Feds Delete Colombo Capo's Decisive Role in Civil Rights Murder Probe

The car in which three civil rights volunteers were murdered in 1964.

The Justice Department recently closed a decades-long, multi-pronged investigation into the 1964 murders of three civil rights volunteers in Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan.

On June 21 that state's Attorney General, James Hood, held a press conference during which he said, "I am convinced that during the last 52 years, investigators have done everything possible under the law to find those responsible and hold them accountable .... we have determined that there is no likelihood of any additional convictions. Absent any new information presented to the F.B.I. or my office, this case will be closed."

The Justice Department's report to the Mississippi AG on the final investigation into the June 21, 1964 murders of Michael Schwerner, 24, and Andrew Goodman, 20, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, 21, a black Mississippian, is 48 pages long and includes not one reference to Colombo crime family captain/high-echelon informant Gregory Scarpa.

If anyone believes the KKK is dead or dormant or inactive, they'd be flat out wrong. The white supremacist group has more than 5,000 members and associates comprising more than 40 formal groups in many states across this nation; each group is made up of chapters. There are more than 100 KKK chapters in America.

"Of all the types of right-wing hate groups that exist in the United States, the Klan remains the one with the greatest number of national and local organizations around the country," the Anti-Defamation League noted.

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The most recent investigation — the FBI's third since 1964 — launched following passage of the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act in 2008, which created a United States Justice Department unit expressly to investigate unsolved civil rights-era homicides.

The murders, which occurred while the three students were driving through Neshoba and Lauderdale Counties, Mississippi, on a remote back-road (and were depicted in the film Mississippi Burning), prompted an intense federal investigation. That investigation, plus a re-examination in more recent years, led to eight trial convictions and one guilty plea.

Edgar Ray Killen, a KKK member who masterminded the triple homicide, was convicted in 2005.

The Mississippi Burning case is closed -- and not only have the Feds not delineated Scarpa's already well-known role in at least two civil rights cases (during which he served as the FBI's enforcer, a for-hire legitimate tough guy who obtained confessions through torture or threats of torture and murder) they have completely erased the violent, murderous longtime Mafioso/informant from the report.

The nearly unbelievable news that a violent member of one of New York's Five Families had actually worked in the FBI's employment, a decision made by J. Edgar Hoover himself, was broken by Jerry Capeci and Tom Robbins; Capeci didn't formally write about the June release of the DOJ document, but he previously noted his role in breaking the story for the New York Daily News, published on June 21, 1994:

GREG Scarpa, who died of AIDS in 1994, lived his entire life on the edge, functioning as a top echelon FBI informer for some 35 years. A week after Scarpa's death, Tom Robbins and I reported in The New York Daily News that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used Scarpa to solve the Ku Klux Klan slayings of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964.

On May 24, 1996, a federal judge unsealed reams of FBI documents that confirmed that the FBI used Scarpa on secret missions to the deep South during the civil rights era. The released papers do not mention the 1964 case, in which Scarpa kidnapped a Klansman and threatened him with death to learn where the bodies of the victims were buried, but they reveal that he made a similar mission in 1966. "If he'd lived 400 years ago, he would have been a pirate," says a former Scarpa lawyer.

Read Capeci and Robbins original story about Scarpa's involvement in the case here. 

Peter Lance, who vigorously covered Scarpa's role as a federal informant in his book Deal With the Devil, noted on Huffington Post that "the incident inspired the film... which wrongly concluded that the case was solved after an African American FBI agent was sent to Mississippi and interrogated a KKK sympathizer."

He also noted that "although the DOJ report concludes that “The FBI conducted approximately 1000 interviews during the summer and fall of 1964,” the truth is that the location of the bodies, buried beneath an earthen damn on the farm of a Klan associate, was not discovered until after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent Colombo crime family capo Greg “The Grim Reaper” Scarpa Sr. down to Mississippi."

Then, a decade later, the Colombo crime family captain "kidnapped and tortured a local KKK-friendly politician into giving up the burial site."

"Only then did the Bureau break the case," Lance reported.

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But there’s not a single word of Scarpa’s role in the report, which simply references him in a cryptic note regarding how "in late July 1964, an informant provided accurate information about the location of the bodies."

"The report otherwise attributes the discovery of the victims to good police work," Lance wrote.

"In fact, Scarpa’s Sr.’s mission in what the Bureau dubbed the MISSBURN case, was actually the first of two civil rights related interrogations he made at the behest of the FBI Director. The second took place in January, 1996 following the KKK firebombing and murder of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer," Lance noted.

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According to Lance, an Assistant FBI Director approved Scarpa for the assignment as can be gleaned via a January 21, 1996 Airtel sent from the FBI's Washington DC-based headquarters to the FBI's New York office.

Heavily redacted, the document's reference to Scarpa Sr.’s name was blacked out. The Airtel further discloses "approved expense funds for him and his common law wife to travel via Mobile, Alabama to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where they would link with Special Agents."

"In the hot summer of 1964 J. Edgar Hoover finally found a way to make some affirmative use of the Brooklyn hit man who had been on his payroll for three years...

Lance provides the "full account" of both investigations in an excerpt from Deal With The Devil.

Read it here

Want to give quick shout out to R.D.'s little Evie.... CONGRATS MOM & DAD 

Hopefully, we'll leave behind a better world in which she can live....