Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  It turned out he was wrong. It wasn’t his fault, but he was wrong. More mistakes got made. The big one occurred after Frankie informed his handlers that the crew was planning a bank robbery in New Jersey. The cops decided to grab the crew during the robbery, confiscate the evidence, and then release them without any explanation. That bust would serve to corroborate Hydell’s information, as well as make the rest of the gang very confused and very nervous.

  The U.S. Attorney’s office will allow registered CIs to participate in certain crimes if it is deemed absolutely necessary to continue an operation. But in this situation there was a chance that an innocent person could get hurt, which would be a public relations disaster, so Hydell was ordered to stay away. Tormey told him, “You know you can’t go, right?”

  He knew. “Don’t worry ’bout it, I got it covered.”

  Five guys planned the heist; four guys went. Probably because it was taking place in Jersey, Matt Tormey’s FBI supervisor would not let the NYPD cover it. Instead the assignment was given to a bureau surveillance unit, which was simply going to film it as evidence. The night of the robbery the unit staked out the bank for more than five hours, then decided the job must have been postponed or canceled. But instead of just packing their cameras and walking away, they notified the Jersey state police. They sent a teletype that included all the information about the robbery, adding the fact that this information had come from an informant. When the crew finally showed up to pull the job, the state police grabbed them. Nobody got hurt.

  The problem was that an inexperienced officer gave a copy of that teletype to the defense attorney representing the crew. It wasn’t done intentionally; it was just a simple, and deadly, mistake. The teletype didn’t identify Frankie by name. It read, “An FBI confidential informant indicated…” But five guys planned the job, and four guys went. Combined with the previous information from the DA’s office, it was obvious that Frankie was working with the Feds.

  Tommy, Matt, and Mike sat down with Frankie in the safehouse and laid it out for him. “We begged him,” Tommy remembers. “We did everything we could to convince him to get out of there. ‘This is really bad,’ Matt told him. But we couldn’t force him off the street. We couldn’t force him to become a witness. There was nothing we could do. Frankie had a mouth; he figured he could talk his way out of it.”

  He couldn’t. One night in April 1998 Frankie went to a strip joint on Staten Island, a place named Scarlett’s, with his best friend, John Mattera. When they walked out of the place four men were sitting in a car waiting for him. The shooter put three bullets into him from just about point-blank range. Frankie Hydell was probably dead before he hit the ground. Tommy learned later that this was an up-the-ladder sanction. People from the social club on Thirteenth Avenue had gone to the bosses in the family and told them they had a piece of paper from the DA’s office that proved Frankie was a rat. Then they exaggerated, claiming they’d caught him with an FBI check, proof that he was working for the government. That was impossible; the bureau doesn’t pay informants by check. But based on that evidence permission had been granted to kill Hydell.

  As Tommy recalls, “We were devastated. You get to know these guys, care about them. It wasn’t just that we lost an informant; this was a person we liked and cared about. And the family had already been through so much with the brother, who had disappeared into the air. This was just too much.” Professionally, if you can’t protect your informants you’re out of the business. And personally, each of them liked Hydell. He had a sort of roguish charm. And once he’d made the decision to cooperate, he’d shown as much dedication to providing information as he had in the past to running scams. If he had continued, been a little luckier, he might have even had a shot at a legitimate future. Stranger things have happened.

  The morning after the shooting Tommy, Matt, Mike Galletta, a deputy inspector, and a lieutenant drove out to meet the Staten Island detectives who’d caught the case. They met with the lieutenant who ran the squad. It was a sensitive situation; they had to be extremely careful what information was divulged to the investigating officers. So without giving the detectives working the case all the details, they explained that they were pretty certain they knew who’d killed Frankie Hydell. Maybe not the name of the wiseguy who pulled the trigger, but the people who made it happen. The names would come.

  The lieutenant was polite. He told them thank you very much and then completely ignored them. Apparently a cab driver claimed he had seen the murder and identified the shooter as a local crackhead. This driver was a street guy who had done some light work for Hydell. Tommy knew this was total bullshit, this was a mob hit, but the lieutenant wasn’t interested. Arresting the crackhead enabled Staten Island to clear the murder. The suspect spent fifteen months in jail.

  Dades believes that Matt Tormey was so upset about Hydell’s murder that he decided to put in his retirement papers. But for Tommy the situation soon got a lot worse. A mob hanger-on facing five years in prison—based on information provided by Frankie—reached out to Dades and Tormey. This guy was a member of the union working on a building under construction in Manhattan while out on appeal. Tommy and Matt met him in an unfinished apartment in the building. He had some important information for them, he explained, but there was a price. His mother had breast cancer and he didn’t want to go to prison, but he couldn’t go public. He couldn’t testify. When Tommy asked for a taste of what he had, the guy looked right at him. “You’re the one who gave out the information that compromised Frankie,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” Tommy was rocked; this was a cop’s worst nightmare, but he’d learned a long time ago to conceal his emotions. “That’s bullshit,” he said evenly. “How do you figure that?”

  The guy smiled and said, “You told somebody on your side of the fence about him cooperating. That person told somebody on our side of the fence.”

  That was all the information this guy would give up without a deal. Maybe it was true, maybe not. Informants all have their own agenda. This guy wanted to beat prison. Tommy laid it out for him: “If you’re offering to take the stand we’ll get you out of prison, but you just telling us, that isn’t going to do us any good.”

  The guy couldn’t take the deal. There was an irrefutable logic to his position: If he testified he would be killed; dead forever was a lot longer than five years in prison.

  Tommy didn’t believe that his talking had resulted in Frankie’s death—except when he did. He just didn’t know the truth. It was possible. But it was hard to accept that he could have been that careless. He never spoke about his informants around people he didn’t know, and it was impossible to believe that someone he knew and trusted could give up the information. He spent a lot of time trying to figure out who the informer might be. It was incredibly frustrating. The possibility that someone working in the NYPD or the DA’s office, or someone affiliated with one of those offices, would give up an informant, knowing that he was going to die, made him furious. But without more information about the source he was wasting his time, just pissing in the wind.

  Unable to find the source of the leak, he turned to finding Frankie Hydell’s killers. And that’s when he met Betty Hydell. “Matt had a pretty good relationship with the family,” Tommy recalls. “When he retired he left them my phone number. I called them first. In the family there was just Betty and her husband and their two daughters. The two sons were dead. The father had been a bus driver for twenty-nine years, a totally legitimate guy. Betty had worked for twenty years; she was totally straight. I called her to break the ice. Basically, I just told her that I intended to solve this homicide and maybe she could help me. She knew Matt and me were close, but she didn’t trust any New York City cops.

  “Building a relationship with her took time. Eventually she invited me out to the house on Staten Island. First thing I told her was that I was sorry about Frankie and I was going to do the best I could to find his killers. ‘Thank you,’ she said, b
ut she said it without a lot of conviction.

  “Betty Hydell was in her late fifties. She was a real pleasant person, and because of all the things she’d been through she was street-smart. She was very leery of me. Right away she told me that it was going to take time to earn her trust because she’d been screwed over by both the FBI and the NYPD. She didn’t tell me why at that point and I didn’t ask. Basically, she was challenging me to prove that I really was interested in solving her son’s murder.”

  Matt had retired and moved to Florida. When Tommy began working the case, the last thing he figured was that it was going to take him to two filthy dirty cops. His real objective was to give the mother some peace.

  When you’re connected to the streets, as he was, a lot of cases start at the end: From the first day you know who committed the crime, then you have to work backward to reach the beginning and prove it. One of the first things he did was subpoena the cell phone records of the people he thought might be involved, from a few hours before Frankie was killed till a few hours after the shooting. It turned out that right after the murder the phones were blasting at each other. A couple of unexpected numbers also turned up. As Tommy had guessed, these were the same guys whose names had popped up in the killing of the union official. They were afraid Frankie was going to rat them out—that was never going to happen, but they didn’t know that—so he had to go.

  Tommy shared each piece of information he developed with Betty. The one thing he found out that he didn’t tell her was that her sister’s husband, Frankie’s uncle through marriage, who was a Gambino capo, may have known about the contract and let it happen. Betty and her sister didn’t have much to do with each other, but Tommy kept that piece of information private. He just didn’t see a reason to hurt Betty any more.

  Frankie Hydell had been registered to the FBI, so officially this was the bureau’s investigation. In the past that wouldn’t have mattered; Tommy and Matt would have worked together. But Tormey had retired and the special agent who replaced him wasn’t a member of the Dades fan club. So Tommy was completely shut out of the loop. Eventually Hydell’s best friend, John Mattera, pleaded guilty to participating in the hit and a second man was tried and convicted. The three other men believed to have been involved, including the actual shooter, were also charged with the crime.

  One of the last things Mike Galletta did before retiring was solve the murder of the union official, Frankie Parasol, and lock up the guys who did it.

  While Tommy was no longer involved in the actual investigation, his work on the case had enabled him to establish a good relationship with Betty and her daughter Lizzie. He really liked both of them. As he explains, “These are really nice people. She just got stuck with two boys that unfortunately went the wrong way. But Frankie wasn’t anything like his brother; mostly he talked a good story, and eventually he paid for that. But none of that was her fault. All she got was the heartache.”

  Over time, Tommy got very close with the family. He would speak with Betty about once each week, more if he had heard something about the case he could share with her. He would call Betty on Mother’s Day and the other family holidays, and she called him on his birthday. And sometimes when she called she talked about both of her sons, Frankie and Jimmy. “Both of them are dead,” she complained to Tommy, “and I doubt anybody is going to do anything about it.”

  Tommy never made any promises about that, except to himself.

  CHAPTER 2

  Good cops live for the rest of their life with the cases they never solved. Long after they put their badge in a frame or in a drawer they still wonder about it. Tommy Dades kept this one close to the edge, just waiting for a familiar word to pop, looking for someone to roll over and bring it back to life. He owed that to Betty Hydell. And through the years he heard a lot of cop talk about Jimmy Hydell’s disappearance. Most of it centered around claims made by Lucchese boss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso.

  In 1993 Casso had been captured by a twelve-member SWAT team after spending thirty-two months running from a racketeering indictment. Even in a world ruled by violence Casso was considered unusually bloodthirsty. He had killed his way to the top of the Lucchese family. Supposedly he would order people killed if he simply dreamt they were cooperating with the cops. He once said that he wanted to kill the twenty-five members of the family believed to be cooperating and he didn’t only because he couldn’t figure out how to get rid of twenty-five bodies. He even broke the rules by which the Mafia had been strictly run for decades by ordering a hit on the completely innocent sister of mob turncoat Peter “Fat Pete” Chiodo, after his attempt to kill Chiodo failed. The woman was shot after dropping off her children at school but survived. Inside the mob and in the newspapers he was known as Gaspipe, supposedly because his father had been an enforcer on the Brooklyn docks known for using lead pipes to bust heads. But cops and prosecutors sometimes referred to him as Lucifer, because they considered him to be a complete psychopath.

  When he was finally caught, in addition to the racketeering charges, he was indicted for fifteen murders. In fact, the actual number of murders in which he had been involved was at least thirty-six. They were going to slam the cell door behind him and melt down the key. He was fifty-three years old and he was never going to drive a car, wear a suit, walk along a beach, eat in a nice restaurant, or touch a woman again. He knew it, his attorney knew it, and the government knew it.

  So Gaspipe flipped. He agreed to cooperate with the federal government. In addition to admitting to all the racketeering charges, he pled guilty to fifteen murders and a variety of lesser crimes. He also agreed to tell the government everything he had learned about organized crime; that included the details of every crime in which he had been involved as well as everything he had heard about throughout his entire career, from fact to rumor. The incentive is that the cooperator gets immunity for any crime to which he confesses—and his testimony can’t be used against him. And finally, Gaspipe agreed to testify against other mobsters. The deal was that when all of that was done, when the government determined that he had honestly fulfilled his cooperation agreement, federal prosecutors would give him what was called a 5K letter. This relates to the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which say, basically, that if a defendant gives substantial cooperation to the federal government his cooperation will be made known to the judge by the U.S. Attorney. Based on the recommendation of the federal prosecutor the judge has the power—but not the obligation—to substantially reduce the sentence of the cooperator.

  Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, for example, admitted to participating in nineteen murders, but after providing information or testifying in trials that resulted in about forty convictions or guilty pleas he was sentenced to five years in prison. Five years for nineteen murders. Eventually he was released and admitted to the Witness Protection Program. The government gave him a new life—with financial support. It was the best deal a mass murderer had ever gotten. Gaspipe got the message. After all, he was only pleading to fifteen killings—although he claimed that he had been involved in thirty-six murders. Complete cooperation was his only shot at freedom.

  The day he signed his cooperation agreement he called his wife at the women’s lingerie shop she owned in Brooklyn and told her, “Sell the store. Take the money and the kids and go to Florida. I’ll never see you again.”

  In response she supposedly said, “Drop dead.”

  On March 2, 1994, at the federal correctional institution La Tuna on the Texas–New Mexico border, Anthony Casso began revealing the innermost secrets of organized crime to FBI agents. During the next three years he met frequently with various agents and told an extraordinary tale of life and death in the Mafia. Particularly death. He admitted to being involved in thirty-six murders, and based on his reputation even that count seemed low. His 302, the official file in which his testimony was greatly condensed, was more than five hundred pages long. The crimes he described in detail ranged from major crimes like his attempt to kill
John Gotti to more mundane efforts like putting rat poison in a judge’s dinner at a restaurant in Little Italy. He named all the names and explained how the mob ran the garment industry, the construction trades, the garbage collection business. He explained how the enormous profits from an extraordinary variety of crimes were divvied up. He identified the retired detective involved in the theft of the “French Connection” heroin and how the money from the Lufthansa robbery was split. He explained how cops and prison guards were bribed and how the mob owned the Little Italy street festivals. It was a chillingly matter-of-fact, day-to-day account of a life lived without rules or morality.

  One of the crimes he described was the kidnapping and murder of Jimmy Hydell, who was killed for his participation in a failed attempt to murder Casso. Gaspipe confessed that he had shot Hydell himself. As he later told Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes, “Maybe I shot him ten times, twelve times. Really, I don’t know the exact amount. It coulda been fifteen.”

  But when he began telling the FBI the whole story of Jimmy Hydell’s murder, he stunned the agents when he mentioned casually that two New York City detectives had played a key role in the killing. At the time of the killing, he continued, he didn’t even know their names. He knew them only as “the cops.” And it wasn’t until after the Hydell thing that they began working for him on a regular basis.

  It was an incredible revelation. According to Casso, he literally had the cops on his monthly payroll. And unlike other rogue cops in the past, these two men weren’t simply providing information, they were doing the dirtiest kind of work for the Lucchese family. They were hired killers.

  In his 302 Casso claimed he had started working with the the cops in 1986, after he survived an attempt on his life and he started trying to find out who had set him up. He reached out to everybody he could trust, demanding answers. Anthony Casso was one of those people who got answers sometimes before he even asked the questions. Among the people he asked was a mob associate named Burt Kaplan, who told him that he had cops inside the Sixty-third Precinct, where the assassination attempt had taken place. Kaplan eventually handed Casso a manila envelope containing all the crime scene photos and reports—and the names of the men who had tried to kill him: Jimmy Hydell, Bob Bering, and Nicky Guido.