Angela Clemente, a New Jersey private forensic investigator, was found badly beaten on a Brooklyn Street only a few hours after a scheduled meeting with an informant.

Clemente was looking into the March 1992 murders of John Minerva and Michael Imbergamo who were gunned down just after they had closed up Minerva’s pastry shop in North Massapequa for the evening.

Minerva was a soldier in the Colombo family for years and Imbergamo as an associate of the family. Imbergamo was also Republican committeeman from North Massapequa. Both were killed in retaliation for switching sides in a rift within a fraction of the Colombo’s.

Clemente, a then 40-year-old single mom of three, routinely shrugged off offers from the police to protect her, was summoned to a meeting in Dyker Heights by an unidentified man. After a short conversation in the Caesar's Bay Shopping Center parking lot, the assailant asked, "Are you going to keep investigating DeVecchio?" When she said, "Yes," the man began punching, kicking and choking her until she lost consciousness, investigators said.

She was left with a large, ugly welt on her stomach, cuts and bruises on her neck, head, legs and lip, and choking marks on her neck.

New York City Police had warned her that she was in danger possibly from other ex-FBI agents for her pivotal role in gathering information that led to FBI agent Lindley DeVecchio’s indictment.

DeVecchio was a major force in the agency’s fight against the mob in the New York area. It was later charged that DeVecchio passed on information to mobster Greg Scarpa about Scarpa's rivals and informants that led to the murders of four people by Colombo crime family members and associates between September 1984 and May 1992.

For more than a decade, DeVecchio a supervisory special agent in charge of the Colombo family squad allegedly served as a mole, enabling Scarpa's brutal crime empire to eliminate government informants in their ranks, competitors trying to poach their territory and anyone else who was a possible threat. The mountain of evidence Clemente collected against him exposed what some have called one of the worst corruption scandals in U.S. history. Clemente claimed ex-FBI agents had embarked on a campaign of "witness tampering, harassment and intimidation" to help DeVecchio. In an explosive letter to the Justice Department, she accused at least three former agents of illegal tactics.