FOR 30 years, she baby- sat the psychotic punk and in the end, she got . . . diddly.
Linda Schiro, 62, bore Greg Scarpa’s boy, Joey, and when Greg was sick, she never left the old man’s side in the hospital.
When he needed a blood transfusion, she gathered 70 donors, some who were more accustomed to spilling blood than giving it.
Ironically, when six donors were picked, the blood of one of those donors gave Scarpa AIDS.
She was by his side when he found out in 1986 that he was HIV positive.
On that day, the man who made widows and orphans was not so tough. “I saw the tears streaming down his face,” Schiro said.
And she was with him on June 8, 1994, when Scarpa died in bed, rather than a Brooklyn gutter.
Linda was married to the mob but not officially to Scarpa, so his “inheritance” went to his estranged wife, Connie Scarpa, of New Jersey. From the age of 16, Linda Schiro was bedding wiseguys, dining a la carte, driving a Mercedes, flashing ice on her fingers and admitting she was thrilled by “the life.”
Today she is flat broke, her son, Joey, is dead, murdered, her “stepson,” Greg Scarpa Jr., is doing a long stretch for drug dealing and she is mad as a hornet that Connie Scarpa got the loot.
Little wonder the defense team for retired FBI Agent Lindley DeVecchio are trying to prove that Schiro is a charade of lies looking for a book or movie deal.
Schiro was once a petite beauty who was spoiled rotten by “the life” that owned her. Many women in Bensonhurst envied her.
But today, what 62-year-old woman, who has spent a lifetime with a hard-working Joe of a husband, would want to change places with her?