by Tommy Dades
“My father told me it was something I had to do. He was a great cop and if this was true, he wanted these guys to pay. He gave me his blessing.”
Ponzi had already had a small taste of the case. After the mob found out that Frankie Hydell was cooperating and killed him, Ponzi had run an internal investigation trying unsuccessfully to find the leak. So when Tommy told him about his conversation with Betty Hydell he immediately understood its relevance. It was a flimsy foundation on which to build a murder case against the two detectives, but it was a start. He owed it to his father, to himself, to every cop who had ever put on the uniform, to see where it went. “I’m in,” he said.
Ponzi quietly gave Tommy a tiny office with a desk, a phone, and a computer on the eighteenth floor. They were investigating cops, so nobody else knew about it. He and Tommy had the only keys. Even the cleaning staff wasn’t permitted to open the door.
Vecchione and Ponzi sat down to figure out how they’d work the investigation. Both men supervise relatively large departments. Vecchione runs the prosecutorial side of the Rackets unit; Ponzi is in charge of the investigative side of the entire DA’s office. This was a really unusual situation: As a chief Ponzi rarely had time to get personally involved in investigations. Vecchione was already in the midst of several major cases. “What do you think?” Ponzi asked.
“You kidding me?” Vecchione replied. “Of course we’re going to do this. I’m gonna do it myself. I’m going to try this case and put those two motherfuckers behind bars. What are you gonna do?”
Ponzi nodded firmly. “Let’s do this one.”
Dades’s team was now three strong. The strategy was pretty straightforward: Dades and Ponzi would handle the actual investigation; Vecchione would clear the legal path for them.
Mike Vecchione’s concern from the very beginning was how to keep this investigation on the state level rather than making a federal case out of it. That was going to be a little tricky, because they would need to get carloads of old files from the Feds, and eventually they would need to speak with Gaspipe Casso, who was still in federal custody. But with a little luck and a lot of hard work he felt it could be done.
It wasn’t just ego that made Vecchione want to keep the case in Hynes’s office. It was obvious from that first day that this was going to be a difficult investigation with only a limited chance of success, but he was convinced that legally it would be substantially easier for the state to get a conviction. Vecchione was going to use Betty Hydell’s statement to try to make the Jimmy Hydell murder case against Eppolito and Caracappa. Any additional charges he could make stick would be a nice bonus, but a murder conviction would put them away for twenty-five years to the rest of their lives.
The federal government couldn’t prosecute Jimmy Hydell’s murder. There is no straight murder statute on the federal level. In extreme cases the federal government uses the civil rights laws to bring murderers to justice, based on the concept that they have deprived an individual of his or her civil rights by killing them, but in this situation that would be a tough charge to make stick. The only charge under which the Feds could prosecute the two cops was a RICO. RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, was passed in 1970 to give law enforcement a potent legal weapon to fight the Mafia. RICO allows the government to prosecute people for a pattern of criminal activity rather than specific crimes. They could be prosecuted for being a member of the Mafia. Specifically, to be found guilty under the RICO statute an individual has to commit a minimum of two “predicate acts,” or crimes, in cooperation with at least some of the same people over a substantial period of time. One crime, no matter how heinous it might be; several criminal actions committed within a very short time span; or a series of criminal actions that can’t be connected in some way don’t qualify for prosecution under the RICO statute.
Vecchione didn’t see how the Feds could charge Eppolito and Caracappa under RICO. The two or more underlying crimes that constitute a RICO violation have to be committed within ten years of the indictment. No matter what crimes the two cops committed for Casso, their relationship with him had ended more than a decade earlier. Casso had been arrested in January 1993. Eppolito had retired in 1990, Caracappa two years later. Dades had learned that the two cops were living out in Las Vegas, presumably no longer involved with the Lucchese crime family. Unless they were still committing crimes in the desert for the Luccheses, the statute of limitations had run out for a RICO. And if the Feds couldn’t make a RICO case, they couldn’t prosecute the cops.
But on the state level there is no statute of limitations on murder charges.
Vecchione knew that the Feds might be extremely unhappy if the Brooklyn DA was able to make a murder case against cops that the Eastern District had in its hands years earlier but failed to pursue. That’s not exactly the type of publicity any U.S. Attorney wants. So they might make it difficult for the state to proceed, but they wouldn’t dare risk blocking the investigation. Eventually they would hand over whatever materials they had.
Network television has recently popularized the concept of a “cold case,” a case that hadn’t been solved within a reasonable period of time and is no longer the subject of an active investigation. In other words, a case nobody is losing any sleep over. The media has made cold cases a hot concept. And law enforcement has plenty of them to solve. It is estimated that there are more than a hundred thousand unsolved murders in the United States. Cold cases. It’s an old theme with great dramatic possibilities.
Cold cases live forever on paper, in neglected files crammed into overstuffed file cabinets. The first thing Tommy Dades and Joe Ponzi needed was all the old files. They contained every bit of evidence that had been gathered against the cops. This included Casso’s 302s and all the supporting documents, the reports of any independent attempts to verify Casso’s claims, transcriptions of interviews, the cops’ personnel folders, maybe some newspaper clippings, and all the official reports and notes on the investigation of the murder of Jimmy Hydell. The Feds had a lot of the material. The Brooklyn DA’s office had some of it in its archives; Tommy had his own files, consisting of his own notes and newspaper clippings collected throughout his career, and Ponzi had his clippings. But the Feds would have the most complete files; as far as anybody knew they hadn’t been touched in a decade and they were probably stuffed into the back of a cabinet, maybe like a Sleeping Beauty, just waiting for the right prince to come along.
To begin, Ponzi, Dades, or Vecchione would have to make an official request for the files to the United States Attorney’s Office, Eastern District, specifically to federal prosecutor Mark Feldman. For Vecchione that was a slight problem.
Mark Feldman was another kid from Brooklyn who went way back with all the big players in this case—including Eppolito. Years earlier he had run the Rackets Bureau in the Brooklyn DA’s office. And just as Vecchione had gotten to know Detective Tommy Dades, Feldman had gotten friendly with Detective Louis Eppolito. “One of the reasons we all knew Louis so well,” Feldman was quoted as saying in Mafia Cop, “was because his relatives kept turning up dead.”
In his book, Eppolito describes Feldman as “a tough Jew if I ever met one.” Their relationship, apparently, was cordial, respectful, and strictly professional. When Eppolito needed legal advice, just as Dades turned to Vecchione, Eppolito turned to Mark Feldman.
Dades agreed with Eppolito’s assessment of Feldman, believing, he says, “Mark was probably the best prosecutor of organized crime cases in New York. Bar none. We got to know each other in the 1990s, while I was part of a unique organized-crime task force in the early 1990s. Everybody hears the stories about the battles between the Feds and the state, but this was an unbelievably productive team, consisting of FBI agents and DEA agents and NYPD detectives. It was run by a U.S. Attorney named Jim Walden and Chris Blank, who was cross-designated from the Brooklyn DA’s office.
“We probably created the biggest marriage between the state and the Feds that they
’ve had in years. It was one big happy family. We were taking down cases left and right with no arguments, no problems, because it was a complete team effort. We knew all the players in organized crime. We had lists of old homicides. We’d decide, let’s solve this one—and we did. It was an amazing group and it worked because nobody was fighting for glory. Eventually we indicted forty Luccheses.
“Mark Feldman was a big part of that team.”
While Dades and Feldman were friends, Mike Vecchione’s relationship with Feldman was strained. At best. The two men had started their careers in the Brooklyn DA’s office at roughly the same time. For several years both Vecchione and Feldman had worked in the Homicide Bureau. Vecchione remembers very well how supportive Mark Feldman had been on the toughest day of his legal career. “I was trying a paroled criminal for the cold-blooded murders of two police officers. I had reliable witnesses and I had substantial forensic evidence—but I also had a racially mixed jury at a time when Brooklyn was on the edge of exploding.
“The trial lasted five weeks and the jury reached its verdict on a Saturday morning. Not guilty. I couldn’t believe it. Not guilty? I was stunned. This scumbag had killed two police officers and he was going to walk out of that courtroom. I was just overwhelmed with emotion; it was my responsibility to speak for those two cops and I’d failed. For whatever reasons, I’d failed. After the verdict was announced I went into this little office outside the courtroom, closed the door, and started crying. That was the lowest point in my professional career. It was Mark Feldman’s day off, but he had cared enough to come to court to lend his support. The only person in the office who was there.”
Mike had left the DA’s office in 1980 to run the NYPD Advocate’s Office, but Feldman stayed and eventually became head of the Rackets Bureau under DA Elizabeth Holtzman. When Joe Hynes was elected Brooklyn DA in 1989 he wanted to put his own people in leadership positions and Feldman left, maybe with a little bitterness, eventually landing in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Vecchione and Feldman got along with each other until 2001, when Vecchione took over the Rackets Division. Vecchione was city, Feldman was federal. There is a great deal of competition in New York between the U.S. Attorney’s office and the DA’s office in each borough. It’s a potent brew of ego, ambition, and power, fueled by publicity. Several prosecutors, most recently Rudy Giuliani, have used the publicity generated by high-profile prosecutions to build political careers. So when jurisdictions overlap, egos get stepped on.
Feldman’s boss for almost two years was U.S. Attorney Alan Vinegrad. Vecchione had a history with him too. When Vinegrad had been an assistant in the U.S. Eastern District office Vecchione had tried a difficult case with him. An ultra-Orthodox rabbi had kidnapped a young boy, whom he believed to be the Second Coming, from his mother. The Feds did not have jurisdiction because the rabbi had not taken the boy across state lines, but the rabbi could be charged under New York State law for secreting the boy in a place he could not be found. Working together, and sharing the publicity, Vecchione and Vinegrad had convicted the rabbi and his wife, and while doing that they had become friendly.
As far as Vecchione was concerned, the already complicated relationship between the Feds and the state had begun deteriorating when Mark Feldman joined the U.S. Attorney’s office. More than ever before, the Feds were taking cases and informants from the state. Vecchione assumed Feldman was still mad at Hynes for forcing him out of the Brooklyn DA’s office. Feldman believed that Vecchione had complained about that to Vinegrad, blaming him specifically for the deteriorating relationship.
So it was against that background that the state had to approach the Feds to get the old files on Eppolito and Caracappa. Tommy Dades made the first call to Feldman. “What’s up, Tommy?” Feldman asked when he called. Like everybody else, Feldman knew Tommy was always on the edge of an adventure.
“Listen to me for a second, Mark. I got some information on the Jimmy Hydell murder,” he said. “So if I was looking to jump in and reopen the Eppolito and Caracappa investigation, and I thought I could corroborate Casso, would you give me the paperwork you guys had when you were investigating? I want to take a shot at doing a state murder case.
“I got to ask you one thing though: If I come to you and ask you for everything you’ve got on it, you gotta give me your word you won’t interrupt me, you won’t force the FBI down my throat, and you’ll let me work on it alone. Can you do that?”
Feldman told him, “I’ll call you back in a half hour.” True to his word he called back less than a half hour later and told Tommy, “Go see Bill Oldham and take whatever you need.” Oldham was a veteran investigator in the U.S. Attorney’s office, another guy who knew his way around. He had been working in that office when Casso had originally made his claims, so he was very familiar with the case.
Several nights later, Dades, Ponzi, and Mark Feldman had dinner at a local restaurant named Two Toms. It was more social than business; the three men were friends with a shared love of the law enforcement world and got together often. Somewhere between the veal and the pasta they began discussing this case. Dades had a lot of respect for Feldman and told him about his conversation with Betty Hydell. “There wasn’t any other reason for Eppolito and Caracappa to be looking for Jimmy Hydell,” he said. “There was no investigation going on, they weren’t even supposed to be working together, there was nobody that even knew Jimmy Hydell was part of the crew that shot Casso, there was nothing else out on him. What happened was that they don’t know what Jimmy looks like so they pick up Frankie by mistake, then they let him go. No harm, no foul. But while they’re waiting for Jimmy to come home Betty catches up with them and has that conversation with them. A little while later Frankie sees them going over the Verrazano to Brooklyn. The last place anybody knows Jimmy was alive was in Brooklyn less than an hour later.” Tommy shrugged. “What else could they have been doing but picking up Jimmy, just like Casso says?”
Feldman was a prosecutor. He’d been involved with hundreds of cases. That seemed like a lot of speculation to him, a lot of blanks to fill in. No one except Casso had seen the two cops with Hydell. Maybe it made sense over a table at Two Toms, but Feldman knew that the only possibility the state had to make the case was to convince Casso to testify—and that Casso was not going to testify.
The only other guy who could make the case was the go-between, Burt Kaplan. But Feldman knew from his own experience that Kaplan fancied himself a stand-up guy. He was in jail pretty much for the rest of his life. In 1998 he’d been convicted of marijuana trafficking and sentenced to twenty-seven years in federal prison. He was sixty-five years old. After his conviction he’d been given an opportunity to corroborate Casso’s testimony and maybe walk out of prison, but he’d turned down the government’s offer. He made it clear that he wasn’t “a rat.” He wasn’t a “stool pigeon.” He was an old-time, hate-the-coppers stand-up guy. He wasn’t talking to anybody.
“Don’t even think about Kaplan,” Feldman told them. The odds against them making the murder case weren’t exactly astronomical, and it wasn’t a bet anybody with good sense would make. Especially without Casso or Kaplan. “Betty Hydell isn’t enough,” he said. “You’re going to need a lot more.”
Tommy remained the optimist. “Yeah, I know. But we’ve made tougher cases.” They all knew that Tommy and Mike had turned an unidentified skull fished out of a creek in 1999 into a murder conviction. All the teeth except one molar had been knocked out, and it proved impossible to extraxt a usable DNA sample, so there was no way of identifying it. It sat on a shelf in the Medical Examiner’s office until 2003, when a guy Tommy flipped gave up a murder he knew about, hoping to make a deal. The story was that a kid had been shot and beaten to death and his body was left out in the woods under a pile of old tires for several years. But when the killers found out somebody was planning to put up a mall in the area they went back for the now decomposed body. They broke the skull off the backbone and tossed it in a creek.
Tom
my took that story to Mike. At first he didn’t know about the skull. But when he began doing his research he discovered that a skull had been found not far from the site of the murder. Now they had a victim’s name and a skull, but no way of proving the skull had belonged to the name. Checking the victim’s rap sheet, Tommy learned he had been in prison. He said to Mike, “Let’s take a shot and see if he had dental work done in the can.” Incredibly, they found his dental records. A forensic dentist made the match to the skull. They were able to put the killer away.
Feldman knew all about Tommy’s persistence, but he also knew that without Casso or Kaplan he could spend the rest of his life banging on doors and he wasn’t going to convict the two cops. He offered whatever cooperation he could give them; he had absolutely nothing to lose. In fact, at one point he told Dades that his office was time-barred from bringing a RICO case against the cops. And he also suggested that they add Bill Oldham to their team. Not only did Oldham know the case, he pointed out, but he knew how to maneuver inside the federal system. As an investigator for the U.S. Attorney’s office he had routine access to federal facilities that state investigators did not have. He could save everybody a lot of time.
It made sense. Bill Oldham became the fourth member of the team.
The question of jurisdiction continued to bother Vecchione. While he didn’t say anything, he didn’t trust the Feds to stay out of the case, particularly if it looked like Brooklyn might be able to get an indictment. Two cops indicted for committing murders for a Mafia capo? That was going to make big bold headlines. Big bold headlines make careers. Mark Feldman was an ambitious guy.