The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter (8 page)

My father told the appliance store manager to tell him who did it and he would let him go. The guy spilled his guts. My father then went outside to talk to the agents, who had heard everything through the open window. They said the guy's story was a crock—the names weren't right and the facts didn't match up with their information.

According to Villano, my father threatened the guy, but he lied again. For the third time my father asked the man to tell him what he wanted to know. But that time he wasn't taking any chances. He stuck his gun in the guy's mouth and said if he didn't tell him the absolute truth, he was going to blow his head off, which he said later he would have done.

It worked. Villano said my father told the guy to tell him the story again—slowly—so he could write it down. When my father finished writing the man's statement, he told him to sign it. In the end, because of my father's involvement, the FBI arrested Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers.

Although Hoover's office tried to say Beckwith was tracked down by other means—his fingerprints were allegedly found on the rifle—Villano said that was “pure hokum.” Two all-white juries ultimately couldn't reach verdicts in the case in 1964. But finally Beckwith was convicted of the murder in 1994, dying in prison in 2001 at age eighty.

In his book Villano said after he confirmed the story with my father, he “was ashamed that the people I worked for had to go outside the bureau to find someone to perform their dirty work.”

The second time Hoover and the FBI needed my father's help was to find the bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers—twenty-one-year-old African-American James Chaney from Mississippi and two white men from New York, Andrew Goodman, twenty, and Michael Schwerner, twenty-four—in Philadelphia, Mississippi. That was the case that my mother remembered.

This story was strikingly similar to the Medgar Evers story. The suspect, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, owned an appliance store. My father bought a TV, went back to pick it up late at night, kidnapped the guy, took him to an undisclosed location, put a gun in his mouth and demanded to know where the bodies were. The guy lied at first; then he finally told the truth.

The FBI recovered the bodies, thanks to my father. After a mistrial in 1967, Edgar Ray Killen, who was thought to be the ringleader, was again charged with three counts of murder on January 7, 2005, forty-one years after the crime. He was convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of the three civil rights workers in June of that year.

The third time Hoover and the FBI sought out my father's help during the civil rights era was in 1966 when they asked him to find out who had firebombed Vernon Dahmer's house in Forrest County, Mississippi on January 10, 1966. Dahmer was an African-American farmer and merchant who had agreed to make his grocery store available as a place for African Americans to pay poll taxes.

Dahmer's wife and ten-year-old daughter were also badly burned in the fire, which had been set by Ku Klux Klansmen. “On January 21st, the Jackson, Mississippi office of the FBI called the New York office and, as recorded in an internal memo, requested the use of informant NY-3461—Gregory Scarpa—for a special assignment.”

Klansman Lawrence Byrd, the owner of Byrd's Radio & TV Service in Laurel, Mississippi, was a suspect in the case. Again, as in the other stories, my father went to the shop around nine at night to buy a television just as Byrd was about to close up. My father asked Byrd to put the TV in the car because he had a bad back. Then he and an FBI agent kidnapped Byrd and drove him to a barracks at Camp Shelby, a military base in the Mississippi swampland. My father beat the crap and a confession out of Byrd, who was ultimately sentenced to ten years for arson.

In 2007—after extensive research—Judge W.O. “Chet” Dillard, a former Mississippi district attorney, published the book
The Final Curtain: Burning Mississippi by the FBI.
The book was written to expose FBI tampering in civil rights cases in Mississippi.

In his book onetime DA Dillard said, “The records prove beyond a doubt that JEH (J. Edgar Hoover) sent Scarpa into Mississippi [on] three different cases. The treatment of a key man or men were [
sic
] all the same. Kidnapping, torture and extortion to get what they wanted. They are the same story, only the names are changed.”

My father had a falling-out with the bureau in 1975 and stopped providing information to the feds. But in 1980, Special Agent R. Lindley “Lin” DeVecchio wanted my father back. And he got him. A highly decorated FBI agent, Lin DeVecchio became my father's handler. “Mr. Delo” was Lin's code name when he telephoned my father.

My mother can tell you more about Lin DeVecchio.

 

 

 

 

Lin wanted to be a gangster. He was an FBI agent, but he loved the fact that my father had these feelings for him, which he did. My father cared for him. When my father cared for somebody, he went all out for you, but he still wasn't going to sell himself out.

Even though he cared for Lin, he still knew what he was doing and it was going to benefit him, not Lin. But Lin was playing both ends because he wanted to be a part of the scene, but he was doing it from the FBI side. There were strong feelings there on a friendship level—my father cared for him and he cared for my father. He really did.

CHAPTER 6

THE GRIM REAPER

My father was one of the most feared hit men in the New York Mafia. An enforcer in the Colombo crime family, he was known as “the Grim Reaper” because if you did wrong and you were in the life, or you hurt his family or anyone he cared about, it was his job to bring you death. He'd kill you.

Most mobsters were discreet around their families, but not my father. He started to bring the outside world home with him. My father didn't make any attempt to hide his third family—the Colombo crime family—from our family. Mobsters came over to the house all the time. They'd discuss Mob business in front of Joey and me. My brother and I didn't want to hear about those things because we were still so young.

Sometimes my father's friends would disappear—people I knew and loved. I asked questions about them and he would say they had passed away. I figured out that they must have been killed, but I didn't want to believe that my father had anything to do with their murders.

I really started to figure things out when I was in my midteens. It wasn't all that much of a shock to me because I had grown up in that lifestyle with all my father's friends. Even though I didn't know to what extent he was involved, I had been around it all my life. So it didn't affect me the way people might have thought.

Once I did realize what was happening, my father was honest about what he did. Of course, I was worried, but he had a way about him that made me believe that he was invincible and that nobody could ever touch him. Looking back, I guess that was an immature way of thinking, but I was only a kid.

My father was such a strong person that I believed in my heart that he would overcome any obstacle that came his way. I felt that anybody who tried to interfere with him would be the one to get hurt, not him.

When my father started to bring Mob business into the house, it really affected my brother and me. He would talk to my mother in front of us. He didn't hide anything just because we were in the room. We didn't want to hear about someone being murdered or missing, but it was just regular conversation in our house.

I started hearing things when I was around fifteen or sixteen. I was old enough to understand what was going on at that point. And for a while I had a lot of anger toward my father, since I loved some of the people who were disappearing.

I started blaming my father for a lot of things that were happening. Although I didn't really have too much knowledge as to who else was involved, I was just blaming him. At the time I was very disturbed about all of it, and I let him know. He was pretty much ignoring it—there was nothing he could really say. My brother and I just had to deal with what was happening. We had no say in anything.

Growing up, I never thought there was a code of honor in the Mob—even though there was supposed to be—because I knew that people were disappearing in their own crime families. If you did something wrong, even though you were in the same family, you were getting killed. There was never any honor.

One of the people I remember hearing about that my father killed was Mary Bari. It was 1984. Mary had been dating Colombo consigliere Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico, who had gone into hiding in the 1980s rather than face twenty years for extortion. My mother said Lin DeVecchio told him that Mary Bari was an informant who was a problem and had to be taken care of before she gave up Allie Boy.

So Mary was lured to my father's Wimpy Boys Social Club on the pretense that she was being offered a job as a cocktail waitress. Instead, she was met by my father and some of his crew, thrown to the ground, and shot in the head by my father.

A couple days after the murder, Annie Sessa, the wife of Colombo consigliere Carmine Sessa, came to the house to see my mother. They were talking in front of me.

“Can you believe the dog found Mary Bari's ear?”

My mother looked like she was going to throw up. Annie was smirking.

“What dog? What ear?” I wanted to know what was going on, but they didn't say any more about it. My mother knew about the murder, but she didn't know anything about Mary Bari's ear being shot off.

We found out later it was a sick joke. There was no dog and Mary didn't lose her ear. Annie was making this joke in front of me—telling my mother because she thought it was entertaining. My mother didn't find the joke amusing.

Soon my father's murders got closer to home. When I found out that Joe Brewster had been killed, I was inconsolable. That was devastating to me. I loved him. Joe Brewster had a personality above and beyond personalities, a smile beyond smiles. And for Joe Brewster to get killed by my father? How could he do that? It was unbelievable. He was my father's right-hand man. Joe and my father were so close that my father had been the best man at his wedding and was godfather to Joe's son.

My mother said that Lin told my father, “You know we got to take care of this guy before he starts talking.” My father told Lin not to worry about it, he'd take care of it.

At that point in my life I knew my father was killing people, but I turned away from it. It was almost as if I had taken an oath to my family. I knew what my father was doing, but he was my father. There was nothing I could do about it. I just had to turn the other cheek. I had to try to block it out and not ask too many questions because I really didn't want to know, especially about people that I cared about.

One of the reasons my father had Joe Brewster killed was because he was drinking pretty heavily. He was always coming to the house drunk. I remember one day I asked him to sign my yearbook. When I looked at his signature, it was just a bunch of scribbles. He couldn't write because he was so smashed.

But the main reason was because Joe had become a born-again Christian and didn't want to be in the life anymore. My father agreed with Lin that Joe had to go because he knew too much. And my father said he couldn't trust him anymore.

I remember my parents saying that Joe Brewster was gone. I asked what happened to him. They told me he was sick and had passed away. They lied to me. When I found out that he had been murdered, I stayed in my room, in the dark, crying. I loved Joe Brewster. He was so close to us.

I didn't ask my father if he had killed him, although I had an idea. I had to keep telling myself that he was murdered, but my father didn't do it. Maybe Carmine did it, or maybe Mario did it, or maybe some other member of my father's crew did it. But in my mind there was no way my father did it. That was my defense mechanism toward him killing people. I reasoned that he might've known about it, but he didn't do it. I might've been wrong, which I was, but that was how I protected my sanity.

Of course, it bothered me that he condoned these murders. But as the daughter of somebody who killed people, I had to learn just to block things out. I didn't want to believe that my father could be capable of killing people. I knew that he could and I knew that he did, but I had to turn my mind off to it. I had to preoccupy myself with other things.

When I finally accepted the truth, I couldn't understand how my father could have murdered Joe. I didn't understand how they could kill their own friends. I was—and still am—tormented by it.

One of the murders he planned devastated my brother. My mother can tell the story.

 

 

 

 

I've often thought about the people my father murdered and the families that he destroyed, and it's very painful and disturbing. I knew what that felt like because my brother was murdered, too.

In the life you never get to say good-bye to the people you love. People just disappear. One day they're there and the next day they're gone.