For more than two decades, Gregory Scarpa Sr. lived two lives simultaneously. To the Colombo crime family, he was the Grim Reaper - a killer credited with between forty and fifty murders, a man whose name alone carried the specific authority of organized violence. To the FBI, he was something rarer and more dangerous: a Top Echelon informant, a source whose access to the family's most guarded deliberations made him one of the most valuable assets in the Bureau's organized crime program.
He was both of these things at the same time. For twenty years, a protected killer fed intelligence to the same institution that should have been building a case against him. And when the Colombo family tore itself apart in the civil war of the early 1990s, Scarpa was in the middle of the shooting - while his handler, Special Agent Lindley DeVecchio, allegedly shared the FBI's own investigative intelligence to help him win it.
Then there is Mississippi. In 1964, the FBI quietly sent Scarpa south to extract - by whatever means necessary - the information that broke open the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. A mob enforcer in the service of civil rights. The moral arithmetic has never resolved.
Greg Scarpa, The Grim Reaper is the definitive account of the most corrupted informant relationship in FBI history - a story about murder, institutional failure, and the dangerous line between intelligence and complicity.
