Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  For Tommy Dades, friends and boxing, those were the constants. And the case of the two skells.

  He’d been working the case for more than a year now. He was pretty sure he knew the facts that mattered and he was still confident eventually he or somebody else would prove the two cops were guilty. But there was one thing he couldn’t figure out, one thing that just didn’t make sense to him.

  Why.

  Unlike the TV shows on which detectives spend just about the whole hour trying to unravel the always complicated motive behind the crime, most often the motive is pretty obvious: Money, sex, and power pretty much cover most crimes. In fact, neither Dades nor Ponzi nor Vecchione, none of these guys, ever wasted too much time wondering why a crime was committed, but this one was different. Just about every man or woman who has ever pinned on a shield, almost without exception, at one time in their career gets the opportunity to go the wrong way. The offers are there, big and small, a cup of coffee to thousands of dollars. It’s a reality of the job. To the credit of law enforcement, most of them turn it down. But having to make that decision, sometimes over and over, is an ingredient in the bond that holds them all together.

  But not Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa. They went bad early in their careers and never looked back. If even some of these accusations were true, as Tommy Dades believed they were, then he was looking at maybe the two dirtiest cops in the whole history of law enforcement. The worst cops ever. And this time Dades, Ponzi, Vecchione, Bobby I, Le Vien, Oldham—all of them wondered why.

  Louis Eppolito was easy to figure. He came from the bottom of the well. His father, Fat the Gangster, and his uncle Jimmy the Clam were made guys in the Gambino family. Jimmy Eppolito was a capo; he learned his lessons from Carlo Gambino. Louis’s father, Ralph, used to bang Louis around pretty good, trying to teach him respect and honor. Except he was supposed to honor wiseguys and respect criminal behavior. What Louis Eppolito really learned from Fat the Gangster, as he wrote in Mafia Cops, was the difference between the bad guys and the good guys. “My father hated cops with a passion, had no respect whatsoever for them. I guess that stemmed from the days he was buying them off for nickels and dimes.”

  Growing up, Louis hung out with these guys. He spoke the language, he knew the streets. He’d even been the one to identify the bullet-riddled bodies of his uncle and his cousin, a wannabe they called Jim-Jim, after they’d been whacked. Maybe there was some time in Louis Eppolito’s life when he really had intended to join the right team, but if there had been, it didn’t last long. He was a natural.

  Steve Caracappa was a little tougher to figure. It wasn’t in his genes. But by the time he joined the NYPD in 1969 he had something most cops never get: a criminal record. Caracappa had grown up on Brooklyn’s streets and dropped out of high school at sixteen. He started working with his father as a laborer. In 1960, he and a partner were indicted on Staten Island for stealing a truckload of construction materials. Apparently the judge in the case gave him a break, reducing the charge to a misdemeanor. Caracappa pleaded guilty and was given probation. In 1966 he joined the army and served a yearlong tour in Vietnam.

  Normally, a high school dropout with a record—even a sealed juvenile record—wouldn’t have been considered by the NYPD. But in the late 1960s a lot of the young men who might have applied for the job were serving in the military, and at the height of the antiwar movement it was a pretty controversial job. To fill its ranks the NYPD was forced to reduce its standards—and even then Caracappa was initially rejected. Finally though, in 1969, he was accepted.

  On paper, he’d had a great career. He’d moved right up the ladder and gotten his gold shield. He’d been given important slots. Several cops who had worked with Caracappa during his career were stunned when Casso fingered him. An officer who had worked with him in narcotics defended him, saying, “On many occasions Steve put his life in danger protecting me when I was involved in making narcotics buys.” He was trusted so completely that he helped create the department’s Organized Crime Homicide Unit inside the Major Case Squad. Dades looked at his record over and over, trying to pinpoint that place, that event, when he turned. There was no easy answer. It was possible he’d been straight all the way to 1978, when he and Louis Eppolito became partners under Larry Ponzi. But even if that was true, you couldn’t blame it on Eppolito. The switch was there all the time; all he did was flip it. Dades finally decided, “I think the both of them just liked the money and enjoyed playing both sides of the fence. I don’t think they knew what side they wanted to be on. What else could it be?”

  While Brooklyn and the Feds supposedly were working together in late May, U.S. Attorney Roz Mauskopf, the head of the Eastern District, called Vecchione’s boss, Joe Hynes. Mauskopf and Hynes knew each other but spoke only occasionally. They just didn’t have a lot to talk about. Although the Brooklyn DA’s office works regularly with federal investigative agencies like the DEA and postal inspectors, with rare exceptions the U.S. Attorney’s office maintained its distance from the local prosecutors. They were the Feds; they had the full power of the government of the United States behind them. They didn’t need to make nice. Hynes had long ago accepted this situation as a reality, knowing there was nothing he could do to change it.

  But Joe Hynes also knew that the Feds were armed with a much greater array of legal weapons than his office and when he believed that arsenal was needed—as, for example, in the case of Abner Louima, who was sodomized by a cop using a broomstick and who faced substantially more prison time if convicted by the Feds—he would ask the U.S. Attorney to take over the case.

  Ironically, Mauskopf was calling to ask Hynes to take over a murder case. A couple of years earlier Mario Fortunato and Carmine Polito had been convicted of a RICO violation for planning a hit on Genovese family associates Sabatino Lombardi and Michael D’Urso, then attempting to fix the jury and lying to the FBI about their involvement in the crime. This wasn’t the usual kind of wiseguy hit; it was more about personal business—Polito was a piss-poor gambler who’d borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars from Lombardi and D’Urso and wanted to wipe out his debts in two shots. Lombardi died immediately. D’Urso had been shot in the back of his head at point-blank range, but somehow he had survived.

  Fortunato and D’Urso appealed their convictions, claiming that however serious their crimes and however many different crimes they may have committed, they still didn’t add up to a RICO. They were killers, not conspirators. This was a personal gripe; it had nothing to do with the family business. Incredibly, Judge Roger Miner of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. In reversing their convictions for “murder in the aid of racketeering” he wrote, “The evidence was insufficient to establish that Polito and Fortunato murdered Lombardi to ‘maintain or increase’ positions in the Genovese crime family or to establish that the shootings of Lombardi and D’Urso were related to the activities of the Genovese crime family criminal enterprise.”

  There was nothing more the U.S. Attorney could do. Even if her office could figure out a way to make the RICO charge stick, retrying them would violate their protection from double jeopardy. Fortunately, being tried under the federal RICO statute does not relieve an individual of the underlying charges, in this case murder. So legally the state could try them for the murder of Fortunato and the attempted murder of D’Urso.

  “I was really stunned when Hynes told me about this phone call,” Vecchione remembers. “Here the Feds were, laying the groundwork to take the Eppolito and Caracappa case away from us to try them under RICO—and they were asking us to take a case on which they’d failed to meet the RICO standard. I couldn’t imagine they didn’t see the irony in all of this. But apparently they didn’t.”

  Hynes agreed to Mauskopf’s request; Brooklyn would take the case. There was no way two killers were going to walk. Both men were indicted for murder by Hynes’s office; Polito chose to be tried by a jury, while Fortunato put his fate in the hands of a judge. In 2007 the judge fo
und Fortunato guilty of murder—one day after a jury had acquitted Polito on the same charges.

  But when Mauskopf called Hynes, Vecchione wondered if the Feds might see this case as the model for the mafia cops. Under this scenario the U.S. Attorney had little to lose by pursuing a RICO case against the cops. Even if they failed to make it stick, they knew that Hynes’s office was there to cover their misjudgment. And if they succeeded, he had to admit, the penalties faced by the cops would be much more severe than anything possible under state law.

  As far as he was concerned the deal he’d made with Mark Feldman was still in effect: Even if the drug investigation going on in Vegas allowed the Feds to connect the dots and beat the RICO time problem, Brooklyn would still get the Hydell murder. That’s where it all started, with Betty Hydell. And solving that particular case was Tommy’s passion. As long as they got that one, Vecchione would be thrilled to see the Feds put the cops away for a couple of hundred years.

  But somehow, he just didn’t believe it was going to work out that nicely.

  CHAPTER 10

  On May 26, 2004, Burt Kaplan was sitting in a cell at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. His presence in Brooklyn was mostly his bad luck. Apparently he was being transferred out of the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex in White Deer, Pennsylvania, for disciplinary reasons—he’d paid a prisoner $1,000 to assault another inmate—and the MDC was a convenient waystation. This was the opportunity the task force had been waiting for. Kaplan fell from heaven. Through Feldman, Bill Oldham had arranged for the One-Eyed Jew to be held there while he made his approach. Several months earlier Oldham quietly had taken an earlier shot at Kaplan, visiting him at Allenwood. Kaplan had made it clear at that time that he wasn’t interested in making a deal. But Oldham persisted, hoping time would wear him down. So as soon as Kaplan had gotten settled at MDC, Oldham called Dades. “The old man’s in Brooklyn and I’m gonna go see him,” he said. “Want to go with me?”

  It was a very nice invitation. And completely unexpected. By this time the rift between the Feds and the state had become obvious and Dades wasn’t interested in playing sidekick to the Feds. “No, that’s all right,” Dades told him. “You go ahead.”

  Two days later Oldham called again. He’d been to see Kaplan, he said. Apparently the meeting had gone well, because this time Oldham told Dades he thought Kaplan was going to come on board. Dades didn’t believe it. The guy had resisted several years of offers from heavy hitters, and now he was going to flip after a single visit from Bill Oldham? That didn’t make sense. “You sure about that?” he asked.

  “He wants some time to think about it,” Oldham said. Kaplan’s lawyer was going to call him with his answer.

  That was a phone call that apparently never got made. So Oldham decided to try him again. Three’s a charm. But this time he called Joe Ponzi. “What are you doing, Joe?” he asked.

  He’d caught Ponzi in the midst of a hectic morning. “Bill, what kind of question is that? What am I doing? I got a hundred people here doing a gazillion things. I don’t know whether to shit or go blind, that’s what I’m doing. What do you have in mind?”

  “You got time to take a ride?”

  Ponzi laughed. “Take a ride where, Bill?”

  “Prospect Park. It’s nice outside, we’ll take a walk.” Oldham paused, waiting for a laugh that never came, and then added, “Wanna go see Burt?”

  Now he had Ponzi’s attention. “What?”

  “I’m going over to MDC to see him. You can come with me.”

  Ponzi’s heart started racing. He’d been spending too much of his life running the division, piling up paperwork. Even in this investigation just about all of the work he’d done had been administrative. This was his chance to get a piece of the action. “When?”

  “Be outside the building in five minutes.”

  Joe Ponzi and Bill Oldham are about as different as sugar and lemon. Ponzi is buttoned-down in dress and manner. Old-school all the way. In the many years that Vecchione had worked with him he couldn’t remember a single time Ponzi had walked into his office when he wasn’t wearing a tie and jacket or his hair was less than perfectly trimmed. The man just exuded professionalism. He spoke softly but firmly and always treated people with respect, even when he was talking to a real lowlife. And he had quietly compiled an enviable record of putting away bad guys.

  On the short drive over to MDC Ponzi wondered if he was making a mistake. He wasn’t properly prepared for this meeting. He liked to know what he wanted to know long before he walked into a room. He liked to know all the details before he asked his first question. He’d done his homework—he’d read Casso’s 302s and all the reports about Kaplan he could find—but he wished he’d had some time to figure out the best way to deal with the old man.

  But there was no way he could have turned down Oldham’s offer. No way. From everything he’d read or been told about Kaplan he found him to be an absolutely fascinating figure. A dying kind. He wanted to see what the old man looked like; he wanted to hear the tone of his voice, the way he used the language. He wasn’t even certain he’d have the chance to speak with him.

  And in truth he wasn’t really very hopeful that he could do what Feldman and Oldham and who knew how many other people had failed to do: convince Kaplan to grab a future. He just didn’t have enough ammunition. He and Vecchione had spent considerable time talking about what they could offer Kaplan, how they could make nothing sound like something. Obviously, they would give him immunity from any state prosecution, but that was like offering a drowning man a cold drink. They both knew that the only thing that might entice the old man was a reduction in his federal sentence, and the state couldn’t make that promise. Ponzi hoped that Oldham’s presence at this meeting might reassure Kaplan that the U.S. Attorney was willing to cut a deal.

  Before they got to the imposing building on Twenty-ninth Street, near the Gowanus Bay, Oldham told Ponzi about his previous meetings with Kaplan, sounding positive but leaving Ponzi with the impression that the chemistry between him and Kaplan hadn’t been good.

  Ponzi, Oldham, and a special investigator from the Eastern District named Joe Campanella waited quietly for Kaplan in a small conference room. Oldham had arranged for the old man to be brought down. Ponzi had spent a sizeable chunk of his life in colorless rooms just like this one, waiting for another bad guy to show up and tell his story. Finally Kaplan arrived and stood in the doorway. He was smaller than Ponzi had imagined, about five-eight and thin. He was wearing an orange MDC jumpsuit and dark-rimmed glasses. He looked a lot more like a Jewish grandfather from Brooklyn who’d worked a lifetime in the garment district than a career criminal. Put a pair of glasses on Robert Duvall and you’ve got Burt Kaplan. One thing surprised Ponzi: The One-Eyed Jew appeared to have two pretty good eyes. Whatever was wrong with his eye, it wasn’t an obvious deformity.

  Kaplan saw Oldham sitting at the table and shook his head, clearly unhappy to be there. “Mr. Oldham,” he began, “I told you we can’t be doing this. We tried this before and I can’t be seen here like this, talking to you.”

  That was part of the prison code: Spend too much time talking to law enforcement and people begin to believe you’re cooperating. That just made life a little more dangerous. Looking at Kaplan, Ponzi decided he was both surprised and truly angry. Obviously he hadn’t agreed to this meeting. So much for Oldham’s claim that he was ready to roll over.

  “Please, Mr. Kaplan, come in.” Oldham was equally polite. “Just give us a few minutes. I want to introduce you to a few people.” Reluctantly, Kaplan sat down. After Oldham had made the introductions, he handed the meeting to Ponzi. “Joe, why don’t you tell him?”

  Joe Ponzi estimates that in his career he’s conducted more than 2,500 polygraph tests and at least as many interrogations. He knew the drill. “Mr. Kaplan, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office has unearthed some evidence about Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa that’s breathed some new life into tha
t investigation…”

  Ponzi was careful not to reveal too much. His rule about that was clear: You want to get information from the subject; you don’t want to provide information.

  “…and the state is now working in conjunction with the Feds on this investigation concerning the allegations against these two police officers.”

  Kaplan put his palms on the table and leaned forward. “Mr. Oldham knows…what’s your name again?” Joe Ponzi. “Mr. Ponzi,” Kaplan repeated. “With all due respect, I’ve been down this road with Mr. Oldham before. The night I got arrested for the pot case”—when he said that Ponzi could see his whole face tighten into a snarl; obviously he was still furious about that conviction—“that night I got pitched by the FBI, the DEA, the DA, every chief and inspector from the police department; I had more business cards from law enforcement in my pocket than I ever seen in my life. Every one of them, they told me I could go home that night. All I had to do was tell them whatever it is they think they know about these two guys.” Ponzi noticed that he was careful not to confirm that he actually did have information about the case. “I told them and I’ll tell you now, no disrespect, I don’t mean to hurt anybody’s feelings. But I’ve done seven years and I can do the rest. If God is good I can do the rest of this. See, I live my life a certain way. That’s the way I choose to live. And I could never put myself in a position where I would have people calling me a rat or saying that I turned my back. Nobody’s gonna accuse me of going bad.”

  “Going bad,” to Kaplan, meant cooperating with law enforcement. There it was again, Ponzi thought. The code.

  “You know what?” Ponzi replied, leaning forward just slightly to show he was not intimidated or dissuaded, knowing the importance of his body language. “If that’s the code you’ve chosen to live by, I could respect that, but I’m missing something here.” He had Kaplan’s attention. He stared right into his eyes. He spoke evenly, never raising his voice. “First of all, if my memory serves me correctly, the infamous Mr. Gaspipe Casso flipped on you. That’s first. Second of all, when he flipped he admitted that he’d put out a contract on you while he was on the lam.” He paused, letting his words bounce around the room. “You, his so-called friend for life. You, who met him through Christy Tick. You, who’s been around these guys your whole life and believe in whatever it is they believe in. He put a hit out on you.