Friends of the Family (26 page)

Kaplan remembered details that Casso had neglected to include in his 302. Gaspipe’s initial dealings with the cops apparently took place in 1985, Kaplan said, when Gaspipe asked him if he could launder two stolen $500,000 treasury bills. One of Kaplan’s associates, a Hasidic banker named Joe Banda, used an Orthodox Jewish jeweler to successfully cash the first T-bill in Europe. Kaplan never knew the jeweler’s name. When European law enforcement got a whiff of this jeweler’s trail, Casso and Kaplan were afraid he would roll over and decided to kill him. At Kaplan’s request, Santora asked the cops if they wanted the contract. Were the two detectives willing to commit murder to cover a money laundering scheme? Santora told Kaplan that they would do the job for $30,000.

Several days later Santora told him that the cops had used a police car to pull the jeweler to the side of the road, informed him that he was a suspect in a hit-and-run, and told him that he had to appear in a lineup. The unsuspecting jeweler went along with them and was handed over to Santora, who shot him and buried him. Kaplan didn’t know exactly where they killed him or where his body was buried. Only years later, after Santora’s killing, did he find out that Santora had kept some of the cops’ payment for himself.

According to Kaplan, Eppolito and Caracappa liked the work. They even refused payment from Casso for getting him the names and mug shots of the people who had tried to kill him. That was a favor, they told him, evidence of the quality of the material they could provide.

Ponzi, and later Vecchione, speculated that Casso must have believed he’d hit the wiseguy jackpot when he realized what he had: two NYPD detectives at the top of the information food chain offering to work for him. In the whole history of organized crime there had never been anybody like these two guys. It was like having family members on the job.

It was one-stop shopping. When Gas complained that he couldn’t find Jimmy Hydell he paid the cops $35,000 to kidnap and deliver him. While some of Kaplan’s confession simply corroborated evidence that Tommy Dades and the other investigators had already gathered, he added a considerable amount of detail. For example, Santora told Kaplan that after the cops had handed over Hydell, he’d put him in the trunk and driven to the Toys “R” Us parking lot. The whole way Hydell was banging on the inside of the
trunk. Finally Santora got so irritated that he stopped the car, opened the trunk, and punched Hydell several times, until he finally shut up.

It was from Kaplan that everyone finally learned what had happened to Jimmy Hydell in the basement of mobster James Gallo’s house. It was brutal. And it lasted a long time. Kaplan had heard it directly from Casso. Although Jimmy Hydell wasn’t a made guy, his uncle was a significant member of the Gambino family. Betty Hydell had almost no relationship with this particular brother-in-law. But Casso, a member of the Lucchese family, knew that he couldn’t whack the nephew of a Gambino without permission. So rather than risk possible retribution from the uncle, or other Gambinos, family boss John Gotti for instance, he invited a faction of Gambinos to the basement to hear right from Jimmy Hydell’s mouth that he was part of the hit team and that Mickey Boy Paradiso, a Gambino capo, had given out the contract. Only after the Gambinos gave their permission to kill Hydell did Casso proceed.

And then he began shooting Hydell, over and over, but he shot him in parts of the body that would produce incredible pain but wouldn’t be fatal.

Casso told Kaplan that Hydell had said to him, “I know you’re going to kill me, Anthony. I want you to promise me one thing: I want you to throw my body out in the street so my mother can get the insurance money.”

Casso had agreed, but it never happened. Hydell’s body disappeared and Kaplan didn’t know what had happened to it. And definitely he did not ask.

If Kaplan didn’t know the answer to a question he didn’t make it up or speculate. As Ponzi knew, some people try to impress their questioners by having an answer for every question they’re asked. Not Kaplan. He knew only what Casso told him. That’s it. Once, someone wondered why Kaplan hadn’t asked Casso a particular question. Kaplan practically looked right through the person who asked that question, telling him, “You don’t ask this guy questions. He’s not that kind of guy. That could only get you hurt. Gas would tell you what he wanted to tell you. Most of the time you didn’t want to know, ’cause it was safer that way.”

Often at the end of a long day with Kaplan, Ponzi would call Vecchione or Tommy Dades. In a general way he would tell Vecchione about Kaplan’s testimony, explaining that much of it corroborated Casso’s 302 almost word for word. Vecchione didn’t ask too many questions. Usually he’d just chuckle, mostly in disbelief. What a deal Casso had passed up.

Tommy Dades didn’t want to know what was going on. Nothing. With the growing distrust between the state and the Feds, he believed that the fewer details he knew about the investigation the better it was for him. “I’m happy it’s going well” was the most he would tell Ponzi. “I don’t need to know.”

Rarely in Joe Ponzi’s career had he spent so much time with a single witness. Most of his previous encounters had lasted only a day or two, three at most, just long enough to do a polygraph or flip a guy. But the debriefing of Burt Kaplan went on for months, and over that time he began to develop a relationship with the old man. Ponzi had always been very careful never to become friendly with one of these guys; this was his job, and that meant never allowing any of it to become personal. But as the days passed he did develop a rapport with Kaplan. “We developed a strange kind of bond,” Ponzi explained. “I think he knew that I was a straight shooter and he liked that. I think he recognized me as someone who got it. I never like to characterize relationships with people like that as ‘I liked him,’ but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you I didn’t.

“Burt Kaplan was a smart guy. I thought that he had an understanding of who he was. In fact, once he said about himself, ‘I’m a criminal. I’m being honest here, I’m a criminal.’ He accepted the fact that he’d picked this life, and he wasn’t the slightest bit apologetic about any of it. I thought he understood people and knew how the game was played. I don’t think he felt terribly bad about any of this; I think he liked that life but felt that if Santora had lived things would have turned out differently.

“I thought he respected me if not liked me.”

Kaplan sometimes referred to Ponzi as “Chief,” and usually when Joe came into the debriefing room Kaplan would greet him with some sort of friendly comment. “Nice suit,” he would tease him. “It’s refreshing to see a guy dressed like a businessman.” Other times he’d appraise the quality of Ponzi’s suit, making it clear he was not impressed. Once, after Ponzi had missed a few sessions and then shown up and begun peppering him with questions machine-gun style, he said, laughing, “Whoa, look who’s here. I guess they brought in the big guns today.”

Several different times Kaplan looked right at Henoch and told him pointedly, “You know, the only reason I’m here is because of that guy.” Meaning Ponzi.

Henoch didn’t respond particularly well to that comment. From the first day, he maintained absolute control of Kaplan. It was obvious that if the Feds thought they could make a RICO charge stick—which was looking more and more likely—Henoch would be prosecuting the case, and piece by piece he was very deliberately building his prosecution.

As early as possible in the process Ponzi began bringing Bobby Intartaglia to the meetings. That was an obvious choice. Bobby I went a long way back with Kaplan. After the attempt on Casso, detectives had discovered that the car he was driving was registered to Kaplan’s clothing business, Progressive Distributors. Bobby I conducted an extensive surveillance of Kaplan’s warehouse on Staten Island. He’d snapped thousands of photographs.

Kaplan and Bobby I got along very well. They knew a lot of the same people, they spoke the same language, they’d even gotten started in their careers at about the same time. Kaplan was comfortable with Bobby I’s easy manner. Intartaglia also formed a nice relationship with Kaplan’s wife and would bring her with him for visits. Eventually, when Ponzi began cutting back on the number of meetings he attended—the debriefing was proceeding very well and he was busy running a hundred-person bureau—Bobby I took his seat at the table.

After Ponzi successfully flipped Kaplan, any leverage the state might have had disappeared. The Feds stormed the barricades, and Henoch began pushing Brooklyn out of the equation. At one point Vecchione officially cross-designated Josh Hanshaft to represent the office. That meant he was going to be Joe Hynes’s man on the prosecution team. But any illusion Hanshaft had that Henoch was going to welcome him disappeared the first time he went down to South Jersey to meet Kaplan. He drove down with Bobby I. When they got there, rather than putting Hanshaft to work, Henoch wouldn’t let either of them in the room with Kaplan. He made them wait outside in the hallway for a couple of hours. Bobby I was furious, complaining loudly, “We’re supposed to be working together. What are we doing here?”

When Ponzi got to the office and saw Hanshaft and Bobby I sitting outside like schoolboys he went inside to talk to Henoch to find out what was going on. During a sometimes heated conversation Henoch said flatly, “I’m not going to allow my witness to talk to—”

“
My
witness?” Ponzi was incredulous. He rarely loses his temper, but this time he was tiptoeing on the edge. “What do you mean, ‘my witness’?
I’m the one who turned this guy. ‘My witness’? Are you kidding me?”

Henoch backed off and brought Hanshaft into the debriefing room to meet Kaplan. But Henoch was never forthright with Hanshaft; he never voluntarily shared information about the case or made him feel like he was part of the prosecution team. When Hanshaft finally confronted him, insisting, “Tell me what you want me to read so I can assist you,” Henoch simply tossed a book of press clippings to him. Hanshaft believed from his first day on the case that Henoch had no interest in keeping him around—and perhaps was already figuring out how the state was going to be tossed off the case.

When Vecchione learned about Ponzi’s confrontation with Henoch he went to see Joe Hynes. “It’s not over yet,” he told him, “but it looks like we’re getting the boot here.”

There was nothing Hynes could do about it at that point. “Just keep me posted,” the DA said. “Let’s just see how it plays out.”

Hanshaft finally approached Henoch, telling him, “Rob, I don’t need to know about everything if you’re not comfortable with that. I understand your concern about information getting out. But I’m here. I’m not going to sit at these meetings with my thumb up my ass. You need to involve me more. Partition the case; just give me a piece of it.”

Henoch gave him the Eddie Lino murder. For Burt Kaplan, Eddie Lino was just another job for his cops. It was typical of the work they did for Gaspipe. As Kaplan explained, so calmly he might have been talking about a truckload of designer suits, “Casso wanted to kill Lino because he’d approved of the original plot against him. He asked me to ask the cops if they wanted to take the contract.” The agreed price for the job was $75,000. Kaplan was in the New York Eye and Ear Hospital, recovering from cataract surgery, when Eppolito shook him awake. “We got him,” he said, slapping down a newspaper on the food tray. He told him the story in detail, including the fact that Caracappa had been the shooter.

Kaplan said he had asked Eppolito, “So how come Steve shot him instead of you?”

Eppolito replied, “Steve was always the better shot.”

Hanshaft set out to make himself an expert on the murder of wiseguy Eddie Lino.

And Kaplan just kept talking.

“Isn’t it true, Mr. Kaplan, that in
exchange for your testimony against my client the government has agreed to reduce your twenty-seven-year prison sentence?”

“No. There’s no such agreement.”

“And isn’t it true your daughter recently adopted your first grandchild? A child you’ll never be able to hold while you’re in prison?”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

“And didn’t the government spend six months with you reviewing the testimony you’re giving here today?”

“Nobody reviewed anything. They asked me questions and I answered them.”

“So let me ask you this, Mr. Kaplan. Wouldn’t you say just about anything to get out of prison?”

“Objection!”

Mike Vecchione could just imagine how the defense attorneys would attack Kaplan’s credibility. He’d been there several times in his own career. But sometimes you’ve got to use some grit to clean up the mess. In 1993 he’d put a killer on the witness stand as his primary witness in a case in
which an off-duty police officer, Robert Cabeza, had used his shield to get behind a bulletproof safety partition in a liquor store and then killed the store owner. His accomplice flipped to try to get a better deal. When this accomplice testified, Cabeza’s lawyer portrayed him as a lying murderer, willing to say anything to cut a deal for himself.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, he’s a convicted murderer; are you telling me he wouldn’t lie?

The best way to avoid that, maybe the only way, is to get as much corroborating evidence as possible. A prosecutor has to prove to a sometimes skeptical jury that his witness is telling the truth, and he does that by providing supporting evidence.

Kaplan had been better than a road map. He’d been their GPS, not only providing the directions, but giving them a multitude of worthwhile stops along the way. The trial strategy was obvious: Kaplan would testify first, describing in detail the scope of Eppolito and Caracappa’s betrayal. He would be followed on the witness stand by a series of other witnesses who would corroborate his testimony and add their own independent experiences. The job of the task force was to find those witnesses, as well as whatever physical evidence was available. If Kaplan said Eppolito drove a Cadillac, they needed to know the mileage. If Kaplan said Caracappa had a black cat, they needed to find out that cat’s name.

Some witnesses who would appear were obvious: Tommy Dades, for instance. After Kaplan testified that Casso had asked him to see if the cops could get Nicky Guido’s address, Dades would tell the jury how he discovered that Caracappa had run a computer search of all the Nicky Guidos in Brooklyn on November 11, 1986, and mistakenly supplied Kaplan with the address of an innocent young man—six weeks before that man was murdered. Then the jury would see the printout; maybe they’d even get to hold it and feel the link to the dead man.

Betty Hydell certainly would testify. Juries relate to mothers, particularly a mother who can identify the people who abducted her son. After Kaplan informed the jury that Casso hired the cops to locate and pick up Jimmy Hydell, Betty would take the stand—maybe she’d even point dramatically at Eppolito and Caracappa—and identify them as the detectives she had seen outside her house the day her son disappeared.

Tommy Galpine, Kaplan’s gofer, who was serving a sixteen-year sentence for the same marijuana deal in which Kaplan was sentenced to twenty-
seven years, would almost certainly flip once he learned that the old man had made a deal. Galpine could both support Kaplan’s allegations as well as testify about his own dealings with the crooked cops. Somebody had to go talk with him.

Certainly the task force would try to find the eyewitness to the murder of Eddie Lino, a man who could confirm much of what Kaplan claimed he had been told by Eppolito. Several former wiseguys living happily in the Witness Protection Program would be approached to see what and how much of Kaplan’s testimony they might be able to support. Henoch’s list of potential witnesses was a long one, and as the investigation progressed it would get substantially longer.

In addition to the computer printout a substantial amount of documentary evidence would be introduced to support Kaplan’s claims. Eppolito’s financial records would show that he had received a lot of money from an unknown source at about the time Kaplan testified he’d loaned him $65,000 of the $75,000 Eppolito had requested. Hospital records would prove Kaplan was recovering from cataract surgery when Lino was killed. Real estate records would prove Steve Caracappa’s mother lived on Staten Island, right where Kaplan said he had gone to meet him. Motor vehicle records would show that the car Casso was driving when attacked was registered to Kaplan’s company. By the time the case was ready to be tried the task force would have turned a mountain of paperwork into steel links between Kaplan, Casso, and the two cops.

And there was at least one more lead that needed to be pursued. It probably was going to be another dead end—at best it was a long shot—but it was one of those intriguing possibilities that a good detective needs to close down. The garage on Nostrand Avenue. The place where Jimmy Hydell had been transferred from Santora’s car to Casso’s car. Tommy Dades had spent several months trying to find it. He didn’t know why he felt it was so important. Chances that a bystander had seen something worthwhile, remembered it, and could be located were south of nonexistent. But Dades just had a cop’s itch about this place. So when he went back to work on the case after joining Hynes’s office, he made finding it his primary objective.

What seemed like such an easy transition from the NYPD to the DA’s office turned out to be a lot more difficult than Dades had anticipated. As a first-grade detective he’d enjoyed a great degree of independence; as long
as he produced, he pretty much structured his own days and nights. As the new guy in Hynes’s office he had very different responsibilities. Maybe it was just the culmination of too much happening too soon, maybe he should have taken some time away from the job, but it didn’t click for him in the detective investigator’s office. He struggled there, but rather than complaining to Ponzi or Vecchione, after four months he resigned. Both Ponzi and Vecchione tried to talk him out of it, tried to reason with him, but he’d made up his mind. He walked out the door and didn’t look back.

For the first time in his adult life Tommy Dades wasn’t on the job. A lot of his identity had been tied into that shield and without it he was drifting. Nothing in his life that mattered seemed tied down. He retreated into his PAL gym, spending long hours there every day, teaching kids how to defend themselves.
Keep your guard up, deflect the punches. That way the other guy can’t hurt you.

If only the rest of his life was that basic.

One afternoon several weeks after resigning Dades decided to try one last time to make peace with his father. He left a message, pretty much neutral in tone, a simple “I never heard from you again” kind of thing. In response he received a nasty phone message telling him never to call again, not to write. I’m not interested in hearing from you, his father wrote, I don’t want anything to do with you. If I had any other phone numbers for you, I’d call and tell you that to your face.

Tommy called again, this time letting loose some of the anger he felt. On his father’s answering machine he left this bitter message: Here’s every phone number you possibly can call to get in touch with me, but I don’t think you’ve got the balls to say that to my face. If you decide that you want to take a trip and say it in person, I suggest you make sure it’s a one-way ticket, because believe me, you’ll never make it back to Minnesota.

His father left one more message. It was pretty much to the point. You’re a loser, he said. You don’t know what happened between me and your mother. You don’t know the truth. If you had any pride, you’d lose my phone number.

Tommy responded with a final blast. When he hung up the phone that time, knowing it was the last time, he actually felt a little better.

At the beginning of September Mike Vecchione began the first of what eventually would be four trials of Brooklyn Democratic leader Clarence
Norman. Although far less glamorous than the Mafia cops case, it had far more important implications. In a recent primary election Norman had run his own candidate against Joe Hynes. And with Norman pulling the strings to bring out regular Democratic support, that candidate had had a real chance to win. In heavily Democratic Brooklyn winning the primary guarantees victory in the general election. Norman had made it clear that if his guy won, he intended to walk into court and basically spit in Vecchione’s face and tell him to get the fuck off the case.

He had the power to do just that, if his candidate won. Norman’s candidate lost. Hynes was set for another term. When Norman walked into the courtroom he barely looked at Vecchione.

It still wasn’t an easy case. The state intended to bring four different charges against Norman in four trials. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals had agreed to hear a challenge to the strongest charge, so while waiting for a decision from that court Vecchione had to bring a secondary charge against Norman.

He was also worried about the jury. Juries can be fixed; he knew that to be absolutely true because it had happened to him in a wiseguy murder trial. The vote for conviction had been eleven to one, and years later he learned that one vote had been bought. There was no possible way he could have won the case. In this situation he was well aware that Clarence Norman was among the most powerful black men in New York politics—and nobody knew how far he might go to stay out of prison.

The charges against him consisted of three felony counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions and a misdemeanor count of concealing contributions from his own campaign treasurer. His defense attorney called it a case of poor bookkeeping—and maybe it really wasn’t a strong enough case to bring down the Democratic party leader.

But by the time Vecchione finished his summation to the jury it was no longer about a few thousand dollars in illegal campaign contributions, but rather about upholding the American democratic process. It was about ethics and integrity and the misuse of political power. And it took the jury one day to find Norman guilty of all charges. The conviction automatically caused him to be expelled him from the New York State Assembly, where he had been the number two man, and caused him to be disbarred as a lawyer and give up his leadership of the county Democratic Party. Sentencing was
delayed until after the second trial, which was scheduled to begin the following January. Vecchione was already at work preparing for that one.

While Tommy Dades was wrestling his personal demons and Vecchione was prosecuting Clarence Norman, the investigation they had started more than a year ago in a windowless room in the Brooklyn DA’s office had become a major investigation involving literally hundreds of investigators from at least five federal and state law enforcement agencies spread across the nation. Dades’s casual phone conversation with Betty Hydell had grown into a multimillion-dollar effort to put two dirty cops away for the remainder of their lives. Plus. The cold case had become scalding hot.

As the investigation proceeded late into 2004, so did the legal maneuvering. Joe Ponzi had remained close friends with Mark Feldman and the prosecutor kept him in the loop. A lot of the time, Ponzi believed, Mark was using him to unofficially pass along information he felt Mike Vecchione should know. On a professional basis both Dades and Ponzi often got frustrated by their friend Feldman during this investigation, but their personal relationship remained strong. Both of them had tried hard to work out some sort of accord between him and Mike Vecchione, but that just wasn’t going to happen.

One winter afternoon Ponzi was sitting in Vecchione’s office, bringing him up to date. Then he mentioned casually that DEA agent Mark Manko had appeared before the grand jury and testified about Kaplan’s statements.

Vecchione looked up. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you know?” Ponzi seemed surprised.

“No, I don’t know. Are you telling me they started the grand jury presentation?” Ponzi nodded. Vecchione paused to let that news sink in. “What about our deal to get Hydell? What about us going in with Kaplan, what happened to all that?” He shook his head in disbelief. “Tommy was right. We’re getting fucked over here. This is complete bullshit.”

Very basically, a legal case begins when a prosecutor presents evidence to a grand jury, then gives that grand jury a charge under the law that fits the evidence. The prosecutor explains exactly what the statute says. If the grand jury believes it has seen sufficient evidence to suggest that a crime may have been committed under that particular statute, it issues a true bill. A true bill means an indictment has been returned and the accused person
or persons has been charged with a crime under the specific statute. Then the indictment, the formal accusation charging a defendant or defendants with a crime, is drawn up. The grand jury meets in secret, the proceedings remain private, and there is never any type of public record of what happened in the grand jury room.

So Vecchione knew absolutely nothing about these proceedings until Ponzi alerted him. He assumed the fact that Feldman or Henoch had gone to a grand jury meant they believed they had sufficient evidence to make their RICO charge stick. But even if that was true, Feldman had agreed to take the Hydell case out of it, to let Vecchione try Jimmy Hydell’s murder. It certainly didn’t look like that was going to happen.

Vecchione was livid. It wasn’t just ego, it was the extraordinary sense that he had been conned. He picked up the phone and called Feldman. “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” he said. “We had a deal, Mark. We agreed that we would take Hydell, you would take the RICO if you could make it.”

Feldman started to hedge. “That’s not really the way I remember it,” he said. “I think I said that if there was a RICO we would take it. Well, there’s a RICO.”