A killer for the Columbo crime family in Brooklyn, NY, Scarpa was estimated to have murdered at least 50 people. It turned out that he had also been an FBI informant for most of his "career", and information he supplied was crucial in the convictions of dozens of his fellow Mafiosi. FBI Director
J. Edgar Hoover considered Scarpa such a valuable source that in 1964, when three civil-rights workers were murdered in Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan and the suspects refused to say where the bodies were buried, he secretly sent Scarpa to Mississippi to beat the information out of them. It worked.