March 31, 2006 – 8:02 p.m.
When a much-respected veteran FBI agent was indicted in New York this week on charges that he helped Italian mobsters carry out four murders, probably the least surprised official in Washington was Rep.
Delahunt, a former district attorney, played a key role in the investigation of corruption in the Boston office of the FBI years back, where a handful of top agents were engaged in rackets and murder with the legendary Irish mobster Whitey Bulger and his gang.
In the winter of 2005, Delahunt told me in an interview, he was contacted by attorneys involved in a case of corruption in the NYPD, where two officers were suspected of working as hitmen for the mob.
“People implicated in the case” visited him in Massachusetts, Delahunt told me Friday, because they had heard about his role in the Boston case. They had also read stories about legislation he had introduced (HR 4132) with Rep.
The Law Enforcement Cooperation Act, as they call it, would make it a crime for FBI agents and employees not to inform state and local prosecutors of crimes by their informants.
Months ago, Delahunt had told me that the bill also had potentially important ramifications for the U.S. war on terror, where Islamic informants are likely to be even more murderous than American gangsters, if that’s possible.
“It would relate to informants working in any capacity” for the FBI, said John Kivlin, Delahunt’s counsel.
I asked Kivlin why the bill was restricted to the informants and not extended to the FBI agents themselves.
“Maybe we should have put that in,” he said with a laugh.
R. Lindley DeVecchio, the veteran FBI agent indicted March 30, was “well respected,” according to media reports.
And indeed, an FBI colleague who has known him for years e-mailed me, “Lin is innocent.”
DeVecchio entered a not guilty plea on Thursday.
But according to Kivlin, who was Delahunt’s first assistant D.A. during the probe of corruption in the Boston FBI office, “agents who worked with him were confronting him openly.”
Kivlin’s point of view is borne out in a Sept. 2005 special report by the Justice Department Inspector General on “The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Compliance with the Attorney General’s Investigative Guidelines.”
Justice Department guidelines require the FBI to report crimes, or impending crimes, to relevant state and local officials.
“It doesn’t mean an FBI agent has to drop the informant,” Delahunt said. “But it gives law enforcement the facts it needs to make a decision.”
“There’s a culture of concealment in the FBI,” he declared.
The report describes DeVecchio’s handling of Gregory Scarpa Jr., a captain in the Colombo crime family, who helped him put away a number of gangsters and rise to star status in the FBI between 1987 and 1992.
But just as in Boston years earlier, where FBI agents turned tips from their prize informants into promotions and pay raises, DeVecchio began taking steps to protect his own meal ticket, according to the IG report.
“For example, evidence was presented indicating that DeVecchio warned Scarpa of his pending arrest on federal credit card fraud charges and may have intervened with the sentencing judge to request lenient treatment,” the IG said.
“There also was suspicion that in 1987 DeVecchio leaked to Scarpa information that the Wimpy Boys Social Club, a favorite Colombo gathering place, was subject to court-ordered electronic surveillance.”
There were rumors that DeVecchio “tipped off Scarpa to the planned DEA arrest of his son, Gregory Scarpa Jr., and others in connection with the criminal activity at the social club; and that, as a result of the warning, Gregory Scarpa Jr. became a fugitive,” the IG said.
The FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility looked into the Scarpa affair, Kiviln says, but dropped it when DeVecchio retired.
Delahunt said such behavior is all too typical at the FBI, even years after agents went to jail in the Boston case.
“In 42 or 43 percent of these cases,” he said, “they have been noncompliant” in reporting crimes by informants.
“The Justice Department guidelines are routinely ignored by the FBI,” added Kivlin by phone from Massachusetts.
Not according to the FBI, of course.
“The FBI already has substantial oversight on the use of informants and the legal limits,” a senior official told me, strictly on a not-for-attribution basis. “Such issues are reviewed by U.S. attorneys as well as the Department of Justice and its inspector general.”
More light may be shed on all this at hearings on the Delahunt-Lungren bill.
One was planned for the fall, but could be moved up because of the New York case, said a committee aide who is not permitted to speak on the record.
“There will be hearings. Beyond that I’m not sure I can give you a time frame. I’m sure that recent events will move the issue forward.”
“We’re aren’t Boy Scouts,” legendary former CIA chief Richard Helms once uttered.
That qualified as a Washington gaffe, i.e., an unintentional blurting of the truth.
Indeed, FBI, CIA and U.S. Special Operations personnel routinely turn to lowlifes to get close to their enemy, whether it’s a mob boss, a Colombian drug kingpin or the Mafia.
But they not only use such mokes to collect information, they also use them to take down the opposition, in a kind of mutual support pact.
That was the way the U.S. government took down Colombian cartel boss Pablo Escobar in the mid-1990s, the CIA official who oversaw the operation told me a few years ago. The agency used a rival cartel to get them inside and destroy Escobar.
How such Faustian bargains blow up in agents’ faces — and they almost always do — was dramatized in the 2000 movie, Traffic.
During the cold war, the CIA had similar problems with murderous police captains and army colonels in places like Guatemala, Chile, Iran and so on, who they hired in their campaigns to beat back any signs of communism.
“Hey, we got 25 years out of the shah,” a retired CIA operations officer told me years ago, right after Islamic radicals overthrew his US-backed government.
Today, the next generation is surely working hard on recruiting al Qaeda’s Islamic rivals in Hezbollah, Hamas and a hundred splinter groups and militias to spy on al Qaeda and help us bring them down.
Or at least we hope so, don’t we?
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.