior, he provided some information to the
FBI based on things he heard while he was incarcerated,
and and that's covered pretty well and both Lance's book
and also Sandra Harmon's book about some people that he
(40:39):
became close to, like Terry McNichol, who is one of
the Oklahoma bombers, Oklahoma City bombers, and then also some
others that were involved in some of New York terrorism
and so. And he provided that information that he he
(41:00):
got to law enforcement two the prison authorities as well.
But Gregory's information that he provided was was not really
this is what the mob was doing. He wasn't the
informant like Scarpa was. He certainly wasn't an informant while
(41:24):
he was working as a coppo in the Colombo family
up until his arrest. He was a very stand up
loyal guy as far as the Mob was concerned.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
It's interesting, I've done so many shows about the Oklahoma
City bombing and I was never aware that what was
Scarpa actually tipped them off about more explosives that were
under Terry nichols house. Is that right, right?
Speaker 1 (41:50):
Right? And that that was one of the things they
were looking for for and for the evidence and they've
they so I think you're exactly right. They they found
them pretty much based exactly where scarpusit they were going
to be. And then what kind of scarpage Jr.
Speaker 2 (42:06):
Sorry it's a great junior. And what kind of benefit
that in federal prison for giving him that kind of information?
Was he an extra meal? What does he get in
time off? What do he is?
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Well? I think he got nothing. Frankly, I think yeah.
I think a lot of they just thought, oh, this
is just a guy looking for, you know, some time
off or some of this out of the next thing.
But you know, Greg was going to spend the rest
of his life in prison, except that you know, he
had ended up with throat cancer, and they said, okay,
he's done thirty three years, he's renounced the mob. He
(42:37):
did all that stuff, he said, you know, in retrospect,
and I think his renouncing the mob was sincere. He
just came back and realized, oh my god, what this
life I was living was just awful, and I heard
so many people and so anyway, he did thirty three years,
and as I recall, at least four of those years
(42:57):
were in solitary. So and when he got sick, they
gave him a compassionate release, but they didn't release him
because of the information that he provided, right and.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
When this compassionate release is yeah, so now he Great
Junior would be just about my age. I think he
was a few years older than me. And it's so
true looking back, you know that that wasn't a an
admirable lifestyle. You know, I could see, especially spending time
in solitary. I for you's a lot of time to
look back on your life and say, boy, I made
(43:33):
some big mistakes, you know.
Speaker 1 (43:35):
Is that what he said to Yeah, well he said
that in a couple of different contexts, and he you know,
he and it's not so much. I mean, he knows
that he personally his life could have been very different.
But I think one of the things that's admirable like
(43:56):
Greg Junior is also at least he has remorse, remorse
for the people that he hurt and the families that
he hurt, and and he's aware of that too, Whereas
you know, some of these guys are just just you know,
I feel bad because I need to say I feel
bad and otherwise I won't get what I want. But
(44:18):
I'm certain that Greg is sincere in his remorse and anyway,
he's yeah, he's he's he's older now and he's he's uh,
you know, I don't know how much longer he'll be around.
I hope it's I hope it's much longer, because I
think he being out of prison and just sort of
(44:41):
trying to find his way in life again has been
a challenge for him. But it's you know, at least
he's not a prisoner and solitary anymore.
Speaker 2 (44:50):
Yeah. I have mixed emotions too about all these podcasts,
like you said, you know, either guesting or hosting and
so many. First of all, he's supposed to keep your
mouth shut. That was you went ind and and then
then the notoriety and the fan you know, the fan worship,
you know what I mean for these guys that when
(45:10):
you know they're pretty disgusting people, Well, what do you
think of all they've been doing a lot of You've
been doing some podcasts lately, right.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
Yeah, I think it's I have the same sort of
feeling about and some of it is I think that
on the receiving end, there are people out there that
are fascinated by this life, and they they fantasize about it,
or they were romanticized about it and some of these guys,
(45:39):
and you know, I think the two main guys that
I've had contact with on this book, Larry Masa and
Greg Scarper, are both genuinely remorseful for what they did
and have tried. And Larry Masa has been very successful
in terms of trying to lead a good life after
you know, Masa spent ten years in prison and he
(46:04):
got out of prison and he's, you know, he's he is,
he's leading a good life, and he's also telling a story.
And I think what happens is that people hear that
story and and they take it in a way that
I don't think Larry means it. He doesn't mean He's
not bragging, he's not trying to say like, hey look
at me. He's saying, here's the life I led, this was,
(46:27):
this is who I was. I'm not that guy anymore.
And so, but I absolutely get your point. I think
there are some people out there that are, you know, hey,
I was a tough guy. I was the mafia guy
the whole time, and uh, look at me. And but
that's I don't think that's either Greg or Larry Frankly.
Speaker 2 (46:46):
Out there hamming it up for the microphones on top
of her.
Speaker 1 (46:50):
Yeah, you know, playing to the camera.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
We're talking to Jonathan Dyer and you can find him
at jonathandireauthor dot com. He's also on Blue Sky. He
was on Twitter for a while but took a run
in after the crazyes on Twitter. Greg Scarper Legendary Evil,
The Many Faces of a Mafia Killer. Is there anything
about Craig scarp I haven't asked you about that? You
want the audience to out?
Speaker 1 (47:15):
Well? I think that his final years are pretty interesting too.
You know, he tried to stay out of prison for
as long as he could, but he was also a
violent guy right up until the end. And there's a
there's a part in the book that he was up
in Minneapolis and Rochester, Minnesota. He's not Minneapolis, Rochester, Minnesota,
(47:37):
in a federal prison hospital up there, and he was
dying and he'd lost most of his body weight. He
was covered with sores, I mean it was full blown
aids and he was trying to get released. And so
the judge that was hearing his plea to be released
(47:59):
so that he could die at home, it looked like
he was going to release him, and then the district
attorney came in, or the prosecuting attorney came in and said, no,
don't release him. And he asked the doctor who was
testifying about Scarpu's physical condition, really a couple months before
(48:20):
he died. He said, does this essentially he said, does
his trigger finger still work? And the doctor said yes.
And his mistress, Linda Schiro, her response to that at
first was like, this is crazy. He's down to like
eighty pounds. He can't even get out of bed. And
then Linda Shira says, and then I thought about it,
(48:42):
and I thought, if he goes home, he might kill someone.
And she knew him as well as anyone, and I
think that speaks to who he was up until the
last minute. He was a dangerous man. And that's another
remarkable thing about Greg Scarpa.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
You know, it's so true, and in some ways you
really can't blame him. You live your whole life using
violence as a tool, as a resource, and some people
it's you. Your go to resource is the first option
you you that's how you've lived your whole life, that's
how you made a living. And it's just a muscle memory,
you know what I mean, It's just a Greg Scarf.
Speaker 1 (49:23):
Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry anyway, that's a great point.
I make that point too. That was just that was
his go to solution. There's a problem, violence, violence is
a solution. You know you always hear you heard from
your teachers. Violence was not the answer. But for him,
violence was the answer. And that's that was part of
his DNA and it.
Speaker 2 (49:41):
Worked for him, and he made a lot of money.
He got to the top of the Klemo family. You know,
he made a name for himself that he's doing that
that's what worked for him.
Speaker 1 (49:50):
Uh.
Speaker 2 (49:50):
Absolutely, just by total coincidence. For the audience. If you
check out Patreon, the show I'm talking about, it's called
Last Man Standing, and it was I did that before
my memory came up a talking to somebody about these
guys trying to shake me down and uh off the
salm some dynamite. I had a couple of cops with
me too, So I tell that story. It's in the
(50:11):
Patreon and just total by coincidence. Days later, we get
a it's Wild Blue Press right as your publisher. Wild
Blue Yeah, yeah, Wild Blue Yeah. Jonathan Dyer wrote this
book about the Greg Scorpa. But Jonathan, before we go
because we do have a few minutes left now this
Nick Temple file. Now, first of all, you're telling me,
you know you're a linguistic translator kind of guy, but
(50:35):
you when the intelligence division of that, did you have
any kind of interesting adventures in that?
Speaker 1 (50:42):
Well? Yeah, I mean the whole thing was kind of
it was interesting from that. You know, we were in Berlin,
and as you know, Berlin was sixty miles into these Berlin,
so it was actually behind the Iron Curtain. And the
way I've described it to people, it was a lot
like guard duty. There was a lot of monotony, a
(51:03):
lot of just everyday thing. You know, you're you're you're
working as an intercept operator or a transcriber, and armies
do what armies do on a day to day basis.
And it was punctuated by moments of like, oh my god,
this is it World War three, We're starting And obviously
that never happened, but you know, you get a glimpse here,
(51:25):
a flicker there, and somebody talking over here, and you
add it up and you say, well, I'd better better
get this to my supervisor. And you know, I'm not
I know it may sound silly ed, but you know,
this is the and that was the nineteen eighties. But
I'm still not allowed to talk about the specifics of it,
but I think that was the general gist of it,
(51:47):
that that there was, you know, we did our jobs.
We were we use diligence and trying to keep track
of what the Soviet Union was up to, and every
now and then it was it was it was pretty scary.
Speaker 2 (52:04):
It looks like you wrote about seven books about this
Nick Temple. What kind of adventures does he get into?
Speaker 1 (52:10):
Well, he's you know, he's kind of a James Bond type,
although he's not he's not as as skilled as Bond.
He's a he's a CIA agent, and he gets into uh,
various positions where I've either and they adversary is usually
(52:31):
the Soviet Union because that's what the Cold War was
all about. And there's some plot is uncovered and Nick
has to uh do what he can to to afford
it and so and each book has got obviously a
different plot and a different attempt by the Soviet Union
and Nick is in there and he just keeps plugging
away and keeps fighting every time. He's you know, it's
(52:53):
like whack them all right, every time they raise their head.
He's he's got to be there.
Speaker 2 (52:58):
We've been talking once again. Jonathan Jonathan dyreauthor dot com.
You can find him on Blue Sky. The book is
called Greg Scarpo Legendary Evil, The Many Faces of a
Mafia Killer. And another weird coincidence that the p I
I worked for there in Brooklyn, that was that organized
crime investigator. He came out of Army and I think
it was Army Intelligence himself, so I know it's a treasure.
(53:23):
Pan Yeah, small world, Small world, my friend, Jonathan Jyer,
thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure talking to you,
and I'll look forward to seeing or listening to the podcast.
Speaker 2 (53:37):
You got it. I'll definitely send you a copy. I
don't work.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Thank you, all right, take care of us. M.
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