On November 2008, all charges were dropped against R. Lindley DeVecchio, a 30-year FBI veteran who had been indicted on four counts of second-degree murder. Six months later, he published a memoir defending his career. The case centered on his two-decade relationship with Gregory Scarpa Sr.
, a Colombo crime family hit man attributed with more than 50 murders, and allegations that DeVecchio fed him intelligence used to kill people. DeVecchio was a supervisory special agent who ran the organized crime unit out of the FBI’s New York field office. He was considered one of the Bureau’s most effective mob hunters. His effectiveness came from an informant: Scarpa, known inside the family and in FBI files as the Grim Reaper.
Born in Brooklyn in 1928, Scarpa rose through the Profaci family, which later became the Colombo family, and became one of New York’s most feared enforcers. His crimes included loan sharking, bookmaking, hijacking, and murder. Scarpa was first recruited as an FBI informant in 1961 under questionable circumstances involving a mission to Mississippi during the Civil Rights Movement. He used violent methods, but produced results, and the FBI came to see him as useful.
By the time DeVecchio inherited Scarpa as an informant in the 1980s, the arrangement had been running for two decades. The FBI’s confidential informant program is designed to cultivate sources inside criminal organizations for intelligence. The boundary is that the source must never use the relationship as cover to commit crimes. Investigators who later reviewed the case files said that in this relationship, that boundary dissolved completely.
DeVecchio reportedly called Scarpa “my girlfriend” in conversations with colleagues, met him privately outside official channels, accepted gifts, and socialized with an asset he was supposed to control. By the late 1980s, according to testimony gathered years later, the relationship had flipped. Scarpa was feeding DeVecchio just enough actionable intelligence to justify the arrangement while extracting information to protect himself and eliminate his enemies. The dynamic fully detonated during the Third Colombo War from 1991 to 1993, an internal conflict between a faction loyal to imprisoned boss Carmine Persico and a faction backing acting boss Vic Orena.
The war produced 12 murders and at least three dozen shootings over two years. Scarpa was one of the most prolific killers in that conflict, operating on the Persico side with intelligence that witnesses later described as impossible. He knew where targets were, their routines, and which safe houses were safe. According to testimony presented during the 2006 indictment proceedings, the source of that intelligence was DeVecchio.
Specific allegations were documented. DeVecchio allegedly told Scarpa the home address of rival faction member Nicholas Grancio, who was killed on January 7, 1992, shot in his car in Bensonhurst. DeVecchio allegedly revealed the location of a witness cooperating with law enforcement and passed information that directly preceded murders. Four murders in total were cited in the eventual indictment, with prosecutors connecting them to information that could only have come from inside the FBI.
The investigation into DeVecchio began inside the FBI as early as 1992. Agents in the New York field office raised concerns about his relationship with Scarpa, logging irregularities, unofficial meetings, and missing documentation. An internal affairs investigation ran for years, but in 1996 DeVecchio was cleared due to insufficient evidence. He retired from the FBI with full benefits in 1997.
The case stayed closed for nine years. Then prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York started reviewing the evidence again. Forensic investigator Angela Clemente, working with attorney Flora Edwards, had spent years reconstructing the evidentiary record. They found witnesses and documentation that reframed what the internal affairs investigation had reviewed.
In March 2006, DeVecchio was indicted on four counts of second-degree murder. The charges alleged he had provided material assistance to Scarpa in killing four people between 1984 and 1992. DeVecchio was 65 years old and pleaded not guilty. The prosecution’s case rested significantly on the testimony of Linda Schiro, Scarpa’s long-term companion, who claimed to have been present for conversations between Scarpa and DeVecchio in which specific intelligence was exchanged.
In November 2008, the charges were dropped. The case fell apart because the defense found inconsistencies and contradictions in Schiro’s prior testimony, material discrepancies that made her vulnerable to cross-examination. Prosecutors made the calculation that if Schiro collapsed on the stand, the jury would acquit DeVecchio, so they dropped the charges. DeVecchio walked out of court a free man.
Six months later, he published a memoir titled “We’re Going to Win This Thing,” a line he claimed to have told colleagues the day he was indicted. The book portrayed him as a dedicated agent who was the victim of a witch hunt. He gave interviews and spoke at panels. The four people connected to the murder charges remained dead.
The case raised uncomfortable questions the FBI never fully confronted. DeVecchio’s organized crime convictions were real, and the cases he built put actual criminals in federal prison. Examining his legacy would mean asking how much of that record was built on intelligence from a man who was murdering people while providing it. It could mean reopening convictions and confronting the possibility that the FBI’s war on the Colombo family and the family’s internal war were partly run by the same source.
The institution that trained, promoted, and pensioned DeVecchio had too much invested in the version of the story where he was simply a great agent. The pattern connects to other informant scandals in organized crime history, including the Whitey Bulger case in Boston, where FBI agents protected a killer for decades. In both cases, the informant became the mission, the source became the objective, and the people the institution was supposed to protect became acceptable collateral. Some of those killed during the Colombo war were themselves active participants in mob violence, but others were witnesses who had decided to cooperate with law enforcement.
If the allegations are accurate, they were identified to their killer by a federal agent whose job was to protect them. DeVecchio died in 2023 at age 82. He was never convicted of anything, and his FBI pension was never touched. Scarpa pleaded guilty to three murders and racketeering in 1993 and died in federal custody in 1994 at age 65.
The victims connected to the allegations got no justice or acknowledgement.