This story first appeared in Gang Land News and is being published here with permission.
By Jerry Capeci
A key government witness who helped the feds take down dozens of mobsters including the current and former chieftains of the powerful Genovese crime family says that in addition to wearing a wire and testifying at several trials he was coerced by one of his FBI handlers into an unwanted sexual relationship that lasted for nearly three years, Gang Land has learned.
The agent, the wife of a supervisor of the FBI’s Genovese family squad during the investigation, allegedly enjoyed her scandalous relationship with mob defector Michael (Cookie) D’Urso from mid-1998, when he became a cooperating witness, until early 2001 while he was tape-recording thousands of conversations with members and associates of all five families, D’Urso has told Gang Land.
In War Against the Mafia, a book scheduled for publication in December, former FBI agent Mike Campi wrote that he learned years after he retired in 2007 about D’Urso’s allegations that “shocked me to the very core.” But to his “surprise and disappointment,” he wrote, the FBI showed no desire to pursue the allegations and prosecute her. And on orders from FBI censors in Washington, Campi had to omit a crucial detail from his manuscript — the name of the agent.
She is Joy Adam, Gang Land has learned. Adam, 59, retired in 2017 after an unrelated internal FBI inquiry cleared her of technical violations of FBI policy by intentionally keeping reports about a New York investigation of mob boss Joseph (Skinny Joey) Merlino from FBI databases in order to keep the Philadelphia and Miami FBI field offices in the dark about the probe.
D’Urso told Gang Land more than 13 years ago that Adam solicited sex from him and used her power as an FBI agent to force him to continue having sex with her while he worked as an FBI undercover operative. D’Urso explained he felt trapped by Adam, fearful that she would upend his deal with the feds — or worse. Before relating the sensational story, Gang Land had to agree to keep what he called a “possible life and death” situation and a “big story,” a secret until he decided to reveal it, or he was killed.
We met in a restaurant in the shadow of Brooklyn Federal Court, where D’Urso had testified against Carmelo (Carmine Pizza) Polito, the Genovese mobster who was found guilty of shooting him in the head in a Williamsburg social club, and where his two Mafia bosses, Liborio (Barney) Bellomo and the late Vincent (Chin) Gigante pleaded guilty in 2003 to racketeering crimes that stemmed from his cooperation.
When D’Urso told me he was forced to have sex with agent Adam for years, he stated that when his five years probation ended in March of 2012, he would think about letting me write that “big story.” That day never came. D’Urso declined to discuss the matter now, or comment about Campi’s book. But he released me from my oath of secrecy, now that Campi has written about it.
Gang Land was unable to reach Adam, or her husband, or get the FBI, or any of their former or current colleagues, to have them get back to us if they had any comment regarding the allegations described by D’Urso or by War Against The Mafia. The FBI declined to comment about D’Urso’s allegations, or why it censored parts of Campi’s account in his upcoming book.
Campi spent most of his 24 years on the Genovese squad and was supervisor of 150 mob-busting agents when he retired. In War Against the Mafia, which is currently slated for publication on December 12, the former G-man wrote that the FBI’s Inspections Division, and its Inspector General’s Office, each did nothing to investigate D’Urso allegations while Adam was still an agent.
Campi wrote that long after D’Urso was sentenced to probation in 2007, D’Urso called him and told him that “for years, literally within weeks of having first cooperated a decade before,” he and agent Adam, who is identified only as Jane throughout, had been engaged in sexual activity that is all blacked out in the FBI-vetted version of the book that Gang Land has obtained.
“That was what he said,” Campi wrote. “He had been too afraid to bring it up to me or anybody else in law enforcement until now. His fears had been many,” Campi wrote. “His cooperation agreement might get torn to shreds and he’d receive his full life sentence” for a murder he admitted, and that “Jane would of course brand him a liar.”
“He eventually told his wife,” Campi wrote, and she “wanted to kill Jane.” D’Urso also “told his attorney and the private investigator who his lawyer worked with” about it while it was going on, and he later “confidentially shared this information with some in the news media,” Campi continued. “His message,” Campi wrote, was: “If I get killed, it’s this crazy FBI agent, not necessarily organized crime.”
Adam allegedly seduced D’Urso, Campi wrote, “only a couple of weeks after he began cooperating.” It happened “at a hotel near Newark airport” after she called and told him to meet her there” and “they had a meal and then a few drinks,” Campi continued.
“Jane shared that she had been one of the agents keeping an eye on him before his decision to cooperate,” and then “the conversation took a shocking and unexpected turn,” Campi wrote.
As directed by FBI censors, Skyhorse Publishing blacked out the specifics. But according to what D’Urso told Gang Land years ago, Adam said: “Hey, you wanna get laid tonight? I’ve been listening to your conversations for years and I’ve grown attracted to you.”
“I was shocked,” D’Urso told me. “She was not my type. I did not want to, but I knew that would be tough to admit. I said to myself, ‘What do I do? If I say no, is she going to hold it against me. Her husband is the supervisor on the squad. She can make it 10 times worse for me. Nobody’s going to believe me over her, so do I bang her and try to have an ally, or do I say no.”
There was very likely no way that the turncoat gangster could say, “No,” even if he wanted to.
“As a street guy,” is the way Campi put it in War Against the Mafia, “he concluded his best option was to go along with her demand as the least risky choice. I think it’s also possible it crossed his mind that (having sex with her) would give him leverage over the FBI, because the organization would be publicly embarrassed if he leaked this information.”
“It became almost too much for D’Urso to bear,” Campi wrote. He noted that running would make him a fugitive, negate all his work, violate his cooperation agreement, and expose him to a possible death sentence from the mob or a life in prison for the murder he had pleaded guilty to. “In the end,” Campi wrote, “D’Urso concluded he had no safe alternative,” but to grin and bear it, so to speak.
That notion wasn’t easy to swallow, and Gang Land pressed D’Urso why he just didn’t say no, and refuse to have sex with her.
“Whenever I resisted,” D’Urso said, “she’d stop approving the funding for living expenses that we needed to survive because I couldn’t keep any of the money from scores I was making with Sammy (Genovese capo, Salvatore Aparo) and (wiseguy) Joe Zito because the FBI was keeping that as evidence. I really had no choices.”
“She demanded to have sex every time we met,” he said. “She’d get there early before everybody and we’d have sex. It became a mandatory routine. And if it couldn’t be before, it had to be after. She wouldn’t let me go.”
“This fucking woman put me in a hospital,” he continued. “I thought I was having a fucking heart attack, and my wife had to take me to the hospital.”
Campi wrote that D’Urso stopped having sex with Adam after he made what the former FBI agent thought was a “remarkable” phone call to him and “launched into a bizarre tirade” about agent Adam. It happened, he wrote, right after the FBI pulled the plug on its investigation and the feds took down 45 mobsters and associates from all five families in April of 2001 on racketeering, murder, and other charges.
“I hate working with this woman, Mike,” D’Urso told him in a call from the “safe house” that the FBI had placed him and his family. “I can’t stand it. Some people, you just can’t stand Well, I can’t stand her. We don’t get along. She just makes my skin crawl. Mike, I’d rather go to jail than keep working with her. I hate her even more than Polito.”
“For D’Urso to say this against Jane was just remarkable,” Campi wrote, noting that Polito had “orchestrated” the 1994 social club shooting of D’Urso in which D’Urso’s cousin was killed. (As Gang Land has reported, Polito was found guilty of killing D’Urso’s cousin and the attempted murder of D’Urso, but the conviction was overturned because the government didn’t prove they were related to mob activity.)
“He didn’t provide any specifics,” Campi wrote, and he concluded that it was because Adam had just withheld funds for living expenses from D’Urso — combined “with the accumulated overall overbearing stress” that D’Urso was under as the feds prepared to arrange witness protection for his family and his in-laws.
“Then another striking event took place,” Campi wrote. He was called to a hospital emergency room by D’Urso’s wife because “he thought he was having a heart attack. It turned out he was having a panic attack, not a heart attack.”
Campi understood that could happen from all the stress that Durso was under, even when he “reiterated that he did not want to spend any further time with Jane,” Campi wrote. “I thought his request still came from the stress Durso was feeling trying to adjust himself and his family to a new life,” and not that she was forcing him to have sex with her, which would be a crime.
“Believe it or not,” Campi wrote, “my supervisor at the time was Jane’s husband,” and when Campi told him to reassign another agent to handle D’Urso “and to keep Jane completely away from Durso, he asked me why.” His answer, Campi wrote, was: “Because Durso told me he hates her more than he hates Carmine Polito. That’s why. Now remove her from all contact.”
Years later, when D’Urso called Campi and explained those actions, the former FBI agent recalled that “once we began working with Durso, I also noticed that Jane began to wear sundresses to work.” He noted that he “never really noticed any other agents dressed in this manner” but “didn’t think much about it at that time.”
In hindsight, Campi wrote, he recalled other unusual quirks that Adam had during the D’Urso investigation that made more sense now.
When D’Urso would call him and “let me know he was on the way to a meeting and needed to be wired up,” and Campi “let the team know, Jane would usually immediately grab her purse and sprint out of the squad area.”
Campi wrote that another agent “would look over at me and at the time we’d laugh at her behavior,” he wrote, “never having a clue as to why she was in such a rush to set up for surveillance. We figured maybe she was hurrying because her bureau car was parked a distance from the office, and she had to get a head start to arrive in a timely manner.”
“All of these puzzling statements and behaviors through the years,” Campi wrote, “now fit together . . . for the first time.”
Another time, Bernard Kane, an agent who had worked with Campi in the Cincinnati division of the FBI and who had been recruited along with Adam “as new agents by the FBI Philadelphia Division,” approached Campi as he was talking to Adam.
“Bernie said that while Jane was undergoing new agent training in Quantico, she dated a high school boy,” Campi wrote. “She laughed when Bernie concluded but did not deny the story. It appeared as though her laughter was confirming the story. This struck me as a red flag that Jane was just a bizarre character.”
Bizarre indeed. But nowhere near as bizarre as the allegations leveled by D’Urso and recounted by Campi in War Against the Mafia.
