FBI used gangster to solve civil-rights case, girlfriend says
NEW YORK - The FBI used mob muscle to solve the 1964 disappearance of three civil-rights volunteers in Mississippi, a gangster’s ex-girlfriend testified Monday, becoming the first witness to repeat in open court a story that has been underworld lore for years.
Linda Schiro said that her boyfriend, Mafia tough guy Gregory Scarpa Sr., was recruited by the FBI to help find the volunteers’ bodies. She said Scarpa later told her he put a gun in a Ku Klux Klansman’s mouth and forced him to reveal the whereabouts of the victims.
The FBI has never acknowledged that Scarpa, nicknamed “The Grim Reaper,” was involved in the case.
Schiro took the stand as a witness for the prosecution at the trial of former FBI agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, who is charged in state court with four counts of murder in what authorities have called one of the worst law-enforcement corruption cases in U.S. history.
Prosecutors say Scarpa plied DeVecchio with cash, jewelry, liquor and prostitutes in exchange for confidential information on suspected rats and rivals in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Scarpa died behind bars in 1994.
The notion that Scarpa strong-armed a Klan member into giving up information about one of the most notorious crimes of the civil-rights era has been talked about in mob circles for years.
It supposedly happened during the search for civil-rights workers James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, who were beaten and shot by a gang of Klansmen and buried in an earthen dam near Philadelphia, Miss. The case was famously dramatized in the movie “Mississippi Burning.”
Investigators struggled for answers in the early days of the case, stymied by stonewalling Klan members.
Schiro testified Monday that she and Scarpa traveled to Mississippi in 1964 after he was recruited by the FBI. She said Scarpa helped find the volunteers’ bodies by “putting a gun in the guy’s mouth and threatening him.”
The killings galvanized the struggle for equality in the South and helped bring about passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Seven people were convicted at the time, but none served more than six years.
Mississippi later reopened the case, winning a manslaughter conviction against former Klansmen and part-time preacher Edgar Ray Killen two years ago. He is serving a 60-year prison sentence.