Mobster Girlfriend's Decade-Old Interview Undercuts Murder Case

NEW YORK, Nov. 1 -- To hear Linda Schiro tell it, she lived the carefree life of a Mafia moll, complete with a new Mercedes, heisted jewelry and talk around the kitchen table of murder.

Her stories of life with her boyfriend, a capo in the Colombo crime family, were convincing enough for prosecutors to haul R. Lindley DeVecchio, an FBI agent, into court on four murder charges, in a case that was billed as potentially the worst instance of law enforcement corruption in American history.

But Thursday prosecutors dropped the murder case after a reporter revealed that a decade ago Schiro had given a very different account of the killings.

"The interest of justice requires me to stand before you and ask that you dismiss the indictment," Assistant District Attorney Michael Vecchione said to Justice Gustin S. Reichbach in Kings County Supreme Court in Brooklyn.

Schiro, the prosecution's chief witness, testified on Monday that her boyfriend, Gregory Scarpa Sr., was an informant for the FBI managed by DeVecchio. Yet DeVecchio, she said, had also revealed confidential information to Scarpa, for pay, that helped set up four killings in the 1980s and early 1990s.

On Tuesday, however, journalist Tom Robbins published a story on the Village Voice Web site recounting that he and another reporter, Jerry Capeci, had interviewed Schiro in 1997 for a never-published book. On tape, Schiro had denied that DeVecchio had any involvement in two of the murders, did not mention him at all in her account of a third and said he had passed information to Scarpa for only one murder.

At the time, Robbins had promised Schiro not to publish her information in the newspaper, nor to attribute it directly to her, nor to cooperate with law enforcement inquiries.

It was only after the trial began and he realized that the case rested on Schiro's evidence -- which could send a man to prison for life -- that Robbins made the agonizing decision to break his promise and publish her story, he said in an interview.

"No journalist wants to go against a source," he said. "But life imprisonment trumps almost any promise you can make."

Defense and prosecuting attorneys subpoenaed Robbins's interview tapes, and Wednesday court was canceled as they listened to them to assess the damage to the case.

Schiro, 62 -- dressed in a dark suit and wearing a gold locket containing a photograph of her dead drug-dealing son, Joey -- testified Monday of drawing the blinds to hide DeVecchio's visits to her home.

DeVecchio, 67, a tall man in a pinstripe suit, watched her intently as she gave her testimony. The last time the two had faced one another publicly was in 1998, in a different Brooklyn courthouse, as DeVecchio testified against Scarpa's son Gregory Scarpa Jr. in a racketeering case.