June 4th, 1994, Federal Medical Center, Rochester, Minnesota. A 66-year-old man with one eye, his body wasted to under a 100 pounds, took his last breath in a prison hospital bed. The official cause was AIDS related complications. He’d contracted the virus from a blood transfusion 8 years earlier, donated by a fellow mobster, a bodybuilder who’d shared needles shooting steroids.
The man dying that morning was Gregory Scarpa Senior. They called him the Grim Reaper. He’s been linked to at least 26 murders, and some estimates run far higher. And for roughly three decades, he’d been doing it all while working as a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This wasn’t some street level rat trading petty information for cash.
Scarpa was a maid kappa regime in the Columbbo crime family. the chief enforcer for boss Carmine Persico. He ran lone sharking, hijacking, securities fraud, and contract killing out of a Brooklyn social club called the Wimpy Boys. And while he did all of that, the FBI paid him. They protected him. They tipped him off.
And in the 1960s, according to his longtime companion and to later court testimony, they put him on a plane to Mississippi to terrorize a clansman until he gave up what the bureau couldn’t get on its own. This is the story behind the upcoming Mark Wahlberg film, By Any Means, in theaters this September. And the real history is messier, darker, and more disputed than any 2-hour movie can hold.
This is how the United States government allegedly partnered with a homicidal mafia hitman to lean on the most infamous racist killers in American history and then kept him on the books for decades while he kept killing. But here’s what a movie can’t tell you. Gregory Scarpa wasn’t a one-time asset the bureau regretted using.
He was for years the FBI’s longestrunn, highest valued top echelon informant on the Italian mob. And the relationship eventually helped destroy an FBI agent’s career. Ran alongside a Columbbo civil war that left a dozen men dead and exposed one of the dirtiest secret partnerships in the history of American law enforcement.
To understand how a Brooklyn killer ended up doing the federal government’s dirty work in the Deep South, you have to start at the beginning. Gregory Scarpa was born May 8th, 1928 in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Italian immigrants. The neighborhood was Benenhurst. By his early 20s, he was running with the Prophecy Crime Family, which would later become the Colombo family.
Scarpo was quiet. He didn’t drink much. He coached neighborhood kids. He cooked Sunday sauce for his daughters. To his family, he was daddy. To the street, he was something else entirely. He was the guy you called when a problem needed a permanent solution. By the late 1950s, Scarpa had developed a reputation as a calm, efficient murderer.
No drama, no witnesses. He’d walk in, the target would die, he’d walk out. He reportedly took pleasure in it, once saying of a man he’d killed that he’d like to dig him up and shoot him again. Then came March 1962. Scarpo was arrested for armed robbery. He was looking at hard time. And here’s where the entire arc of his life changed.
The FBI offered him a deal. Become an informant. Help us understand the inner workings of the Italian mafia, and we’ll make this easier on you, Scarpa said. Yes. He was opened as a top echelon informant. That was the FBI’s classification for the most valuable assets. mob insiders who could give them organizational charts, names of made men, sit-down details, hits before they happened.
Scarpa fit the profile perfectly. He was inside. He was trusted and he was completely amoral. For the next couple of years, he fed the bureau information. Then, in the summer of 1964, the FBI came to him with a request that had nothing to do with the New York mafia. On June 21st, 1964, three young civil rights workers disappeared in Nishoba County, Mississippi.
James Cheney, a 21-year-old black activist from Mississippi. Andrew Goodman, 20 years old, a Jewish college student from New York. Michael Schwerner, 24, also a Jewish New Yorker. They were registering black voters during Freedom Summer. The Ku Klux Clan, working with local law enforcement, ambushed them on a rural road and executed them.
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Then they vanished into the swampland. Jay Edgar Hoover dispatched scores of agents. They couldn’t crack it. Local police included clansmen. Witnesses were terrified. The bureau had no informants in the Mississippi clan, no leverage, no leads. They knew who probably did it. They couldn’t prove it. They couldn’t even find the bodies.
And that is where one of the most disputed stories in FBI history begins. According to Scarpa’s longtime companion, Linda Shiro, who testified to this in 2007, the bureau flew Scarpa to Mississippi, handed him a gun and a bag of cash in a hotel room, and pointed him at a local clansman. Shirro says Scarpa later told her he kidnapped the man, put a gun in his mouth, and forced him to reveal where the bodies were.
The FBI has never confirmed any of it. And here’s the part the legend usually leaves out. Several former FBI agents flatly dispute that Scarpa cracked the case at all. They say the real break came from a paid Mississippi source, a state highway patrolman who told investigators the bodies were buried at the old Jolly farm.
The three civil rights workers were found on August 4th, 1964 in an earththen dam on that farm outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, 44 days after they vanished. Cheney, Goodman, and Schwerner had each been shot. The federal prosecution that followed 3 years later, convicted seven men, and the courtroom case rested largely on two clan insiders who turned witness, not on a Brooklyn hitman.
So treat the gun in the mouth as what it is. A vivid, widely repeated and still unproven claim. The upcoming movie by Any Means directed by Elegance Breton and starring Mark Wahlberg as Scarpa and Yaha Abdul Matin II as a young black FBI agent actually dramatizes both Mississippi chapters. It opens with a version of the 1964 body’s case and it builds towards Scarpa’s second documented trip south.
Because there was a second trip and the better documented one is the Vernon Dawnmer case. On January 10th, 1966, a black civil rights leader named Vernon Dawnmer was firebombed in his own home near Hattisburg, Mississippi. Dmer was 57 years old. He was the local NAACP leader. He had been quietly registering black voters for years, even offering to pay their pole taxes himself.
The Ku Klux Clan under Imperial wizard Sam Bowers decided to make an example of him. They drove up to his farmhouse before dawn. They shot it up. Then they hurled jugs of gasoline through the windows. Dmer’s family escaped out the back. Dmer himself grabbed a shotgun, stood at the front of his burning house, and traded fire with the clansmen to give his family time to flee.
He inhaled the burning fumes. His lungs were destroyed. He died later that day. He is remembered for the line that became his creed. If you don’t vote, you don’t count. The clan around Hattisburg was tight. The FBI had no leads again. So, according to multiple accounts, the bureau brought Scarpa back. This is the episode with a name attached.
Scarpa and an FBI agent walked into an appliance store in Laurel, Mississippi, owned by a clansman named Lawrence Bird. Posing as a customer, Scarpa offered to help carry a television set out to the car. Then they shoved Bird inside, drove him to a remote spot, sometimes described as the grounds of Camp Shelby, and beat him savagely.
What’s beyond dispute is the result. Bird was severely injured and signed a 22-page statement to the FBI that implicated other clansmen. It took decades, but Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard who ordered the hit, was finally convicted of Dmer’s murder in 1998, 32 years after the killing. Bowowers died in prison in 2006. That’s the chapter by any means is built around.
The film invents a fictional black FBI agent named Wayne Strider, played by Abdul Matin, as Scarpa’s partner. There’s no historical record of a black FBI agent partnering with Scarpa in Mississippi. Black agents working civil rights cases in 1966 were vanishingly rare and none are documented in that role. So the Buddy framework is Hollywood, but the underlying discomfort is real.
The federal government, unable to penetrate domestic white supremacist terror, is alleged to have outsourced the brutal part of the job to organized crime. And whatever exactly happened in Mississippi, the FBI’s response afterward is not in doubt. They kept using him because the moment Scarpa came home, he stayed in the FBI’s orbit. He was dropped as a formal informant in the mid 1960s, then reopened in 1980 under a new handler, supervisory special agent R. Lindley Devcio.
Lind Devio had joined the bureau under Hoover. He ran the Colombo squad and he took on Scarpa as his prized personal asset. They met alone in FBI, rented apartments and hotel rooms. The relationship got so close that Scarpa in code referred to Dvcio as his girlfriend. During the 1980s, while Scarpa was officially helping the FBI map the Columbbo hierarchy, he never stopped committing crimes.
Loan sharking, hijacking, stock fraud. In 1985, he was indicted for running a major credit card scam he should have done real time. Instead, Dvcio submitted a memo to the sentencing judge listing Scarpa’s contributions to the bureau. Scarpa walked away with five years probation and a $10,000 fine. His own mob colleagues were so stunned by the light sentence that some began to wonder if he was a rat, he was also killing people.
Investigators later linked him to the murders of Mary Bari in 1984, Joe Brewster, Dameno, Lorenzo Lampacy, and others. Some of those killings happened while Dvcio was actively handling him. The bureau either didn’t know or didn’t want to know. In 1991, everything started to unravel. With boss Carmine Persico imprisoned, the Columbbo family split into two waring factions.
On one side, loyalists to Persico. On the other, acting boss Victor Orena, who wanted the throne for himself. Scarpa picked Persico. And on November 18th, 1991, Arena Gunman opened fire on Scarpa near his Brooklyn home while family members were present. The shots missed. That was the opening of what’s now called the Third Columbbo War.
For the next several months, Scarpa went on a rampage. He was 63 years old. He had cancer. He was HIV positive. And he was the single most violent participant in a war that left about a dozen men dead. In December 1991, Scarpa gunned down Vincent Fousaro as Fousaro hung Christmas lights outside a Brooklyn home.
On January 7th, 1992, he and his crew killed Orena Capo Nicholas Grio. On May 22nd, 1992, he murdered Lorenzo Larry Lampesi. And here is the part that destroyed careers and embarrassed the bureau for a decade. Other agents on Dvkio’s own squad came to suspect their supervisor was feeding Scarpa intelligence, names, locations, photographs, helping the Grim Reaper win.
One agent, Christopher Favo, reported him. Favo said that when news of a rival’s murder came in, Dvcio slapped his desk and said in effect, “We’re going to win this thing.” As if it were his war, too. The FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigated. Dbecio retired in 1996. A decade later, in 2006, Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hines indicted him on four counts of murder, charging that he leaked information that led to the deaths of Mary Bar, Joe Brewster Demenico, Larry Lampassie, and a teenager named Patrick Porco. The case
collapsed in 2007 when the prosecution’s star witness, Linda Shiro, was caught on old tape recordings contradicting her own testimony. Devio was cleared. He has always maintained his innocence. Scarpa himself never saw the end of the war. On December 29th, 1992, out on bail and under house arrest, he got into a street gun battle with drug dealers in Brooklyn. He killed one of them.
He took a bullet to the face that destroyed his left eye. He spent the rest of his life behind dark glasses. On May 6th, 1993, sick with AIDS and finally cornered, Scarpa pleaded guilty before federal judge Jack B. Weinstein to three murders and a murder conspiracy. He was sentenced to 10 years. He served barely a year of it.
He died on June 4th, 1994, weighing under 100 lb. The grim reaper had finally met his own. The way HIV got into his bloodstream is its own grim story. In 1986, Scarpa needed emergency surgery and a transfusion. By mob instinct, he distrusted the hospital blood bank and asked friends and relatives to donate instead. Among the roughly 15 to 20 donors was Paul Mey, a bodybuilder who used steroids and shared needles and who had HIV without knowing it.
Scarpa contracted the virus that would kill him 8 years later. He later sued the hospital for negligence and won a settlement. What’s the lesson here? What does Scarpa’s life actually tell us? The answer is uncomfortable. The FBI made a calculation. It decided some criminals were too useful to fully prosecute. It accepted information from the inside while a man it was paying kept taking lives on the outside.
They had to know a great deal. And still the relationship continued for years with cash, with gifts, with legal interventions, with tip offs. By any means packages this history into a thriller with a satisfying arc, a mafia killer with no soul does something that looks like good. He helps the cause of civil rights.
He earns a flicker of moral grace through partnership with a young black agent. It’s cinematic. It’s also by necessity a simplification because the same man whose name surfaces in those Mississippi stories went on killing in Brooklyn for the next 30 years with FBI knowledge, with FBI protection, with FBI money. Carmine Persico, the boss Scarpa served, died in federal prison in 2019, still serving a 139-year sentence.
Lindvecio published a book defending himself and died a free man. Sam Bowers, the clan Imperial wizard who ordered Vernon Dmer’s murder, finally went to prison in 1998 and died there. Vernon Dmer’s family is still working to make sure the world remembers what he died for. Linda Scarpa, the daughter who watched her father become a monster, wrote a memoir titled The Mafia Hitman’s Daughter.
And the FBI has never officially confirmed that Gregory Scarpa was ever in Mississippi at all. That’s the real story behind by any means. Not a clean redemption. A government accused of trading a clansman’s confession for a hitman’s protected career. A federal agency that paid an admitted murderer for years.
And a Mississippi farmer named Vernon Dmer who stood at the door of his burning house with a shotgun while his children ran out the back. and died so that other black Americans could vote. Vernon Dmer was the hero. Gregory Scarpa was the weapon. And the questions about who pointed that weapon and what they let him do afterward or why 60 years later this remains one of the dirtiest open secrets in American law enforcement.
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