Is Mark Wahlberg’s By Any Means mobster a real person? The real-life inspiration behind the famous Gregory Scarpa Sr. is darker than the film

By Any Means is a 2026 Paramount crime thriller that opened in United States cinemas on 4 September after a Los Angeles premiere on 1 September. Director Elegance Bratton, whose earlier feature The Inspection came from his own life, takes a screenplay by Sascha Penn and turns a half-known FBI-and-Mafia episode into a 107-minute R-rated hunt.


Mark Wahlberg plays Gregory Scarpa Sr., the Brooklyn Colombo captain the bureau used off the books. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Wayne Strider, a young Black FBI agent sent into 1960s Mississippi after civil rights leaders are killed. Giancarlo Esposito is Vernon Dahmer, the Forrest County NAACP president whose firebombed home starts the story the film wants you to feel.

Nicole Beharie, Josh Lucas, David Strathairn, Ethan Embry, LisaGay Hamilton and LaChanze fill out the bureau, the Klan orbit and the Dahmer household. Wahlberg also produces.

Principal photography ran in Atlanta in spring 2025. The official line is simple enough: two men who should never share a car agree that the law has limits. They do not. That is the film people are walking into. The man Wahlberg is wearing makeup to become lived a much longer, uglier life than one Mississippi winter.


Gregory Scarpa Sr. was born in New York on 8 May 1928 to Salvatore and Mary Scarpa, first-generation immigrants from Lorenzaga, near Treviso in Italy. He grew up in Brooklyn, in the streets that fed the Profaci family and later the Colombos. He was not tall. Accounts put him around five foot ten and, in his prime, about 220 pounds, thick neck, heavy arms, the kind of build people compared to a piano mover. He dressed well and liked cash in his pocket. He liked being feared more.

He married Connie Forrest around 1950. They had four children, among them Gregory Scarpa Jr., who would follow him into the family and later spend decades in federal prison. The marriage frayed. By the early 1960s Scarpa had begun a long relationship with Linda Schiro, then a teenager he met in Bensonhurst. They had two children, a daughter also named Linda and a son, Joey. Scarpa never fully left the first household in a clean way. In 1975, still tied to Connie and living with Schiro, he married former Miss Israel Lili Dajani in Las Vegas.

The domestic map was a mess on purpose. At home, his children later said, he could be punctual for dinner and gentle. Outside the house he signed letters KM, for Killing Machine, and collected nicknames: the Grim Reaper, the Mad Hatter. He told people he stopped counting bodies at 50. Federal estimates later ran higher.


He was a hijacker, loan shark, extortionist and hitman. In March 1962 he was arrested for armed robbery. That pinch is the usual starting point for the informant story. Facing prison, he agreed to talk. The relationship with the FBI lasted, with a gap, for more than two decades. He was paid. One oft-cited figure is about 158,000 dollars over the years, on top of whatever he kept from the street. He was closed as an informant in 1975 and reopened around 1980 under agent Lindley DeVecchio.

That second chapter is the one that still produces arguments in courtrooms and books. Associates claimed Scarpa called his federal contact “the Girlfriend.” Prosecutors later said DeVecchio fed him addresses, pending arrests and rival locations during the Colombo civil war. DeVecchio denied leaking on purpose. A murder case against the agent collapsed. The paper trail of airtels and 209s is long enough that nobody serious pretends Scarpa was a one-off snitch who helped once and went home.

The violence was not abstract. In 1984, Mary Bari, a woman thought to know where a Colombo fugitive was hiding, was lured to a bar, shot and put in a boot. Scarpa has been tied to that killing in later reporting. During the third Colombo war of 1991 to 1993 he fought for imprisoned boss Carmine Persico against acting boss Victor Orena. On 18 November 1991 gunmen hit near his home while family were leaving. In 1992, already sick, he lost an eye in a firefight with drug dealers after a dispute involving his son. He still went hunting. Crew members described him coming home bright after a hit, talking about what a face looked like after the shot. That is the man, not the trailer version.


Health finished what rivals did not. In 1986 he needed transfusions after a bleeding ulcer. He did not want hospital blood. Associates donated. One donor, a bodybuilder, had HIV from a dirty steroid needle. Scarpa developed AIDS. He pleaded guilty in May 1993 to three murders and conspiracy. He was sentenced to life, later trimmed on health grounds.

He died on 4 June 1994 at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, aged 66, far thinner than the ox who went to Mississippi. Joey was shot dead not long after. Gregory Jr. did 32 years, including time in ADX Florence, and received compassionate release in 2020. He is now public about the family story. Daughter Linda has described growing up thinking another man was her father, then learning the truth as a teenager, then surviving the war that came to the driveway.

The movie hangs on 1966. The real travelogue is usually told as two trips.

In the summer of 1964, during Freedom Summer, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. The FBI needed bodies and names. Later accounts, including those pushed by Scarpa’s circle and by writers who mined bureau files, say the bureau brought Scarpa south because agents could not legally do what he would do.


The story that stuck is ugly and specific: a gun in a Klansman’s mouth, threats that went further, a burial site in an earthen dam. The three bodies were recovered on 4 August 1964. Chaney, the Black organiser, had been beaten and shot more than the two white men. The bureau’s own public language has often been vaguer: an informant tip. Other investigators have said a Mississippi highway patrolman, not a Brooklyn capo, pointed the way. Both versions circulate. The film age prefers the capo.

Scarpa was back after 10 January 1966, when two carloads of Klansmen firebombed Vernon Dahmer’s house and store in Forrest County. Dahmer was 58, a farmer, shopkeeper and NAACP chapter president. He had let Black residents use his place to pay poll tax and register. He returned fire so his wife and children could get out. His lungs were seared. A daughter was badly burned. He died saying that if you do not vote, you do not count. His registration card arrived after the funeral. Sam Bowers, Imperial Wizard of the White Knights, was convicted years later and died in prison in 2005.

Published accounts say Scarpa and an FBI contact grabbed Lawrence Byrd, a Klan-aligned businessman in Laurel, beat him and threatened him until he signed a long confession naming others. How much of that the bureau will ever confirm in a clean sentence is another matter. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI wanted results in Mississippi and did not want its own agents on the wrong side of a brutality charge.


A Colombo killer on a leash solved a problem. Gregory Jr. has said the request came down from the top, Johnson to Hoover to a tough guy from Brooklyn. That is family memory. It is also the spine of By Any Means.

What the film does not have room for is the rest of the bargain. Scarpa used the badge when it suited him. He used the street when the badge looked away. Mississippi was a job. Brooklyn was the career.

The film is set against 1966 Mississippi. Wayne Strider, played by Abdul-Mateen II, is a young Black agent pulled out of file-room exile and paired with Scarpa. Strider is not a historical name. Bratton has said the character was created, with roots in the little-documented Black agents of Hoover’s bureau and in the idea that someone had to mind Scarpa when he went south. Wikipedia and some listings have loosely tied Strider to DeVecchio.

That is a stretch the director himself does not sell. DeVecchio was Scarpa’s later New York handler. Strider is the movie’s moral engine: a man who still believes in the job until the job hands him a murderer and says get it done.

Wahlberg’s Scarpa is the tool. Prosthetics and makeup were heavy enough that Greg Scarpa Jr. cried on set, calling for his father, because the face and a dressed house snapped him back to being 13. Bratton has called that the stamp he wanted. A family dinner scene was rebuilt from a story Junior told about his father after a school fight.


The children and Linda Schiro’s circle talked to the production. Bettie Dahmer, Vernon’s daughter, also spoke to Bratton. She has said she accepts that the picture is more about Scarpa than about her father. Other Dahmer relatives, including Dennis Dahmer, have called the film a distortion, a revenge thriller hung on a real murder, too close to a white saviour shape. That split is part of the release, not a footnote.

The plot, without turning this into a scene-by-scene list, is a partnership that should not work. Strider wants a case that can stand up. Scarpa wants leverage, money, and the pleasure of hurting men in hoods who think they are untouchable. Justice and vengeance smear into each other. Bratton has talked about filming the attack on the Dahmer house from inside, with the family, rather than watching hooded men as spectacle. He has also said he is after emotional truth more than a deposition. Wayne does not exist. The fire does. Scarpa did go south. The film invents the two-hander so a Black protagonist is not a suitcase carrier in his own history.

Wahlberg has said he thought he knew Scarpa from the Colombo wars and old biopic scripts that never got to Mississippi. This chapter surprised him. Abdul-Mateen has talked about building Strider from the pressure on Black agents who were asked to represent a change they did not get to live. Josh Lucas and David Strathairn play bureau lifers. Ethan Embry is in the Klan orbit as Sam Bowers. Esposito’s Dahmer is the reason the car points south.


Inspired is the honest word. Scarpa was real. Dahmer was real. The Klan murder was real. The FBI’s habit of using monsters when the law felt slow is real. The two-man buddy engine is construction. The neat arc from assignment to reckoning is construction. Combining the 1964 disappearance case and the 1966 fire into one feverish season is the way scripts work, and it is also how rumours have always mixed those years.

Scarpa’s later life is darker than anything a studio will put in the second act. The Colombo war dead. The eye. The stolen blood. The son shot after the father wasted away in Minnesota. The agent who sat at the table and later stood in a dock. The millions that seemed to vanish when he died. None of that is required for a Friday night thriller, and all of it is why the real Grim Reaper still sits in true-crime shelves thirty years on.

Bratton came up through documentary instinct. He interviewed Scarpa children, Dahmer family, FBI voices, even a judge and surviving Klan-connected people. Then he made a genre film anyway. That is the tension. You can feel the research in the house and the makeup. You can feel the rewrite in Wayne Strider. Well, that is the deal audiences accept when the poster says “inspired by.”

By Any Means is in cinemas now. No official streaming or digital date has been announced.