Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  Right on top was a photograph of Hydell. Jimmy Hydell wasn’t a made guy, but he was around. At first Casso didn’t believe Hydell was involved. “That’s crazy,” he said. “I just got him a job with the unions.” Casso and Hydell apparently went back a few years. At one point Casso had been in a luncheonette when Hydell and some friends were tearing up a nearby Chinese restaurant. When the owner of that restaurant appealed to Casso for help, Gaspipe had confronted Jimmy Hydell and his friends. Hydell had his dog with him, a big dog who kept leaping toward Casso. After warning Hydell three times to get that dog away from him, Casso screwed a silencer onto the barrel of his gun and killed the dog. “Put him in the fucking trunk,” he ordered Hydell.

  Casso had never heard of the other guys. They were hangers-on, wannabes, small-time shooters with big-time ambitions. They came from who knew where and then they went back. Nobody knew how to find them. But more than anything, Casso wanted to know who had paid the bills for the attempt on his life. That was the one name he really needed; until he knew who had put out the contract on him, his life was in danger, and he knew that Jimmy Hydell could tell him. So he put the word on the street that he wanted Jimmy Hydell—alive. It was the two cops who delivered Jimmy Hydell to him, ironically in a car trunk.

  That was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Mob guys spent their lives worrying about rats, people who got jammed up and started talking to the law. But cops on the inside providing information to the mob? Getting them whatever information they needed? This was a very special gift. This just didn’t happen too often. Kaplan owned them and he knew what he had, so he wasn’t about to give up their identity, even to a friend like Casso. They were Kaplan’s life insurance policy. Any business they did for Casso had to go through him. That’s just the way it was and that was okay with Gaspipe.

  Casso ended up doing a lot of business with the two cops. His “crystal ball,” he called them, and in his 302 he claimed they had been involved in eight murders, including two in which they actually pulled the trigger. They were on his payroll for more than a year before he learned their identities.

  Kaplan gave them up. One night he was telling Gaspipe that his cops had a hard-on for a guy named Red Calder, who somehow had been involved in the killing of one of “Lou’s relatives.” The relative turned out to be Jimmy “the Clam” Eppolito, a member of the Gambino family. Jimmy had been whacked because his son had gotten involved in a charity con that involved President Jimmy Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, and Ted Kennedy. That had brought down too much heat. He had to go. So Casso finally learned the cop’s name: Lou Eppolito.

  It was more than a year later, Casso told the Feds in his deposition, that he finally learned the name of Eppolito’s partner. Kaplan showed him a copy of the autobiography Eppolito had written, Mafia Cop. Look at this, he said, showing him a photograph of Eppolito with Steve Caracappa. The caption over the photograph identified them as “The two Godfathers of the NYPD.” Casso immediately recognized the two cops as the men who had delivered Hydell to him. Kaplan told him that Caracappa was really pissed at Eppolito for putting his picture in the book.

  The FBI agents were stunned by Casso’s story. There were bad guys in just about every police department; everybody knew that. That was reality. Some guys took advantage of the shield. No question. But cops on the Mafia payroll? If he was telling the truth, this was a story that was going to rock New York City: killer cops.

  The problem was that nobody actually knew if anything Gaspipe Casso said was true. Casso was a crazed killer; it was reasonable to assume he might also be a liar.

  The primary condition of the agreement Casso had made with the government required him to divulge the complete details of every illegal activity in which he had been involved or of which he had knowledge—and then he had to stop doing it. He had to go straight. If he didn’t, if he withheld information or continued to be involved in criminal activity, the government could throw out his cooperation agreement and prosecute him for every crime he’d ever committed, from murder to jaywalking.

  It turned out that from the very beginning Casso had been a lot less than completely honest. For example, he neglected to mention to the FBI that he had been involved in plots to kill federal judge Eugene Nickerson and federal prosecutor Charlie Rose. And while in prison he bribed guards to provide him with everything from cash to sushi, then attacked 350-pound mobster Sal Miciotta for informing prison officials that he was smuggling in contraband. Gaspipe had even planned an elaborate prison break—he was going to escape on horseback! But the information he continued to provide to the government was so valuable that the Feds probably would have overlooked these problems—if he hadn’t made the mistake of accusing Sammy Gravano of lying.

  Sammy the Bull had been the government’s key witness against John Gotti. It was Gravano’s damning testimony that put Gotti in solitary confinement until the day he died. The government had a big investment in Sammy’s testimony; the absolute last thing they wanted to know was that he had lied on the stand. That might have been enough to allow Gotti to appeal his conviction.

  But after Sammy had testified against mob boss Chin Gigante, Casso wrote a letter to prosecutors claiming that Gravano had lied under oath. Casso also accused Gravano of ordering the stabbing of the politically active reverend Al Sharpton and claimed that Sammy had been involved in drug trafficking.

  The accusations against Gravano were easily disproved, but as a result of Casso’s letter the government claimed he had breached his plea agreement. Rather than providing him with a 5K letter requesting leniency, they allowed the judge to sentence him to thirteen concurrent life sentences plus 440 years in prison.

  The government had stated that Casso was a liar. So none of the claims he made in his 302—including those against Eppolito and Caracappa—could be pursued without jeopardizing the Gotti conviction. Casso’s two cops walked away without a legal problem, but not without the accusations against them becoming publicly known. Three weeks after Casso had begun cooperating the New York Post ran a major article headlined I HIRED COPS TO WHACK GOTTI FOE: MOB CANARY GIVES NAMES TO PROBERS. The article reported, “During secret, out-of-state debriefing sessions Casso shocked his federal handlers last week by disclosing how he had enlisted two city cops to carry out a contract killing…”

  The names of the two detectives spread rapidly through the city’s law enforcement community. Tommy Dades heard about it from several different people in the NYPD. Many of the cops who had worked with or knew Lou Eppolito or Steve Caracappa refused to believe Casso’s story. They knew the two cops as tough, effective, and brave officers, while Casso was a true nut job. But a lot of others weren’t so sure. There had always been something edgy about Eppolito, something that just didn’t feel right. By the time this story appeared both men had retired, so the department took no action. Without corroboration from a legitimate source there was no case, just the word of this skell, and the department wasn’t working overtime to find someone to back up Casso’s claims. There was little benefit to the NYPD to keep a scandal like this in the headlines. Mostly they hoped the story—just like Casso—would be locked away and forgotten forever.

  The thing was, Tommy Dades believed Casso. Maybe Gaspipe wasn’t the most honest guy in the world, maybe he wouldn’t make a credible witness, but the stories he told squared with what Dades had learned working organized crime cases for almost two decades. It was the kind of stuff you just couldn’t make up. Not only the stories implicating the cops, but all of it, all the other plots and crimes and betrayals he recounted. It all had the ring of truth. Like a lot of cops, Tommy had read Eppolito’s autobiography, Mafia Cop, when it was published in 1992. That was years before Casso starting talking. The premise of the book was that Eppolito had grown up in a Mafia family: His father and his two uncles were with the Gambinos. His grandfather had been a close friend of Lucky Luciano. But supposedly he had gone straight—even though at his wedding the band played the theme from The Godfather.
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  Tommy thought the book was total bullshit. What kind of cop writes a book in which he admits, “Every time we went on a call where a husband smacked his wife, I went back that night and smacked it to her too…battered wives were the most vulnerable.” He didn’t believe any of Eppolito’s going-straight stuff, particularly when Eppolito bragged in the book, “At least the mob guys treated me with respect. Not because I was a cop, but because I was a man of honor.”

  A “man of honor”? That was the phrase used by the mob to describe a made guy, a member of an organized crime family. No cop Tommy had ever known claimed proudly to be a “man of honor.” Back then Tommy didn’t know what Eppolito really was doing but he figured he was doing something. Casso’s testimony confirmed that.

  There was nothing Tommy could do about it though, except file all the details in his mind. There was a lot of information stored up there, bits and pieces of five hundred cases, names and relationships and crimes, a lot of dots waiting to be connected. But this wasn’t his case, so it wasn’t his business. It was more office gossip than work.

  And that’s the way it stayed for more than three years, until Frankie Hydell told him about the day his brother disappeared. “I was sitting with Frankie in a safehouse, an apartment, going over some information, when I saw he had this tattoo on the back of his neck, just above the top of his tank top. It said, ‘Gaspipe’s a Rat.’ ‘What’s that all about?’ I asked him.

  “‘The guy’s a no-good scumbag,’ he told me.

  “I knew right away what that was all about. Obviously Frankie believed Casso’s claim that he had killed Jimmy. So we got to talking about that, nothing specific, just bullshitting. Finally I ask him, ‘So what’s your take on all that shit about the two cops being there? Think that’s true?’ I wasn’t looking for anything, so I was pretty surprised what he told me.

  “He kind of laughed at that and shook his head. ‘You shitting me? I know they were fucking involved.’

  “That’s when I started paying close attention. ‘Yeah? Like how?’

  “‘I’ll tell you how.’ I could see the anger building in him as he told me about it. ‘The day they killed Jimmy they grabbed me first.’

  “‘What are you talking about?’

  “He nodded yes. ‘Yeah. They grabbed me first. I’m telling you, it was those two guys. I was driving my brother’s car so they musta thought I was him. I come home and they was waiting by the house. They had an unmarked car, a police car. They show me their shields and try to stick me in their car. Fuck you, I told them, I ain’t going nowheres with you till I know what the fuck this is all about. I was giving them a hard time and then one of them goes to the other one, “This isn’t him.” So they let me go.’

  “He told me the whole story. About a half hour later, he said, he was driving away from the house when he saw the two cops again, this time heading toward the Verrazano Bridge, going to Brooklyn. Right at that moment he didn’t think that had any meaning. In this world there are things that happen every day that no one can explain. Sometimes good things, sometimes not so good things. But there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s just the way things are, so you just shrug your shoulders, next. Frankie said it was only much later that night, when Jimmy didn’t come home, that he figured out what had happened.

  “I asked him, ‘How do you know it was the same cops Casso was talking about?’

  “‘ ’Cause they looked just like he said, a fat one and a skinny one. Like Laurel and Hardy, you know what I mean?’ When he saw their photographs in the newspapers he knew for sure it was them; he said that’s how he found out their names.”

  Frankie hadn’t told anyone about this. Tommy didn’t bother asking why—he knew the answer: Cops had kidnapped his brother and were somehow involved in his murder. As far as Frankie knew, maybe they had even killed him. When the NYPD was told that cops were involved they didn’t even bother to investigate. So the last thing Frankie was going to do was go to the cops. It was obvious to him that he couldn’t trust cops to investigate cops. “I know they killed my brother,” he told Tommy, “and nobody’s doing nothing about it.”

  Tommy knew he was right—the case was dead. “There was nothing I could do about it either. Frankie was a confidential informant, not a witness. If I told this story to a lieutenant, he’s gonna want to know the source of that information. That would mean exposing Frankie, which could put Frankie’s life in danger. There wasn’t any upside; Frankie was never going to testify against those two cops, and even if one day the world turned upside down and he agreed to take the stand in a courtroom, prosecutors would still need someone to corroborate his testimony. Nobody was going to take the word of a street guy like Frankie against a detective like Eppolito.”

  An active cop collects a lot of information during his career. Tommy knew a lot about a lot, much more than he had time to investigate. Most detectives maintain relationships with half a dozen informants; Tommy had about fifty people on the streets telling him what was going on. People trusted him to use the information they provided without burning the source. Even Sammy the Bull would call him regularly after he got out of prison just to talk. Now he knew another secret: He knew what had happened the day Jimmy Hydell disappeared. Not every detail, but enough to get him real interested. But it wasn’t enough to do anything about it. What he needed to open an investigation was a reputable witness willing to testify against the cops. Without that he had nothing. And then when Frankie was murdered he had less than nothing. Dead men don’t testify.

  So the information had about as much value as knowing that Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan—until the day you’re on Jeopardy! and the category is “Capitals of Former Members of the Soviet Union.” Tommy never forgot about the case though. You never know when the category is going to come up. That was the debt he felt he owed to Frankie.

  One afternoon in September 2003, six years after Frankie’s murder, Tommy was sitting at his desk at the Intel Division at the Brooklyn Army Terminal when Betty Hydell called. She was calling to ask Tommy the usual question, was anybody doing anything about the alleged leak in the Brooklyn DA’s office. But after a while their conversation moved to the subject that cemented their relationship, the murders of her two sons. “Let me ask you this, Betty,” Tommy began. “You know I don’t want to aggravate you, but there’s gotta be something more you can tell me. Just try and think.”

  After a long pause, Betty replied, “Believe you me, Tommy, there’s a whole lot I could add, but what good would it do me? I told it all to the FBI five years ago and they never even called me back.”

  That was news to Tommy. The FBI had some additional information? “Well, why didn’t you ever talk to me? You know I would’ve listened.”

  “I know you’re working on a lot of other things; I read about them. And if the FBI didn’t do anything about it, why would I think you could?”

  Because for me this is personal, Tommy thought, although he didn’t say it. Instead he suggested, “Why don’t you go ahead and tell me the story?”

  On the day Jimmy disappeared, she said, he’d been picked up at the house by a friend of his, Bob Bering. He’d left his car behind because Frankie needed it to go to work. A little while later Frankie left, but he came back inside a few minutes later and told Betty that when he’d gotten into Jimmy’s car two cops had come out of nowhere flashing their badges. “They tried to grab me,” he told her. “They thought I was Jimmy.” When they realized they had the wrong Hydell brother they’d let him go. Then they got back into a dark, unmarked police car and drove away.

  Having chased a lifetime of bad tips, Tommy rarely got excited. But this time he couldn’t help himself. This was the same story Frankie had told him before he’d been popped—but this time it was coming from a clean source. “What are you telling me, Betty? Are you saying you saw these guys?”

  It was even better than that. “I wanted to know what was going on, so me and Lizzie, we went out and got in my car. We went a
round the corner and there they were, still there waiting. I pulled up right next to them. There were two men sitting in the front. I rolled down my window and asked, ‘What’s your problem with my son?’

  “The fat one pulled out a police badge and held it up.” Betty had seen far too many police shields in her life to be intimidated. “‘So what’s that supposed to mean? I asked you why you’re bothering my son. He hasn’t done anything.’”

  “It’s none of your business,” the fat one told her. “Police business.”

  Her son was her business, Betty told them. “You just leave him alone.” Then she drove away.

  Tommy thought about all this. The wheels were turning. “Let me ask you this, Betty. Would you recognize those guys?”

  Another surprise. “Oh, I know them,” Betty said. “I saw them on Sally. I told that to the FBI too.” One afternoon she had been watching a repeat of The Sally Jesse Raphael Show and who should Sally have on but retired detective Louis Eppolito, who was there promoting his book, Mafia Cop. “Oh my God,” she’d said aloud. She recognized him instantly. Louis Eppolito was the fat guy who mistakenly had tried to pick up Frankie Hydell the day Jimmy was murdered. She immediately went out and bought his book and looked at the photographs. It was him. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind. It was him, the cop. You don’t forget the face of the man who killed your son. “Lizzie’ll tell you the same thing. She was right there with me.”