Audiobooks by Peter Lance

Deal with the Devil: The FBI's Secret Thirty-Year Relationship with a Mafia Killer

From an award-winning investigative reporter: the shocking story of the mob killer who terrorized the streets of New York City for decades . . . while working for the FBI In Deal with the Devil, five-time Emmy Award winning investigative reporter Peter Lance draws on three decades of once-secret FBI files and exclusive new interviews to disclose the epic saga of Colombo family capo Gregory Scarpa Sr., who spent more than thirty years as a paid Top Echelon FBI informant while wreaking havoc as a drug dealer, loan shark, bank robber, hijacker, high-end securities thief,and killer. A Mafia capo who "stopped counting" after fifty murders,earning nicknames including "the Grim Reaper" and "the Killing Machine" ,Greg Scarpa was enlisted by the FBI as early as 1960. His detailed debriefings on Mafia practices and activities went straight to J. Edgar Hoover and revealed the structure of Cosa Nostra long before the celebrated Valachi hearings. In forty-two years of murder and racketeering, Scarpa served only thirty days in jail, thanks to his secret relationship with the Feds. But Scarpa's most deadly reign of terror came in the period from 1980 to 1992, when more than half his homicides occurred,even as Scarpa was serving as a paid informant under Supervisory Special Agent R. Lindley DeVecchio, who ran two organized crime squads in the FBI's New York Office. The celebrated case agent on the 1985-1986 Mafia Commission prosecution, DeVecchio had persuaded Scarpa to return to the fold as an informant, under laws that explicitly forbid organized crime insiders from committing murder or other crimes while receiving compensation from the Bureau. And yet, drawing on secret memos that went to every FBI director from Hoover to Louis Freeh, Lance documents that Scarpa not only continued his violent rampage during these years, but actually launched a new war for control of the Colombo crime family,a conflict that left fourteen dead and dozens injured. Before he died of AIDS, contracted through a tainted blood transfusion, Scarpa committed or ordered twenty-six murders,including the violent rubout of his own brother Sal in 1987 and the drive-by slaying of his nephew Gus Farace, which triggered a five-hundred-agent manhunt,all while serving as an informant for Lin DeVecchio. When DeVecchio himself was indicted on four counts of murder in 2007, Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes called the case "the most stunning example of official corruption . . . I have ever seen." Yet the murder charges against DeVecchio were dismissed a short time later,even as a New York State Supreme Court judge described the FBI's association with Scarpa as a 'deal with the devil.' After the case's abrupt dismissal, Lance started peeling back the layers on what defense attorneys called Scarpa's 'unholy alliance' with the FBI. Through exclusive interviews with Scarpa's son Greg Jr. and former Lucchese boss Anthony 'Gaspipe' Casso, among others, as well as more than 1,150 pages of confidential briefing memos, many revealed here for the first time, Lance traces links between the Scarpa case, the infamous Mafia Cops case, and more. Written with the same astounding capacity for penetrating criminal networks that marked Lance's previous books, Deal with the Devil is a page-turning work of investigative journalism that reads like a Scorsese film.

Peter Lance (Author), Peter Lance (Narrator)

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Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI

In the years leading to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than Ali Mohamed. A former Egyptian army captain, Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA in Europe, the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, and the FBI in California—even as he helped to orchestrate the al Qaeda campaign of terror that culminated in 9/11. As investigative reporter Peter Lance demonstrates in this gripping narrative, senior U.S. law enforcement officials—including the now-celebrated U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who personally interviewed Mohamed long before he was brought to ground—were powerless to stop him. In the annals of espionage, few men have moved between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed. For almost two decades, the former Egyptian army commando succeeded in living a double life. Brazenly slipping past watch lists, he moved in and out of the U.S. with impunity, marrying an American woman, becoming a naturalized citizen, and posing as an FBI informant—all while acting as chief of security for Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri. Known to his fellow terrorists as Ali Amiriki, or “Ali the American,” Mohamed gained access to the most sensitive intelligence in the U.S. counterterrorism arsenal while brokering terror summits, planning bombing missions, and training jihadis in bomb building, assassination, the creation of sleeper cells, and other acts of espionage. Building on the investigation he first chronicled in his previous books, 1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up, Lance uses Mohamed to trace the untold story of al Qaeda’s rise in the 1980s and 1990s. Incredibly, Mohamed, who remains in custodial witness protection today, has never been sentenced for his crimes. He exists under a veil of secrecy—a living witness to how the U.S. intelligence community was outflanked for years by the terror network. From his first appearance on the FBI’s radar in 1989—training Islamic extremists on Long Island—to his presence in the database of Operation Able Danger eighteen months before 9/11, this devious triple agent was the one terrorist they had to sweep under the rug. Filled with news-making revelations, Triple Cross exposes the incompetence and duplicity of the FBI and Justice Department before 9/11 . . . and raises serious questions about how many more secrets the Feds may still be hiding.

Peter Lance (Author), John Pruden (Narrator)

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