Mafia Son: The Scarpa Mob Family, the FBI, and a Story of Betrayal

Bestselling author Sandra Harmon uses her inside access to the Mob, law enforcement, and jailed Mafioso Gregory Scarpa Jr. to tell an epic true story of crime and betrayal.

The Scarpas were a Mafia dynasty led by Greg Scarpa Sr., so notorious for his addiction to violence and murder that he was nicknamed “The Grim Reaper.” His son, Gregory Jr., a promising young athlete, worshipped his ruthless and manipulative father, and slowly he was drawn into his father’s dark world. What no one but father and son knew was that for thirty years, starting in the 1960s, Scarpa Sr. was an informant, working intimately with FBI handlers. For decades, his connection to the FBI—including the much-publicized agent Lin DeVecchio—protected him, granting him a virtual license to kill. However, when faced with arrest in the late 1980s, Scarpa asked his son to leave his wife and children, and take the fall for his father.

In 1995, after years in prison, Gregory Jr. was transferred to Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and re-indicted on superseding charges. There he was imprisoned alongside Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and made a deal with the government to get information from Yousef in exchange for leniency. A year later, he furnished the feds with detailed intelligence on what would eventually result in the September 11 attacks. But, incredibly, Gregory’s desperate warnings were unheeded, and he was sentenced to forty-years-to-life in isolation at the notorious ADMAX, the most secure federal prison in the country, in Florence, Colorado. There, he would supply the FBI with intelligence on Oklahoma City bomber and fellow prisoner Terry Nichols. Again, his contribution was ignored, and Gregory remains at ADMAX, where he believes he will one day be murdered.

A story that gained national notoriety in 2007 as a result of former FBI agent Lin DeVecchio’s sensational murder trial, at which Sandra Harmon testified, this is an unforgettable tale of violence, wealth, and sex, set in a world where a man’s word is both everything and nothing.