Hi Gang,

So I finished reading Deal With the Devil by Peter Lance. What a difficult book to read. Very annotated and sourced, but full of run on sentences from front to back. One paragraph could contain only 2 long sentences in it, no exaggeration.

Peter Lance's theory about the 3rd Colombo war boils down to the following:

The FBI via Lin DeVecchio instigated the Colombo war by feeding Greg Scarpa Sr. false information. The aim was to have Greg Scarpa Sr. rise to the top of the Colombo family so that the FBI would have a top echelon informant sitting on the Commission.

I find that a bit unrealistic and fanciful, for this reason...

Scarpa did not have the ability to create two factions. It was Little Vic [Orena] who had that power, by polling his captains to vote for a new boss.

The book skips over the glaring fact that no matter who attacked who first, or fired the first shot, it was Orena who was most likely responsible for ordering the Consigliere to poll the capos to choose sides.

The first Consigliere to do so at Orena's order was Angelina, and he was reportedly whacked for it on the orders of Carmine Persico. Most likely, Orena denied ordering Angelina to do the poll and dodged Carmine's wrath.

The second Consigliere was then ordered to poll the capos again. This Consigliere's name was Carmine Sessa. He refused to and instead turned on Little Vic in a failed hit/ambush.

Peter Lance's position is that Carmine Sessa only attacked Little Vic because he was misled by Greg Scarpa. That attack was supposedly the first shot fired in the 3rd Colombo War. But what Peter Lance avoids is the question of how did the Colombos separate into two factions in the first place. Scarpa had nothing to do with that, and last time I checked, if an acting Boss starts polling capos to see if they will vote against the sitting boss, that is grounds for being whacked.

Peter Lance's book bends over backwards to put Little Vic Orena into a good light. The book's express aim is to win him a new trial. Orena's sons contribute to the book in the form of interviews and/or quotes. But I think that Peter Lance went too far in exempting Little Vic Orena from responsibility for the genesis of the 3rd Colombo war as the price paid for getting Orena's sons to contribute to this sensational book. If the book made Orena look bad, why would his son's contribute?

No I don't think Orena came out of the 3rd Colombo war smelling like daisies, and Greg Scarpa was, until the end, a vassal and slave of the Persico Mafia family.

If Scarpa's FBI handler played a role in instigating that conflict, the conflict was already there when Orena polled the captains. Before it became a hot war, it was already a cold one.

If anything, Scarpa's FBI handler was a double agent...an FBI agent, pretending to be a corrupt FBI agent, whose true goal was to help Scarpa whack as many made men as possible, and then have the rest arrested.