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Five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter Peter Lance draws on three decades of once-secret FBI files and exclusive new interviews to disclose the epic saga of Colombo family capo Gregory Scarpa Sr.
"The perfect mix of thorough research and gripping storytelling."—NPRGregory Scarpa Sr. spent more than thirty years as a paid top echelon FBI informant while wreaking havoc as a drug dealer, loan shark, bank robber, hijacker, high-end securities thief, and killer. A Mafia capo whose nicknames were "Grim Reaper" and "Killing Machine," Scarpa was enlisted by the FBI in the 1960s. His debriefings on Mafia activities went straight to J. Edgar Hoover, revealing the structure of Cosa Nostra long before the celebrated Valachi hearings. In forty-two years of murder and racketeering, Scarpa served only thirty days in jail. But Scarpa's most deadly reign of terror came from 1980 to 1992—while he was a paid informant under Supervisory Special Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, who ran two organized crime squads in the FBI's New York Office.
In Deal with the Devil, Peter Lance peels back the layers of Scarpa's unholy alliance with the FBI. Through exclusive interviews with Scarpa's son and other wiseguys and more than 1,150 pages of confidential briefing memos, Lance traces links between the Scarpa case, the infamous Mafia Cops case, and more in this page-turning work of investigative journalism that reads like a Scorsese film.