N.Y. mob implodes; retired FBI agent cleared

NEW YORK - They were an underworld odd couple: the Mafia moll and the retired FBI agent.

She fingered him in four murders that occurred more than 15 years ago. He denied the charges.

Today, in the midst of the third week of the sensational murder trial of former agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, the case imploded.

The Brooklyn District Attorney's Office announced that it was dropping all charges after tapes made nearly a decade ago by the prosecution's star witness, mob mistress Linda Schiro, contradicted much of her sworn testimony in court this week.

Schiro, 62, had lived for years as the common-law wife of the mobster Gregory Scarpa, who died in 1994. Scarpa, a ruthless hit man who was known in certain circles as "the Grim Reaper," also had for years been a secret, high-level informant for DeVecchio and the FBI.

The murder case hinged on allegations, most of them built around Schiro's testimony, that DeVecchio had provided Scarpa with information about four potential informants or rivals who were subsequently killed.

DeVecchio, a celebrated crime buster who worked some of the top mob investigations in the 1970s and 1980s, had the later part of his career tainted by allegations that he had "crossed the line" in his dealings with Scarpa. An internal probe by the Justice Department in 1994 labeled them without merit, but rumors persisted.

Last year, the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office put the case before a grand jury, which returned an indictment implicating DeVecchio in four murders.

"This nightmare is over," he said after the charges were dismissed. "I'll never forgive the Brooklyn D.A.'s Office for irresponsibly pursuing this case. My question is, 'Where do I go to get back my reputation?' "

DeVecchio's lawyer, Douglas Grover, was in the midst of a grueling cross-examination of Schiro when the case took the equivalent of a mob hit.

A story in the Village Voice on Wednesday detailed taped interviews Schiro gave in 1997 in which she offered decidedly different accounts about three of the four murders that were part of the DeVecchio case.

"Had we been provided these tapes much earlier in the process, I daresay we wouldn't have been here," Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione said.

Vecchione and defense lawyers listened to the tapes, provided by reporter Tom Robbins, on Wednesday afternoon. Vecchione then moved to have the charges dismissed this morning. Schiro could now face perjury charges.

DeVecchio, 67, who faced the possibility of life in prison, walked away a free man. But whether the decision lifted the cloud over his career remained an open question.

At the heart of the case was the relationship between DeVecchio and Scarpa, a relationship that, testimony indicated, had caused concern among some agents who worked with him at the time. But it was only after Schiro agreed to testify last year that charges were filed.

Schiro and DeVecchio appeared to have little in common, except their connection to Scarpa. She was an admitted gangster groupie who began dating the Colombo crime-family hit man when she was 17. Still brassy and sometimes belligerent, her personality did not betray her Bensonhurst roots.

DeVecchio was a career G-man who "turned" Scarpa in the 1970s and used him as a high-level confidential informant. Aloof and reserved, the gray-haired defendant showed little emotion during the trial, which began Oct. 15.

Schiro, who spent two days on the witness stand this week, alleged that between 1978 and 1992 - the year her common-law husband was imprisoned - DeVecchio was a weekly visitor to the couple's home in Brooklyn. Each week, the agent came bearing information for Scarpa, she said. And each week, Scarpa gave the agent an envelope stuffed with cash.

Schiro admitted that she has discussed book deals that, she said, would be based "partly on truth and partly on fiction." But she insisted she was telling only the truth from the witness stand.

She acknowledged that she made no effort to stop her murderous husband from carrying out any of the hits, including the murder of their son's 18-year-old best friend, whom, she claimed, DeVecchio had fingered as an informant. That murder was the only one, according to the Village Voice, in which her court testimony matched her recorded 1997 interviews.

Schiro's testimony included a matter-of-fact description of gangster domesticity, a dark and sometimes violent version of Married to the Mob. Scarpa and his associates often celebrated a successful "hit" by sharing drinks in her kitchen, she said. Money came from a lucrative loan-sharking operation, she added, and taxes were never a concern.

"Greg was a gangster," she said. "I never paid any taxes."