Mark Wahlberg portrays Mafia killer Gregory Scarpa Sr. in ‘By Any Means’

During the summer of 1964, New York City mobster Gregory Scarpa Sr. traveled south to rural Mississippi and, using violent scare tactics, helped the FBI learn where the Ku Klux Klan had buried three slain civil rights workers.

Later, when the KKK killed another civil rights leader in Mississippi by firebombing his house, Scarpa went back to help authorities solve that crime.

The FBI’s secret alliance with a hardened Mafia criminal is the subject of a new movie, By Any Means, scheduled to open in theaters on September 4. Directed by Elegance Bratton, the movie stars Mark Wahlberg as Scarpa and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as an FBI agent.

For the movie, Wahlberg’s appearance underwent a dramatic transformation, including temporary cosmetic work on his nose and chin, reminding Gregory Scarpa Jr. of his father. Gregory Jr. and his sister, Linda Scarpa, served as advisers for the movie.

During a telephone interview, Gregory Jr., 74, said it felt like he was in his father’s presence while with Wahlberg on the set. “When I was talking to him I was actually, like, seeing my father,” Gregory Jr. said.

Bratton, who also directed the 2022 film The Inspection, told Entertainment Weekly he was drawn to Sasha Penn’s script with its focus on “people who are battling institutions that are failing them.”

“This is a story about justice moving through corrupted systems,” he said. “I wanted this film to feel muscular, entertaining, and haunted at the same time.”

Wahlberg told the entertainment news website that By Any Means “is going to be one of the great revenge thrillers in quite a long time.”

‘Freedom Summer’

The real-life saga began during the 1964 “Freedom Summer,” a campaign to register as many African Americans to vote in Mississippi as possible. On June 21, three Congress of Racial Equality workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The FBI got involved and enlisted Scarpa.

Known as “The Grim Reaper,” the 5-foot-10, 220-pound Scarpa was described as “an ox of a man; like a short piano mover (with a) thick neck and huge biceps,” according to Peter Lance’s true crime book Deal With the Devil: The FBI’s Secret Thirty-Year Relationship With a Mafia Killer.

A Colombo crime family captain, Scarpa was said to have stopped counting the number of people he killed at 50, once boasting that he loved the smell of gunpowder. Also known as “The Killing Machine,” Scarpa even signed personal letters “KM.” The FBI believes he may have killed as many as 100 to 120 people.

In Mississippi, Scarpa lived upto his tough-guy reputation. He stuckan FBI-supplied pistol in a Klansman’s mouth, threatening to “blow his f—ing brains out if he didn’t spill the beans” about where the three civil rights workers were buried, according to Deal With the Devil. Scarpa also took out a straight razor and unzipped the man’s fly as if ready to emasculate him. At that point, the Klansman blurted out the burial site. On August 4, the three bodies were recovered at a farm six miles south of Philadelphia, buried in an earthen dam under 14 feet of red clay.

“Goodman and Schwerner had each been shot once in the head,” Lance wrote. “Chaney, the Black man in the group, was shot three times and beaten savagely.” 

As the FBI’s website notes, the killings, portrayed in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning, resulted in arrests and indictments. In October 1967, seven defendants, including a deputy sheriff, were found guilty on charges of federal conspiracy and violations of the victims’ civil rights. “One major conspirator, Edgar Ray Killen, went free after a lone juror couldn’t bring herself to convict a Baptist preacher,” the FBI’s website states.

In the end, “Killen eventually got his due,” according to the FBI. “He was convicted of manslaughter on June 21, 2005, the 41st anniversary of the crimes.”

‘If you don’t vote, you don’t count’

Identified as FBI informant NY-3461, Scarpa was back in Mississippi in January 1966, working again with the bureau. This time, a Black farmer and shopkeeper named Vernon F. Dahmer died after two carloads of hooded Klansmen used 12 gallons of gasoline to set his house on fire, according to Lance’s book.

Dahmer, a 58-year-old Sunday school teacher, had allowed his store in Forest County, Mississippi, to be used to register voters and as a place for Blacks to pay their poll taxes. During the attack, Dahmer’s lungs were seared, and his 10-year-old daughter was badly burned. The official trailer for By Any Means depicts a version of this incident.

Near death in the hospital, Dahmer told a reporter he fought for voting rights because “if you don’t vote, you don’t count.” He died having never been able to vote. Weeks later, his voter registration card arrived.

After the firebombing, Scarpa and an FBI agent approached Lawrence Byrd, a KKK-aligned senator and owner of Byrd’s Radio and TV in Laurel, Mississippi. They shoved him into a car, then drove to a place where they beat him “within an inch of his life,” threatening to string him up naked in winter so the animals could get to him, according to Deal With the Devil. On March 2, 1966, Byrd signed a 22-page confession, implicating himself and seven other Klansmen in the attack on Vernon Dahmer.

Based on a true story

As Lance notes in Deal With the Devil, the 1964 and 1966 Mississippi incidents sometimes are commingled as one story. Despite the discrepancy, most accounts share a common thread: FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover knew about and approved of Scarpa’s participation.

Hoover understood that Scarpa was “a ruthless gangster with little regard for human life,” according to the author. Hoover was the bureau’s director during the 1960s when FBI agents were in Mississippi investigating the KKK’s deadly attacks on civil rights advocates.

Currently, the true scope of Scarpa’s unofficial involvement in Mississippi remains unclear. For instance, award-winning investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, in a December 2025 story on the Mississippi Today website, wrote that former FBI agents have said the location of the three civil rights workers’ bodies “actually came from Mr. X, a Mississippi highway patrolman who knew the Klansmen.”

In Mississippi Burning, fictional FBI agents played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe battle the KKK in small-town Mississippi after the three civil rights workers went missing, but the movie makes no mention of Scarpa. On the FBI website, the bureau only says it acted “on an informant tip” in exhuming the three bodies from an earthen dam at a local farm.

Discussing his father’s role in Mississippi, Gregory Jr. told The Mob Museum that the movie By Any Means is mostly accurate.

“All movies, they sensationalize a little bit here and there,” he said, “but this is based on a true story.”

Now living in Fort Myers, Florida, Gregory Jr. followed his father into the Colombo crime family and spent 32 years in prison for conspiracy to murder and other crimes. While in prison, Gregory Jr. provided the government with information he learned from fellow inmates regarding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the New York Daily News reported. Noting that Gregory Jr. was suffering from throat and neck cancer, a federal judge in 2020 granted him a compassionate release from prison.

Speaking of his father, Gregory Jr. said authorities at the highest levels in the 1960s needed someone in Mississippi to help the FBI.

“It came all the way from President Johnson to Hoover, and Hoover got in touch with a tough guy from Brooklyn to go down there and see what he can do,” Gregory Jr. said. “And that’s what he did. He went down there.”

Three decades later, on June 8, 1994, Scarpa died at age 66 in the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, while serving a life sentence for murder and racketeering. Scarpa died of complications from AIDS, the result of a blood transfusion he received before going into emergency surgery in 1986 at Victory Memorial Hospital in Brooklyn for bleeding ulcers. Soon afterward, with his stomach hemorrhaging beyond repair, surgeons at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan removed his stomach, requiring him to digest his food with pancreatic-enzyme pills, according to a 1996 article, “The G-Man and the Hit Man,” by Fredric Dannen in The New Yorker.

In addition to those health concerns, Scarpa later lost an eye in a gun battle with two Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, drug dealers, “one of whom he is believed to have killed,” The New Yorker reported. The drug dealers had gotten into a dispute with his son, Joseph, over a narcotics transaction. In 1995, Joseph was killed in an apparent drug-related shooting.

Over time, Scarpa’s weight dropped to 150 pounds, down from 220 pounds when he assisted the FBI in Mississippi as a feared “ox of a man.” According to New York Times reporter Sel Raab, Scarpa once said he so enjoyed killing a hated rival that he wanted to dig up the corpse and kill him again.

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas.