Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  Sometimes, though, it doesn’t work so well. Sometimes agency rivalries can’t be overcome and disparate personalities cause friction. It’s the difference between harmony and a cacophony. This task force was one of those other times. Rather than one for all, it was more like one for one. In contrast to the unified front always presented to the media, as this investigation progressed, there existed a wide and ever-present breach between the state and the Feds that just couldn’t be crossed. While they shared a common objective, neither side ever learned to trust the motives of the other side. And even within the two camps, there were personality conflicts.

  This particular joint task force was practically an all-star team of veteran cops and lawyers. Each of them had enjoyed considerable success in his career. These were powerful guys who knew how to navigate the system. Several of them were close to retirement and knew well that nailing two murderous detectives would create a great wave of media attention they might ride into the future. So in addition to putting away two skells, there was the potential for personal enhancement. There were some strong personalities in that room, and at times tempers got raised. According to Dades, Bill Oldham often tried to dominate these meetings. “Who knows why?” Dades wondered. “Maybe because he worked for the Feds and thought they owned the case. Bill Oldham was a good guy; he was a thorough, productive investigator and as dedicated to justice as anybody on the team. But truthfully we had our differences. He’d always bring something to eat to the meetings. Other people would have a cup of coffee, but he was the only one eating at these meetings. McDonald’s, a bagel, a muffin, sushi, he was always eating something and he’d sit there stuffing down food as we tried to work. The real problem was that sometimes he got so enthusiastic that he tried to dominate the meetings. Like everybody else, he wanted to see the justice done, but he had his own issues. There were a lot of really accomplished people in that room and some of them resented him.”

  Mike Vecchione attended only those meetings that took place in the DA’s office conference room. As the Feds gradually began to impose their rules over the investigation, his relationship with Mark Feldman, always respectful but never particularly friendly, grew substantially worse. Dades, too, had started to become disenchanted with Feldman. He had long considered the prosecutor a friend, but it had become obvious to him that Feldman put their relationship second to business. What made that more difficult to accept was Tommy’s deep belief that this case would best be prosecuted by the state, who could go after the cops for at least eight individual murders in addition to a shopping list of criminal acts, while the Feds basically had a single RICO charge to make.

  Among the few things the members of this task force had in common were their law enforcement experience and their dedication to this investigation. Everybody wanted to put these two dirty cops away. So no matter how badly their personalities clashed, the real work, the daily drudgery, got done. This was an unusually difficult investigation, made considerably more difficult from the very beginning by the continued emphasis on secrecy. There were people out there who might have pertinent information whom Henoch would not allow investigators to approach because he was afraid they would “spill the beans.” Tommy pointed out that there weren’t any beans to be spilled, reminding Henoch forcefully that the crimes being investigated had been committed more than a decade earlier and there was nothing Eppolito and Caracappa could do to erase them. They couldn’t change history.

  It turned out that the Feds were worried that if Casso’s cops found out that the investigation was active they’d stop doing whatever illegal deals they were doing in Vegas. Dades thought that was pretty much a bullshit excuse. He wanted to shake the trees, get people running, making phone calls. That was a technique he’d used successfully several times before; you get somebody up on a wire, you light a match and find out who he calls and what he says. One time in a murder case Dades and Mike Galletta were working, they had taps on the phones of the two primary suspects. They had a few bits of information, but not nearly enough to make the case. They picked up one of the suspects and during his interrogation dropped the few details they’d learned, then warned the suspect he was crazy not to flip because it was getting late fast and if he walked out of the office the deal was off the table. Dades and Galletta knew that as soon as the suspect left the office he would have to report the entire conversation to his capo in the family. That’s exactly what happened. Dades and Galletta listened on the tap as he told his boss, “They questioned me about [so and so] and they’re getting hot. They know a lot of stuff. I don’t know what to do.”

  The capo told him to calm down and shut up, reassuring him that there were certain incriminating details only the two of them knew.

  The information they got from that phone call was crucial to making the case against the two mobsters. When faced with additional evidence the first suspect finally flipped. The evidence was so overwhelming both men pled guilty.

  Dades wanted to try the same technique in this case. He wanted to plant a story in the newspapers that would rattle Eppolito and Caracappa. He wanted to see how they reacted, what they did, who they called, and who called them as a result of the story. But he was overruled. The U.S. Attorney didn’t want anybody knowing that this particular cold case was being thawed.

  That decision hampered the investigation. For example, Dades realized pretty quickly that several wiseguys who might have information about the case were living happily in the Feds’ Witness Protection Program. These were people who had worked with or knew Casso—some of them may have even benefited from information provided by the two cops. Getting to them required cooperation from the Feds and going through some red tape. The U.S. Attorney finally agreed to let him speak with several of these men, but with one condition: He couldn’t tell them precisely why he was speaking to them.

  Basically, when an individual flips he agrees to cooperate with law enforcement agencies for a specific length of time. During that time he is required by his agreement to answer any and all questions to the best of his knowledge. The law enforcement agency owns his past. But at the end of that time period his obligation ends. He doesn’t have to speak to anyone. He doesn’t have to answer any questions. That’s the way most agreements read; but in practice, most of these guys love talking about their former lives, back when they were somebodies. Often they’re living ordinary lives under made-up identities, working mundane jobs, unable to talk about their good old days. In their new lives recounting their greatest hits just doesn’t make good cocktail party chatter. So these occasional conversations with law enforcement at least temporarily allow them to talk about who they were way back when.

  “Among the people I wanted to speak to,” Dades explains, “were a former Lucchese family captain named Fat Pete Chiodo, a three-hundred-pound wiseguy who had flipped after he got shot nine times during a botched hit in a gas station, and Little Al D’Arco, who had been the acting boss of the Lucchese family while Casso and Vic Amuso were on the run. D’Arco was later demoted for messing up the hit on Chiodo. I also wanted to speak to D’Arco’s son Joe; he was another made guy and he was involved in the Anthony Dilapi hit. I thought there was a good chance the D’Arcos would talk because the family had turned on them, and I knew that Pete Chiodo had no love for the family because Casso had made an attempt on his sister’s life to punish him for testifying.”

  D’Arco was the first mob boss in history to testify against his Mafia family and then go into the Witness Protection Program. What made Al and Joe D’Arco particularly interesting to Dades was the fact that Joe D’Arco had been the triggerman in the Anthony Dilapi murder. Dilapi was the wiseguy who was hiding from Casso and Vic Amuso in California. To find out where Dilapi was hiding, Caracappa had written to his parole officer, claiming the NYPD wanted to speak with him because his name had come out in an investigation. Caracappa got the address and passed it along to Kaplan, but Dilapi managed to get away—so Caracappa again wrote to Dilapi’s parole officer, again unde
r the guise of NYPD business, to get his new address. As a result, Joe D’Arco was able to find Anthony Dilapi and kill him.

  Like Casso and Kaplan, Chiodo and both D’Arcos were the property of the federal government. Nobody got to speak with them unless the U.S. Attorney approved it, arranged it, and supervised the interview. For example, Dades’s request to speak with the younger D’Arco was turned down. He never found out why. It just wasn’t approved. Arrangements to interview Chiodo and Al D’Arco were made through the offices of the federal prosecutor and the Federal Marshal Service, which runs the Witness Protection Program. After Dades’s request for those two interviews had been approved, a time and location was designated for each of the calls to actually take place.

  Dades sat in an office in the Southern District with Bobby I and several other people while a marshal actually placed the phone calls. The New York end of the interview was conducted by speakerphone. “I pretty much followed the same script for both phone calls,” Dades recalls. “‘Listen,’ I told them, trying to ask them questions without giving them any information, ‘this is what we’re doing here. We’re looking at law enforcement leaks and law enforcement corruption that involved Gaspipe Casso. We know that he was getting inside information from somewhere, but we don’t know where. You know anything at all about that?’”

  Both Chiodo and D’Arco seemed to be cooperative. Fat Pete verbally shrugged his shoulders. He didn’t know nothing about any of that kinda stuff. D’Arco admitted that he knew Casso had very reliable sources, but he had never asked him where the information was coming from. “He would just come back from wherever and say that he had got some information from his guys. You know, it was always pretty good. But where he got it, who knows?”

  D’Arco said that when Casso gave them Dilapi’s location he’d told them, “The cops got where he was.” Three men had been sent out to California—his son among them—and “they killed him [Dilapi] in his garage.”

  The conversations took a lot longer to arrange than they lasted. Without being able to refer specifically to leaks or sources or even names, Dades felt like a guy playing poker blindfolded. These calls, and other similar conversations, confirmed what the task force already knew: Casso had been extremely careful about protecting his source. Even in a world in which any wall might have ears, or at least an embedded listening device, Casso—and Kaplan—had been remarkably successful at keeping this secret.

  Dades also began visiting as many of the places described by Casso as possible. He wanted to see the crime scenes so that he might visualize the crime. After more than thirteen years he didn’t expect to find any physical evidence, but that wasn’t his objective. He liked to roam around these places by himself, collecting information, seeing how the shadows stretched through the day. He wanted to know if there were trees there that might have provided cover, or a building or an overpass nearby from which someone might have seen something, or if the streets ran north or south. You just never know what you need to know.

  He started at Dyker Park. He was almost positive he knew the precise spot where the cops had picked up Hydell. It was a comfortable place for a quiet meeting: It was in the shadows, you could easily see anybody approaching, and there weren’t a lot of people passing by. He sat there in his car for a long time, looking at air, wondering what Hydell thought when he saw the cops walking toward him. Had he been relieved? Did he think he was safe? Did he know Eppolito or Caracappa?

  He walked down the street, looking for the pay telephone from which Jimmy Hydell had called his mother. It wasn’t there. Maybe it never was there, maybe it was in a completely different location, but that was something he would never be able to determine. Betty had lost the number and location she’d obtained from the phone company and he knew too well from previous investigations that the company wouldn’t have kept such records.

  From there he drove to the Toys “R” Us parking lot on Flatbush Avenue where the two cops had handed Hydell over to Casso and Amuso. He drove to the back end of it. He knew that area pretty well too. It was a secluded place where he had often met informants. This was where Casso had seen Eppolito for the only time. There were a few cars in the lot, and an adult and two young kids were walking toward the store. Dades just looked around, taking it all in, etching it into his memory.

  He also would have gone to see the garage where Hydell had been transferred from the backseat of the cops’ car to the trunk of the second car, and the house where Casso had killed Hydell, but they hadn’t identified either place yet. They knew the garage was somewhere on Nostrand Avenue and they had a pretty good idea where the house was—and they knew it belonged to a wiseguy. They were confident they’d figure out the exact locations pretty soon.

  So Tommy headed for the Belt Parkway, to the spot where the two cops had pulled over Eddie Lino and Caracappa had shot him to death. Like all the other places he would visit, he knew there would be little to see, unless he could look into the past. He drove along the service road, stopping just before he reached Ocean Parkway. He walked around, feeling the place more than looking for something that wasn’t there.

  There are three types of evidence: physical evidence, meaning the smoking gun or, with the assistance of a good forensic lab, the smoke; circumstantial evidence, where facts and logic lead to an inescapable conclusion; and eyewitness testimony.

  Tommy had already found the computer readout, but with a lot of luck, the task force might discover another little bit of physical evidence. Maybe a sheet of paper that might have been stuck in a file and forgotten or a note somebody wrote, or even evidence saved from one of the murders that could be connected to the cops, but it wasn’t going to be much.

  There already was a lot of circumstantial evidence, but a good defense lawyer can create an alternate reality, poking holes in a prosecutor’s case, raising maybes to possibilities to doubts.

  So almost from their first meeting, Vecchione, Dades, Joe Ponzi, everybody on the task force, knew their ability to convict the two cops would probably depend on gaining the cooperation of Gaspipe Casso, Burt Kaplan, or maybe even a wiseguy named Tommy Galpine. Galpine was a younger guy who had worked for Kaplan. Among his many jobs, at times he served as the liaison between Casso and Kaplan, carrying cash from Casso to Kaplan to pay the cops. And while he was a minor player, apparently he knew all about Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa.

  This little piece of information had appeared as easily as a magician’s rabbit. Apparently someone had interviewed Galpine’s girlfriend while working another case. Dades didn’t know how they found the girlfriend, just that they did and she told her story. According to this story, she was with Galpine in a popular Chinese restaurant in Brooklyn. During their meal Galpine looked up at a black and white photograph hanging on the wall above her head. It was a signed head shot, the kind of picture that covers the walls of every deli and Italian restaurant in New York. But this was a head shot of a burly Louie Eppolito. “See that guy?” Galpine bragged to his girlfriend. She turned to look and he explained, “That’s one of our cops.”

  So it was known that Galpine knew. The task force decided to approach Casso first, mostly because he was already in New York, sitting in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, waiting to testify in another case. He was right there, just down the block, easy to get to. More importantly, he was already talking. In another case he had agreed to speak to Suffolk County detectives investigating the source of a leak that had led directly to the killing of two courageous businessmen, Robert Kubecka and Donald Barstow, who were helping detectives infiltrate the mob-controlled trash collection industry. Vecchione was actually mildly optimistic that Gaspipe would cooperate with this investigation; he knew that Casso had absolutely nothing to lose—he had been sentenced to spend his next thirteen lives in prison—and perhaps his freedom to gain. He’d already spilled once; why not do it again? If he could prove he had been telling the truth seven years earlier he might be able to get his plea agreement reinstated.


  Kaplan would be the second choice. Everybody knew the One-Eyed Jew would be a tough nut to crack. The hope was that he was growing older without any chance of getting out of prison and might want to see one more sunset without bars in front of it before he died. Nobody would have bet on it though.

  They would approach Tommy Galpine only as the third resort. Galpine had been convicted of dealing drugs and was serving a sixteen-year sentence in federal prison. But Galpine had remained a true believer, totally loyal to Kaplan. Vecchione believed he wouldn’t talk unless Kaplan flipped. The only real hope for a prison cell conversion was that down the line he would remember he was a lot younger than his onetime boss. Kaplan was old enough to know he wasn’t going to live that many years in prison; Galpine wasn’t that lucky.

  So that was it. While the task force was doing grunt work, Vecchione started to talk lawyer. “We agreed that I would pitch Casso first, Kaplan second, and only then Tommy Galpine,” Vecchione says. “Gaspipe Casso was represented by an attorney named John D. B. Lewis. I didn’t know him, but I’d learned that he shared office space down in Greenwich Village with O. J. Simpson defense lawyers Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. Lewis had filed Casso’s final appeal after the government canceled his plea agreement, claiming in his papers that the entire arrangement, as well as Casso’s role as an informer, had been compromised by the defense attorney selected by prosecutors to represent him. That attorney was a former prosecutor who apparently didn’t like certain elements of the plea deal. He had tried to withdraw from the case, but when he did, prosecutors threatened to bring ethical and disciplinary charges against him. That made it impossible for him to withdraw—resulting in a serious conflict of interest. I thought it was an interesting argument that had some legal merit—the U.S. Attorney had forced Casso to keep an attorney who didn’t want to be there—but the judge had tossed it out. After reading those papers it was obvious Lewis was a very good lawyer.”