No Tipping The Capo To Legendary Mobster

At the end Greg Scarpa went to his grave unrespected.

A made man for four decades, a feared enforcer, a Colombo capo powerful enough to single-handedly start a bloody family war, he might have rated a funeral no less extravagant than the great flower-bursting mob send-offs of yore.

But as it turned out, Greg Scarpa had lived two lives -- one of them as a federal informant who spun dark mob secrets for 20 years. And cops surveilling the old man's wake Sunday saw not a single confederate come with lowered head to kiss the coffin and bid him farewell.

"Bless the body of Gregory," said the Rev. Eugene Coyle over the polished golden oak coffin at St. Bernadette's Church in Bensonhurst yesterday morning. But he addressed only family and neighbors who had come in a procession totaling five cars.

"None of us lives as his own master," Coyle said. "And none of us dies as his own master."

Greg Scarpa's resume is the stuff of mob legend.

In the 1960's, with budding Colombo boss Carmine (Junior) Persico, he helped then-boss Joe Profaci beat back an ambitious rebel faction headed by Crazy Joe Gallo.

In 1971, he was hauled before a Senate subcommittee for grilling about an airport theft ring, and he smiled broadly and took the Fifth more than 60 times.

One day in the late 1970s, one Dominick Somma complained about screwups that Scarpa's son Greg Jr. had made during a bank job, and Scarpa shot him on the spot. The memory always riled him later. "I'd like to dig him up and shoot him again," he once snarled.

In 1991, discussing a small business matter, he coolly faced down -- all by himself -- two rival capos who were backed up by nearly 50 heavily armed torpedoes.

Later that year, as the Colombos blew apart in civil warfare, he personally whacked three rivals, one of whom was putting up Christmas decorations on his home at the time. "I love the smell of gunpowder," Scarpa said.

And in late 1992, when his left eyeball was shot out in an ambush, he matter-of-factly refused to seek treatment until after he'd attended to some business, gone home and had a Scotch.

"He was a unique individual," says his lawyer, Joseph Benfante. "If he'd lived 400 years ago, he would have been a pirate."

Just before he died last week at 66 -- of AIDS contracted during surgery in 1986, when a member of his own crew helpfully donated bad blood -- Scarpa dictated a final revelation, a potentially explosive document that could wreck the feds' case against Colombo capo Alphonse (Allie) Persico, son of Scarpa's old friend Junior Persico.

Much discussed yesterday in Brooklyn Federal Court, the deathbed affidavit absolves Allie of any participation in the deadly 1991-92 Colombo war, for which he is set to go to trial later this month. It was Scarpa's own war, the dead man insists.

Rival hoods "shot at me while I was in a car with my daughter (Linda) and 2-year-old grandchild," says Scarpa's affidavit. "I was so upset over this that my only intention was to retaliate...I had no instructions to retaliate from anyone, especially Allie Persico...I did not need anybody's permission to act...Allie Persico had nothing to do with any of these events."

If he is cleared -- and he might be -- feds fear that the college-educated Allie will turn the now virtually moribund Colombo family into a viable operation again.

And such could be the final legacy of Greg Scarpa, helping from beyond the grave to rebuild the mob that yesterday gave him no respect as he went to the earth.

"Human reasoning is defective," Coyle offered yesterday, considering the eternal mysteries as the few mourners quietly wept. "We come up with the wrong answers as often as we come up with the right answers."