CIA and FBI ties to organized crime is John Kiriakou’s survey of documented partnerships between U.S. intelligence and the mob. During World War II the FBI worked with the Genovese family to secure the ports of Brooklyn and Newark; the CIA repeatedly used the Santo Trafficante family of Tampa — beginning around 1959, after Castro took Cuba, specifically with Santo Trafficante Sr., who took CIA money to move against Castro but, by Kiriakou’s account, never really did anything — in its plots to assassinate Fidel Castro; and in the 1980s it worked with the Pablo Escobar cartel against communist separatists in Colombia — while the DEA fought the same cartel.[1][2][3][4][5] He also cites the FBI recruiting Colombo-family hitman Greg Scarpa to find the bodies of murdered civil-rights workers — whom Kiriakou also refers to as “freedom riders” — in Mississippi; Scarpa kidnapped a Klansman and shot him in the knees to make him talk, and “like magic” the FBI found the bodies.[6][7][8]
Greg Scarpa
Kiriakou gives an extended account of Scarpa — a Staten Island-born Gambino/Colombo associate he says killed as many as 120 people on behalf of the mob. Scarpa’s FBI handler became so close to him that the agent began feeding Scarpa inside information about FBI surveillance, letting Scarpa evade law enforcement for roughly 25 years — a relationship for which the handler was later prosecuted.[8][9] Scarpa, who refused any blood transfusion except from a fellow Italian, was unknowingly given HIV-infected blood by his own Italian driver during an emergency transfusion; he later died of AIDS, at which point the mafia and the FBI both severed ties with him. He is buried under a small headstone in Staten Island next to his son, who was killed in a bad deal at 27.[10][11]
Institutional friction
Kiriakou separately notes that federal prison guards are poorly trained, sometimes illiterate, forcing prisoners themselves to read and hand out mail at mail call.[12] He says the CIA can never hold operational primacy for a recruitment operation on U.S. soil — that has to run through the FBI — which he calls a component of the “very deep and visceral hatred” the two agencies have for one another.[13]