On September 25, 1984, Mary Bari walked into a Brooklyn social club expecting to discuss a waitressing job. The 31-year-old had lived alongside Colombo crime family life for years, so the setting was familiar. But the club was controlled, and the conversation never happened. She was grabbed, thrown to the floor, and shot three times at close range by Greg Scarpa Sr.
, one of the most feared killers in the Colombo organization. Bari was not killed for stealing or betraying the mob. Her crime was proximity. She was the girlfriend of Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, a Colombo underboss and brother of boss Carmine “the Snake” Persico.
Persico had been a fugitive since jumping bail during an extortion sentencing in June 1980, and Bari had been close to him for years before that. The family feared she knew where he was hiding. In the Colombo world, that suspicion was enough. Bari began dating Persico as a teenager, according to reports, becoming part of mob Brooklyn at an age when others were building ordinary lives.
Press accounts described her as a five-foot-two brunette who was remembered by people, but in mob narratives, women in her position were often reduced to labels. The distinction mattered little to the men who decided her fate. The Colombo family in those years was a pressure cooker of federal attention and internal tension, and its money came from gambling, loan sharking, and extortion. The fugitive lifestyle Persico lived demanded a support network of people who rented apartments, carried cash, and knew which phones were safe.
That system required secrecy, and the family became paranoid about anyone who might break it. By 1984, Bari was seen as a potential weak point. The brutal logic of the mob did not require proof of betrayal; suspicion alone could mark someone for removal. The instrument the family used was Gregory Scarpa Sr.
, a Colombo captain so feared he was called the Grim Reaper. Scarpa was also an FBI informant with a relationship to the bureau going back decades. In later years his handler was R. Lindley DeVecchio, an FBI supervisor who specialized in organized crime informants.
The arrangement gave the FBI intelligence but also gave Scarpa a level of protection, and the line between informant and killer became dangerously blurred. The trap set for Bari was deliberately ordinary. She was told about a waitressing job, a believable opportunity for a woman trying to lead a normal life. The social club gave the killers control of the room, the timing, and the witnesses.
Inside, Greg Scarpa Jr. grabbed her, and then his father fired three shots. The murder itself created a set of logistics, moving the body, cleaning the scene, and relying on fear to keep witnesses silent, and for years, that system worked. Persico remained a fugitive until his capture in 1987 in West Hartford, Connecticut.
He was returned for sentencing and received prison terms that included five years on one count and twenty years on another. By then, Bari had been dead for three years. The man she was allegedly killed to protect was alive; the woman perceived as the risk was gone. The case took a darker turn years later when new allegations surfaced.
Carmine Sessa, a Colombo figure who became a government witness, told authorities that Bari had been killed because she knew where Persico was hiding. Court filings in the later DeVecchio case summarized an allegation that, shortly before the killing, DeVecchio told Scarpa that Bari was speaking to federal agents and might reveal Persico’s location. That claim was contested. DeVecchio was indicted in 2006 on charges related to four murders, including Bari’s, but the charges were dropped in 2007 after evidence emerged that undermined the prosecution’s key witness.
The allegation was never proven, but it exposed the nightmare at the center of the story. A woman suspected of talking to federal agents may have been killed by a mobster who was himself secretly talking to federal agents. The informant system was supposed to keep criminal sources controlled, but the more valuable a source became, the harder it was to restrain him. Scarpa’s later years only deepened the darkness.
In the early 1990s, the Colombo family split into another internal war, with Scarpa loyal to the Persico faction and becoming one of the most violent figures in the conflict. He died in prison in 1994 from AIDS and cancer, diminished and sick, far from the legend of the Grim Reaper. Sessa, who admitted his own role in multiple murders, later expressed disgust with the life he had lived, a common ending for men who once enforced silence and eventually spoke to prosecutors. But the confessions and regret came after the damage was done.
Mary Bari’s murder is not remembered for a boss or a soldier, but for a woman who became inconvenient through proximity. Her death shows that the mob does not kill only its own, but whoever becomes a problem. The loyalty it proclaimed moved upward, never downward, and protection was reserved for the valuable.
On September 25, 1984, the Colombo family demonstrated exactly what a secret was worth, and it was measured in blood.