DA, FBI Get Morality Lesson

The dropping of the case against former FBI Special Agent Lindley DeVecchio for allegedly providing information to a mobster that facilitated four murders was a just result for a matter in which two law-enforcement agencies wound up badly embarrassed.

The Brooklyn District Attorney's Office in withdrawing the charges essentially admitted that it put far too much faith in the mobster's longtime mistress as its primary witness. But while Mr. DeVecchio expressed righteous anger at his prosecutors after the case was dropped, his dealings with the late Gregory Scarpa reflect poorly on himself and the FBI, even if you believe Mr. DeVecchio did not dispense information that contributed to the four murders.

The case unraveled after Linda Schiro's testimony last week that Mr. DeVecchio told Mr. Scarpa of potential witnesses against himself or his son and sometimes furnished information about where they could be located. Her statements before the Brooklyn jury directly contradicted what she told two veteran reporters a decade ago, when she implicated Mr. DeVecchio in one of the murders but said he had no involvement in the other three.

This presented a dilemma for the reporters, Jerry Capeci, a longtime organized-crime reporter for the Daily News who now maintains his own Web site, and Tom Robbins, a labor and investigative reporter for the Village Voice who previously worked with Mr. Capeci at the News.

When they spoke to Ms. Schiro in 1997, they guaranteed her confidentiality and pledged to use the material she gave them, unattributed, only for a book and not in any newspaper articles. The book proposal never went anywhere.

Her testimony presented a real ethical dilemma for two reporters with well-earned reputations for protecting sources. Her changed story in front of the jury did not necessarily mean she was perjuring herself, but if her earlier version of events was known, it would certainly damage her credibility and give the jury good reason to have doubts about Mr. DeVecchio's guilt.

Reporters are loathe to reveal confidential sources, even when faced with the possibility of jail. Part of the reason is practical - concern that sources will not trust them if they betray a confidence, no matter the rationale. Part of it springs from something more intangible - a sense of honor.

In this case, the fact that Ms. Schiro had testified publicly raised questions as to whether the reporters were still bound by their pledge of a decade ago. Even more importantly, if they did not come forward, there was a serious prospect that Mr. DeVecchio would be convicted and sentenced to a lengthy prison term.

Mr. Capeci and Mr. Robbins ultimately decided that the wrong inherent in sending away the ex-FBI agent based on questionable testimony took precedence over protecting a source who had in a sense waived their pledge by going public about the murders. Mr. Robbins wrote a long piece on the Voice Web site Oct. 30 noting the discrepancies between Ms. Schiro's court testimony and what she had told them, and appeared before the parties and presented copies of the tapes the following day.

Faced with a difficult choice, Mr. Robbins did the honorable thing. That would have distinguished him in any event, but particularly so in contrast to the Brooklyn DA and the FBI.

Information emerged over this past weekend, from both the Detective who persuaded Ms. Schiro to cooperate and a writer who was familiar with the book proposal by Mr. Robbins and Mr. Capeci, that the Brooklyn DA's Office knew of the contradictions between what Ms. Schiro said a decade ago and what she told investigators before going to the jury. A revelation almost as astonishing as what happened in court came when a spokesman for DA Charles Hynes said that his investigators were aware of Ms. Schiro having spoken to the two reporters but did not ask what she had said because they assumed they wouldn't tell them. It shows the danger of making assumptions.

The DA's Office also failed to pay heed to that old cliché: "consider the source." Federal prosecutors sought to bring a case against Mr. DeVecchio about a dozen years ago but ultimately decided Ms. Schiro was an unreliable witness. In their minds, she shared that quality with her longtime boyfriend, Mr. Scarpa, whose information about the two men who later became known as the "Mafia Cops" was riddled with enough inconsistencies that an early case against them was scuttled.

Mr. DeVecchio, meanwhile, should put a leash on the outrage he expressed toward the DA.

Investigators and prosecutors must sometimes make deals with the devil to convict criminals who are even worse, with the most obvious example being Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, who admitted to committing 19 murders but got off easy because he was the primary witness against John Gotti 15 years ago.

But Mr. Gravano was not committing murders while helping the Feds to make their case. Mr. Scarpa, in contrast, was a killing machine during his years on the FBI payroll. In a grotesque irony, it was those murders that immunized him against fellow mobsters' suspicions that he was cooperating with law-enforcement.

Investigators may justify criminality so an informant can maintain his cover, but that can't include looking the other way for a murder.

The sad truth is that it was not until Mr. Robbins stepped forward that a clear, moral line was drawn in a case that should humble the two law-enforcement agencies involved.

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