Friends of the Family (7 page)

They knew that although Eppolito and Caracappa had separate assignments most of their careers, they remained close friends and were often seen together.

And they knew that, once before, Eppolito had been caught appar
ently working with the mob—and had gotten away with it. In March 1984, police had raided the Cherry Hill, New Jersey, home of Rosario Gambino, a capo in the Gambino crime family. Gambino had been indicted for selling heroin and had been on the run for almost a year. During the raid they recovered thirty-six law enforcement reports—and found Detective Louis Eppolito’s fingerprints on several of them. It didn’t seem like a coincidence. An investigation discovered that one afternoon Eppolito had shown up at the offices of the Intelligence Division supposedly to ask detectives questions about the case. He told them that he had recently seen Gambino at a Brooklyn restaurant and was curious about the status of the investigation.

The documents found in Gambino’s home were copies—the originals were still on file at Intel. How they got from Intel to the house was the story of the fingerprints. Eppolito was brought up on departmental charges. But to the absolute astonishment of just about every cop who knew how the disciplinary system functioned, Eppolito had managed to beat the case. No matter which way you turned it, it didn’t make sense.

Mike Vecchione in particular always believed that something very unusual had taken place inside the trial commissioner’s courtroom. The trial commissioner’s office is where the police police themselves. Under New York State law a police officer is a civil servant and enjoys all the protections of the civil service code. So no matter what violation or even crime a cop might be charged with committing, from minor infractions like being absent from a post to extremely serious charges like murder, the city can’t penalize or suspend them, or fire them or take away their pension, without giving them due process. In the police department due process means a full administrative proceeding in front of an independent hearing officer, a judge, with the right to confront witnesses and face your accuser. The hearing takes place in a courtroom setting and it is conducted just like a civil trial. The primary difference is that there is no jury; the judge makes all the decisions.

Most cops consider it a kangaroo court. They think it’s stacked against them: No cop who goes in comes out innocent. That’s what made the whole Eppolito case so strange.

In 1980, while Dades was out on the street, Mike Vecchione had left the Brooklyn DA’s office and accepted Police Commissioner Bob McGuire’s offer to become the NYPD’s Chief Prosecutor. “I prosecuted hundreds of
cases against cops as well as supervising a forty-person staff. We convicted cops for minor infractions like being out of uniform and for serious crimes like extortion. I remember I prosecuted two cops who had a nice little business going; they were stopping trucks for minor traffic violations like a broken taillight as they left the Hunts Point market and then negotiating a payment instead of a ticket. I tried a cop for shooting a kid to death; this was a complicated case in which the Manhattan DA didn’t have enough evidence to bring criminal charges against him, but the NYPD could bring lesser charges of mishandling his weapon. We convicted him and he was fired, with the loss of his pension. It wasn’t much, considering the gravity of the crime, but it was the best we could do.”

It was in the advocate’s office that Vecchione first encountered cops doing business with organized crime: He was preparing to try two detectives for tipping off the local wiseguys running Vegas nights for churches and synagogues that they were going to be raided, when they took a plea. Those cops lost their jobs but they were allowed to keep their pensions.

So Mike knew the system. That’s why he couldn’t understand what had happened in the Eppolito case. In his book, Eppolito claimed he was the victim of a police vendetta against him, that the department was going after him only because his family was mobbed up. His explanation for the fact that his fingerprints were found on documents in the possession of a Mafia drug dealer was about as clear as a kaleidoscope. Some of those prints were photostats of his prints, his lawyer explained. The crime lab reported that the two original prints they found were “similar” to Eppolito’s, meaning the quality of the prints was not good enough to make a unique identification, but in all the ways they could be compared they matched Eppolito’s.

“That was his defense to the primary evidence against him,” Vecchione remembers. “And it never made any sense at all. The trial commissioner’s name was Hugh Mo, who took over after I’d left the office and gone into private practice. Hugh Mo found Eppolito not guilty. I just didn’t get it. Did they find Eppolito’s original fingerprint on a copy, or a copy of his fingerprint on an original, or on another copy? But the fact is even that doesn’t matter. The fact that his prints were there is pretty strong evidence that Eppolito handled the documents. Mo said you can’t base a finding of guilt on a copy of a fingerprint, or on a fingerprint on a copy of a document. I
thought that was ludicrous. If a copy of a document comes out of a machine with my fingerprint on it, it means I touched the copy. I’ve been involved in at least a thousand cases and believe me, the presence of those prints in addition to all the other evidence—the fact that he happened to show up at Intel and happened to discuss the case with a detective—is either proof that Eppolito was guilty or it’s the worst series of misunderstood events since Rosemary Woods ‘accidentally’ erased twenty-one minutes of the Nixon tapes.

“Let me be clear about it: There is absolutely no evidence that Mo or anyone else involved in this administrative proceeding did anything illegal. Apparently Mo even concluded that Eppolito had the documents in his possession. But he still dismissed the charges against him.”

So they knew that Eppolito had had at least one confrontation with Internal Affairs and somehow managed to beat the charges against him.

They knew the U.S. Attorney had tried to flip both Anthony Casso and Burton Kaplan. Casso turned out to be a liar and Kaplan didn’t want to know from nothing.

They knew that long after both detectives had retired they remained extremely close. They lived across the street from each other in Vegas and Eppolito on occasion introduced Caracappa as his cousin. They suspected the two retired detectives still had excellent contacts within the NYPD. Both men had made a lot of loyal friends on the job, many of them still active, many of whom would happily pick up the phone to tell them that somebody was looking at the old charges against them. But they were confident that neither man was aware that four men had reopened a twenty-year-old investigation.

They knew that Eppolito and Caracappa had been both smart and very lucky for more than twenty years. That’s what they knew when they went to work.

But they believed the two detectives had gotten away with murder, and that’s what they intended to prove.

During his career Tommy Dades had seen
the potpourri of events that life as a cop has to offer. There was the nutcase who killed two people and then decapitated their bodies. He sat one of the headless bodies in an easy chair and jammed a smiling head under each arm, then took several photographs. He did it, he explained after he’d been caught, as a present for the detectives.

In the Sixty-eighth squad Tommy worked with a female partner named Fran for five years, whom he’d met originally when they both were working narcotics. One afternoon they were told to go interview some guy about a complaint made by a neighbor. When they knocked on his door he shouted for them to come in. He was waiting for them in his living room—sitting on a portable potty going to the bathroom. Fran looked at Tommy, who shrugged his shoulders and said, “Interview him.” So they did.

Tommy saw it all. Accident victims decapitated. Murder victims with their throats slit or nine thousand bullets in them. He’d seen the body of a man who died alone in his apartment in August and lay undiscovered for several weeks—long enough for his maggot-covered body to melt into the couch. He’d been present in an insurance office when a baby was born and
been on the floor of the stock exchange watching men literally step over the body of a man who died of a heart attack.

Like every cop who has put in their time, he’s been there. He’s seen it. But as he sat there alone in Ponzi’s little office reading Casso’s 302s over and over even he was stunned by the range of Gaspipe’s allegations against Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa.

Dades had heard the many stories about police corruption. He knew all about Frank Serpico and David Durk and the Knapp Commission, which had once cleaned up the police department. He knew about the Prince of the City and infamous inside theft of the French Connection heroin. He knew about the cops with reputations inside the locker room for using their weapon too easily, cops who got passed from station house to station house because everybody knew they were dangerous. He had heard the stories about the old days, when the cop walking the beat expected—and happily accepted—tips, meals, and holiday presents. He knew that some cops still looked the proverbial “other way” rather than enforce quality-of-life crimes. He knew that every precinct had at least one “house mouse,” a cop who did nothing on the job but pass the years until he had earned a pension.

And he was familiar with the legendary “blue wall of silence,” the cop code that forbade police officers from talking to anyone about the mistakes, misjudgments, and even crimes of fellow officers. He knew all the locker-room stories of bad cops and crooked cops and violent cops and even crazy cops—although, improbable as he knew it sounded, in his own career he had never actually seen another cop take even a small bribe, walk away from his duty, or perform some crazy, unnecessary act.

He knew all that, but there was nothing he knew about in the whole history of the NYPD that prepared him for the tales Casso told.

A 302 isn’t a precise transcript; it’s a summation written by an FBI agent after conducting an interview. The debriefing of Casso had taken place over a three-year period. These interviews were conducted by various agents investigating different crimes. And in these incredible pages Casso told the story of his relationship with the detectives from the day it began.

It turned out that the Hydell killing was only one of the murders in which they played an active part. As Gaspipe told the FBI, after a Gambino associate, a heroin-addicted drug dealer named Eddie Lino, was stopped and shot
to death on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, Kaplan told him, “After the cops had shot Lino, some guy who was just crossing the street saw Steve…”

Steve? That’s how Casso learned the first name of Eppolito’s partner.

Casso claimed they were on his payroll for a long time. He told the FBI that “the cops” had been paid $50,000 for picking up Jimmy Hydell. After that he’d given Kaplan $10,000 every three months to pay them for the information they were providing. After a few years he even gave them a $5,000 raise, paying them $15,000 every three months, until he was arrested in January 1993.

Those payments covered all kinds of work. For example, when Casso and his underboss, Vic Amuso, decided a mobster named Anthony Dilapi could no longer be trusted, they put out a contract on him. The problem was Dilapi was running, supposedly hiding out somewhere in California. Casso asked Kaplan if Eppolito and Caracappa could find him. Caracappa got his address by contacting Dilapi’s parole officer. A mob guy named Joe D’Arco carried out the contract. Once Casso began talking he didn’t stop. It turned out that after killing Dilapi, D’Arco just tossed the gun out his car window—and “the cops” found out that, incredibly, the LAPD recovered it.

It took Casso more than five hundred pages to chronicle his growing reliance on his “crystal ball,” his spies inside the police department. In addition to serving as an early warning system alerting the mob to wiretaps, providing the names of informers, and providing details about the progress of investigations the NYPD launched against the mob, the cops became Casso’s personal Google, quickly responding to every request for information he made. Among the many secrets they revealed was that the FBI had planted a bug, a microphone, inside a railing directly in front of a social club in Little Italy run by Genovese capo Pete DeFeo.

Sitting there, reading this stuff, Dades couldn’t even begin to calculate the amount of damage Eppolito and Caracappa had done to New York City, to American law enforcement’s war on organized crime. These were cops—cops!—and every day they were giving up other cops. They were the worst kind of scumbags imaginable. Fighting this war the department had come to depend on informers inside the mob for intelligence. Detective Steve Caracappa—detective? Tommy almost had to spit out the word—had access to almost all of that information. Numerous operations that initially seemed promising had ended in sudden failure, and until Casso opened
his mouth no one knew why. For example, when the cops told Kaplan that a Colombo family member named Dominick Costa was cooperating, that piece of information was passed from Kaplan to Casso to Vic Orena, the acting boss of the Colombo family, who ordered Costa’s relatives to get rid of him. End of Costa.

It was the cops who warned Kaplan that John “Otto” Heidel was a rat and was trying to get out from under his own problem by catching Casso on tape. Casso told Lucchese capo George “Georgie Neck” Zappola to take care of the situation. According to Casso’s testimony, Zappola later told him what had happened. Vinny Zappola and Little Sally Fusco Jr. got the contract. They slashed a tire on Heidel’s car and waited for him to show up. As Heidel started to change the tire Vinny Zappola approached him. Heidel took off, running for his life, with Zappola right behind him. Heidel was hit a couple of times and grabbed a motorcycle; for a few seconds there was a chance he might live. But Fusco was driving the getaway car and he had raced the wrong way up a one-way street to cut off Heidel. Finally, Zappola caught up to him and put the fatal bullet in his chest.

As soon as Heidel’s body was identified NYPD detectives raced to his house to search it before the mob got there to clean out any evidence. No telling what might be found there—diaries, phone books, you never knew. Incredibly, either Eppolito or Caracappa—Kaplan didn’t tell Casso which one, but it turned out to be Eppolito—managed to get inside as part of the team. Whichever one of them it was found microcassettes hidden in a secret compartment in the bathroom and slipped them into his boot. Later, when Casso played the tapes, he heard Vic Amuso’s voice pointing out to Heidel that it was a cold night and asking, “You want anything?”

Amuso replied, “Yeah, soup.” Apparently the tapes were destroyed.

To Tommy Dades, this all seemed like a bad movie. Casso had first told these stories more than a decade earlier—and absolutely nothing had been done about them. And if Betty Hydell hadn’t called him one day, they would have continued rotting in a taped-up box in a storeroom. On page after page Casso detailed the cops’ betrayals. Another Lucchese capo, Sal Avellino, was told that a mobster known as Finnegan was talking to law enforcement. Casso asked Kaplan to have the cops check it out. It took the cops several weeks, but eventually they confirmed it: Finnegan was a rat.

The cops informed Kaplan that Genovese associate Pete Savino was
wearing a wire. Casso and Vic Amuso tried to figure out who might get hurt by that wire. It turned out that Sonny Morrissey, who represented the Lucchese family in several meetings with Savino, probably had the most to lose. Casso and Amuso were worried that Morrissey might flip, putting them in jeopardy. Pete Chiodo got the contract. Morrissey was killed and buried in New Jersey. It turned out that Morrissey didn’t die easy. According to Casso, after being shot, Morrissey swore he wasn’t a rat—then pleaded with Chiodo to kill him quick, to “take him out of his misery.”

Casso’s stories went on and on. When Caracappa learned that James Bishop, the former head of Painters Union Local 37, who served as union liaison with the Luccheses, was cooperating with both the NYPD and the New York DA’s office, he immediately alerted Kaplan. In May 1990, Bishop was shot eight times while behind the wheel of his Lincoln Town Car—the car was still moving and the shooters had to leap out of the way to avoid being run down by a dead man.

As Dades continued reading, he began to wonder if Eppolito and Caracappa were cops who went bad, or bad guys who became cops. They were officially employed by the city, but there was no question who they were working for. They were traitors to every man and woman in law enforcement. After mobster Bruno Facciolo was murdered—he was found with a canary stuffed in his mouth—in the summer of 1990, the cops told Kaplan that Louis Facciola, Al Visconti, and Larry Taylor had been picked up on a wire making plans to whack several members of the Lucchese family to get even for that killing. Casso and Vic Amuso responded by putting out contracts on all three of them. After Visconti and Taylor had been killed, the cops told Kaplan that the NYPD had tried to convince Facciola to save his own life by cooperating. Facciola refused—and got whacked.

In addition to the range and number of crimes described by Casso, Dades was also surprised by his audacity. Casso admitted that he had ignored mob tradition by trying to kill a family member of another mobster, but his 302s also described an attempt to assassinate federal prosecutor Charlie Rose. That was exactly the kind of crime the Mafia had scrupulously avoided to prevent massive government retaliation. And the “crime” supposedly committed by Rose? Casso blamed him for leaking an embarrassing item about his wife to the press and decided to get even. Naturally, the only people Casso trusted to get Rose’s address were the cops. It was amazing, Tommy
thought, that the only people a crazed Mafia capo trusted were New York City detectives. He just shook his head in disbelief. For ten years this stuff had been collecting dust. Just reading it made him feel dirty. He wanted to get these guys.

Casso was captured before he could make his move against Rose, but supposedly he did get an address for the prosecutor in the Hamptons. One of his people waited at the house for the prosecutor to show up, but for whatever reasons Rose never got there. That was truly fortunate—it turned out to be the wrong Charlie Rose. It was the wrong address: This was the home of the TV show host, not the prosecutor.

Casso’s 302s also solved several mysteries for Dades. On Christmas Day 1986, a kid named Nicky Guido had been assassinated mob-style while sitting in his newly purchased red Nissan Maxima in front of his house in Brooklyn. The NYPD did a thorough investigation, trying to find a link between Guido and the mob, but there was nothing there. Guido had no known mob connections, he didn’t appear to have any debts, he wasn’t a witness to any crimes, yet the mob had killed him. It made no sense—until Casso explained what had happened: A guy named Nicky Guido was one of the three men who had screwed up the hit on Casso. The cops got an address for a Nicky Guido on Court Street in Brooklyn. That made sense because Guido’s father supposedly worked on the docks.

On Christmas Day, Georgie Zappola, Frankie Lastorino, and Joey Testa went to the house, figuring Guido would be home on the holiday. They waited until a young man got into the driver’s seat of the red car. Another man, an older guy—it turned out to be his uncle Anthony—eased into the passenger seat. All the pieces fit perfectly. They pumped nine bullets into the body of an innocent kid.

Casso found out they’d whacked the wrong Nicky Guido from the newspapers. According to the story in the papers, this Nicky Guido was an installer for the telephone company. The murder of Nicky Guido had been a simple mistake. The two cops had provided the wrong address. No one knew what the intended victim looked like, so they had killed an innocent person.

The 302s also included a litany of Casso’s greatest hits, including killings that were planned and never carried out, attempts that failed, and the many more that succeeded. He began with the most high-profile miss, his
attempt to kill John Gotti for the unsanctioned murder of mob boss Paul Castellano. In an effort to hide his involvement in the plot, he decided to blow up Gotti in his car, the method of execution favored by the Sicilian Mafia. In addition to Gotti, Casso intended to kill his underboss, Frank DeCicco. On Sunday morning, April 13, 1986, a little less than four months after Castellano’s death, Casso went after Gotti.

He’d found out Gotti was going to be at the Veterans and Friends Social Club in Bensonhurst. Vic Amuso and his brother Bobby went with him. The bomber was a drug dealer named Herbie “Blue Eyes” Pate, who supposedly had been a munitions expert in the army. The explosive was C-4, which makes a very big bang.

Pate was waiting in Bensonhurst in his own car. Eventually he joined the three men in Bobby Amuso’s Chrysler. He had a shopping bag with him, filled with groceries; Italian bread was sticking out of the top of the bag. They sat there for a long time, waiting until DeCicco showed up. DeCicco parked and went into the club. Herbie switched off the safety on his bomb and began walking down the street. As he passed DeCicco’s car he appeared to drop something. As he bent down to pick it up, he slipped the bomb under DeCicco’s car and went back to his own car.