The man entering the store had recently arrived from Chicago, he said, and he was looking to purchase a television set. The shopkeeper he greeted, Lawrence Byrd, owner of Byrd Radio and TV, had no idea what he was in for. A fixture in Laurel, Mississippi for decades, Byrd had come face to face with Gregory Scarpa, but that name would remain completely unknown for decades. The two haggled over the price of a new set and when Scarpa learned the store closed at 9:00 pm, he asked if he could pick it up afterwards: “Could you wait for me even if I’m a few minutes late?” Byrd was glad to make a sale and gracious enough to accommodate this request.
Twenty minutes after 9:00 that evening, Scarpa approached the now empty store. “Could you put the set in my car, please? I have a bad back and can’t lift anything,” Scarpa claimed. Byrd dutifully grabbed the set in his arms and carried the TV outside. “Put it on the back seat,” Scarpa demanded. “The trunk is filled with my clothes.” The store manager opened the car door and pushed the TV onto the back seat, leaning his body inside the car. Scarpa took this opportunity to pistol whip Byrd, telling him to lay down and shut up. An FBI agent who had been hiding in the front of the car sat up and started the vehicle. As they drove away, Byrd complained that he felt like throwing up. “If you do, you’ll eat it,” Scarpa replied. They drove an hour south, Byrd believed, to Camp Shelby, a large military post in Hattiesburg spanning 134,000 acres. It was there Scarpa was tasked with extracting a confession.
Scarpa led Byrd inside a building, past what resembled a kitchen, and tied him to a chair near an open window to allow for the FBI to listen to the interrogation. The store manager began to plead for his life and Scarpa interrupted: “I work for the Grand Dragon of a Chicago chapter of the Klan,” he explained to the KKK member. “He’s very put out by this action of yours down here because it wasn’t coordinated with him. Tell me the whole story of how this happened so I can give him a full report. Then I’ll let you go.” Over two iterations of questionings and beatings, Byrd gave him two different accounts of what had occurred. Each time, Scarpa went outside to confer with the FBI agents standing guard outside on the veracity of the tales. “He’s stroking you—that’s not the way it happened,” they informed him. On the third attempt, Scarpa lost his patience and stuck his .38 pistol in Byrd’s mouth. “Listen, prick, this is your last chance. You either tell me the absolute truth or I will blow your head off. I don’t have any more time to waste.” Begging to be let go, Byrd offered a new version, which the FBI agents accepted. Byrd was driven back to the edge of town and dumped out of the car. Before doing so, Scarpa raided Byrd’s wallet and removed $800 in cash.
As far as FBI special agent Anthony Villano knew, the above story never made it into any of the Bureau’s official files. He came across this civil rights case through his work on organized crime for the FBI’s New York office and confirmed the account with Scarpa, a member of the Mafia whom the FBI had called in to help solve a murder. Director J. Edgar Hoover had been feeling pressure to solve several civil rights cases that had fallen under his jurisdiction and when the leads dried up, his agents often turned to known criminals such as Scarpa to extract information using methods they would not dare employ themselves. In this instance, he had been hired to identify the perpetrators of the murder of Vernon Dahmer, president of the Forrest County chapter of the NAACP, who died after his home was firebombed by the KKK on January 10, 1966. Dahmer’s wife, who survived the attack, described the events in her testimony, later recorded in an appeal decision:
…the first witness, who was the widow of Dahmer, testified that she and the family were awakened by shots and “Molotov cocktails” thrown through the glass and told of all of the occurrences involving burning and shooting by men on the outside of the house.
All that was noted in the Bureau’s files was that the Jackson, Mississippi FBI office on January 21, 1966 called the New York office for assistance, who in turn brought in Scarpa, FBI informant NY-3461. Scarpa had been begun his relationship with the Bureau following an armed robbery arrest in 1962. He evaded serious jail time thanks to this arrangement and the FBI used his penchant for violence and wanton disregard for the law to solve difficult cases. Villano also wanted to use his services to pursue organized crime, but there was a problem from Scarpa’s perspective: according to him, he had not been compensated at all by the Bureau. “My expenses came to about $2,300,” Scarpa explained to Villano, “and that covers the air fares, the car rentals, motels, and meals for the four days it took. I beat that creep out of eight hundred, so all I want is the rest of what I laid out, $1,500.” Villano worked to get Scarpa paid and in the process discovered that some other FBI agents were faking their informants’ signatures to obtain payments for services rendered. At least one agent, he learned, had been quietly fired for this offense.
Scarpa had brought his mistress Linda Schiro on the trip to build an alibi if needed later. He took her out shopping beforehand and they flew first class. Their first destination, a hotel in Mobile, Alabama, was crawling with FBI agents, one of them handing Scarpa a gun in their room. “I’m going out with these men,” Scarpa had explained to her. “If I’m not back, there’s a return ticket on the bureau.” He took a stack of cash out of his pocket and handed it to her. “Here—take this.” She was immensely proud of his work with the Bureau and became his partner for life.
Out of the 14 indictments laid by prosecutors, Byrd was later convicted of arson and received a 10-year sentence, along with three accomplices who were convicted of murder. Byrd’s 22-page typewritten statement obtained by the FBI in March 1966 was adjudicated to have been “given voluntarily and not as the result of any threats, force, or other wrongful inferences.” A local district attorney recalled Byrd’s mysterious injuries at the time after visiting him in the hospital: “Lawrence was a tough guy—a big, rawboned country boy—but he was beat up so bad he was never the same after that.” All of those convicted of murder in the trial were released from prison on parole in the 1970s.
In assessing the case, Villano’s view was the Bureau went too far in their quest for results. “I was ashamed that the people I worked for had to go outside the Bureau to find someone to perform their dirty work.” Scarpa, however, through this assistance had earned his get-out-of-jail-free card: “Occasionally I’d run across his name in connection with a crime,” Villano admitted, “but I wanted no part of him. As far as I was concerned, he’d earned a lifetime pass from the Bureau.” Scarpa, for his part, in the ensuring years had to prove his bona fides to his associates to explain away any nagging doubts, particularly about how he was able to consistently avoid jail time. After receiving probation on a credit-card-fraud conviction, Scarpa wasted no time in quashing any rumors of a relationship with law enforcement. “We all suspected something,” recalled Carmine Sessa, a consigliere in the Colombo crime family, “but a few days later we were in the club with Greg and a guy he hated. We’re all talking and joking, and out of nowhere, Greg whips out a piece and shoots the guy in the head. Christ Almighty, the guy’s brains were all over me! My ears were ringing from the gunshot. Cool as he can be, he told us to roll the body in the rug and get rid of it. Nobody distrusted Greg after that day.”
Top Brass
Anthony Villano could not have been terribly surprised at the corruption he found at the FBI, given his first interaction with police. Working in Manhattan’s theater district at the age of fifteen, he and his young co-workers would steal from the venue or theatergoers, anything they could take that would go unnoticed. Once while working coat check, he stole a set of brass knuckles from an overcoat pocket and later showed them off to his friends in public. A police officer happened to be nearby and accosted Villano, demanding to know how he had obtained the weapons. After explaining how he had “found” them in a theater, rather than punish or let the teenager off with a warning, the officer released Villano on the condition that he obtain cigarettes for the policeman from the theater, given their scarcity at the time. This was Villano’s first experience with a payoff of law enforcement, except he never delivered in this case on his promise. He believed the policeman to be dishonest, but surely, he thought, the senior ranks would not have tolerated such behavior if they became aware of it. He held other authority figures in similar esteem: “If the local priest seemed unpleasantly human, the cardinal, I was sure, was one step from sainthood.”
After a stint in the Navy at the tail end of World War II, Villano joined the FBI as a stenographer. He soon changed jobs to his ideal role, that of FBI special agent, in 1954. From what he could observe, the Bureau operated in a world on its own, separated from politics. “Who was President and who was in Congress didn’t matter, to Hoover or to us,” Villano recalled. In Hoover, the FBI had a leader who initially denied even the existence of an organized crime syndicate in the United States. Unlike Hoover, Villano gained exposure to the Mafia early in his life, remembering the violence they brought to his local community in Brooklyn: “There was one other Italian family on the block. Supposedly, two of the sons belonged to the Mafia and after one of them tried to quit the organization, both brothers were found in gunny sacks, the bodies pockmarked with icepick wounds. I remember the wailing of the women at the funeral.” Rather than cover the threat the Mafia posed to the security of Americans, Villano’s FBI training at Quantico spent more time dealing with domestic dissent. In the field, Villano used his typing skills he learned in his early FBI work to police the political speech of labor leader Ben Gold: “I recorded every speech, 170 and more words a minute...I testified in court about Gold’s May Day rally statements. He was convicted, but the Supreme Court ordered a new trial when it was shown that the FBI had investigated some jurors and had invaded the privacy rights of the jury. The government then dropped the case.”
Black-Bag Jobs
In the days of the Red Scare, Villano like many in the Bureau, participated in what he called “the persecution of those known as Communists.” They perfected harassment techniques, which included “nails embedded in wood that could be placed under a car to cause a flat tire; sugar for gas tanks, potatoes for exhaust pipes.” While the dissidents were away from their homes, the FBI would also break and enter into their properties without a warrant, a practice they euphemistically termed black-bag jobs. For these assignments, “agents brought along itching powder to sprinkle in gloves and undergarments,” as well as a foul smelling substance to rub in their coats. Villano learned that some went as far as poking holes in condoms found among their belongings to disrupt the radicals’ personal lives. FBI agents were willing to cross any legal line to disrupt these political activities and Villano was no exception. Had he been asked to undertake any of these dirty tricks, he “would have followed orders; we were all infected with the Bureau’s fever about Communist menaces.”
One estimate pegged the number of black bag jobs as 1,500; since the Bureau destroyed their records, an exact accounting of the practice is an impossible task. Hoover officially banned the practice in 1966, but no one told Villano, who continued using the surreptitious entry technique unabated: “if the ban included agents dealing with criminals, they kept that a secret from me.” The jobs carried an inherent risk of the homeowner returning unexpectedly or a surprise appearance from the local police. Villano could recall specific instances of this occurring: one where the FBI agents managed to convince the police they were handling a national security matter that required discretion and another where they simply punched the local officers and ran from the scene before their identities could be discovered.
The Six Types
Villano eventually came to learn that there were several types of FBI special agents, none of which matched the public image portrayed by Hoover’s vision of immaculate law enforcement. One was the boozers, those that required alcohol to get through the workday. A criminal division agent who fit this description, “a big, backslapping Irishman,” was put under surveillance by the Bureau’s internal security group. This followed revelations from an informant that a hostile foreign embassy was looking to recruit him, given that his tendency to drink made him an easy target. While following the agent around town, internal security did not notice any embassy approaches; however, they did note the excessive amount of time he spent drinking on the job at bars. This discovery earned him an early retirement with a 40 percent disability pension, a clean and simple method of sweeping this issue under the rug.
Another group was the shoppers: those who spent their work hours hunting for bargains. There were also jocks, regular patrons of the New York Athletic Club or the Y. The students spent their nights in class and their days studying as much as possible; while the Bureau did not always appreciate these endeavors, an agent becoming a lawyer or a PhD held a certain cachet for the organization. The investors were tempted by Wall Street and watched daily stock tickers, hiding their investments in the names of their family members, away from the prying eyes of the Bureau.
The lovers cashed in on the prestige that came with working at the FBI for their romantic liaisons; the only rule was to keep the affairs private and not embarrass the institution. One mother wrote to the FBI that her daughter, who worked for the Bureau in Washington, DC, was having an affair with a senior supervisor at the FBI. To put a stop to the relationship, his superiors demoted him to a field agent role (also known colloquially as a “brick agent”) and moved his post hundreds of miles away from Washington. Undeterred, the man continued to see the woman every weekend, driving the required distance continually to the point where the woman’s mother wrote another letter of complaint to the FBI. The Bureau increased his distance from the woman to 1,500 miles. “To hell with them,” the man told Villano. “I’ll fly in every weekend.” Given the lovestruck man was only months away from retirement eligibility, Villano wondered: Was he not risking getting fired with this approach of continuously angering upper management? “They know better than that,” the man countered. “There are dozens of guys working at Bureau headquarters who have situations like mine. They wouldn’t dare dismiss me.”
Amongst all of the non-job related activities, the FBI like any institution demanded results. The superiors, those that had the ability to control futures and career prospects, according to Villano kept “demanding tangible evidence of progress.” The agents would oblige them, supplying as an example “names identified as belonging to an organization—political or criminal—even if they faked some entries or kited the figures.” While Villano had some success in recruiting informants from the mob, he realized that others applied a disingenuous approach to feeding status reports upwards without putting in any real work outside of their desks: “The agent responsible for a crime family could mine the old reports, add a little new information from the local police plus some gossip from a brick agent, and presto, he presented the Bureau with what passed for a fresh, meaningful look at a segment of organized crime.” For some, this was simply fulfilling what the system required, reporting every 45 days regardless of the status on the ground, whereas for others the deskwork amounted to “a manifestation of laziness, time-serving until the pension or private-industry offer came along.”
All the while, the activities of organized crime continued, in many cases undisturbed. One of the most tangible results Villano could obtain was the return of stolen goods through informants. Insurance companies were happy to participate to recover their losses and the Mafia figures assisting the FBI could receive substantial sums of money, depending on how much the companies were willing to pay. Villano used informants as much as possible to chip away at the empire the Mafia had established, but it required being mired in crime. He explained the rationale for one specific case: “I knew I was perpetuating the career of a criminal, but I believed that the information [the mafioso] gave us was worth much more than what he managed to steal. It was a case of two steps forward and one step back.” The dangers also involved crime more serious than theft. By 1968, the Mafia had adopted the tactic of kidnapping heroin dealers, holding them for ransom. The wife of one such dealer was called on the phone, the kidnappers informing her that the price for her husband’s release was $50,000. “I wouldn’t give you fifty bucks for him,” she replied. A few days afterwards she received a package, inside of which she found the head of her late husband.
What Tommy Could Not Abide
“Please, Tony—I’ve lost one brother already. Make sure you bring back my other one!” Emanuel “Manny” Gambino’s sister was laying at Villano’s feet, screaming, after banging her head against a wall in grief at her family home in Queens, New York. Villano had been tipped off by one of his informants that Manny Gambino had been kidnapped and he had worked his way into gaining the family’s trust. He convinced them that he would do everything possible to return Manny, son of Joseph Gambino and nephew to Carlo Gambino, the “boss of all bosses” in the Mafia at the time. In May 1972, in the midst of internal infighting within the mob, the family had received the following ransom note:
If you want him back alive, this is your last chance. If he dies, the killer will be you for not paying. The sum of $350,000 placed in a triple‐strength garbage bag. One more call will be placed at 9 o’clock on Wed. Yes or no is to be the answer. If yes, be ready to move and have a full tank of gas. No tricks. No cops. If no, good luck, widow.
The phone call with further instructions had arrived, but without sufficient time for the FBI to trace the call. The Bureau was unwilling to front any real money for this transaction (using fake money would have been their preference), so it was up to the family to assemble what they could, which amounted to just over $40,000 in cash. Villano marveled that a Mafia family was attempting to “buy back one of their own at discount prices.” Or perhaps, he reasoned, they were afraid of attention from the IRS if they could have produced $350,000 ($2.5 million today) in short order. Tommy Gambino, Manny’s brother, requested that Villano be in the car with him as he delivered the cash. Walkie-talkie in hand to communicate with the FBI cars that would tail them, Villano lay on the floor in front of the back seats, while Tommy and his business partner rode in the front to make the drop.
Villano had tried to reassure Manny’s screaming sister that they faced no danger, but Tommy was less certain. The first step was to drive to a telephone booth near the corner of East 82nd Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan to await further instructions. On the half-hour drive there, Villano inquired if Tommy was carrying a gun. The mafia figures were shocked, wondering if the FBI man was looking to charge them with carrying a concealed weapon. No, he informed them, “in a kidnap case it might be better if we all had guns in the car.” This talk was doing nothing to assure Tommy there was no danger and he became increasingly apprehensive as time went on.
As they approached the phone booth, Tommy wanted to remain in the relative safety of the car until the telephone began ringing. However, there was nowhere nearby to park. Villano advised it would be better for him to stand next to the phone booth in case the kidnappers were watching. While Tommy stood nervously at the booth, FBI agents circling the area took note of the license plates of cars driving by and checked their owner information with the local FBI office, part of a futile attempt to identify the kidnappers. After a long wait, Tommy received the call and the next set of instructions were in hand: they were to drive over the George Washington Bridge, take the first exit they saw in New Jersey, drive north, enter the first gas station on the right and wait next to a panel of four payphones. Villano advised the FBI cars to maintain their distance, lest they be unwittingly discovered.
Arriving at the next destination, Villano was impressed with the preparedness of the kidnappers. The venue they had chosen was closed, the telephones the only well-lit space in the area. Villano was beginning to realize that Tommy was not cut out for this type of work. He was stammering as he waited for the second phone call and Villano worried that he would succumb to a heart attack. Upon returning to the car, he had the final instructions in his mind but had extreme difficulty conveying them to his partner and Villano. After a few moments of confusion, Villano learned the final step consisted of driving another mile until they reached a metal rail, where Tommy was to get out of the car, throw a plastic bag filled with the money over the ledge and drive away. If they succeeded in following these instructions, Manny Gambino would be returned the next morning, Tommy was told.
Villano wanted the car to move slowly, hoping this would allow enough time for the FBI cars to get into position to monitor the drop. He instructed Tommy—with some difficulty as Tommy’s mind was fraught with worry—to drive past the drop site as if he had inadvertently missed it. He did so, but after circling back and throwing the cash over the rail, Tommy ran back to the car as fast as he could. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” he yelled, wheezing. Villano again asked Tommy to move slowly, but he was in no such mood. Tommy saw headlights approaching in his rearview mirror. “They’re following us—they’re going to grab us, too,” he gasped through his audible breathing. Villano instructed him: “Just pull off at the exit ahead,” and then relayed their location to a backup car several miles away from them.
“Holy Christ, they’re going to overtake us!” Tommy screamed as the mysterious car approached them rapidly from behind. “Stay in the center of the road until the exit,” Villano replied. “I’ll take care of it if there’s trouble.” As they drove onto the exit ramp, the car continued to drive by them on the adjacent road uneventfully, a random passerby in the night. After safely returning to the Gambino family home in Queens at 3:00 am, Villano learned that the drop site railing marked where the parkway crossed over another road, which would have made stationing another car there in time to catch the kidnappers even more difficult than he had originally thought. Nonetheless, his supervisor had been able to record the license plate of a suspicious van aimlessly circling in the area. As Villano entered the family’s home, Tommy was still stammering. Pointing to Tommy, Villano explained to the grief-stricken family that he had witnessed “a very brave deed, performed by a man who had done everything he could for his brother, including risking his life.” The FBI agents and the Gambino family shared sandwiches and alcohol as they wallowed in their sense of doom. Tommy thanked Villano for his kind words and confided that he had included a picture of a religious icon in the bag of cash to stir some sympathy in the kidnappers, hoping to increase the chances his brother would return home.
There was no sign of Manny Gambino the next morning. Villano returned to the drop site and located a ripped garbage bag, with the money and religious picture nowhere to be found. He kept the bag in case it contained fingerprints and drove back to an FBI office in Manhattan. “Tommy requested that I not force him to come upstairs for an interview and I granted his wish,” Villano admitted. As time passed, another FBI informant handed Villano the case on a platter: “The man to look up is Bob Sentner; that will solve the case,” he was told. Coincidentally, Sentner’s name was tied to the van the FBI had catalogued the night of the drop. The informant’s tale went as follows: Manny had fallen for a “show-biz blonde” and wanted to leave his family, as the woman would not accept the life of a mistress. Manny was advised to give up on this prospect: “In his circles it was okay to have a mistress but it was bad form to leave your wife, particularly if you were a nephew of Carlo Gambino.” Manny suffered from a cashflow problem, holding too many debts on the street from gamblers, including Henry Robert Sentner, indebted to Gambino for $100,000. The plot began as a hoax, Manny kidnapping himself to allow for his disappearance and a life with his girlfriend. The accomplices began to have their doubts, believing that Manny would turn them over to the mob or the law. “There was an argument in Gambino’s Cadillac,” Villano learned, “and Sentner settled the dispute with a bullet in the back of Manny’s head.”
Some in the senior ranks above Villano had disapproved of the Bureau’s role in the Gambino kidnapping case, believing their involvement to have sullied the reputation of the FBI. Villano believed the FBI’s role was to help everyone and if this assistance led to the development of future informants, all the better. He warned, however, of a line that some had crossed: “There were those agents who treated major figures in organized crime as their equals or, worse, with servility. They seemed overwhelmed by the power and arrogance of top-echelon people in [La Cosa Nostra].”
Others in the Bureau lacked any semblance of a line they would not cross. As Villano was to discover, they were willing to contemplate murder.
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