WHEN Joe “Olive Oil King” Profaci ran the Brooklyn mob, he would hold court on the steps of his church.
By the time Greg “The Grim Reaper” Scarpa was running a crew in Brooklyn, they would leave bodies on the steps of the church.
A Brooklyn court yesterday heard how a hit team led by Scarpa’s son Joey blew away Dominick Masseria because the old man thought he was a rat. The hit went down on the steps of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Bensonhurst on Halloween night in 1989 and the shooters left him there, nearer to God.
Testifying at the trial of former FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio, who’s accused of being an informer for the elder Scarpa – who was supposed to be the G-man’s rat – former Scarpa hit man Larry Mazza told just what a thoroughly resistible human being his former boss was.
“Just a vicious, violent animal, but unscrupulous and treacherous,” Mazza said.
He recalled how made man Joey DeDomenico committed a fatal error – he found God.
“Joey wanted to get out of the life,” Mazza recalled.
Of DeDomenico, Scarpa told Mazza being born again “is one step away from being a rat.”
Compared to Scarpa, legendary tough guys like Carmine Galante, whose life was ended in a hail of bullets, his cigar still clenched in his teeth, was almost a saint.
For example, when a nun was raped by two men in East Harlem in 1982, cops found the fiends before the Galante crew did.
Not to be deterred, Galante got two of his soldiers to confess to two robberies they did not commit.
That way they could get into Rikers Island and kill the two perps. Luckily, for the animals, the cops foiled the plot.
Now, that’s a real man of respect . . . Well, sort of. Whereas Greg Scarpa was the original god-less father.