Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  But both Dades and Ponzi assured him that Feldman’s word was gold. Better than gold. Besides, they told Mike, Feldman knew and accepted the fact that the U.S. Attorney couldn’t bring murder charges against the cops. “Why don’t you go ahead and speak to Mark yourself?” Ponzi suggested to Vecchione. “You guys are the lawyers; get it all squared away.”

  “So I called Feldman,” Vecchione remembers. “This was business, and we’re both professionals. We started talking about the case and he told me, ‘Look, I think we’re time-barred. The acts look like they’re too far in the past for us to be able to make a case. We don’t have any indication that these guys have been involved in any kind of continuing criminal enterprise, so it’s a single murder. We don’t have a statute for that. So go ahead, knock yourself out.’

  “‘That’s great, Mark,’ I told him.

  “‘Just one thing though,’ he added. It was almost as an afterthought. ‘If it turns out that somehow we can make a RICO out of this, you guys can keep the Hydell murder, but we’ll do the RICO.’ That sounded reasonable to me. I knew that Feldman was protecting his claim, but he didn’t sound optimistic.

  “‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘As long as we can do the murder.’”

  That was the plan. The state would go first, prosecuting the Jimmy Hydell murder, and then, if the Feds could find a RICO charge in there somewhere, the state would then hand over all its evidence and the federal government would proceed. It was an easy deal for Feldman to make. As it might have been described on the streets, it was nothing for nothing.

  When Mike hung up he figured maybe he was wrong, maybe Tommy and Ponzi were right, maybe the Feds weren’t going to get involved. From nailing the two cops to jailing them, this was going to be all Brooklyn. But Vecchione still had this feeling, this little legal itch that just wouldn’t go away, that it wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded.

  Besides, Feldman had already proved his word was good. The day after his initial conversation with Tommy Dades, he handed over the investigative material the Feds had in storage. Less than an hour after Dades had parked his car in front of the U.S. Attorney’s office at 1 Pierrepont Street he was trying to figure out how to fit five very large boxes in his trunk and backseat. He had no idea what he might find inside those boxes. Apparently the Feds had taken Casso very seriously, at least until he’d threatened the Gotti conviction with his accusations against Sammy Gravano. So it was likely there was a lot of valuable information in those boxes in the back of his car. Right then, right at the beginning, before Tommy carried those boxes up to the eighteenth floor and opened them up, he felt like a little kid on Christmas morning, waiting excitedly to see what surprises he would find.

  A lot of cops aren’t great readers. It’s a job that promises action; it doesn’t require going into the office, sitting behind a desk, and working through a pile of papers. So much of the time the type of kid who decides to become a cop is looking for action more than intellectual challenge. Even on the job there are numerous assignments that don’t require a lot of reading.

  Anybody looking at Tommy’s background would have figured he wasn’t much of a reader. He came from a broken home and spent as much time on the streets as in school. He was never a great student; he’d dropped out of school after his freshman year in high school to join the marines—although instead of taking the oath he’d ended up working in Vegas. But it turned out that Dades was an avid reader. That was just another one of those little surprises about Tommy Dades.

  That came from his grandfather. His name was Eddie Schwartz—“Blackie” they called him on the loading docks of the New York Daily News, where he worked for most of the forty years he spent with the paper, because of his dark complexion. Blackie Schwartz was a self-educated guy from the Lower East Side who ended up foreman, and every night he’d bring home a fresh-smelling copy of the “night owl,” the first edition, for his grandson. The Daily News wrote about the two things that most interested Tommy, crime and boxing. Tommy read anything to do with organized crime, anything. When the other kids were reading books about sports heroes or the children’s classics, Tommy was reading the biography of Monk Eastman, a tough guy from the nineteenth-century Five Points gang that once owned the city. Rather than collecting baseball cards, Tommy kept stories about mob guys. Learning about organized crime was his hobby long before it became his profession.

  But he didn’t stop when it became his profession. He continued to read everything he could find about organized crime and remembered it, and in his mind he made the connections. Tommy was a great talker; he collected informants like Trump collected rent. Few men who haven’t had a mass card burned in their hand and taken the oath of omertà knew more about organized crime than Tommy Dades.

  But as much as Dades loved being on the streets, it was this ability to mine documents that made him a great detective. He’d read piles of documents to figure out how the pieces fit. He’d find the anomalies that other detectives had overlooked. He remembered the names and the connections and the crimes that went with them. He had the necessary patience to sit and read and the talent to understand every word of it.

  To the five boxes of dusty material he’d carried into the war room he added his own collection of clippings. And then he opened the boxes and went to work learning about the incredible betrayal of Detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa. If there was a nugget in the piles of papers and tapes and transcriptions that would enable him to put those guys away, he was going to find it.

  When Dades sat down at the very beginning of the investigation the investigators already knew quite a bit. They knew that officially Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa had both retired from the NYPD with their full pensions, meaning that any outstanding problems they may have had were resolved: Their records were clean. They knew that Eppolito claimed in his book to have been the eleventh-most-decorated officer in department history. He also wrote about participating in several gunfights. Describing the first one, in which he was one of several officers who killed a bank robber, he claimed, “I learned something about myself during that gunfight. I not only had the capacity to kill, I had the capacity to forget about it, to not let it bother me.”

  That’s strange, Dades thought. According to Eppolito’s records cited in the federal indictment, while on the job he hadn’t been involved in a single shooting.

  They knew that Louis Eppolito had come from a mob family, that three members of the Eppolito family had been murdered in mob hits. They knew that he liked playing the role of a wiseguy; he dressed large, spoke loud, and carried a big ego. In Mafia Cop, Eppolito’s coauthor wrote that Eppolito told him he had committed “a litany of felonies while wearing the badge, but they were all in the name of ‘honor’ and ‘respect.’”

  Caracappa, they knew, fit the role of the quiet sidekick. Caracappa played Ed Norton to Eppolito’s Ralph Kramden—if those two TV characters had been cold-blooded killers rather than city workers.

  They knew that Eppolito and Caracappa had attended the police academy at about the same time and first worked together under Larry Ponzi in the Brooklyn Robbery Squad. And that in 1984 Caracappa had become a member of the Major Case Squad, an assignment that gave him easy access to the department’s most sensitive investigative information. And that three years later he assisted in the founding of the Organized Crime Homicide Unit inside the Major Case Squad, giving him routine access to highly confidential intelligence about the FBI and the NYPD’s plans to attack the Mafia—particularly the Lucchese family.

  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 apparently 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.

  CHAPTER 4

  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 clean
ed 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…”