HARRISBURG — The author of a book on the late mob boss Russell Bufalino once claimed to be trying to broker a deal of freedom for a convicted murderer serving life in exchange for dirt investigators could use against Dunmore businessman Louis DeNaples, the inmate claimed in a filing Thursday in his defamation suit against the writer.
Louis Coviello said he refused the offer from Matt Birkbeck, who he said claimed to be acting on behalf of state and federal law enforcement officials who owed him for assistance with their investigations of Bufalino’s crime family in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
“I am authorized to make you an offer of a deal: Help the feds, or the state send DeNaples to prison, and you’re a free man. It’s that simple,” Birback allegedly told Coviello.
Coviello said that despite his refusal of the offer, Birkbeck fabricated statements in his book, “The Quiet Don,” that falsely depicted Coviello as an informant and made him the target of violent attacks from other inmates.
Birkbeck, a former reporter for The Morning Call in Allentown, declined comment Friday.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Harrisburg said in an email that that the agency has “no comment, either by way of confirmation or denial, in response to such questions” regarding Birkbeck’s allegedly acting as a go-between.
Coviello, 59, a former Dunmore high school football star convicted of the 1978 murder of a drug dealer in Lackawanna County, filed the 12-page declaration in the U.S. District Court in Harrisburg in support of a petition to stay a request by Birkbeck and the other defendants in the lawsuit to have it thrown out.
The declaration details what Coviello says was a 55-minute meeting between Coviello and Birkbeck on Aug. 7, 2007 at the State Correctional Institution at Mahanoy, which started with the writer buying the inmate a cheeseburger and a Mountain Dew soft drink from the prison’s vending machines.
When asked why Birkbeck was making the offer instead of someone from the state or federal government, Birkbeck allegedly said it was for “plausible deniability,” as prosecutors could say they never sent him if problems later arose, Coviello said in the declaration.
Coviello said Birkbeck became irate when his offer was rejected. “Either help me or the people who sent me, or you can count on spending the rest of your miserable life in prison, and it might not be much longer,” Birkbeck allegedly told him. “I doubt that your fellow convicts will be too happy with you when they hear you’ve been cooperating with the state and feds to nail DeNaples and have him sent to prison.”
Birkbeck wrote about the encounter 12 days later in The Morning Call in a story that said DeNaples, then the owner of the Mount Airy Casino Resort in Monroe County, was the focus of a federal and state investigation into organized crime.
The story reported that Coviello said he testified before a grand jury in Dauphin County about his family’s relationship with DeNaples. Coviello also reportedly said he spoke to FBI agents about DeNaples, adding that he often ate at the DeNaples’ home and his father Joseph did business with DeNaples.
After a hung jury trial in 1977, the elder Coviello and DeNaples pleaded no contest to defrauding the federal government during the cleanup of Tropical Storm Agnes, and were sentenced to probation. “But four other men, including a member of the Bufalino crime family, were convicted later for their roles in bribing a juror during the DeNaples trial,” the story said.
The book also detailed the interview, but Coviello said it contains fabrications, including an admission by him of suffocating a witness against another alleged mobster.
Coviello said the book, published in 2013, was a surprise to him because Birkbeck did not say he was writing about Bufalino, who lived in Kingston. As recently as the week of May 16, Coviello said he was shown three “snitch notes” disclosing threats from other inmates at the State Correctional Institution at Huntingdon and told, “You may not make it to the weekend.” His declaration was dated June 5.
