Free The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter by Linda Scarpa Page B

out in the open. I told Greg I was worried that someone was going to come in and see him talking to an FBI agent. He told me not to worry about it, so I didn’t worry.
    That was Greg. He just did what he wanted to do. Greg didn’t fear anything or anyone, especially not the FBI. One day some FBI agents came to my house. He put a movie on for some of the agents to watch in the living room while he was in the kitchen talking to one of them.The movie he put on for them: The Godfather. He knew what he was doing.
    One time Greg, Tony and I took a ride to my sister’s house in Huntington, Long Island. She had just separated from her husband.Tony was stoned out of his brain. Greg didn’t like the way Tony was acting, so he coldcocked him. He knocked him out so bad that Tony was out for five minutes.
    Tony quit the Bureau in 1973. Some time later, the FBI wanted to have Tony killed because he became an alcoholic and was doing all these stupid things. They were afraid he was going to say or do something that would put informants and the informant program in jeopardy. When Tony was Greg’s handler, he’d go to the Flamingo Lounge, where Greg was, putting Greg in danger. Nobody there knew who Tony was, but he still wasn’t supposed to do that. Greg was going to kill him for the FBI, but Tony died before he had the chance.
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    That was how my mother remembered what happened in Mississippi, but we’ve discovered the facts may be a little different. What’s interesting, though, is the information about my father buying a television set from a suspect who owned or managed an appliance store appeared in each and every story.
    However, the account from my father’s first FBI handler, Tony Villano, the agent my mother mentioned, was written in the late 1970s. That seemed to be where the story about the TV first surfaced, leading us to believe that somehow that story was incorporated in the telling—and continued retelling—of my father’s subsequent work in Mississippi. Either that, or maybe more than one of the three suspects—or even all three—really did sell televisions.
    In 1977, Villano wrote a book, Brick Agent: Inside the Mafia for the FBI, about his years in the FBI working with Mafia informants. (During Hoover’s time, a street agent for the FBI was said to be “on the bricks.”) Two of the people in the book, who were identified with pseudonyms, were actually my father.
    In his book Villano talked about the first time my father had a falling-out with the FBI, which was before the two ever met. Apparently, my father believed that the Bureau owed him $1,500 for the work he did for them in Mississippi.
    After Villano found my father’s name in the FBI’s filed on closed informants, he got him the money he was owed. However, he wasn’t able to get my father to cooperate with him. So he challenged my father, who he said was built like “an ox of a man,” to an arm-wrestling contest. The fact that they wrestled to a draw impressed my father, who decided to “make a marriage” with Villano, as the agent called it.
    Villano thought of my father as “a friend,” and he bent—as well as broke—the law to help him. He even used my father as his bookie to make illegal sports bets for him. One time a criminal who could have implicated my father in some robberies offered to cooperate with the FBI. Villano got the man to back off by making up a story that the Colombo family planned to kidnap his daughter if he talked. That guy died in prison.
    In his book Villano said that all the time he worked with my father, he had to reassure himself that their relationship wasn’t “the ultimate perversion of the whole law-enforcement idea. In my mind, what we did was justified on the grounds of the greatest good.”
    But other FBI agents didn’t agree. “I had a discussion with Tony that made me think that Scarpa