Free The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter by Linda Scarpa

thank you, number one, for not killing me. Number two, I learned a lot from that. I have a daughter now and she stays clear of all that kind of bullshit. She’s seventeen, and a sweetheart. She’s involved in softball and other sports, and she’s a great girl. Thank you for giving me these opportunities.
    Like I told Linda, “Turn your wounds into wisdom.” My wounds have been part of a long journey. They’re part of who I am today.

CHAPTER 5
    J. EDGAR HOOVER, THE FBI AND MY FATHER
    My father loved James Bond.
    For as far back as I could remember, my brother and I used to watch 007 movies with him. We watched every single one of them—twice. I was probably around nine or ten when he started telling us he was James Bond. I never really understood what he meant.
    â€œThat’s your father. You don’t know your father. Call me Greg, Greg Bond.”
    â€œDad, how is that you? You’re an agent? Like James Bond is a secret agent?”
    Then I’d look at him and laugh. He always had such a crazy sense of humor. I just figured he was playing with us.
    â€œOkay, Dad. You’re a secret agent.”
    It wasn’t until I was older that I learned what he was talking about. When my father told us he was working for the FBI, my interpretation wasn’t the same as other people’s interpretation—that he was a rat.
    I didn’t fully understand what he was, but I never knew him to be a rat because he never put anybody in jail. He never took the stand and testified against anybody. So when I heard he was with the FBI, I thought he was with the FBI—meaning he was an agent.
    I was impressed by the fact that he worked for the FBI. No wonder he used to call himself “Greg Bond.” I never said to him, “Dad, oh, my God, you can’t do that because you’re a gangster.”
    I felt that my father really was above everybody else. I thought he was invincible: He was a gangster, yet he was working with the FBI. It was as if he had an edge on everyone else. I learned later that he really didn’t.
    My father first got involved with the FBI back in the 1960s. He was arrested on March 7, 1960, for armed robbery and released on bond. He was thirty-two at the time and a made man in the Profaci crime family, which later became the Colombo crime family. Right after that, the FBI contacted him to get information about his brother, Salvatore Scarpa, who was also a made man in the Profaci family. He told them to get lost.
    In August 1961, the FBI contacted him at his Wimpy Boys Social Club because they wanted some information about a feud between two factions in the Profaci family. My father refused again. He also told them to stop contacting him because people were starting to ask questions. The FBI agents agreed, but they told him to call them if he ever wanted to talk.
    On October 27, he called the New York office of the FBI and said he wanted to meet with one of the agents. He officially started working for the FBI under the Top Echelon Informant Program on November 21, 1961. But my father wasn’t about to take orders from anyone—not even the FBI. He told the agents that they were not to contact him with any assignments. The agents agreed to “merely accept whatever information he desires to furnish.”
    There’s an old saying, “While you’re playing checkers, I’m playing chess.” That pertained to my father. He made them think they had the upper hand, but they really didn’t. He only gave them the information that he wanted them to know.
    My father wasn’t just a regular informant. He helped save J. Edgar Hoover’s ass on three separate occasions in the ’60s. During that time Hoover was getting a lot of pressure for not protecting the civil rights of African Americans in the Deep South. Hoover enlisted my father’s help—first to find the killer of Medgar Evers, then to find the bodies of three