From an award-winning investigative reporter: the shocking story of the mob killer who terrorized the streets of New York City for decades . while doing work for the FBI

In Deal with the Devil, five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter Peter Lance draws on 3 decades of once-secret FBI documents and exclusive new interviews to disclose the epic saga of Colombo family capo Gregory Scarpa Sr., who spent more than thirty years being a paid Best Echelon FBI informant while wreaking havoc as a about Cope with the Devil: The FBI’s Key Thirty-Year Relationship with a Mafia Killer drug dealer, loan shark, loan provider robber, hijacker, high-end securities thief-and killer.

A Mafia capo who “stopped keeping track of” after fifty murders-earning nicknames including “the Grim Reaper” and “the Killing Machine”-Greg Scarpa was enlisted from the FBI as soon as 1960. His detailed debriefings on Mafia procedures and activities went right to J. Edgar Hoover and uncovered the structure of Cosa Nostra a long time before the celebrated Valachi hearings. In forty-two years of murder and racketeering, Scarpa served only four weeks in jail, thanks to his secret relationship using the Feds. But Scarpa’s most dangerous reign of terror emerged in the period from 1980 to 1992, when more than half his homicides occurred-even as Scarpa was serving as a paid informant under Supervisory Special Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, who went two organized crime squads in the FBI’s NY Office.

The celebrated case agent in the 1985-1986 Mafia Commission prosecution, DeVecchio had persuaded Scarpa to return to the fold as an informant, under laws that explicitly forbid organized crime insiders from committing murder or other crimes while receiving compensation through the Bureau. And yet, drawing on secret memos that visited every FBI movie director from Hoover to Louis Freeh, Lance files that Scarpa not merely continued his violent rampage of these years, but actually launched a new battle for control of the Colombo criminal offense family-a discord that left fourteen useless and dozens injured.

Before he died of AIDS, contracted through a tainted blood transfusion, Scarpa committed or ordered twenty-six murders-including the violent rubout of his own brother Sal in 1987 as well as the drive-by slaying of his nephew Gus Farace, which triggered a five-hundred-agent manhunt-all while serving as an informant for Lin DeVecchio. When DeVecchio himself was indicted on four matters of murder in 2007, Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes called the case “probably the most spectacular example of official corruption . . . I have ever noticed.” The murder costs against DeVecchio had been dismissed a short time later-even as a New York Condition Supreme Courtroom judge described the FBI’s association with Scarpa as a “cope with the devil.”

After the case’s abrupt dismissal, Lance started peeling back the layers on what defense attorneys called Scarpa’s “unholy alliance” using the FBI. Through special interviews with Scarpa’s child Greg Jr. and previous Lucchese boss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, amongst others, as well mainly because more than 1,150 webpages of private briefing memos, many uncovered here for the very first time, Lance traces links between the Scarpa case, the infamous Mafia Cops case, and even more.

Written with the same incredible capacity for penetrating criminal networks that proclaimed Lance’s previous books, Cope with the Devil is definitely a page-turning function of investigative journalism that reads like a Scorsese film.