The Mafia Hit Man's Daughter by Linda Scarpa Page A

couldn’t reach verdicts in the case in 1964. But finally Beckwith was convicted of the murder in 1994, dying in prison in 2001 at age eighty.
    In his book Villano said after he confirmed the story with my father, he “was ashamed that the people I worked for had to go outside the bureau to find someone to perform their dirty work.”
    The second time Hoover and the FBI needed my father’s help was to find the bodies of the three murdered civil rights workers—twenty-one-year-old African-American James Chaney from Mississippi and two white men from New York, Andrew Goodman, twenty, and Michael Schwerner, twenty-four—in Philadelphia, Mississippi. That was the case that my mother remembered.
    This story was strikingly similar to the Medgar Evers story. The suspect, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, owned an appliance store. My father bought a TV, went back to pick it up late at night, kidnapped the guy, took him to an undisclosed location, put a gun in his mouth and demanded to know where the bodies were. The guy lied at first; then he finally told the truth.
    The FBI recovered the bodies, thanks to my father. After a mistrial in 1967, Edgar Ray Killen, who was thought to be the ringleader, was again charged with three counts of murder on January 7, 2005, forty-one years after the crime. He was convicted of manslaughter in the deaths of the three civil rights workers in June of that year.
    The third time Hoover and the FBI sought out my father’s help during the civil rights era was in 1966 when they asked him to find out who had firebombed Vernon Dahmer’s house in Forrest County, Mississippi on January 10, 1966. Dahmer was an African-American farmer and merchant who had agreed to make his grocery store available as a place for African Americans to pay poll taxes.
    Dahmer’s wife and ten-year-old daughter were also badly burned in the fire, which had been set by Ku Klux Klansmen. “On January 21st, the Jackson, Mississippi office of the FBI called the New York office and, as recorded in an internal memo, requested the use of informant NY-3461—Gregory Scarpa—for a special assignment.”
    Klansman Lawrence Byrd, the owner of Byrd’s Radio & TV Service in Laurel, Mississippi, was a suspect in the case. Again, as in the other stories, my father went to the shop around nine at night to buy a television just as Byrd was about to close up. My father asked Byrd to put the TV in the car because he had a bad back. Then he and an FBI agent kidnapped Byrd and drove him to a barracks at Camp Shelby, a military base in the Mississippi swampland. My father beat the crap and a confession out of Byrd, who was ultimately sentenced to ten years for arson.
    In 2007—after extensive research—Judge W.O. “Chet” Dillard, a former Mississippi district attorney, published the book The Final Curtain: Burning Mississippi by the FBI. The book was written to expose FBI tampering in civil rights cases in Mississippi.
    In his book onetime DA Dillard said, “The records prove beyond a doubt that JEH (J. Edgar Hoover) sent Scarpa into Mississippi [on] three different cases. The treatment of a key man or men were [ sic ] all the same. Kidnapping, torture and extortion to get what they wanted. They are the same story, only the names are changed.”
    My father had a falling-out with the bureau in 1975 and stopped providing information to the feds. But in 1980, Special Agent R. Lindley “Lin” DeVecchio wanted my father back. And he got him. A highly decorated FBI agent, Lin DeVecchio became my father’s handler. “Mr. Delo” was Lin’s code name when he telephoned my father.
    My mother can tell you more about Lin DeVecchio.
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    When Greg decided to meet with Lin, we were living on Fifty-Fifth Street. Greg didn’t want Lin coming down that block because it was a dead end. He was afraid that if anyone came to the house when Lin was there, there