The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter (7 page)

CHAPTER 5

J. EDGAR HOOVER, THE FBI AND MY FATHER

My father loved James Bond.

For as far back as I could remember, my brother and I used to watch 007 movies with him. We watched every single one of them—twice. I was probably around nine or ten when he started telling us he was James Bond. I never really understood what he meant.

“That's your father. You don't know your father. Call me Greg, Greg Bond.”

“Dad, how is that you? You're an agent? Like James Bond is a secret agent?”

Then I'd look at him and laugh. He always had such a crazy sense of humor. I just figured he was playing with us.

“Okay, Dad. You're a secret agent.”

It wasn't until I was older that I learned what he was talking about. When my father told us he was working for the FBI, my interpretation wasn't the same as other people's interpretation—that he was a rat.

I didn't fully understand what he was, but I never knew him to be a rat because he never put anybody in jail. He never took the stand and testified against anybody. So when I heard he was with the FBI, I thought he was
with
the FBI—meaning he was an agent.

I was impressed by the fact that he worked for the FBI. No wonder he used to call himself “Greg Bond.” I never said to him, “Dad, oh, my God, you can't do that because you're a gangster.”

I felt that my father really was above everybody else. I thought he was invincible: He was a gangster, yet he was working with the FBI. It was as if he had an edge on everyone else. I learned later that he really didn't.

My father first got involved with the FBI back in the 1960s. He was arrested on March 7, 1960, for armed robbery and released on bond. He was thirty-two at the time and a made man in the Profaci crime family, which later became the Colombo crime family. Right after that, the FBI contacted him to get information about his brother, Salvatore Scarpa, who was also a made man in the Profaci family. He told them to get lost.

In August 1961, the FBI contacted him at his Wimpy Boys Social Club because they wanted some information about a feud between two factions in the Profaci family. My father refused again. He also told them to stop contacting him because people were starting to ask questions. The FBI agents agreed, but they told him to call them if he ever wanted to talk.

On October 27, he called the New York office of the FBI and said he wanted to meet with one of the agents. He officially started working for the FBI under the Top Echelon Informant Program on November 21, 1961. But my father wasn't about to take orders from anyone—not even the FBI. He told the agents that they were not to contact him with any assignments. The agents agreed to “merely accept whatever information he desires to furnish.”

There's an old saying, “While you're playing checkers, I'm playing chess.” That pertained to my father. He made them think they had the upper hand, but they really didn't. He only gave them the information that he wanted them to know.

My father wasn't just a regular informant. He helped save J. Edgar Hoover's ass on three separate occasions in the '60s. During that time Hoover was getting a lot of pressure for not protecting the civil rights of African Americans in the Deep South. Hoover enlisted my father's help—first to find the killer of Medgar Evers, then to find the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers and finally to find the murderer of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer.

The movie
Mississippi Burning
was based on the disappearance of those three civil rights workers. Although the movie indicated an African-American FBI agent, who flew down to Philadelphia, Mississippi, to question the town's mayor, broke the case, it was really my father who cracked it.

My mother went with my father to Mississippi when he was helping Hoover find the bodies of the three civil rights workers. I've asked her to tell the story. However, as part of our research we've pieced together my father's involvement in these three civil rights cases. I'll talk about that after my mother tells you what happened.

 

 

 

 

That was how my mother remembered what happened in Mississippi, but we've discovered the facts may be a little different. What's interesting, though, is the information about my father buying a television set from a suspect who owned or managed an appliance store appeared in each and every story.

However, the account from my father's first FBI handler, Tony Villano, the agent my mother mentioned, was written in the late 1970s. That seemed to be where the story about the TV first surfaced, leading us to believe that somehow that story was incorporated in the telling—and continued retelling—of my father's subsequent work in Mississippi. Either that, or maybe more than one of the three suspects—or even all three—really did sell televisions.

In 1977, Villano wrote a book,
Brick Agent: Inside the Mafia for the FBI,
about his years in the FBI working with Mafia informants. (During Hoover's time, a street agent for the FBI was said to be “on the bricks.”) Two of the people in the book, who were identified with pseudonyms, were actually my father.

In his book Villano talked about the first time my father had a falling-out with the FBI, which was before the two ever met. Apparently, my father believed that the Bureau owed him $1,500 for the work he did for them in Mississippi.

After Villano found my father's name in the FBI's filed on closed informants, he got him the money he was owed. However, he wasn't able to get my father to cooperate with him. So he challenged my father, who he said was built like “an ox of a man,” to an arm-wrestling contest. The fact that they wrestled to a draw impressed my father, who decided to “make a marriage” with Villano, as the agent called it.

Villano thought of my father as “a friend,” and he bent—as well as broke—the law to help him. He even used my father as his bookie to make illegal sports bets for him. One time a criminal who could have implicated my father in some robberies offered to cooperate with the FBI. Villano got the man to back off by making up a story that the Colombo family planned to kidnap his daughter if he talked. That guy died in prison.

In his book Villano said that all the time he worked with my father, he had to reassure himself that their relationship wasn't “the ultimate perversion of the whole law-enforcement idea. In my mind, what we did was justified on the grounds of the greatest good.”

But other FBI agents didn't agree. “I had a discussion with Tony that made me think that Scarpa thought he had a license to kill,” a retired agent recalled. “Around 1970, an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration got blown away, and the DEA heard that Scarpa was the triggerman. They wanted to interrogate Scarpa, and Tony did a tap dance to obstruct their investigation. Scarpa was not arrested or charged with that murder.”

In his book Villano credited my father with finding out the name of the man who executed Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary for the NAACP. Evers was shot in the back by a rifle bullet in the driveway of his Jackson home on June 12, 1963.

Villano said the FBI contacted my father, whom he referred to as “Julio,” to go down to Mississippi to “persuade” a member of the white Citizens' Council to give up the name of the person who assassinated Evers. The FBI, in return, paid my father for his services, as well as guaranteed him a walk on an armed-robbery charge he was facing.

“If he would assist the investigation in Mississippi, he would be the beneficiary of the best the bureau could do for him,” Villano wrote in his book.

Villano said my father agreed, so my father and his girlfriend flew to Miami Beach to establish an alibi. He checked her into a hotel and then went to Jackson, Mississippi, to a store managed by the white Citizens' Council member. My father told the guy he had just moved to Jackson from Chicago and needed to buy a television set. After the purchase he told the man to hold it and he would return later that night—although he might be a little late.

Around 9:20
P. M.,
my father showed back up at the store and asked the manager, who was alone, to put the television in his car. He said he had a bad back and couldn't lift anything. The manager agreed. When they got to the car, my father told him to put the TV in the backseat because the trunk was filled with clothes.

When he opened the door and leaned in to secure the television, my father pushed him to the floor and jumped onto the backseat. Then he shoved a gun in the manager's ribs and ordered him to stay put and not open his mouth. An FBI agent, who had been lying on the front seat, jumped up and started driving.

Villano said they drove south for a few hours, with a car full of agents following them. Finally they arrived at a deserted building somewhere in the Louisiana bayou. The agents surrounded the house, while my father brought the guy inside. He tied him to a chair near an open window. My father told the man he worked for the grand dragon of the Chicago chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, who was unhappy with the assassination of Medgar Evers because he hadn't coordinated it.