Deal With the Devil

by Lance, Peter

• ISBN13: 9780061455346
• ISBN10: 0061455342
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-07-02
• Publisher: William Morrow & Co

Summary

In his more than three decades in law enforcement, FBI Special Agent R. Linley DeVecchio was considered one of the Bureau's top agents on organised crime. With contacts at the highest levels of the mob, he offered the Feds an unprecedented window into the workings of the Brooklyn families--and tips he supplied led to more than seventy successful prosecutions that helped propel a young district attorney named Rudolph Giuliani to national prominence.Yet by the 1990s it was charged that "Mr. Organized Crime," as DeVecchio was known, had taken his infiltration too far. As Emmy-winning reporter Peter Lance discovered while researching his 2004 book COVER UP, DeVecchio had developed a very close relationship with Colombo crime family killer Greg Scarpa Sr., known as "The Grim Reaper." For years Scarpa was DeVecchio's informant--but some evidence allegedly suggested that Scarpa had provided him information that the mobster used in three murders during the Colombo mob wars of the 1980s. Though the DeVecchio story was only a subplot in COVER UP, after its publication Hynes's office filed charges against DeVecchio--and cited Lance's investigation as a wonderful springboard to understand the story. Lance was subpoenaed by defense attorneys in connection with the 2007 trial. And yet in late 2007, the case against DeVecchio was dramatically dropped when the credibility a key witness (unrelated to Lance's reporting) was impugned. Now, after three years of investigation, Lance returns to tell the complete story of this most mysterious of the unresolved Mafia stories of the 1980s and 1990s. Drawing on exclusive interviews, unseen legal documents, and the same astounding capacity for understanding criminal networks that mark his investigations of al Qaeda in New York, SIX SIX SIX--named for DeVecchio's pager signal to Scarpa--is a riveting, definitive account of what Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes calls "The most stunning example of official corruption that I have ever seen."