by Tommy Dades
Steve? That’s how Casso learned the first name of Eppolito’s partner.
Casso claimed they were on his payroll for a long time. He told the FBI that “the cops” had been paid $50,000 for picking up Jimmy Hydell. After that he’d given Kaplan $10,000 every three months to pay them for the information they were providing. After a few years he even gave them a $5,000 raise, paying them $15,000 every three months, until he was arrested in January 1993.
Those payments covered all kinds of work. For example, when Casso and his underboss, Vic Amuso, decided a mobster named Anthony Dilapi could no longer be trusted, they put out a contract on him. The problem was Dilapi was running, supposedly hiding out somewhere in California. Casso asked Kaplan if Eppolito and Caracappa could find him. Caracappa got his address by contacting Dilapi’s parole officer. A mob guy named Joe D’Arco carried out the contract. Once Casso began talking he didn’t stop. It turned out that after killing Dilapi, D’Arco just tossed the gun out his car window—and “the cops” found out that, incredibly, the LAPD recovered it.
It took Casso more than five hundred pages to chronicle his growing reliance on his “crystal ball,” his spies inside the police department. In addition to serving as an early warning system alerting the mob to wiretaps, providing the names of informers, and providing details about the progress of investigations the NYPD launched against the mob, the cops became Casso’s personal Google, quickly responding to every request for information he made. Among the many secrets they revealed was that the FBI had planted a bug, a microphone, inside a railing directly in front of a social club in Little Italy run by Genovese capo Pete DeFeo.
Sitting there, reading this stuff, Dades couldn’t even begin to calculate the amount of damage Eppolito and Caracappa had done to New York City, to American law enforcement’s war on organized crime. These were cops—cops!—and every day they were giving up other cops. They were the worst kind of scumbags imaginable. Fighting this war the department had come to depend on informers inside the mob for intelligence. Detective Steve Caracappa—detective? Tommy almost had to spit out the word—had access to almost all of that information. Numerous operations that initially seemed promising had ended in sudden failure, and until Casso opened his mouth no one knew why. For example, when the cops told Kaplan that a Colombo family member named Dominick Costa was cooperating, that piece of information was passed from Kaplan to Casso to Vic Orena, the acting boss of the Colombo family, who ordered Costa’s relatives to get rid of him. End of Costa.
It was the cops who warned Kaplan that John “Otto” Heidel was a rat and was trying to get out from under his own problem by catching Casso on tape. Casso told Lucchese capo George “Georgie Neck” Zappola to take care of the situation. According to Casso’s testimony, Zappola later told him what had happened. Vinny Zappola and Little Sally Fusco Jr. got the contract. They slashed a tire on Heidel’s car and waited for him to show up. As Heidel started to change the tire Vinny Zappola approached him. Heidel took off, running for his life, with Zappola right behind him. Heidel was hit a couple of times and grabbed a motorcycle; for a few seconds there was a chance he might live. But Fusco was driving the getaway car and he had raced the wrong way up a one-way street to cut off Heidel. Finally, Zappola caught up to him and put the fatal bullet in his chest.
As soon as Heidel’s body was identified NYPD detectives raced to his house to search it before the mob got there to clean out any evidence. No telling what might be found there—diaries, phone books, you never knew. Incredibly, either Eppolito or Caracappa—Kaplan didn’t tell Casso which one, but it turned out to be Eppolito—managed to get inside as part of the team. Whichever one of them it was found microcassettes hidden in a secret compartment in the bathroom and slipped them into his boot. Later, when Casso played the tapes, he heard Vic Amuso’s voice pointing out to Heidel that it was a cold night and asking, “You want anything?”
Amuso replied, “Yeah, soup.” Apparently the tapes were destroyed.
To Tommy Dades, this all seemed like a bad movie. Casso had first told these stories more than a decade earlier—and absolutely nothing had been done about them. And if Betty Hydell hadn’t called him one day, they would have continued rotting in a taped-up box in a storeroom. On page after page Casso detailed the cops’ betrayals. Another Lucchese capo, Sal Avellino, was told that a mobster known as Finnegan was talking to law enforcement. Casso asked Kaplan to have the cops check it out. It took the cops several weeks, but eventually they confirmed it: Finnegan was a rat.
The cops informed Kaplan that Genovese associate Pete Savino was wearing a wire. Casso and Vic Amuso tried to figure out who might get hurt by that wire. It turned out that Sonny Morrissey, who represented the Lucchese family in several meetings with Savino, probably had the most to lose. Casso and Amuso were worried that Morrissey might flip, putting them in jeopardy. Pete Chiodo got the contract. Morrissey was killed and buried in New Jersey. It turned out that Morrissey didn’t die easy. According to Casso, after being shot, Morrissey swore he wasn’t a rat—then pleaded with Chiodo to kill him quick, to “take him out of his misery.”
Casso’s stories went on and on. When Caracappa learned that James Bishop, the former head of Painters Union Local 37, who served as union liaison with the Luccheses, was cooperating with both the NYPD and the New York DA’s office, he immediately alerted Kaplan. In May 1990, Bishop was shot eight times while behind the wheel of his Lincoln Town Car—the car was still moving and the shooters had to leap out of the way to avoid being run down by a dead man.
As Dades continued reading, he began to wonder if Eppolito and Caracappa were cops who went bad, or bad guys who became cops. They were officially employed by the city, but there was no question who they were working for. They were traitors to every man and woman in law enforcement. After mobster Bruno Facciolo was murdered—he was found with a canary stuffed in his mouth—in the summer of 1990, the cops told Kaplan that Louis Facciola, Al Visconti, and Larry Taylor had been picked up on a wire making plans to whack several members of the Lucchese family to get even for that killing. Casso and Vic Amuso responded by putting out contracts on all three of them. After Visconti and Taylor had been killed, the cops told Kaplan that the NYPD had tried to convince Facciola to save his own life by cooperating. Facciola refused—and got whacked.
In addition to the range and number of crimes described by Casso, Dades was also surprised by his audacity. Casso admitted that he had ignored mob tradition by trying to kill a family member of another mobster, but his 302s also described an attempt to assassinate federal prosecutor Charlie Rose. That was exactly the kind of crime the Mafia had scrupulously avoided to prevent massive government retaliation. And the “crime” supposedly committed by Rose? Casso blamed him for leaking an embarrassing item about his wife to the press and decided to get even. Naturally, the only people Casso trusted to get Rose’s address were the cops. It was amazing, Tommy thought, that the only people a crazed Mafia capo trusted were New York City detectives. He just shook his head in disbelief. For ten years this stuff had been collecting dust. Just reading it made him feel dirty. He wanted to get these guys.
Casso was captured before he could make his move against Rose, but supposedly he did get an address for the prosecutor in the Hamptons. One of his people waited at the house for the prosecutor to show up, but for whatever reasons Rose never got there. That was truly fortunate—it turned out to be the wrong Charlie Rose. It was the wrong address: This was the home of the TV show host, not the prosecutor.
Casso’s 302s also solved several mysteries for Dades. On Christmas Day 1986, a kid named Nicky Guido had been assassinated mob-style while sitting in his newly purchased red Nissan Maxima in front of his house in Brooklyn. The NYPD did a thorough investigation, trying to find a link between Guido and the mob, but there was nothing there. Guido had no known mob connections, he didn’t appear to have any debts, he wasn’t a witness to any crimes, yet the mob had killed him. It made no sense—until Casso exp
lained what had happened: A guy named Nicky Guido was one of the three men who had screwed up the hit on Casso. The cops got an address for a Nicky Guido on Court Street in Brooklyn. That made sense because Guido’s father supposedly worked on the docks.
On Christmas Day, Georgie Zappola, Frankie Lastorino, and Joey Testa went to the house, figuring Guido would be home on the holiday. They waited until a young man got into the driver’s seat of the red car. Another man, an older guy—it turned out to be his uncle Anthony—eased into the passenger seat. All the pieces fit perfectly. They pumped nine bullets into the body of an innocent kid.
Casso found out they’d whacked the wrong Nicky Guido from the newspapers. According to the story in the papers, this Nicky Guido was an installer for the telephone company. The murder of Nicky Guido had been a simple mistake. The two cops had provided the wrong address. No one knew what the intended victim looked like, so they had killed an innocent person.
The 302s also included a litany of Casso’s greatest hits, including killings that were planned and never carried out, attempts that failed, and the many more that succeeded. He began with the most high-profile miss, his attempt to kill John Gotti for the unsanctioned murder of mob boss Paul Castellano. In an effort to hide his involvement in the plot, he decided to blow up Gotti in his car, the method of execution favored by the Sicilian Mafia. In addition to Gotti, Casso intended to kill his underboss, Frank DeCicco. On Sunday morning, April 13, 1986, a little less than four months after Castellano’s death, Casso went after Gotti.
He’d found out Gotti was going to be at the Veterans and Friends Social Club in Bensonhurst. Vic Amuso and his brother Bobby went with him. The bomber was a drug dealer named Herbie “Blue Eyes” Pate, who supposedly had been a munitions expert in the army. The explosive was C-4, which makes a very big bang.
Pate was waiting in Bensonhurst in his own car. Eventually he joined the three men in Bobby Amuso’s Chrysler. He had a shopping bag with him, filled with groceries; Italian bread was sticking out of the top of the bag. They sat there for a long time, waiting until DeCicco showed up. DeCicco parked and went into the club. Herbie switched off the safety on his bomb and began walking down the street. As he passed DeCicco’s car he appeared to drop something. As he bent down to pick it up, he slipped the bomb under DeCicco’s car and went back to his own car.
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.