On June 4, 1994, a 66-year-old man with one eye, his body wasted to less than one hundred pounds, took his last breath in a prison hospital bed at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota. The official cause of death was complications from AIDS, a virus he had contracted eight years earlier through a blood transfusion. The blood had been donated by a fellow mobster, a bodybuilder who shared needles while using steroids. The dying man was Gregory Scarpa Sr.
, known as the Grim Reaper. He was linked to at least twenty-six murders, with some estimates running far higher. For roughly three decades, he had done all of it while working as a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Scarpa was not a street-level rat trading petty information for cash.
He was a made captain in the Colombo crime family, the chief enforcer for boss Carmine Persico. He ran loan sharking, hijacking, securities fraud, and contract killings out of a Brooklyn social club called the Wimpy Boys. While he did all of that, the FBI paid him, protected him, and tipped him off. In the 1960s, according to his longtime companion and later court testimony, the bureau even sent him to Mississippi to terrorize a Klansman into revealing what the FBI could not uncover on its own.
The real history is messier, darker, and more disputed than any two-hour film can hold. This is the story of 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 payroll for decades while he kept killing. Gregory Scarpa was born on May 8, 1928, in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, to Italian immigrant parents. By his early twenties, he was running with the Profaci crime family, which would later become the Colombo family.
Scarpa was quiet, rarely drank, coached neighborhood kids, and cooked Sunday sauce for his daughters. To his family, he was daddy. To the street, he was something else entirely. He was the man you called when a problem required a permanent solution.
By the late 1950s, he had 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 took pleasure in it, once saying of a man he had killed that he would like to dig him up and shoot him again.
In March 1962, everything changed. Scarpa was arrested for armed robbery and faced hard time. The FBI offered him a deal: become an informant, help them understand the inner workings of the Italian mafia, and they would make the charges easier on him. Scarpa agreed and was opened as a top echelon informant, the bureau’s classification for its most valuable assets.
These were mob insiders who could provide organizational charts, names of made men, sit-down details, and warnings about hits before they happened. Scarpa fit the profile perfectly. He was inside, trusted, and completely amoral. 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 twenty-one-year-old Black activist from Mississippi. Andrew Goodman was a twenty-year-old Jewish college student from New York, and Michael Schwerner was twenty-four, also a 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 before vanishing into the swampland. J. Edgar Hoover dispatched scores of agents, but they could not crack the case.
Local police included Klansmen, and witnesses were terrified. The bureau had no informants in the Mississippi Klan, no leverage, and no leads, and they could not even find the bodies. This is where one of the most disputed stories in FBI history begins. 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 claimed Scarpa later told her he kidnapped the man, put a gun in his mouth, and forced him to reveal where the bodies were buried. The FBI has never confirmed any of this. Several former agents flatly dispute that Scarpa cracked the case at all. They maintain 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, forty-four days after they vanished. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner had each been shot. The federal prosecution that followed three years later convicted seven men, and the case rested largely on two Klan insiders who turned witness, not on a Brooklyn hitman. But there was a second documented trip south.
On January 10, 1966, a Black civil rights leader named Vernon Dahmer was firebombed in his own home near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Dahmer was fifty-seven years old and the local NAACP president. He 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, shot it up, and hurled jugs of gasoline through the windows. Dahmer’s family escaped out the back while he 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 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, and the FBI had no leads. According to multiple accounts, the bureau brought Scarpa back. This time, the 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 a car. Then they shoved Byrd inside, drove him to a remote spot sometimes described as the grounds of Camp Shelby, and beat him savagely. What is beyond dispute is the result. Byrd was severely injured and signed a twenty-two-page statement to the FBI implicating other Klansmen.
It took decades, but Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard who ordered the hit, was finally convicted of Dahmer’s murder in 1998, thirty-two years after the killing. Bowers died in prison in 2006. Whatever exactly happened in Mississippi, the FBI’s response afterward is not in doubt. They kept using Scarpa.
He was dropped as a formal informant in the mid-1960s, then reopened in 1980 under a new handler, Supervisory Special Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio. Lindley DeVecchio had joined the bureau under Hoover. He ran the Colombo squad and took on Scarpa as his prized personal asset.
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 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 ten-thousand-dollar 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 several murders, some of which happened while DeVecchio was actively handling him. In 1991, everything started to unravel.
With boss Carmine Persico imprisoned, the Colombo family split into two warring factions. On one side were Persico loyalists, and on the other was acting boss Victor Orena, who wanted the throne for himself. Scarpa sided with Persico. On November 18, 1991, Orena gunmen opened fire on Scarpa near his Brooklyn home while family members were present.
The shots missed. This was the opening of what is now called the Third Colombo War. For the next several months, Scarpa went on a rampage. He was sixty-three years old, had cancer, and was HIV positive, yet he became the single most violent participant in a war that left about a dozen men dead.
In December 1991, Scarpa gunned down a rival as he hung Christmas lights outside a Brooklyn home. In January 1992, he and his crew killed another Orena captain. In May 1992, he murdered another enemy. Agents on DeVecchio’s own squad came to suspect their supervisor was feeding Scarpa intelligence, names, locations, and photographs, helping the Grim Reaper win the war.
One agent, Christopher Favo, reported him. Favo claimed 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 multiple deaths. The case collapsed in 2007 when the prosecution’s star witness was caught on old tape recordings contradicting her own testimony. DeVecchio was cleared and 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 but 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 ten years and served barely one. He died on June 4, 1994, weighing under one hundred pounds. The Grim Reaper had finally met his own.
The way HIV entered 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 fifteen to twenty donors was Paul Mele, a bodybuilder who used steroids, shared needles, and 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. Carmine Persico, the boss Scarpa served, died in federal prison in 2019, still serving a 139-year sentence. Lindley 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. And the FBI has never officially confirmed that Gregory Scarpa was ever in Mississippi at all. The federal government is accused of trading a Klansman’s confession for a hitman’s protected career, paying an admitted murderer for years while he kept taking lives on the outside.
Vernon Dahmer was the hero. Gregory Scarpa was the weapon. The questions about who pointed that weapon and what they let him do afterward remain one of the dirtiest open secrets in American law enforcement.