FBI informants who caused mayhem on the side
ASSOCIATED PRESS
9:16 a.m., March 1, 2003
BOSTON – Here are 11 dangerous criminals who received a measure of protection from the FBI while serving as informants. Most informed in organized crime or political corruption cases, but a few were involved in highly political cases in the turbulent 1960s.
Details are drawn from interviews, court records and published reports.
DICK CAIN, aka RICARDO SCALZETTI.
He was a sheriff's investigator in Cook County, Ill., who joined the mob and rose to become right-hand man to Chicago boss Sam Giancana. Cain was convicted of conspiracy in a robbery and sentenced to 10 years in prison. An FBI informant who helped solve that crime was murdered after Cain helped unmask him. Nevertheless, Cain was later recruited as an FBI informant.
"We had been turning a blind eye on his machinations as he tried to take over gambling in Chicago. What an ambition! The deal was that we would not focus on his activity if he spun off his competitors to us," Cain's FBI handler, William Roemer, wrote in his book, "Accardo: The Genuine Godfather."
While informing for Roemer, who is now dead, Cain became a suspect in a 1972 gangland killing. Roemer said he initially dropped the informant, but Cain wasn't prosecuted and soon went back to informing for Roemer.
Cain was killed in an apparent mob hit in 1973. Years later, Roemer remembered him as "one of my closest friends."
GREGORY "THE GRIM REAPER" SCARPA SR.
He was both a Colombo family mob captain in New York City and longtime FBI informant. Scarpa sided with mob boss Carmine Persico in the early 1990s in a war to put down a family mutiny. Authorities came to suspect that Scarpa, while acting as an informant, took part in as many as 13 murders by the Persico side.
Hearing of one Scarpa murder, handler Lindley DeVecchio slapped a desk and declared triumphantly, "We're going to win this thing!" another agent later testified. Government prosecutors later conceded that evidence suggested DeVecchio leaked information to Scarpa, including names of enemies cooperating with the FBI. DeVecchio later said FBI supervisors knew of the murder suspicions but let him keep using the informant.
Scarpa eventually pleaded guilty to committing three of the murders and playing a role in others.
MICHAEL BURNETT, aka MICHAEL RAYMOND.
A swindler who was sentenced to 13 years for fraud in 1979, he was also suspected in at least five murders dating back to the early 1970s. Authorities believed the killings were Burnett's way of eliminating witnesses to his scams. Nevertheless, he was enlisted as an informant in FBI stings on corrupt public officials in Chicago and New York in the 1980s.
Florida police who wanted to talk to Burnett about murders say the FBI isolated him while he worked as an informant. Later, he was charged with a 1975 murder, but the case collapsed when a witness recanted. He was finally sentenced to life in prison for plotting the 1994 murder of a witness set to testify against him in a bank fraud case.
The prosecutor, Margaret Giordano, assistant U.S. attorney in the New York borough of Brooklyn, calls Burnett "a serial killer in the true sense of the word – except he is motivated by greed." She says the FBI was aware of the murder suspicions during his years as an informant.
LENNY PATRICK.
He rose to become a lieutenant in the Chicago mob and later admitted in court to killing six men. Faced with racketeering accusations, he agreed in 1989 to become an FBI informant, wearing a wire to a meeting with Chicago mob boss Gus Alex. Paid $7,200 over two months as an informant, Patrick kept working as a mob leader, according to FBI handler Roemer.
Patrick testified against Alex in 1992 and helped send him to prison. Once asked in court about suspicions he had killed more than the six victims he acknowledged, Patrick replied in a raspy voice, "No, I've run out of cemeteries." Patrick later joined the federal Witness Protection Program.
JAMES "WHITEY" BULGER and STEPHEN "THE RIFLEMAN" FLEMMI.
Boston mobster Bulger worked as an FBI informant throughout the 1980s, and Flemmi, his top lieutenant, did so off and on from 1965 to 1990.
Much of the information they provided was about Boston's Angiulo crime family, which was virtually wiped out in a series of criminal cases brought by Boston-based FBI agents. As the Angiulos lost their grip, Bulger and Flemmi took over control of loan-sharking, gambling and other rackets in greater Boston.
According to court testimony, Boston FBI agents were aware of many of Bulger and Flemmi's crimes, including murders, but looked the other way, occasionally even tipping them off when state police or other agencies were on their trail. According to testimony, Bulger also bribed FBI agents while working as an informant.
Flemmi is now serving 10 years for obstruction of justice and other offenses and awaiting trial on a federal racketeering case. Bulger, a fugitive on the FBI's most wanted list, is also under indictment on racketeering charges.
Prosecutors blame the two gangsters for 18 murders, 11 committed while Bulger was working as an FBI informant.
VINCENT JAMES "JIMMY THE BEAR" FLEMMI.
Stephen's younger brother, Jimmy was recruited as an FBI informant in 1965, even though the bureau knew his goal was to become Boston's top hitman. He is believed to have killed at least eight people.
FBI documents show that Boston agents allowed innocent men to go to prison for one of the murders they knew their informant had committed. Flemmi died in prison in 1979 after Massachusetts authorities convicted him of attempted murder in another case.
GEORGE STINER and LARRY STINER.
During the social tumult of the late 1960s and early '70s, then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover identified the Black Panthers as the single greatest threat to the internal security of the country. In 1969, two leaders of the Panthers were killed at the University of California. Two brothers, George and Larry Stiner, members of a rival black nationalist group, the United Slaves, were convicted of conspiracy to commit the murders and were sentenced to life in prison. Both were FBI informants at the time of the murders, according to former agent Wesley Swearingen, who worked in the Los Angeles office.
Subsequently, a May 26, 1970, FBI memo obtained by a congressional committee disclosed that Los Angeles agents had laid a plan to secretly advise the United Slaves of the time and location of Black Panther events "in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course."
The Stiners escaped from San Quentin in 1974. Larry Stiner turned himself in 19 years later; his brother George remains at large.
GARY THOMAS ROWE JR., aka THOMAS NEAL MOORE.
In the 1960s, Rowe was an FBI informant who helped convict three Ku Klux Klan members of federal rights violations in the killing of a civil rights volunteer in Alabama. The state charged Rowe with the murder, but the case was dropped after the federal government said his work as an informant gave him immunity.
He admitted to congressional investigators that he had beaten blacks, with the permission of his FBI handlers, in order to maintain his credibility with Klansmen. He said agents told him: "We know it's something you have to do, and we understand it, and we need the information."
After five years as an FBI informant, Rowe went into the federal Witness Protection Program. He died of a heart attack in 1998.
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ROBERT FOLEY.
A roughneck from rural Kentucky, Foley first killed in 1976, shooting a man who called him a name. He was given a 35-year sentence but won parole in four years. In 1991, he was again in legal trouble on forgery and weapons counts. However, an FBI agent went before an Ohio judge and helped Foley gain release to work for the bureau as an informant.
Eight months later, while helping the FBI, he shot two brothers to death after a fist fight during a party at his home, pumping a total of 12 rounds into them. Eventually, he was convicted of those two murders and four others that took place in 1989 – the first for informing on him to his parole officer and the three others because they were witnesses. The family of the two brothers eventually sued the FBI for $12 million, saying it was responsible for their murders.
The bureau acknowledged that it broke its own rules in handling Foley, but it argued it could not foresee the murders and Foley wasn't technically an employee. A judge dismissed the suit. The bureau said several agents were "mildly sanctioned." Foley has claimed he was framed for all the murders and remains on death row in Kentucky.
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