You Can Go Home Again

For Roy Lindley Devecchio, life was back to normal. The silver-haired grandfather and his wife, Carolyn, ate cottage-cheese pancakes at a breakfast place called Millie's. In the gated community where he lives in Sarasota, Fla., he resumed his duties as president of the homeowners' association and chatted with residents about parched lawns and insect spraying. His neighbors, he tells NEWSWEEK, had mostly welcomed him back after a six-week absence in New York. Few seemed to notice that for the past year and a half he had worn a court-ordered monitoring device around his ankle.

Roy (Lin) DeVecchio is accustomed to living a double life. In March 2006, prosecutors in the Brooklyn district attorney's office accused him of being a corrupt FBI agent who sold fatal secrets to the mob. But then they abruptly dropped murder charges against him earlier this month. Until that point, he had been living in a strange limbo, the quiet retiree who was either a mob-busting hero of the FBI—or a mobbed-up traitor, depending on whose story was to be believed. In DeVecchio's version, he was the victim of a former mob moll who wanted to get rich from books or movies by smearing his good name.

During his 33-year career in the FBI, DeVecchio was a respected, even revered, G-man who ran investigations into organized crime; he helped cripple New York's Five Families. His specialty was handling confidential informants, wiseguys who leaked information to the Feds. Tall and tough-talking with a North Jersey accent, DeVecchio was able to win the respect of mobsters and gumshoes alike. His prized informant was Gregory Scarpa Sr., a capo for the Colombo crime family known as the Grim Reaper. Scarpa's ability to evade arrest, despite years of brutal crime, was the stuff of mob lore. Scarpa's associates said he had a law-enforcement source he called "the girlfriend," who gave him, in effect, a free pass to kill.

State prosecutors said DeVecchio tipped off Scarpa to rats or rival wiseguys and turned a blind eye when they were snuffed out. In return, the mob rewarded DeVecchio with stolen jewelry, rubberband-bound rolls of cash and prepaid hotel rooms stocked with champagne and prostitutes, prosecutors said. Pleading not guilty, DeVecchio denied it all.

The allegations of the now collapsed and discredited case are the stuff of movies. In 1984, when a mob moll began singing to the Feds, DeVecchio allegedly informed Scarpa. The mob capo invited the woman, Mary Bari, 31, to the Wimpy Boys Social Club in Brooklyn. Scarpa's own son, Gregory Jr., held her on the floor while his father shot her three times in the head, according to court files. A few days later, said the prosecutors, Scarpa and DeVecchio "shared a chuckle" that the snitch's body had been dumped beneath an elevated subway line just two blocks from Scarpa's house. In a 1990 case, DeVecchio allegedly warned Scarpa that an 18-year-old named Patrick Porco might implicate Scarpa's son Joey in the murder of another teenager. A Scarpa crew allegedly picked up Porco and executed him. Porco, one of Joey Scarpa's close friends, attempted to block the bullets with his arms and hands, according to court testimony. When Joey moped around after Porco's execution, DeVecchio supposedly retorted he would feel worse in jail.

Some of DeVecchio's fellow G-men began to wonder about him when he seemed to take sides in a mob war that broke out in 1991. At the time, DeVecchio was running the squad investigating the Colombo family. Prosecutors said Scarpa asked a favor from his FBI handler: could he possibly provide the address of a rival gangster, Lorenzo Lampasi? Prosecutors said DeVecchio checked FBI surveillance and not only supplied Scarpa with an address but the time Lampasi, 66, habitually left for work, along with a description of how he would get out of his car to close the gate to the parking lot near his home. Nearly a year into the war, allegedly armed with the information, Scarpa and his hit men pulled up alongside Lampasi as he closed the gate one morning and shot him to death.