ABOUT/SCOTT CURTIS

Scott Curtis is a former FBI agent turned TV crime analyst who is also a writer and investigator.

SCOTT CURTIS is a former FBI agent known for having spearheaded the largest single-day takedown of organized-crime members in U.S. history, 127 arrests on January 20, 2011—a record that still stands. Mobsters universally acknowledged Curtis as the guy “in charge”—the operation’s lead agent inside the FBI’s dedicated C-38 Colombo unit—and would complain about Curtis by name on wiretaps, in blogs, and openly in the press via their lawyers, who called him “obsessed.” [Sources hyperlinked where possible.]

“In New York City’s courtrooms and on the pages of its local tabloid newspapers, Curtis was mentioned almost as often as the men and women he was investigating,” wrote the Allentown Morning Call upon his retirement from the FBI.

Curtis is also a crime analyst on radio and television news shows including CNN. A sought-after expert on both criminal activity and the inner workings of law enforcement, he is quoted with frequency in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, and the Intercept, among other publications. [See Press page linked HERE.]

Over his career, Curtis successfully quarterbacked high-profile investigations out of the nation’s largest field office in New York City and from Philadelphia, disrupting dozens of criminal enterprises. 

Also a government-corruption analyst, Curtis has worked in both government and in the private sector as an investigator, holding senior positions as a corporate compliance executive and threat-intelligence consultant.

Curtis is a former Associate Director/Global Investigations & Compliance for a worldwide professional-services consulting company and has been a Vice President of Investigations & Compliance for a publicly traded sports-and-entertainment company. He is also the founder-CEO of FLEO Investigations, operating in the New York City, Los Angeles, New York State, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania areas.

Most recently, Curtis has worked on the national Opioid Task Force in concert with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Jersey, the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, Homeland Security, and associated agencies investigating multi-ethnic criminal groups conspiring to perpetrate wide-ranging schemes from insurance fraud to selling prescription drugs on the black market and deadly fentanyl. He has possessed a “Top Secret” security clearance from the U.S. government since 1986, and in December, 2022, his Top Secret clearance was renewed in conjunction with contract work for the Department of Justice. 

WEST POINT GRADUATE

Scott Curtis is a graduate of the United States Military Academy (West Point).

A former infantry captain (variously a platoon leader and Company Commander), he is a 100-percent service-disabled military veteran. 

A NOTABLE CAREER IN LAW ENFORCEMENT

An ex-FBI agent specializing in organized crime (especially the Italian mafia) and government corruption, Curtis was on the front lines, busting sophisticated criminal networks using informants, wired-up undercovers, and wiretaps (also: stings, tailing, and photo surveillance). He’s an expert on How It All Works, the gathering of evidence from indictment to trial, whether the grounds be robbery, fraud, or homicide. (Curtis spends some of the year teaching these advanced, state-of-the-art techniques to national-security personnel in the United Arab Emirates via U.S. State Department-sponsored contracts.)

Curtis has also served as an expert witness testifying in numerous federal trials and related hearings as the actual investigator and “lead agent” in the field spearheading all these investigations. He has extensive experience in trial and witness preparation and jury selection. He is additionally a weaponry and tactical expert.

Though mainly known for his headline-making activities as a New York City mafia-buster, Curtis was also honored in 2020 with a prestigious Department of Justice Executive Office of the United States Attorney (EOUSA) Director’s Award for his investigation as lead case agent and successful ensuing prosecution of the mayors of both Allentown and Reading, Pennsylvania—both engaged in elaborate public-corruption schemes featuring the rigging of public contracts. 

After just five years stationed in Philadelphia, Curtis was the widely recognized driving force behind criminal convictions of more than a dozen Pennsylvania public officials and business executives engaged in illicit pay-to-play.

He earned unprecedented convictions of crooked politicians by charging them with having received bribes in the form of campaign contributions (as opposed to the more usual briefcase payoffs). Prosecutors changed their minds that it couldn’t be done after Curtis captured these schemes on wiretaps and via wired-up informants, the federal government now seizing hundreds of thousands of dollars of campaign contributions as illegal proceeds.

HOMICIDE EXPERT

Curtis is an alumnus of the FBI National Academy (a graduate-level training course for law-enforcement executives), also completing both the New York City Police Department’s Homicide Investigators Course and the International Homicide Investigators Association Course. He was welcomed as a member of the NYPD’s Honor Legion after his work from 2008 to 2012 investigating and successfully prosecuting members of the violent criminal organization behind the 1997 cold-case homicide of an NYPD officer that Curtis personally wound up solving—and classified by the New York Daily News in 2000 as one of the "Top Ten Unsolved Crimes of the 20th Century" in New York City. 

Curtis was active in the period when the Colombo crime family was famously beset by a civil war, investigating and prosecuting individuals for the associated murders and attempted murders. He was also charged with investigating the FBI’s mishandling of confidential informants, dating from a period when the squad was led by controversial supervisor Lin DeVecchio, and notorious Colombo soldier and hitman Greg Scarpa (a.k.a. “The Grim Reaper”) and others had committed murders while being paid informants for the FBI. (Though DeVecchio was ultimately cleared of misdoing, 19 members of the Colombo crime family saw convictions tossed and charges dropped citing DeVecchio’s actions.)

ADVANCED TRAINING

Curtis has received extra training in confidential-source cultivation, interview and interrogation, white-collar crime, money-laundering, public corruption, homicide investigations, and more, over the course of 30-plus years as an investigator, most of it out of the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. (“Areas of Expertise” page linked HERE for comprehensive list including such big-picture experience with terrorism, transnational organized crime, weapons trafficking, et al.) .

SIGNIFICANT ACHIEVEMENTS

Scott Curtis’s remarkable efforts led to the conviction of hundreds of sophisticated criminals—with emphasis on the storied Colombo crime family—when in 2011, he spearheaded the largest single-day takedown in U.S. history of organized-crime members, effectively dismantling the Colombos’ ruling administration (for a spell, anyway). [See: “Testimonials” page linked HERE.]

Identified by Gang Land News journalist and contract columnist Jerry Capeci in The Huffington Post as “the lead FBI agent in the Colombo purge,” Curtis planned and (usually personally) executed hundreds of arrests, searches, and surveillance operations of violent, highly sophisticated criminals with such memorable monikers as “Junior Lollipops,” “The Claw,” “Fish” Marra, “Tommy Shots,” “Andy Mush,” “Fat Larry,” “Richie Nerves,” et al.

The record 2011 takedown (requiring Curtis run point for months, working hand in hand with the EDNY U.S. Attorneys’ office) made headlines internationally. Curtis rendered all key tactical and operational decisions as the guy actually out in the field working informants and flipping new ones, too, including on the very day of the bust. The Allentown Morning Call has cited Curtis’s resulting “semi-celebrity status” in New York City.

What began as Curtis’s investigation of this single murderous Colombo cell was designated by Eastern District of New York (EDNY) attorneys several months prior to the mass arrest as the tip of the spear, the testimony of his cooperators alone implicating dozens of organized-crime members in felonious offenses across all five New York Italian-mafia families and New Jersey’s DeCavalcante family (inspiration for The Sopranos).

United States Attorney General Eric Holder was on hand the day of the mega-bust at EDNY offices, introduced to Curtis by the attorneys he had worked with so closely, Holder personally congratulating Curtis for this historic achievement. FBI Colombo-squad supervisor Seamus McElearney emailed Curtis three days later: “You did an unbelievable job putting this all together—great determination.”

“What I really can’t comprehend….[is why the FBI] won’t rein in FBI Agent Scott Curtis,” a one-time acting boss of the Colombo crime family named Tommy Gioeli famously complained to the world in 2011 on his media-savvy personal blog—before being tried and finally sentenced to 18 years in a federal jail. Curtis also busted brokerage-boiler rooms hijacked by the mob that defrauded thousands of regular folks of more than $40 million. Flipping violent criminals into cooperating witnesses, Curtis has an ultra-rare, intimate familiarity with the witness-protection program. 

In the course of his career with the FBI, Scott Curtis solved more than ten cold-case homicides. With a shovel in his hand, Curtis personally found the body of Colombo underboss William “Wild Bill” Cutolo (below), missing for more than nine years and whose death marked the formal end of the Colombo war. Curtis’s discovery of the body was deemed “for pure drama…the top New York mob story of the year” by Gang Land columnist Jerry Capeci. Confessions Curtis himself obtained from the henchmen ordered to commit this murder also wound up supporting the life sentence handed down to the acting boss of the Colombo family, Alphonse “Allie Boy” Persico (son of incarcerated family boss Carmine “The Snake” Persico).

Curtis is an expert on the history and rituals of the mafia: inductions, moral code, murder protocols, and such rackets as loansharking, car theft, bank burglaries, labor unions, and construction. Also: confidential informants manipulating agents. He has served as something of a mentor to flipped mafia wiseguys connected to scores of baseball-batterings and murders—men who are out of jail and struggling to stay legit. 

IN THE MEDIA

Curtis remains a sought-after expert on criminal matters, frequently solicited by television-news and radio programs to speak about ongoing homicide and homeland-security investigations.

He has been interviewed on such subjects as the future of organized crime in America given the carelessness of a younger generation making threats via text message, and also corruption in the United States Senate in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, the New York Post, the Intercept, and other major news outlets.

Scott Curtis also frequently appears as a legal analyst on CNN, guesting as a crime analyst on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and CNN NewsNight with Abby Phillip, where he’s discussed such subjects as imminent changes at the FBI after FBI Director Christopher Wray’s announced resignation.

When United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead on the street in midtown Manhattan by alleged vigilante assassin Luigi Mangione, CNN’s Anderson Cooper had Curtis on to speak about weaponry and the behavior of this fugitive.

CNN NewsNight also invited Curtis on to discuss the ways the FBI would investigate the New Orleans New Year’s Eve crowd attack and how it would be determined the ISIS-inspired killer acted alone.

Curtis is, too, a regular contributor to WFMZ-TV’s evening broadcast.

After Brazilian killer Danelo Cavalcante shimmied up a crack between two walls in his widely televised escape from a county jail, Curtis commented on his chances surviving on the outside.

Curtis has also weighed in multiply on Bryan Kohberger, the 28-year-old former criminology PhD student who finally pled guilty to having committed a quadruple murder at the University of Idaho and whose DNA was linked to the crime scene.

"I was surprised that he pled guilty or decided to plead guilty as the prosecutor was outlining the facts of the case and the evidence of the case. It didn't seem like such a slam dunk case there and there was room for doubt, reasonable doubt that the defendant could take advantage of," Curtis noted.

"Obviously there was evidence linking him to the crime scene and there were events that took place before and afterwards that circumstantially could add to the prosecutors' case there proving that he was the only one with the means and the only one that was available in that vicinity at that time that could perpetrate those murders but we have no eyewitness to those murders actually taking place." 

Curtis also found Kohberger's body language in court telling.

"I've dealt with cold-blooded killers who went to court and plead guilty to their involvement in murders and who broke down crying and showed a lot of emotion in that process but I also had cold-blooded killers who were involved in murders who stood up in court like Kohberger and just rattled off 'yes I'm guilty' to a bunch of murders showing no emotion and appearing to show no remorse for what he had done at all," Curtis observed.  

"They're sociopaths or psychopaths and they probably showed from an early part of their lives going back to childhood that they would show no emotion toward any type of hardship or people being hurt. They're basically callous to things that regular people would say I feel bad about that."

"Everybody would love to know what that answer is, why this happened, why he did these crimes," said Curtis on the eve of sentencing, admitting some late-in-the-game admissions were unlikely: "I don't think Kohberger is going to say anything. I don't think the judge is going to force him to say anything."

AFFILIATIONS

Scott Curtis is a member in good standing of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, the FBI National Academy Associates, the International Homicide Investigators Association, NYPD Honor Legion, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the American Legion, West Point Field Force, and the Disabled America Veterans Association. 

PERSONAL

A former fellow of the Veterans in Media & Entertainment AT&T program and alumnus (and current teaching assistant) of the Writers Guild Foundation Veterans Writing Project, Scott Curtis also has experience as a content creator, writing and consulting for scripted television. [See TV+Film page linked HERE.]

A onetime nationally ranked gymnast, Curtis enjoys serving the community coaching youth sports teams, conducting Congressional-nomination candidate interviews for West Point, and executing numberless DIY home projects.