Friends of the Family (8 page)

Tommy knew from his own experience what the waiting feels like. You just sit there, in the freezing cold, in the stifling heat, trying to keep your mind occupied, worrying that you might have to take a piss and miss the target, thinking a thousand thoughts about nothing. Half of the job is waiting, on both ends of the law. Finally DeCicco and another man—from that distance it could have been Gotti—slipped out of the club and into the car. Herbie Blue Eyes pulled alongside DeCicco’s car and hit the button. The car disintegrated.

Turned out it wasn’t Gotti in the car. He hadn’t yet become known as “the Teflon Don,” but still, he was pretty lucky. Casso never lost interest in getting even with Gotti, but after that failed hit it became too tough to get close to him. Ironically, Casso told the FBI in this 302, it wasn’t the mob who made it almost impossible to get near him—it was the fact that wherever Gotti went he had the FBI watching him.

For Tommy, much of this read like some kind of Stephen King novel—cops using their badges to facilitate murders. But as he continued reading, the story became even more horrific. Eppolito and Caracappa weren’t only
accessories to many murders, they didn’t just provide information—they were cold-blooded killers.

The cops had pulled the trigger. In this 302 Casso admitted that he and Vic Amuso were very concerned that if eventually they were able to kill Gotti, or if their role in the murder of Frank DeCicco was discovered, Gotti’s associates Eddie Lino and Bobby Borriello would “look to avenge his murder.”

As Tommy later discovered, that wasn’t the complete truth. Apparently, while being tortured by Gaspipe, Jimmy Hydell had told him that Mickey Boy Paradiso, Bobby Borriello, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, and Eddie Lino had set up the hit on Casso. They had gotten permission up the line, Hydell said, although he didn’t know exactly who had first come up with the idea. And if he did know, the name died with him.

Eddie Lino and Bobby Borriello had big-time reputations. They were heavy hitters and chances were they’d be coming back for more. So Casso decided they had to go.

Casso claimed that he had spoken to Chin Gigante’s brother, Ralph, several different times about his plan to kill Gotti, Lino, and Borriello. He wasn’t looking to start a war, just repay a debt. After the three men had been whacked the Chin would have to meet with the Gambinos to explain that the three men were killed in retaliation for the unsanctioned murder of Paulie Castellano. But first Casso had to find a way to get those killings done without his own involvement being known. He asked Kaplan to find out if the cops wanted the contract on Eddie Lino. They were the perfect hit team because their badges would allow them to get close to him.

Eppolito and Caracappa accepted the contract to kill Eddie Lino. It would be an easy job, they told Kaplan, because they knew all about Lino from the streets. Casso agreed to pay them $75,000.

At Kaplan’s request Casso provided a dark sedan similar to an unmarked police car for the cops to use in the hit. It was the type of car that any wiseguy would recognize instantly. He left two guns in a paper bag in the trunk.

Apparently Eppolito and Caracappa spent some time watching Lino. Their first plan was to kill him in his house. Casso claimed he didn’t know the details, but it was easy for Tommy to envision the scenario. Two detectives knocked on Lino’s front door and showed him their badges. We want
to ask you a few questions, Eddie. He opens the door for them. End of story. But whatever their reason, the cops decided that was too complicated. They needed to get Lino away from people. So they tailed him to the parkway and pulled him over. NYPD detective Stephen Caracappa murdered him, then calmly walked away.

There were some things about that hit that Casso didn’t know but Tommy remembered very well. At the crime scene police found a man’s Pulsar wristwatch on the ground. The watch didn’t belong to Lino. The assumption was that it belonged to his killer. Forensic examiners found several strands of brown hair caught in the casing. But until a suspect was identified and a hairs comparison could be made, those hairs had no value.

Casso also didn’t know that there was a witness to Lino’s killing, a guy just crossing the street. This witness described the shooter as “skinny, with dark hair” and watched him race away from the scene. This witness supposedly looked inside the vehicle and saw the blood-spattered body of Eddie Lino. Given the fact that it was dark and that eyewitnesses are often unreliable, Tommy knew that information was of limited use to detectives investigating the killing and would be even less valuable in a courtroom.

As Tommy Dades read this stuff he shook his head. He knew about a lot of it, maybe even most of it, but reading it was just unbelievable. If they had put these stories on
The Sopranos
nobody would have believed them. For example, Gas admitted that he had killed a mob architect named Anthony Fava, the man who had designed Casso’s million-dollar waterfront house in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, because he knew too much about the Lucchese family business. Another wiseguy, Joe Brewster De Dominico, was whacked for turning down a contract from Greg Scarpa.

Casso even killed because he was a good neighbor. When his next-door neighbor told Casso’s wife that their daughter’s former boyfriend had raped her and asked for protection, Casso took care of the problem. Pete Chiodo killed the ex-boyfriend.

In addition to providing evidence about the two cops’ massive betrayal of their badges, the wealth of information in Casso’s 302s filled in a lot of blanks concerning other cases. Casso told his FBI questioners that the two men were responsible for the theft of the French Connection heroin from the NYPD Property Office. This was in the late 1970s. One of the thieves was a cop, another cop, so he knew how things worked. It was unbelievably
simple: This skell put on a police uniform and signed the drugs out of the property office. Nobody questioned him. And then sold them.

Gas told the FBI how the money from the infamous Lufthansa robbery was split. He confessed to extorting substantial sums from the Palm restaurant and several Tony Roma franchises, a school bus company, garbage collectors, and hotels. He talked about the huge profits made in the drug business and explained how the Lucchese family became a police force for Russian mobs operating a multimillion-dollar gasoline tax scam.

Long before Dades had finished reading Casso’s 302s he despised Detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa. He believed most of what Casso had said was true. He’d gotten the details right, particularly concerning those cases in which Dades had been involved or those people that he had known. Not every word was right—in Tommy’s career he’d never met an informant who confessed everything he knew or told 100 percent of the truth—but this was close enough for him to believe Casso’s claims about the cops were true.

As Dades sat alone in a windowless office reading this material he was only a few months away from retirement. The ending of his career was bittersweet; a mess that he’d gotten himself into with a woman had led to an Internal Affairs investigation. He’d been vindicated, but the way he’d been treated had soured him on the department. In almost twenty years he’d never taken a sick day; he’d had his leg broken commandeering a car to chase a drug dealer—when the driver ran him over; his nose had been just about ripped off his face when he got slammed by an attaché case with a steel tip while making a narcotics bust; he’d been stabbed with a hypo, thrown on tile floors, shot at, punched in the face—and never put in a disability claim. Yet when this woman made an easily disproved claim against him, they treated him like a lying felon.

If that hadn’t happened he would have stayed on the job for a few more years, no question about that, but he knew they were watching him now. And he couldn’t risk losing his pension, his health insurance, all the benefits he’d earned. He still had a wife—just barely, but they were still together—and two beautiful kids. So it was for them he knew he had to put in his papers.

He knew the politics of the department as well as he knew the rules of the streets. He’d seen good cops get screwed out of the security they’d
earned for committing minor transgressions. If the department wanted to get you, you were got. So he was leaving angry at the department—but not with the cops, not with the people he had worked with and knew.

Those people he loved. And the final thing he wanted to do on the job was clean out the stink. As he explains, “No one who hasn’t done this job can begin to understand it. When you do it day after day you establish friendships and you become part of a family. Every day you put your life in the hands of your partners; you trust them not because you know so much about them, but because they’re wearing the uniform. I never stopped to think about it, I never realized it, until it became time to leave. It’s just…no matter where you go in this city there’s a precinct there, and you know you can walk in there and be welcomed. It’s an extraordinary sense of comfort.

“I loved the job and I loved the people I worked with. That was my family.

“Eppolito and Caracappa had betrayed them all. Every single one of them. Everybody knows the movie cliché, some actor with a deep voice warning, ‘This time it’s personal.’ Well, I didn’t care if it was a cliché or not; for me this time it really was personal. I’d been doing the job for almost twenty years. I don’t know how many guys I put in jail. I know I was involved with at least fifty murders, probably more. I never added up the numbers, but I had to be responsible for a few thousand years of sentences. But that had always been part of my job. They were the bad guys and we were the good guys. This was a very different thing. These guys had betrayed my family. I didn’t care what it took, but I was going to get them.”

Tommy Dades hadn’t set out to be a cop. It just sort of happened to him. After he returned from Vegas with his friend, his grandfather got him a job driving a delivery truck for the
Daily News
. He started there as a seventeen-year-old and stayed five years. When he was twenty he took all the civil service exams. “I passed them all,” he remembers. “I would have taken any of those jobs. If sanitation had called me first, right now I’d be a retired sanitation worker. But the police department called first. I swore into the police academy on July 16, 1984.

“Mostly I became a cop because it was a decent-paying job with good security. I didn’t know anything about the history or traditions of the NYPD and none of that really mattered to me. I didn’t take the job to protect society. It was a good job. That was it; that’s what it meant to me.

“During those first few years on the job there were times I thought maybe I’d made a big mistake not waiting for the fire department or corrections or sanitation. I remember leaving the academy and walking a foot post on Surf Avenue and West Thirty-second Street in the dead of winter. I would stand there in the snow for five hours in January—there wasn’t a soul on the streets—freezing like there was no tomorrow. I was miserable, just waiting for the night to end. I didn’t know enough to go inside and get warm. I was a rookie; I was afraid to hide. On the real cold nights my mother would bring me thermoses. She’d come out there in the cold to find me and stay with me for a little while. I spent a lot of nights wondering,
What the hell am I doing? This is not what I envisioned.
”

After spending about two years in uniform Officer Dades got a temporary transfer to narcotics to work as an undercover. It was in narcotics that the job became his passion. “I was out of my mind; I was a wild man. I was commandeering cabs, jumping out of windows—when I heard they were making pot deals in the cemetery behind Trinity Church I’d hide inside until I saw them and then I’d leap out the window and grab them. I pulled my gun a zillion times. I used to use theatrical makeup to make track marks on my arms; I’d put carbon under my eyes, put on some old clothes, and head down to the Lower East Side looking to buy heroin. If I was playing a money guy in a big case I’d wear a nice suit, a flashy tie, expensive jewelry, and I’d drive an Eldorado. In the morning I was a junkie, in the afternoon I was a kilo dealer. One time I was playing the money man, working with a great undercover named John Massoni. We were making a deal for three or four kilos with some Colombians. We met them in a bar—and we had a hundred thousand dollars in a suitcase. You bet you’re aware of everything going on around you. If somebody took an extra-deep breath, I heard it. The Colombians came in carrying gift-wrapped boxes containing kilos of coke. My job was to walk over to them and hand John the suitcase. He’d make the exchange. We’d leave and once we were out of there the arrest team moved in on them. We were having a great time and doing a great job.”

It was also the most dangerous job he’d ever done. “The only time I was ever scared on the job was when I went into the Coney Island projects to buy a nickel bag. I did that all the time. My field team, my backup, couldn’t come anywhere near the projects. I was wearing a mike but it never worked
because it was cheap equipment, so the field team didn’t know where I was. I’d go into an apartment with nine locks on the door. There was nothing anybody could do to help. If I got in trouble, by the time my backup figured it out I was already dead.

“I never took elevators in those buildings because I didn’t want to be trapped if someone tried to rob me. I’d walk up the steps. All the lights had been busted; all you smelled was piss. On each landing I’d see people sitting with their crack pipes. I carried a .380 automatic; in the winter I’d keep it out of my pocket with my finger on the trigger. This is only a little more than three years after I was driving a newspaper delivery truck.

“You had to be careful and you had to be lucky. There were guys getting guns put to their heads and forced to snort coke. At that point you have to do what you have to do. That didn’t happen to me. People would see my gun and I’d play off it. ‘So what? What the fuck you looking at?’ As a white guy in those neighborhoods I did real good. I had a great time. We had so many small buys and at least five major cases involved half a key [kilo] or more. Every time I got over I had this big adrenaline rush. If you don’t feel alive at those moments, if you don’t feel your heart pounding, you might as well be dead.