The following excerpt from chapter 2 of Greg Scarpa, Legendary Evil provides some insight into Scarpa’s earliest attempts to determine what criminal behavior by a Top Echelon Criminal Informant might be tolerated by the FBI. I’ve removed the annotations for ease of reading. Enjoy!

“Scarpa’s financial probing was not the only test he had for the FBI in 1962. Less than three months after convincing the FBI to pay him $3,000, Scarpa looked to determine the limits of criminal behavior the FBI would tolerate from him. In short, would the FBI turn a blind eye while Scarpa committed murder? He used the credibility of his long-standing relationship with Charlie LoCicero to get the answer to that question.

“In a memo marked ‘URGENT’ and dated September 13, 1962, from the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI’s New York Office to Director J. Edgar Hoover, the SAC reported the remarkable piece of intelligence that Charlie LoCicero had ordered Scarpa to murder Joseph Magliocco. Magliocco considered himself to be the prime candidate to succeed family boss Joseph Profaci, who had passed away from throat cancer on June 6 of that year. The memo went on to state that Scarpa had gone so far as to ‘case’ Magliocco’s Long Island home in preparation for the hit. The contents of the memo were so sensational that a follow-up, also marked ‘URGENT,’ was sent later that day detailing instructions from the FBI to Scarpa that ‘under no circumstance can he participate in the murder of Joseph Magliocco.’ An additional memo from the FBI’s Special Investigative Division in Washington, D.C. confirmed that same day that the New York Office ‘has instructed the informant and the informant agrees that he must not participate in the execution of Joseph Magliocco.’

“Murder was clearly off the table in 1962. It is an open question whether LoCicero actually gave Scarpa the order to hit Magliocco. In the memos following the admonition prohibiting the murder of Magliocco, Scarpa reported that LoCicero could not obtain Commission approval for the hit, and it was therefore called off. Scarpa also stated that he believed LoCicero’s order to kill Magliocco may have been LoCicero testing Scarpa’s loyalty in the ongoing struggle for power after Profaci’s death. However, it is just as possible that master manipulator Greg Scarpa was testing the FBI. As FBI Special Agent and Scarpa handler Anthony Villano, who used the alias “Nick Biletti” when referring to Scarpa in his book, noted, Scarpa ‘seemed to like to test the temperature of the water whenever he contemplated a major crime.’ Certainly murder qualified as a major crime.”