On June 4, 1994, a 66-year-old man with one eye and a body wasted to under 100 pounds took his last breath in a prison hospital bed in Rochester, Minnesota. The official cause was AIDS-related complications. He had contracted the virus from a blood transfusion eight years earlier, donated by a fellow mobster who had shared needles while using steroids.
The man dying that morning was Gregory Scarpa Sr. They called him the Grim Reaper. He has been linked to at least 26 murders, and some estimates run far higher. For roughly three decades, he had been doing it all while working as a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Scarpa was a made captain in the Colombo crime family and the chief enforcer for boss Carmine Persico. He ran loan sharking, hijacking, securities fraud, and contract killing out of a Brooklyn social club called the Wimpy Boys. While he did all of that, the FBI paid him. They protected him. They tipped him off.
In the 1960s, according to his longtime companion and later court testimony, they put him on a plane to Mississippi to terrorize a Klansman until he gave up what the bureau could not get on its own. This is the story behind the upcoming Mark Wahlberg film, *By Any Means*. The real history is messier, darker, and more disputed than any two-hour movie can hold.
This is how the United States government allegedly partnered with a homicidal mafia hitman to lean on the most infamous racist killers in American history, and then kept him on the books for decades while he kept killing.
Gregory Scarpa was born on May 8, 1928, in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Italian immigrants. By his early 20s, he was running with the Profaci Crime Family, which would later become the Colombo family. Scarpa was quiet. He did not drink much. He coached neighborhood kids and cooked Sunday sauce for his daughters. To his family, he was daddy. To the street, he was something else entirely.
By the late 1950s, Scarpa had developed a reputation as a calm, efficient murderer. No drama, no witnesses. He would walk in, the target would die, and he would walk out. He reportedly once said of a man he had killed that he would like to dig him up and shoot him again.
In March 1962, Scarpa was arrested for armed robbery and was looking at hard time. The FBI offered him a deal. Become an informant, help us understand the inner workings of the Italian mafia, and we will make this easier on you. Scarpa said yes. He was opened as a top echelon informant, the FBI’s classification for its most valuable assets.
For the next couple of years, he fed the bureau information. Then, in the summer of 1964, the FBI came to him with a request that had nothing to do with the New York mafia.
On June 21, 1964, three young civil rights workers disappeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi. James Chaney was a 21-year-old Black activist from Mississippi. Andrew Goodman was a 20-year-old Jewish college student from New York. Michael Schwerner was a 24-year-old Jewish New Yorker. They were registering Black voters during Freedom Summer. The Ku Klux Klan, working with local law enforcement, ambushed them on a rural road and executed them.
J. Edgar Hoover dispatched scores of agents. They could not crack it. Local police included Klansmen. Witnesses were terrified. The bureau had no informants in the Mississippi Klan, no leverage, and no leads. They knew who probably did it. They could not prove it. They could not even find the bodies.
According to Scarpa’s longtime companion, Linda Schiro, who testified to this in 2007, the bureau flew Scarpa to Mississippi, handed him a gun and a bag of cash in a hotel room, and pointed him at a local Klansman. Schiro says Scarpa later told her he kidnapped the man, put a gun in his mouth, and forced him to reveal where the bodies were.
The FBI has never confirmed any of it. Several former FBI agents flatly dispute that Scarpa cracked the case at all. They say the real break came from a paid Mississippi source, a state highway patrolman who told investigators the bodies were buried at the old Jolly farm.
The three civil rights workers were found on August 4, 1964, in an earthen dam on that farm outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, 44 days after they vanished. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had each been shot. The federal prosecution that followed convicted seven men, and the case rested largely on two Klan insiders who turned witness, not on a Brooklyn hitman.
The upcoming movie *By Any Means*, directed by Elegance Bratton and starring Mark Wahlberg as Scarpa and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as a young Black FBI agent, dramatizes both Mississippi chapters. It opens with a version of the 1964 bodies case and builds toward Scarpa’s second documented trip south.
The better documented second trip is the Vernon Dahmer case. On January 10, 1966, a Black civil rights leader named Vernon Dahmer was firebombed in his own home near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Dahmer was 57 years old. He was the local NAACP leader and had been quietly registering Black voters for years, even offering to pay their poll taxes himself.
The Ku Klux Klan under Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers decided to make an example of him. They drove up to his farmhouse before dawn and shot it up. Then they hurled jugs of gasoline through the windows. Dahmer’s family escaped out the back. Dahmer himself grabbed a shotgun, stood at the front of his burning house, and traded fire with the Klansmen to give his family time to flee. He inhaled the burning fumes, his lungs were destroyed, and he died later that day.
He is remembered for the line that became his creed: "If you don't vote, you don't count."
The Klan around Hattiesburg was tight. The FBI had no leads again. So, according to multiple accounts, the bureau brought Scarpa back. This episode has a name attached. Scarpa and an FBI agent walked into an appliance store in Laurel, Mississippi, owned by a Klansman named Lawrence Byrd. Posing as a customer, Scarpa offered to help carry a television set out to the car. Then they shoved Byrd inside, drove him to a remote spot, and beat him savagely.
What is beyond dispute is the result. Byrd was severely injured and signed a 22-page statement to the FBI that implicated other Klansmen. It took decades, but Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard who ordered the hit, was finally convicted of Dahmer’s murder in 1998, 32 years after the killing. Bowers died in prison in 2006.
The film invents a fictional Black FBI agent named Wayne Strider, played by Abdul-Mateen, as Scarpa’s partner. There is no historical record of a Black FBI agent partnering with Scarpa in Mississippi. Black agents working civil rights cases in 1966 were vanishingly rare, and none are documented in that role. The buddy framework is Hollywood, but the underlying discomfort is real.
The federal government, unable to penetrate domestic white supremacist terror, is alleged to have outsourced the brutal part of the job to organized crime. And whatever exactly happened in Mississippi, the FBI’s response afterward is not in doubt. They kept using him.
Scarpa was dropped as a formal informant in the mid-1960s, then reopened in 1980 under a new handler, supervisory special agent R. Lindley DeVecchio. Lind DeVecchio had joined the bureau under Hoover. He ran the Colombo squad and took on Scarpa as his prized personal asset. They met alone in FBI-rented apartments and hotel rooms. The relationship got so close that Scarpa, in code, referred to DeVecchio as his girlfriend.
During the 1980s, while Scarpa was officially helping the FBI map the Colombo hierarchy, he never stopped committing crimes. In 1985, he was indicted for running a major credit card scam and should have done real time. Instead, DeVecchio submitted a memo to the sentencing judge listing Scarpa’s contributions to the bureau. Scarpa walked away with five years probation and a $10,000 fine.
His own mob colleagues were so stunned by the light sentence that some began to wonder if he was a rat. He was also killing people. Investigators later linked him to the murders of Mary Bari in 1984, Joseph Brennan, Domenico, Lorenzo Lampassi, and others. Some of those killings happened while DeVecchio was actively handling him. The bureau either did not know or did not want to know.
In 1991, everything started to unravel. With boss Carmine Persico imprisoned, the Colombo family split into two warring factions. On one side were loyalists to Persico. On the other was acting boss Victor Orena, who wanted the throne for himself. Scarpa picked Persico.
On November 18, 1991, Orena gunmen opened fire on Scarpa near his Brooklyn home while family members were present. The shots missed. That was the opening of what is now called the Third Colombo War.
For the next several months, Scarpa went on a rampage. He was 63 years old. He had cancer. He was HIV positive. And he was the single most violent participant in a war that left about a dozen men dead.
In December 1991, Scarpa gunned down Vincent Fusaro as Fusaro hung Christmas lights outside a Brooklyn home. On January 7, 1992, he and his crew killed Orena capo Nicholas Grancio. On May 22, 1992, he murdered Lorenzo Larry Lampassi.
Other agents on DeVecchio’s own squad came to suspect their supervisor was feeding Scarpa intelligence, names, locations, and photographs, helping the Grim Reaper win. One agent, Christopher Favo, reported him. Favo said that when news of a rival’s murder came in, DeVecchio slapped his desk and said, in effect, "We're going to win this thing," as if it were his war too.
The FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigated. DeVecchio retired in 1996. A decade later, in 2006, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes indicted him on four counts of murder, charging that he leaked information that led to the deaths of Mary Bari, Joseph Brennan, Larry Lampassi, and a teenager named Patrick Porco. The case collapsed in 2007 when the prosecution’s star witness, Linda Schiro, was caught on old tape recordings contradicting her own testimony. DeVecchio was cleared. He has always maintained his innocence.
Scarpa himself never saw the end of the war. On December 29, 1992, out on bail and under house arrest, he got into a street gun battle with drug dealers in Brooklyn. He killed one of them. He took a bullet to the face that destroyed his left eye. He spent the rest of his life behind dark glasses.
On May 6, 1993, sick with AIDS and finally cornered, Scarpa pleaded guilty before federal judge Jack B. Weinstein to three murders and a murder conspiracy. He was sentenced to 10 years. He served barely a year of it. He died on June 4, 1994, weighing under 100 pounds.
The way HIV got into his bloodstream is its own grim story. In 1986, Scarpa needed emergency surgery and a transfusion. By mob instinct, he distrusted the hospital blood bank and asked friends and relatives to donate instead. Among the roughly 15 to 20 donors was Paul Mele, a bodybuilder who used steroids and shared needles and who had HIV without knowing it. Scarpa contracted the virus that would kill him eight years later. He later sued the hospital for negligence and won a settlement.
The FBI made a calculation. It decided some criminals were too useful to fully prosecute. It accepted information from the inside while a man it was paying kept taking lives on the outside. They had to know a great deal. And still the relationship continued for years with cash, with gifts, with legal interventions, with tip-offs.
*By Any Means* packages this history into a thriller with a satisfying arc. A mafia killer with no soul does something that looks like good. He helps the cause of civil rights. He earns a flicker of moral grace through partnership with a young Black agent. It is cinematic. It is also, by necessity, a simplification.
The same man whose name surfaces in those Mississippi stories went on killing in Brooklyn for the next 30 years with FBI knowledge, with FBI protection, with FBI money.
Carmine Persico, the boss Scarpa served, died in federal prison in 2019, still serving a 139-year sentence. DeVecchio published a book defending himself and died a free man. Sam Bowers, the Klan Imperial Wizard who ordered Vernon Dahmer’s murder, finally went to prison in 1998 and died there. Vernon Dahmer’s family is still working to make sure the world remembers what he died for.
Linda Scarpa, the daughter who watched her father become a monster, wrote a memoir titled *The Mafia Hitman's Daughter*. And the FBI has never officially confirmed that Gregory Scarpa was ever in Mississippi at all.
That is the real story behind *By Any Means*. Not a clean redemption. A government accused of trading a Klansman’s confession for a hitman’s protected career. A federal agency that paid an admitted murderer for years. And a Mississippi farmer named Vernon Dahmer who stood at the door of his burning house with a shotgun while his children ran out the back, and died so that other Black Americans could vote.
Vernon Dahmer was the hero. Gregory Scarpa was the weapon. And the questions about who pointed that weapon and what they let him do afterward remain, 60 years later, one of the dirtiest open secrets in American law enforcement.