The Gumar, the Fed and the Mobster

Oct. 30, 2007 — -- The gangster boyfriend who showers you with jewelry and a brand new Mercedes is a given. But there's also the fling with the 18-year-old supermarket delivery boy, the practical jokes involving chopped-off body parts and the son whose best friend is killed on the orders of your beau.

And, of course, the casual attitude toward the truth, the unhealthy predilection for painkillers and antidepressants, and the mission to help the FBI solve the murder of civil rights workers in the deep South: It's a life of "The Sopranos" meets "Desperate Housewives," with a little bit of "Mississippi Burning" thrown in.

Linda Schiro is not your average big-haired, fur-wearing "gumar," though at first glance her story has all the trappings of the quintessential mob mistress.

Schiro, the longtime girlfriend of mobster Gregory "The Grim Reaper" Scarpa Sr., is also the chief prosecution witness against former FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio, who is accused by the government of supplying information to Scarpa that helped the gangster murder four people.

The moment she took the stand in Brooklyn Supreme Court Monday, the 62-year-old brunette with parted, medium-length hair, a gold necklace and a black pantsuit enthralled the judge and spectators with stories about her life amid La Cosa Nostra.

From her childhood on the streets of Bensonhurst, an Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn, Schiro grew up in "this way of life," as she describes the mafia. A middle child raised largely by her father after her mother's death from stomach cancer, she only spent a few months after high school doing legitimate work as a clerk on Wall Street before becoming Scarpa's mob mistress at age 17.

While dating low-level gangster Larry Pistone during the early 1960s, Schiro went out one night to the Flamingo Lounge, a bar in her neighborhood. She was at the bar with two friends when Scarpa walked in, marched straight over to her and asked to be introduced.

"He told me how beautiful I was, he asked me to dance and he asked for my number," Schiro testified Monday morning.

Soon they started going out and it didn't take long before Scarpa, who was 35 and married, told her that he was involved in the Colombo crime family, one of the five ruthless mob families that dominated crime in New York City.

Though most mobsters follow an unwritten rule that their criminal lives should be shielded from their women, Scarpa flaunted his criminality in front of Schiro, she said.

"If we were in a bar or restaurant, other guys would come in and give him money, shylock money," said Schiro. "Greg hijacked TVs and stored them in my father's apartment … He told me about everything -- committing burglaries, the numbers racket, murders."

One night in the Flamingo, she saw Scarpa's propensity for violence up close. When George, the bartender, insulted a friend of his, Scarpa took him from behind the bar, "took him in the bathroom and flushed his head in the toilet," Schiro testified.