Carmine the Snake by Frank DiMatteo

Author:Frank DiMatteo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2018-06-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

The Grim Reaper

“I love the smell of gunpowder,” Gregory Scarpa would say with eyes dancing.

BY THE TIME CARMINE MATURED out of his youthful reputation as an up-close-and-personal killer, his days of freedom were down to a few and he chose as his battle leader a true psychopath, a guy who would kill his own grandmother if she looked at him funny—or if the price was right. He was Gregory “The Grim Reaper” Scarpa, a stylishly dressed ladies’ man who carried thousands in cash on him at all times in case he needed to pay out an emergency bribe. Scarpa was a trip and a half, happy as a clam with a gun in his hand.

He was nuts, thought he was James Bond, and told his kids that he worked for the government. In a sense it was true, but holy shit. He was a tough guy, five-ten, 210 pounds, with a heavy build and pitch-black hair. Dating back to the 1960s, he’d been a Colombo, involved in extortion, loans, and reportedly narcotics, getting his instructions from the boss, be it Profaci, Colombo, or Persico.

By his willingness to take on the most difficult and distasteful hits, he had made himself a wealthy man, with homes in Vegas and in three of the five New York City boroughs. He once bragged that killing enemies was such a gas, he wished he could ghoul the bodies from their graves and snuff them one more time.

Scarpa HQ was the Wimpy Boys Social Club on Thirteenth Avenue in Dyker. His record was long, but he always walked, sometimes with probation, other times with the charges dropped outright.

Scarpa may have had some personality traits in common with Carmine Persico, but unlike the stoic Junior who would rather do time than rat every single time, Scarpa was not averse to cooperating with authorities.

In fact, almost bizarrely, Scarpa was a rat from the get-go. According to FBI documents, Scarpa was initially contacted in August 1961 at the start of the Gallo-Profaci War. At that time Scarpa lived in a freestanding house on a quiet street on Staten Island. The feds came to visit him at the social club he owned. They came back two or three times. Scarpa was friendly with the agents, but he didn’t give up any info. He told the feds not to contact him again because people were starting to talk about why agents kept visiting his club. The agents agreed and told him that if he changed his mind about supplying info, there was money to be made, and they gave him a number to call. Scarpa’s actual co-operation with the U.S. Government went at least as far back as 1964 when the feds used him to help solve the “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. Somewhere there’s a tape of Scarpa cajoling a KKK member to disclose where the bodies were buried—and by cajoling, I mean he beat the shit out of him and stuck a gun in his mouth.

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