The FBI's Most Valuable Hitman transcript

It's May 22nd, 1992 in Brooklyn, just before dawn. 66-year-old Lorenzo Lampasi steps out of his car to open the gate of his bus yard, and someone [music] shoots him dead in the street. Hours later, inside the FBI's Colombo Squad in New York, Special Agent Chris Favro brings the murder to his supervisor's desk. The supervisor slaps the desk. We're going to win this thing. The shooter is his own paid informant, Gregory Scarpa Senior, Colombo Capo.

The man the tabloids call the Grim Reaper is FBI informant number 34. Top echelon, paid in cash, and by the time that body hits the pavement, he has [music] spent more than 20 years on the Bureau's books. None of this is street rumor. It is sworn FBI testimony, government disclosure letters, and the language of a federal appeals court. So, how does a hitman get onto the FBI payroll? And what happens when the agents around him finally try to close the file?

Bensonhurst, 1962. A storefront social club called the Wimpy Boys, cigarette smoke hanging over a card game nobody is really playing. A kid from the neighborhood comes through the door needing money, and the man at the back table lends it. Six figures on the street, collected with a look. Other criminals lower their voices around him. He is not a boss, he is what a boss calls. That is the first file on Gregory Scarpa Senior, the streets file.

The tabloids fatten it into legend. 50 bodies, 120. A nickname that sells paperbacks. The number [music] that survives a courtroom is three. Three murders from a single war you are about to watch, sealed with a guilty plea and his signature. Two more names, Mary Bari in 1984 and [music] Joseph De Domenico in 1987, will surface two decades later in a place nobody expects. a murder indictment against an FBI supervisor.

Hold those names. They are the last act of this story. And one personal fact, small enough to miss. Greg Scarpa does not let strangers near him. Not near his business. Not [music] near his secrets. And in a hospital bed years from now, not near the blood going into his veins. That habit will do what every gun in Brooklyn never could. The second file has a number instead of a name. Informant 34. Top Echelon, the FBI's brand new designation in 1962 for sources who sit at the table where the mafia votes because no agent, no wiretap, no surveillance van can [music] ever get inside that room.

Only a made man can. Which means the program can only ever buy one [music] kind of person. A criminal senior enough to matter. And in that world, senior means blood on his hands. The FBI does not catch Greg Scarpa in 1962. It signs him. The file opens that year, runs into the mid-70s, goes dark, reopens in 1980, and stays hot [music] for 12 more years. Do the math. Even with the dark years, that is more than 20 years of his life on the books of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

[music] The rules for a source like this are strict. Two agents always. Every meeting documented. Nobody runs a Top Echelon informant alone. Scarpa is run alone. From 1980 on, his handler is Supervisory Special Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio. [music] Lynn, who also supervises the FBI squad hunting the Colombo family. Read that twice. The man hunting the family and the man handling its deadliest capo are the same man. >> [music] >> He is the desk.

Scarpa is the street. And in the house in Brooklyn, the man from the desk is known [music] simply as Mr. Dello. So, what does the Bureau actually buy with a deal like this? And what does the killer get back? Everything in this video comes from from sworn affidavits to appeals rulings and the trial transcript. Scarpa had two files. This story runs to a few thousand pages. Nobody gets through that with one tool, not even us.

One model to pull a date out of a 200-page opinion, another to sharpen the look, a third for a reference image of a Bensonhurst Social Club in 1962. Taking five subscriptions every month, which is why I moved all of it into Chat LLM by Abacus AI. Every top model, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, and more, in one place, on one subscription. When a new model drops, >> [music] >> it's in there the same day. You don't even have to choose.

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The agent turns a conversation into a working website or app, hosting, database, and even Stripe payments included, and keeps running around the clock until the job is done. All of it for just $10 a month, less than a single one of those subscriptions. Go to chat.llm.abacus.ai or click the link in the description. Start with what the Bureau pays. A federal appeals court will eventually put it in nine flat words. Scarpa was paid by the FBI for his information.

The figure most often quoted sits around $158,000 and nobody has ever produced one clean ledger, which tells you exactly how carefully this money was tracked. Cash is the smaller half of the deal. One legend rides with the file. Mississippi, 1964. Three civil rights workers vanish. The case the Bureau code names MIBURN. And the story told inside the building ever since is that a Brooklyn killer was flown south and made a clansman talk with methods no agent could ever use.

Court papers call it rumored and purportedly. Inside the building it was gospel. This man once did the government a favor it could never admit and never repay. And a debt with no receipt does not expire. It just sits in the walls protecting whoever it touches. Here is what that protection looks like in dated documents. 1986. Scarpa is indicted in a federal credit card fraud case and the arithmetic of the charges puts his exposure at seven and a half years.

His sentence, probation and a $10,000 fine. A capo in federal court on a documented fraud scheme and he does not spend one night in prison. Proof number one, >> [music] >> the mild one. August 1986. He is bleeding internally from an ulcer [music] and goes in for emergency surgery. He needs blood and he refuses the hospital's supply. He does not [music] trust what strangers might put in his veins. So a young bodybuilder from the crew, a man named Paul Mele, rolls up his sleeve and [music] donates directly.

A favor between friends. The bill arrives in seven years and 10 months because it is in that hospital that proof number two happens. Linda Schiro, his companion, [music] testified years later that Scarpa told her his friend had called and that he was not going to have to go to jail. She described visits, cash, a relationship that did not look like a police investigation [music] from any angle you could stand at. And a cooperating Colombo captain later told the government that a hospital hallway had been cleared one day.

Cleared, >> [music] >> the staff was told, for a visit from three out-of-town bosses. There were no three out of town bosses. Hold on to that hospital scene. Every detail of it rests on witnesses whose word is going to matter enormously later. And one of them will eventually detonate this entire story. Proof number three, 1987, the DEA raids the social club, a full narcotic sweep of the crew Scarpa personally runs. Doors come [music] in, 10 men are indicted.

He is not one of them. 10 indictments drawn from his clubhouse, [music] and the man who runs the room is missing from the list. Why? Years later, the government will send defense lawyers a letter itemizing the alleged leaks from handler to source. A list so long it has to be lettered A through H. On it, a target list for that raid, handed over before [music] the doors came in. That letter comes back twice more in this story, and each time it gets worse.

Add it up. Leniency on the fraud, a warning before the raid, exemption [music] from his own crew's indictment. That is a standing service tier, and in 1987, the subscription is current. If a federal file survives a narcotic sweep of the man's own clubhouse, what could ever close it? And what happens when the protected man [music] goes to war? June 1991. The Colombo family splits in half. One faction stays loyal to the imprisoned boss Carmine Persico.

One lines up behind Victor Orena, who wants the chair. And between them, over roughly two years, about a dozen men die on the streets of Brooklyn and Staten Island. Greg Scarpa is 63 years old, a grandfather, and by the government's account, the most active shooter in the entire world. Christmas lights, December 1991. Vincent Fusaro is stringing them across the front of his own house when he is shot dead where he stands.

His own house. His own front door. A month later, Nicholas Grancio is killed in his car and his family later swore in court that FBI surveillance had been pulled off him shortly before he died. Remember the shape of that? An FBI decision, then a body. You will see it again. And then there is a bagel shop. Behind the counter, a young clerk named Matteo Speranza works the register. Bagels in the case, coffee going, a drawer of small bills he counts out for strangers all morning when the war comes through the door and shoots him where he stands.

No rank, no record, no place in anyone's ledger. A kid making change on the wrong afternoon >> [music] >> and the war does not even slow down on its way back out. Two counters run side by side through all of this. Bodies. Climbing. File 34. Open. It stays active and funded [music] straight through while the man on it is the deadliest gun in a shooting war on the front page of every paper in New York. Then it gets worse in a way nobody could design.

Thanksgiving 1991, the New York Post prints an actual story [music] on newsstands naming Gregory Scarpa as an FBI informant in public during the war in a world where being named in print as a [music] rat is a death sentence with a schedule attached. A hit on him is in fact discussed then called off partly because the men who would do it are afraid of what he might tell the law if it goes [music] wrong. He is exposed.

Nothing happens. Then a federal court writes the sentence [music] that explains this entire video. Scarpa dispelled rumors of his cooperation by committing murders. [music] His bosses would not believe that the FBI would allow an informant to kill. [music] Those are federal judges describing how the cover worked. Everybody he dropped was proof to the family that he could not possibly be working for the government because everyone in that world knew the government would never allow it.

The unbelievable is invisible. If that sentence [music] just made your stomach drop, hit the like button and subscribe. It tells me [music] you want more files like this one dragged into the light and there are more of them than you think. Which leaves [music] exactly one question worth asking. Who inside that building is keeping this survivable? [music] And how long can honest agents sit in the same office as the answer?

Inside the squad, the honest agents are already suspicious. They drive their supervisor to meet the source and are told to wait in the living room and for 45 minutes they sit there. A full top echelon debriefing happening on the other side of a wall out of earshot of the only witnesses the rules require and the write-up that comes back is strangely short. Agent Jeffrey Tomlinson will put that detail in a sworn affidavit.

But a bad feeling is worth nothing at headquarters. You cannot walk suspicion into a courtroom. February 27th, 1992. Carmine Imbriale, a Colombo associate, has been arrested and he is talking. Chris Favo walks into his supervisor's office to report it. Routine, the thing an agent does and while he is standing there, the hello phone rings. The hello phone is a dedicated line, the number informants use to reach their handlers directly and when it rings, it means exactly one thing.

A source is calling. DeVecchio picks it up. Favo hears one side of the conversation and he hears this. I don't know if he is saying anything about you. The King's County District Attorney's office has him. The call ends. Favo asks who that was. The answer is one number. [music] 34. >> Please >> Stop here because you are seeing something Chris Favo cannot see yet. You know what 34 is. You know what 34 does for a living.

Favo is still inside the fog of a young agent who trusts the man at the desk. And you are [music] watching a cooperating witnesses name travel out of an agents mouth across 6 ft of federal office and into a killer's ear. The next day Favo raises it. His supervisor implies the problem is handled. The lettered letter from the DEA raid, this phone call is on it, too. Logged as an alleged leak with the date attached. The paper matches the moment down to the day.

Favo's suspicion now has a timestamp. He starts writing things down. Him, Tomlinson, >> [music] >> Raymond Andjich. Three agents keeping a quiet record inside the squad, documenting their own supervisor the way they were trained to document criminals. Their reports go up the chain and headquarters does the last thing anybody in this story expects. It moves. March 3rd, 1992. Assistant Special Agent in Charge, Donald North closes [music] Informant File 34.

The stated reason in the Bureau's language, after discovering evidence of his criminal activity. This is the one moment in the entire story where the machine does exactly what it was built to do. Agents saw something wrong, agents reported it, and headquarters believed them. The system works for 36 days. 36 days in which Gregory Scarpa is, on paper, nothing to the federal government. >> [music] >> An aging capo in an open war, exactly as exposed as every other capo in an open war.

April 8th, 1992. The file is reopened. One man does it with a phone and [music] a form, single-handedly. Two statements now sit side by side and they cannot [music] both stand. To headquarters, the agents reports about Scarpa were false. To Chris Favo in the office, Scarpa confirmed them. One story going up, the opposite story going sideways, and the paperwork that comes out of it puts the most active shooter in the Colombo war back on the books of the Federal Bureau of Investigation as a valued source. 44 days pass, then it is May 22nd before dawn.

Lorenzo Lampasi is 66, and his whole morning is a bus yard and a padlocked gate that has to be swung open by hand before the first drivers arrive. He steps out of his car onto a dark Brooklyn street, keys in his fist. He never reaches the gate. One phone call. One form. 44 days. You have seen this murder before. It opened this video, and now you can see the whole photograph. Favara carries the killing upstairs and gives the details to the man who reopened the file 44 days earlier, and the man slaps the desk like a fan watching a scoreboard change.

We're going to win this thing. Favara testified about that moment under oath. His words, not mine. It was like a line had been blurred over who we were. Like his supervisor was a cheerleader for the Persico faction. An FBI agent in a courtroom [music] saying he watched his boss root for one side of a mafia war, the side informant 34 was killing for. So, ask the question the way the record forces you to ask it. Who is the informant here?

The killer feeding the Bureau or the Bureau feeding the killer? And how many names are already moving down that pipeline? Larry Mazza was in the car. Young, recruited by Scarpa, driving him to the work. When Mazza later cooperated, he described where the information came from. Tips that arrived before things happened. Precise things. The kind of things you cannot learn on a street corner. Scarpa had a name for the source.

He called it the girlfriend. Remember that word. It comes back at the very end of this story in a courtroom from a direction nobody sees coming. The deliveries are itemized in sworn testimony and that lettered government list. The address where arrival could be found, the home address of a man who had flipped, the block where another target lived, the scheduled arrest of Scarpa's son in advance and a copy of the federal complaint against him.

All of it traveling in the wrong direction, all of it arriving on schedule. And when the squads arrests start touching people close to the source, one sworn affidavit records the supervisor's outburst word for word. "I've had it. You will not arrest another single individual without my specific approval." An FBI supervisor [music] demanding a veto over which mobsters his agents are allowed to arrest. August 13th, 1992, they get him anyway.

The door that finally gets him belongs to a different building entirely. A county firearms charge, small and routine, the kind of case that moves through Brooklyn courtrooms by the dozen. And then the federal indictment for the war lands on top of it, brought by prosecutors who never needed anyone's approval and never received anyone's warning. The Grim Reaper stands for fingerprints and a booking photo like any other defendant.

The protection only ever covered the rooms it could reach. He makes bail. That December, a dispute with drug dealers turns [music] into gunfire on a Brooklyn street. A man who walked untouched through a two-year mob war trading shots over a neighborhood beef. And Greg Scarpa takes a bullet to the face. He loses an eye. February 4th, 1993, indicted for three murders. May 1993, he pleads guilty. Vincent Fusaro, Nicholas Grancio, Lorenzo Lampasi, three names you already know now on paper with his signature under them.

December 1993, [music] sentencing judge Jack Weinstein. One eye. Dying, though almost nobody in the room knows why yet. He tells the court, "I expect to go home. I tried to help, your honor. 10 years, not life. 10." He is 65 years old, still doing the arithmetic of a man who believes [music] the arrangement holds. But the arrangement was never his. It existed to keep a file open, a program credible, and a [music] supervisor's judgment beyond question.

Scarpa was the exhibit. And an exhibit that gets indicted has already stopped being useful. Now, stop the clock. Rewind to August 1986, [music] the hospital, the bleeding ulcer. Paul Malloy rolling up his sleeve so that Greg Scarpa would not have to take a stranger's blood. Watch the drip, bag to line, line to arm, a friend's gift running quietly into a grateful man's vein, the one delivery in this whole story that never crosses a handler's desk.

That blood carried HIV. A narcotic sweep of his own clubhouse never touched him. Neither did a fraud indictment carrying 7 and 1/2 years, or a shooting war, or a newspaper printing the word informant next to his name in the middle of that war. The only enemy that ever reached Greg Scarpa came in through his own arm, donated by a friend, accepted because he did not trust strangers, and it took 7 years and 10 months to kill him, August 1986 [music] to June 1994, moving cell by cell through the one system in his world without a leak [music] in it.

June 4th, 1994, a federal prison medical unit. Greg Scarpa dies at 66, 6 months into the only sentence that ever stuck, still expecting to go home. The war itself gets prosecuted. Dozens of Colombo members go away, some for life, on cases built by the squad [music] that shared an office with all of this. And the man who ran him is still drawing a federal [music] salary. So, Scarpa paid, and he paid everything. Did anyone else pay anything at all?

And who is willing to tell this story under oath? January 1994. Chris Favro, Jeffrey Tomlinson, and Raymond Andjich do the thing that ends careers. They go to the FBI about the FBI. Sworn affidavits against the man who writes their evaluations inside a bureau that has never once [music] enjoyed being told it is wrong with no book deals waiting on the other side. Working agents betting everything on paper. Then the building does what buildings do.

It absorbs the blow. 1995. The government itself mails defense lawyers the alphabetized letter A through H. An official list of the ways its own cases may have been poisoned. Hearings follow. FBI agents testify against an FBI supervisor in open court. A two-year internal investigation grinds through the building and ends with no criminal charges. 1996. R. Lindley DeVecchio retires on a full pension denying wrongdoing then and ever since. >> [music] >> Then 10 years of nothing.

The affidavits sit in files. The letter sits in [music] case records. And the question underneath all of it, did an FBI supervisor's information get people killed, >> [music] >> has still never been put in front of a jury. So how does a dead case claw its way back into a courtroom a decade later? And whose voice finally decides it? March 2006. [music] The Brooklyn District Attorney indicts the retired supervisor on four counts of murder.

Mary Bari in 1984. Joseph De Domenico in 1987. [music] Patrick Porco in 1990. Lorenzo Lampasi in 1992. [music] The two names from chapter one plus two more. The theory is simple and radical at once. The information was the weapon. He did not have to pull a trigger to be responsible for the body. A retired FBI supervisor in a state courtroom facing life. The case rests on one witness who can put the deal inside the house, Linda Schiro, Scarpa's companion of 30 years, the woman from the hospital hallway, October 2007.

She takes the stand and swears to the whole architecture. That Lin was in the house, that Lin was paid, and on the murders, that she personally heard the handler feed Scarpa what he needed to [music] find the people who died. For 2 weeks, the deal with the devil is finally on trial, and the deal is losing. Then two journalists walk into the story. Tom Robbins and Jerry Capeci interviewed Schiro back in 1997 [music] for a book that was never finished, and they did what reporters do.

They ran a tape recorder. When they hear what she is swearing to under oath, they go to a judge to be released from their promise of confidentiality [music] because they have the cassettes, and the cassettes say the opposite. On the stand in 2007, her sworn testimony is that Lin's information set up the killings. On tape in 1997, [music] relaxed in her own kitchen, asked about the same murders, she says Lin had nothing to do with either one.

Same woman, same murders, opposite story 10 years apart. Now sit in that courtroom and let the tape run. Hiss first, then a click, and a voice fills the room. Her voice, a decade younger, loose, unguarded, the voice of a woman at her own kitchen table with coffee [music] going and a recorder she has stopped noticing. The jurors look at the speakers, then at the witness stand. Linda Schiro sits at the front of the room under oath, listening to herself.

The reporter on the tape asks about the murders. The younger Linda answers without a pause. Lin had nothing to do with it. Nobody objects. There's nothing to object to. It is her own voice. The state's entire case is one woman's memory, and here is that same memory, 10 years fresher, preserved on a cassette in a reporter's drawer. A witness the defense could never have manufactured. Immune to coaching, immune to cross-examination, hissing through the courtroom speakers in her easy kitchen table cadence.

Every casual answer subtracts [music] a count from the indictment while she sits 20 ft away with nowhere to look. Within days, the case [music] caves in. November 1st, 2007, dismissed. He is never convicted of anything. And here the word comes back [music] the way I promised it would. Scarpa's crew only ever knew the leak by the name he gave it, the girlfriend, >> [music] >> and the case that was supposed to finally name the leak in a verdict dies at the hands of the real girlfriend, Linda Schiro, the state's star witness.

Her own taped voice played back against her from a reporter's drawer. Justice Gustin Reichbach does not let it pass quietly. Dismissing the case, he condemns the Bureau for getting [music] into business with Gregory Scarpa at all. The arrangement that has been called ever since a deal with the devil. The federal appeals record is harsher still, and it sits there in print. He leaked significant information to Scarpa. He was extremely careless, perhaps criminally so.

And then the line that should have ended a career on the spot. The government does not dispute that DeVecchio testified falsely. Every conviction from the squad's cases is affirmed anyway. Nobody walks out of prison, and nobody is ever charged. Three agents put their careers on a sworn affidavit and got exactly one thing out of it, the record. It is the only reason you know any [music] of this, and it is also all anyone ever got.

The final ledger. The men convicted on that squad's cases, life. Gregory Scarpa, 10 years, dead in custody inside 6 months. The supervisor, a full pension, a dismissal, and in 2011, a book written by himself titled We're going to win this thing. The line he said over Lorenzo Lamas' body. The file protected everyone it touched except the man inside it. The question of who informed [music] on whom died in that Brooklyn courtroom, on those cassettes.

So ask the one that is still alive. The top echelon program that produced file [music] 34 also produced Whitey Bulger in Boston, and files like it are still kept today under seal. Numbers instead of names, hello phones that still ring. Somewhere in that building sits a folder that gets expensive to close with every year it stays open. Whose name is traveling down that line tonight? And who steps out of a car before dawn, keys in his fist, to find out?

If you want to see what happens when the arrangement runs the other direction, when the bureau systems become the tool, watch what one man did from inside the FBI, the man who ran a cartel from inside the FBI.