Friends of the Family (17 page)

For the first time Tommy felt something about his father—something bad. He felt like somebody had reached into his gut, grabbed hold of his stomach, and was twisting it inside out. His father had given his second son the same name, Tommy. There was no mistaking the meaning of that. As far as his father was concerned, he had ceased to exist. Once again, he had been abandoned. Then his aunt told him, “I’ll give you his number, but I’m not going to call him for you. You’re going to have to decide on your own if you really want to speak to him. I have to warn you, he’s not a very nice guy. And, truthfully, I can’t understand why you’re doing it.”

Anger? Loneliness? A need to move his life out of neutral? Or maybe just because there was no good reason not to. It wasn’t a good answer, he understood that, but it was the only one he had.

He went to the gym that night and started hitting the heavy bag. When everything around him was falling apart the gym was the one place he felt he belonged. In the gym he was welcomed and appreciated for the person he was. He loved the sport of boxing. It was a world in which the rules were clear: Hit the other guy more than he hits you. There were no shades of gray, no bureaucracy, no tantalizing clues leading to solutions just around the next corner and next corner. Just hit the other guy more than he hits you. And no wives who felt betrayed, or mothers who had died, or fathers who…He hit the bag hard that night.

Tommy dialed his father’s number the next morning. The answering machine clicked on. For the first time in his life Tommy heard his father’s voice. He left a message: “This is your son. Tommy. I’m just calling to say hello to you. You can call me at…”

His father returned his call that night—and left his own message: “I don’t know who this is, but I got a call from you. I think you probably have the wrong guy. But if you want to call back, call me tomorrow morning at…”

They spoke the next day. Tommy had never imagined the sound of his father’s voice, so nothing about the sound of it surprised him. Nor did his cold words. “I’m sorry,” Peter Thomas said, “but I think you’re mistaken. I don’t think you got the right person.”

“I’m not mistaken. I know exactly who you are,” Tommy said firmly.
“If you want to deny who you are to me, go ahead, that’s your business. But if you do…then I think you’re a coward. Look, I’m not calling you looking for anything, I’m just calling out of curiosity. My mother passed away a little while ago; I probably never would have looked for you if she hadn’t died. I just basically called you on a whim. If you don’t believe who I am, go buy a book called
Mob over Miami
. It’s about a case I broke. There’s a picture of me and my name in the book. You’ll see, I do look like you. Then call me back.”

Several days passed without any response. At times Tommy wondered if he’d hear from his father again. He’d already made the decision that he would never call him again. He’d done as much as possible. But even as he concentrated on the investigation the question hung somewhere in his mind, like the slightly out-of-focus background of a snapshot.

At work he continued trying to pin down the location of the garage in which Eppolito took Hydell out of the first car and put him in the trunk of a second car, and the house in which Casso killed him. That switch inside the garage had taken place during the day; it was quite possible—even probable—that there was a witness or witnesses to it. Find the garage and maybe find a witness. And who knows what type of physical evidence might still be found in the house? In another mob execution that took place in a basement, years after the shooting, detectives had found a bullet that had gone through a plasterboard wall and lain untouched on the floor behind that wall, long after the hole it made had been patched and painted over. You just never know.

But still, Tommy wasn’t surprised when Peter Dades called him back. “Sir, you really are my son,” he said quite formally. Sir. The strange use of that word said much about him. “I don’t know what to say to you.” And so they started talking. He asked about Tommy’s mother and his grandparents, about other members of the family.

They were dead, Tommy told him. He then asked about Tommy’s life. Tommy told him about his wife and his own kids, about his career. He told him about the cases he’d solved and the awards he’d won, from the FBI, the DEA, even a Black Achievement Award. “I’m not going to cause you any trouble,” Tommy said. “I want you to know that. I don’t want anything from you. If you think that’s why I called you, you’re wrong. I’m doing fine myself. I drive a brand-new car. I’m going to send you pictures of my house;
we even have a built-in pool. Maybe once we get past that you can be a little more cordial to me.”

Peter Thomas Dades was less forthcoming with the details of his own life. He had a son and a daughter, he said. He said he was still with his wife, then suggested they were living apart. It was a discussion of the facts of their lives, devoid of warmth. It was a small step taken vaguely in the direction of a relationship.

They began corresponding through letters rather than on the phone. They exchanged photographs. Tommy received photographs taken on his parents’ wedding day. They were well preserved; someone had handled them carefully. He got photographs taken during the Vietnam War and taken more recently.

Those conversations they did have most often ended curtly. Peter usually spoke in generalities, avoiding anything truly personal. At one point though, he did say that sometime in the future they would meet and he’d talk more about certain things. But on another occasion he said snappishly, “You know, I don’t owe you any explanation. Two people got married, they got divorced, and that’s it.”

Tommy couldn’t let that one go. This was as close to real anger as he’d come since making that first phone call. “Hey, I’m a father. It’s not like you just had a wife and you didn’t get along so you parted ways. How do you have a son and…and you’re a PI, you had the ability to find me. Weren’t you curious about your kid?”

“No,” he said.

“Okay, that’s fine, at least you’re being honest.”

Tommy also spoke to other members of his family. His grandmother, who was in a nursing home, welcomed him. He spoke often to his aunt Elaine and established a warm relationship with her. His half brother and half sister both told him that as far as being raised by their father went, he “didn’t miss anything.” And he even spoke with his father’s wife. “I hope you’re not mad at me for all this,” he said to her.

“No, no, not at all. I’m happy to talk to you.” She was quite open and friendly, telling him, “I wanted him to find you for a long time. We had so many fights about it. I used to ask him how he could have a son and not want to know what his story is.” They all thought Tommy was crippled, she said, because in the one baby picture they had he had braces on his legs.

Tommy laughed at that. “No, I’m fine. I was born bow-legged; that’s what that was,” he explained. “They were just straightening out my legs.”

Time passed, but both at work and in his personal life, Dades felt like he was standing still. He was making little progress in the investigation and in his relationships with his father and with Ro. It was like he was running just to stay on top of the quicksand; he was working hard and getting nowhere. He’d never worked a case as frustrating as this one. Usually, the object of an investigation is identifying the perp. The evidence is the trail that gets you there. This one was entirely different. This one started with a witness providing key evidence against the killers. They were starting near the end and backtracking to find evidence. And they had seventeen years of catching up to do.

But that was barely a blink of time compared to the catching up he had to do with his father, and he had him walking blind through an emotional minefield. He was almost always comfortable when conducting an investigation. Whatever the situation, he’d been there before. But his relationship with his father was different. He had no emotional resources on which to draw, no experience, no one to talk to about it. Finally, one Saturday, Dades was in his office speaking with his father when Peter made a derogatory comment about his ex-wife, Tommy’s mother. He started to tell a story about a night she did something that caused him to get beaten up. Tommy exploded, letting loose all his frustration, screaming at him, “Who do you think you are to speak about my mother like that! You don’t have the right. You left her like a dog and shut the lights off. She had to go live with her parents. She almost died giving birth to me. My mother was a wonderful woman who had a miserable life and you had a lot to do with that. Her whole life, she never said a single derogatory word about you. So who do you think you are to judge her…”

The conversation ended abruptly and angrily, but not the relationship. It seemed obvious Peter was as ambivalent about it as his son. Peter wrote a letter telling Tommy, basically, “Leave me alone, I don’t want to be bothered with you again.”

And then he called, telling his son to disregard the last part of the letter—the part in which he warned Tommy not to contact him again.

Sometimes Peter Dades made Gaspipe Casso seem logical.

Tommy wrote back, for the first time sending him pictures of his own
children and telling his father, “You have two beautiful, smart grandchildren.”

Peter Dades didn’t write back. He didn’t call. Once again, he disappeared from his son’s life. He cut off all contact without any explanation.

Eventually a family member explained that Peter had wanted nothing to do with Tommy after he learned Tommy was talking to another member of the family. It was a complicated story. There was nothing Tommy could do about it but finally let loose his hatred for his father, the man he’d just found. He went through a period in which he felt embarrassed to have the man’s genes in him and accepted the fact that contacting him had been a great mistake—except for the aunt and grandmother he found.

In every aspect of his life he was becoming more and more isolated.

His closest friends, Vecchione, Ponzi, Parello, and all the others, tried to help, but there really wasn’t too much anyone else could do beyond showing up and offering support. This was a stew of his own making. So as he had done other times in his past when the problems of his life threatened to become overwhelming, he dived deep into the job.

In the investigation Vecchione continued to believe that somehow, some way, he would eventually get access to Casso and that his testimony would help hang the cops. Other people were telling him to forget about Gaspipe, that even if he agreed to testify Vecchione couldn’t risk putting him on the stand. According to the government of the United States of America, Casso was a no-good liar. It would be very difficult to convince a jury that the federal government had that wrong, that instead of believing two highly decorated detectives they should believe a stone-cold killer who’d confessed to seventy crimes, including fifteen murders.

Well, it wouldn’t be easy. But Vecchione had been both a prosecutor and a defense attorney. He’d questioned and cross-examined just about every type of witness imaginable. He’d convicted numerous killers, and in many of those cases he’d depended on the testimony of even-more-violent killers. And he’d won the vast majority of those cases. He’d faced the jury and told them that his witness was a lowlife—and then reminded them that the only people bad guys would commit crimes in front of, or confess to, were people from their world. In that world the only people who could be trusted were thieves and killers. He had no doubt that if Casso went for a deal, he would find some way to squeeze the full value from his testimony.

Of course, that “if” remained the problem. Mark Feldman was intractable. But at the same time he was telling Vecchione he wouldn’t give Casso immunity for the Hydell murder, he was telling Dades and Ponzi that he was keeping Casso in New York so they could interview him as soon as an agreement was concluded. That was real cute, Vecchione thought, real cute. For his friends he was playing the good guy, saying he was keeping Casso close by so they could get in and see him, while at the same time knowing that he wasn’t going to agree to any deal. Vecchione finally decided to approach Feldman’s boss, Chief of the Criminal Division Dan Alonso. He called Feldman to inform him he was going over his head, to his boss, and he didn’t want to do so without telling him. Turned out it didn’t matter; before Vecchione spoke with Alonso, he was told not to bother, because Alonso was not going to do anything for him. Another brick wall.

Vecchione didn’t want to give up. He discussed the situation with his own boss, Brooklyn DA Joe Hynes, who confirmed that Feldman had him in a box. “What is, is,” Hynes said. “We can’t make them do something they don’t want to do.”

That left Casso’s lawyer, D. B. Lewis. Vecchione spoke with him several more times, trying to convince him that this was his client’s only shot at changing the equation. “I don’t understand the problem,” he said. “Your guy’s already confessed to Hydell’s murder on national television. If the Feds were going to prosecute him for it, they would have done it a long time ago. His own words would have hung him. It doesn’t make any sense not to talk to me.

“We’re giving him a chance to get back into court. Once he gets there who knows what a judge’ll do? Right now Casso’s got nothing. You know as well as I do that the Feds wouldn’t dare prosecute him for testifying against two dirty cops. They already got him for fifteen murders. And this’ll give him what he needs, a law enforcement agency verifying what he said was true. Once he gives us what we need, we’re gonna go out and corroborate a lot of it, something nobody else has done. We’ve already corroborated some of it.” Vecchione gave him no details about the investigation beyond what was absolutely necessary and perhaps even hinted they had more than they actually did.

Lewis replied that he would talk to Casso “and make every attempt to get him in.”

It didn’t work. Lewis reported to Vecchione that without a written guar
antee of immunity on the Hydell killing from both the Feds and the state Casso wouldn’t speak to him.