Who Was Greg Scarpa? The Colombo Hitman Who Secretly Worked for the FBI
Mobsters DailyGreg Scarpa was a Colombo crime family enforcer, a killer nicknamed "the Grim Reaper," who secretly worked for the FBI for over 30 years. He is the true story behind the 2025 film By Any Means — a double life among the most controversial in Mafia history.
Who was Greg Scarpa?
Gregory Scarpa Sr., born in Brooklyn in 1928, rose to capo in the Colombo family, running a Bensonhurst crew. He was feared: an enforcer suspected of numerous murders, exactly who the government should have put away.
Instead, the FBI signed him up. Scarpa became a Top Echelon informant in the early 1960s, and the relationship lasted three decades. He fed the Bureau information while still committing crimes inside the family — a contradiction the FBI tolerated. The film's invented agent, Wayne Strider, is the clean version of a bureau that knew exactly how dirty its source was.
The 1964 Mississippi mission
The episode By Any Means dramatizes is real. In the summer of 1964, civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were murdered in Mississippi, and the local investigation went nowhere. Per later accounts drawn from FBI files, the Bureau flew Scarpa south, where he kidnapped Klan member Lawrence Byrd, pistol-whipped him and put a gun in his mouth until Byrd revealed where two bodies were buried.
Two years later, after Vernon Dahmer's firebombing murder, Scarpa reportedly used the same methods on another Klansman. Hoover's FBI had outsourced its most brutal interrogations to a hitman who could do what agents legally could not.
From the shop: Scarpa's story is darker than most fiction — our digital mafia thriller, Shadows of the Underworld, lives in that same world of loyalty, protection and betrayal.
Killer and informant at the same time
That is the scandal of Scarpa's life. While on the FBI's books, he was implicated in murders the Bureau never stopped. During the Colombo war of the early 1990s, he stayed loyal to boss Carmine Persico and was tied to multiple killings. His handler, FBI agent Lin DeVecchio, was accused of leaking information that helped Scarpa target enemies; the case collapsed in 2007.
In 1986, Scarpa got an emergency transfusion from a bodybuilder friend after being shot, and contracted HIV. Enraged, he later murdered the friend who had tried to organize a blood drive for him, among the most senseless killings in a life full of them.
How did Greg Scarpa die?
The end came in the early 1990s. Arrested on weapons and racketeering charges, Scarpa pleaded guilty in 1993 and got ten years. By then AIDS was destroying him; he had lost an eye and much of his weight. Greg Scarpa died in federal prison in Minnesota on July 4, 1994, serving a fraction of what his crimes deserved, from a system that had used him for 30 years and never reckoned with what he was.
For the full history of the case, read the By Any Means true story.
Greg Scarpa: quick answers
Was Greg Scarpa a real person? Yes — a Colombo family capo and longtime FBI informant, and the real figure behind By Any Means.
Why was Scarpa called the Grim Reaper? For the murders he was suspected of as a Colombo enforcer.
What did Scarpa do for the FBI in Mississippi? In 1964 he was flown in to extract a burial site from a Klansman at gunpoint.
How did Greg Scarpa die? Of AIDS-related illness in federal custody on July 4, 1994, after a 1993 guilty plea.
From the shop: Shadows of the Underworld, our digital mafia thriller at MobstersDaily.
Keep reading: Who Was Joseph Colombo? The Boss Who Put the Mafia on Television · Who Was Victor Orena? The Acting Boss Who Went to War With Persico · How Was Joseph Colombo Shot? The Unity Day Shooting, Explained · Who Was Andrew Russo? The Colombo Boss Into His Eighties
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