In this episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins pulls back the curtain on one of the FBI’s most troubling scandals—the case of Joe Stabile, a corrupt FBI agent whose fall from grace revealed just how deep organized crime’s influence could run.

The story begins in November 1978, when Stabile pled guilty to corruption charges. But as Gary explains, that plea was only the tip of the iceberg. Behind it lay years of whispered rumors, shady deals, and quiet payoffs—stories that painted Stabile not as a straight-arrow G-man, but as a hustler working both sides of the law.

Drawing on conversations with retired FBI agents who once worked alongside Stabile, Gary explores the tangled web of mob connections and compromised investigations. Listeners will hear how mobsters slipped him bribes to make gambling cases disappear, and how his background as a New York City cop may have set the stage for the choices that pulled him deeper into the mob’s orbit.

The episode also highlights the work of honest agents, such as Tony Villano, who began piecing together the truth about Stabile’s corruption. Through case files, informant accounts, and law enforcement interviews, Gary demonstrates how the FBI struggled with a culture of silence that often protected its own—even when integrity was at stake.

As the story unfolds, the lines between right and wrong blur, exposing systemic cracks inside federal law enforcement during a time when the Bureau was shifting its focus and fighting for credibility.

Gary closes with reflections on the lasting impact of the Stabile case: what it meant for the FBI’s war on organized crime, and how Stabile himself may have continued to live in the shadows after his conviction—a man caught between two worlds, crime and law enforcement, never fully belonging to either.

This is a must-listen for true crime fans, Mafia historians, and anyone fascinated by how organized crime once ruled the Jersey Shore.

Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.

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0:06 Introduction to Joe Stabile

1:19 The Corruption Unveiled

3:14 Breakfast with Retired Agents

5:59 The Connection to Organized Crime

9:06 Investigating Stabile's Allegations

14:18 The Gambler's Payoff

20:19 Confronting Stabile

21:39 The Aftermath of the Indictment

23:35 Stabile's New Life

25:39 Reflections on Undercover Operations

[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence

[0:04] Unit detective back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. I welcome each and every one of you. I've got a story that it's really interesting how I found out about this. That's part of the story. Let's go back. Here's what I'm talking about. A corrupt FBI agent named Joe Stabile. That's S-T-A-B-I-L-E. November 1978.

[0:26] It was a Monday and FBI agent Joe Stabile was pleading guilty in federal court to corruption charges. Now, you don't hear about this very much. I know a couple of three here in Kansas City over the years that got popped for doing something. A couple of them were involved in a stolen party or a stolen property ring. A couple of others were one of them was just running his mouth too much and he was drinking too much. I don't think they actually end up charging him anything, but he did run his run his mouth way too much. Joseph Beal only admitted in this guilty plea that he lied about some money transactions, but that's just a tip of the iceberg in this, folks.

[1:03] The U.S. attorney for the Eastern District was sitting in the spectators that day, and afterwards he would say, you know, this just shows the determination of the Department of Justice to root out misconduct wherever it may be found in federal law enforcement.

[1:16] Well, you know, that's a pretty strong statement after. So you'll find that they kicked this under the rug as long as they could. Absolutely as long as they could. The head of the organized crime task force there at the time said that there was a bunch of money that Stabile could not account for. He was writing some checks. He was taking some money in and then paying some money back out in a deal. And it was dirty and they had him, but they didn't have him that good. So they dismissed some other charges and charged him with perjury, and he denied receiving any illegal money. He had actually been involved with a New York City policeman and got a $15,000 payment for dismissing getting a case handled for the Clumbo family. But it really, in the end, he wasn't really convicted for that. It was a gambling deal involved. He was involved with New York City policemen.

[2:06] Now, during that time, there was another New York agent named Anthony Avilano, who had made several allegations of wrongdoing against Joe Stabile. They both worked in the Colombo squad early on when they first met. And really, this became, there was a lot of agents sticking up for Stabile, just like I found that with that H. Paul Rico. There were agents, and they never really found any agents. There were policemen who made a case on him for being involved in a murder, a contract killing. He was a Boston agent. But there was a couple of agents that I interviewed and wrote a book several years ago, and they swear that he didn't have anything to do with that. So that was part of that whole filthy Boston office where John Conley ended up getting popped out of. And anyhow, they tried to say this was a Sicilian feud between several agents that were of Italian-American extraction. Well, that's a good way to pass this off and denigrate people. But it really wasn't that. This guy, this guy was dirty.

[3:10] He ended up, he got about five years in the penitentiary and a fine. But let's go back and take a deeper look at this case. And here's how I got into it. I was having breakfast with a couple of local retired FBI agents. I mentioned this book, Brick Agent, and asked if they had ever read it or heard about it. And it's written by a former agent who was assigned to the OC squad in New York City in the 60s and 70s. His name was Tony Villano, and it's a pretty good book.

[3:39] It's hard to find. It's really hard to find, folks. So good luck if you go out and try to buy it. I'll put a link to, I think there's one that's like $35 or $36, maybe $40. I can't remember. I was able to find it online. If you work real hard, you can find it in the Internet Archive online and get a look at it. But it's hard to do. Now, Volano, I started looking at Volano partly in this book and got interested in him because he was actually the first agent to develop Greg Scarpa. And he worked with Scarpa for quite a while. And when Villano retired and really with no, you know, no smell of any kind of hinky panky going on, like what later happened with Scarpa. Uh, but when he retired, Scarpa refused to be introduced to another agent, carry on any kind of relationship with the FBI. Uh, several years later, this Linda Vecchio made a run on Scarpa and brought him back in as a top echelon informant. And then they did a lot of stuff with him. Now, now, uh.

[4:41] Villano is the guy that sent Scarpa down into Mississippi, and in his book, Brick Agent, he tells that story a couple of different ways with some slightly different twists on some of the things that have come out since. And he also names two different people as the informants that they sent down to the south to do these different undercover things on the Ku Klux Klan and try to find those bodies down there and the three civil rights workers down in Philadelphia and solve the murder of Medgar Evers. And there was another one, too. And he names, Villano names two different people trying to cover for Scarpa to make sure nobody can trace this back down to this one guy and it was Scarpa. So anyhow, that morning we were talking about Brick Agent Book and the name Joe Stabile came up because Bill Owsley has read the book. And he said that he worked with Joe Stabile when he was a pretty new agent here in Kansas City who was assigned to the OC squad in Kansas City. Now, Bill has two books on the Kansas City crime family, really great books. You want the whole overall picture of organized crime in Kansas City, his book Open City.

[5:53] And then concerning his career, the second book is Mobsters in Our Myths. And that really starts about the time he got here in the 60s. And he was a case agent on the straw man case or the guy that really started the whole thing that brought down the Midwest crime families from skimming from Las Vegas casinos. Bill Owsley was the original case agent on that. You know, it's funny, by the time they actually had their trials, he was retired. And an even funnier story, ironic maybe you might call this, he was retired and he was doing different jobs in retirement. He worked for the NFL, I think, and maybe the NFL.

[6:32] Major league baseball but he did some of those kinds of things and and alan glick came to town to testify now alan glick was a guy that got the 62 million dollar loan thanks to the bob and was kicking back through lefty rosenthal to put him in the context and and bill owsley he needed a bodyguard and a chauffeur so bill owsley took the job of bodyguarding and chauffeuring uh alan glick back and forth to the court when he came in to testify and you know uh you know so much for the mob's going to go out and kill you if you testify against them because they never did anything to this guy.