Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  In contrast, the cops were going to be defended by celebrity lawyers Bruce Cutler and Ed Hayes, both of whom often appeared on TV as expert commentators and even cohosted their own show on Court TV.

  Bruce Cutler was an odd choice for Louis Eppolito to make. He was another Brooklyn guy, having graduated from Brooklyn Law School to go to work in the Brooklyn DA’s office. But he had become famous as John Gotti’s lawyer, the mob mouthpiece who had successfully helped “the Dapper Don” beat three raps, and often and loudly told people that John Gotti was an honorable man. It didn’t seem to make a lot of sense for Eppolito, who would be trying to prove he had nothing to do with organized crime, to pick an attorney known specifically for his work defending the onetime boss of the Gambino crime family.

  Mike Vecchione found himself smiling when he learned that Eppolito had hired Cutler. “Bruce and I went back a long way. We had worked together in the Brooklyn DA’s office when we were both young attorneys and had become very friendly. He’s an excellent defense lawyer and loves high-profile cases. When I heard Eppolito had hired him I remembered one story he told me. In the 1930s Abe Reles was the most feared hit man belonging to Murder Inc., the organization of killers who did the work for organized crime. When Reles was caught, to save his life he became a government informant. One of the people he implicated for murder was mob boss Albert Anastasia. To protect him before Anastasia’s trial he was kept under guard at the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island. Although there were six cops guarding him every minute, one morning he supposedly took a dive out the window to his death, becoming known as “the canary who could sing, but not fly.” And Bruce told me that one of those cops guarding Reles was his father, police officer Murray Cutler.

  “So when Eppolito hired Bruce I thought, Boy, that’s appropriate.”

  Vecchione knew and respected Eddie Hayes too, although their relationship was professional. Hayes was just as flamboyant as Cutler; a member of the International Best-Dressed List Hall of Fame, he was well known as the inspiration for the central character in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Hanks had played him in the movie. Coincidentally, like Louis Eppolito, he’d actually had a bit part in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. But Hayes had established himself as one of New York’s top lawyers, representing an eclectic mix of clients ranging from Robert De Niro to Andy Warhol’s estate. While he had tried criminal cases, that wasn’t the area in which he’d built his reputation. There were reasons for that, as he told New York magazine: “First, most high-profile criminal trials you lose. Second, the money’s terrible. Third, that’s not the role I wanted in society.”

  Celebrity lawyers like Cutler and Hayes are very expensive; they normally charge a lot more than either Eppolito or Caracappa could have afforded on their NYPD pensions. But Vecchione assumed both of them had taken the case for little money and a lot of publicity. “That’s not at all unusual; lawyers do it all the time, even well-known lawyers like Cutler and Hayes. I did it myself when I was in private practice. I defended a female police officer who’d been fired for posing naked in a men’s magazine. I didn’t think it was fair—the pictures had been taken before she became a police officer—so I took her case for free. The publicity was my payment. I didn’t know what Cutler and Hayes were being paid for defending Eppolito and Caracappa, but I did know they were going to receive an enormous amount of very valuable publicity.”

  The biggest problem that Cutler and Hayes were going to face in this case was the case. Kaplan’s testimony and the supporting evidence would make it very tough, maybe even impossible, to convince a jury that their clients had nothing to do with these killings. So Vecchione guessed they probably wouldn’t focus on that. Rather than tearing down the mountain, they would try to undermine the foundation. They would attack the RICO charge. That’s what he would have done. He was also concerned that Cutler and Hayes’s dramatic courtroom theatrics and emotional appeals would overwhelm Henoch’s methodical presentation and perhaps sway one juror. And one juror was all they needed.

  Cutler’s public-relations offensive began in late April, the day Eppolito and Caracappa were arraigned in Brooklyn. As reported by the Daily News, Eppolito’s daughter, Andrea, “a voluptuous, raven-haired beauty—turning heads in a tan suit with a plunging neckline…launched an emotional appeal for her father.

  “‘My father loved being a cop. He was so proud of all the things he did while working for the city. He protected women. He protected children. He worked with the elderly.’”

  Cutler claimed that Andrea had asked his permission to tell the media how much she loved her father. He said, “She flew out here to be near her father—and brought his heart medication. Family support means the world to Lou.”

  The first suggestion that Vecchione was right about the Feds’ ability to bring RICO charges against the cops came during their bail hearing in July 2005. Judge Weinstein questioned the validity of the RICO charge, calling it “weak” and “relatively stale,” and wondered aloud if the statute of limitations might have run out years earlier. He told them that they were going to have a serious problem with the statute of limitations if they continued to insist that it be tried that way. Weinstein was outwardly skeptical that selling meth in Las Vegas was a perpetuation of their criminal activity for the Lucchese crime family.

  In opposing bail, Henoch argued, “The defendants remain the same violent men they were in the 1980s and 1990s,” and played portions of taped conversations made in Vegas in which Eppolito “made it clear he associates with people who are willing to murder at his request.”

  Weinstein rejected that argument, writing ominously, “The weight of the evidence adduced thus far is not strong.” Deciding that Eppolito and Caracappa posed no danger to society, he granted $5,000,000 bail. To secure payment, the two cops and several members of their families put up their homes and other property. Among those relatives volunteering his home was Eppolito’s brother-in-law, retired detective Al Guarneri, to whom Jimmy Hydell had reached out, apparently for protection, the day he disappeared.

  After hearing the judge’s comments and being released on bail—which included confinement to their relatives’ homes—the boisterous Eppolito happily showed reporters his brand-new ankle bracelet. The Mafia cops walked out of Jack Weinstein’s courtroom with hope.

  Weinstein’s warning had the prosecution worried. Essentially he was telling them that he didn’t buy their continuing conspiracy claim and that they better do something quick to change it if they wanted to survive in his courtroom. If he threw out the RICO they were going to have to turn over the case to the state. Without that conspiracy all they had were some minor drug charges, crimes they could just barely connect to Caracappa.

  Tommy Dades still didn’t believe the RICO would collapse, telling columnist Denis Hamill, “The feds are very, very conservative out in Vegas and they had several opportunities to review the application for a RICO…for them to approve it means they didn’t think the case was weak or ‘time-blocked.’

  “But if it becomes a state case again the feds would hand over Kaplan as a witness, and along with Betty Hydell and several other witnesses, these guys who disgraced the badge are dead.”

  A month later Henoch was back in Weinstein’s courtroom to add a ninth murder to the indictment, the 1986 killing of Jeweler #1, who finally had been identified as Israel Greenwald. As Dades and Lanigan had learned, the dig in Pete’s garage had been successful. Under several feet of concrete the evidence recovery team had unearthed the skeletal remains of a man—precisely where Peter Franzone said the body had been buried. Adding this killing to the indictment would allow Henoch to put Franzone on the stand, and Franzone was the only witness who had actually seen Eppolito and Caracappa at a murder scene and could identify them. Once again, the two cops pleaded not guilty.

  During this hearing Weinstein made it even more clear that he wouldn’t accept the RICO charge; he just didn’t believe the drug case was connected to the Luccheses. He told H
enoch, “I’m puzzled by the prosecution…You’ve come up with the same problem you came up with before. If [the murders are] a separate conspiracy from the drug case, you’re out.”

  In mid-September Mauskopf’s office finally changed its obviously defective RICO charge. At a hearing during which they charged the cops with a tenth murder—the victim was not identified but was presumed to be the unidentified man that Franzone had helped roll into a tarp and lift into the trunk of Frankie Santora’s car—they “retooled” the indictment. Rather than claiming that Eppolito and Caracappa’s crimes were committed for the furtherance of the Lucchese organized crime family, the government came up with a novel solution. As all that RICO requires for a conspiracy charge are two or more people, the updated indictment stated that Eppolito and Caracappa ran their own “racketeering enterprise,” and their crimes were for their own benefit. According to the rewritten indictment, the Eppolito-Caracappa conspiracy lasted twenty-three years and included ten murders and seventeen other crimes in New York and Las Vegas, committed for the purpose of making money for its members and associates. According to the government of the United States, instead of working for the Luccheses, they worked with them.

  Judge Weinstein did not seem impressed. After lecturing the prosecutors about the weakness of their indictment, he suggested they charge Eppolito and Caracappa with ten counts of murder in aid of racketeering rather than claiming they committed the ten murders and all their other crimes as part of a criminal enterprise that might be barred by the statute of limitations. Weinstein then postponed the trial until February 2006.

  Vecchione knew Henoch couldn’t do that. He just didn’t have enough evidence to make ten counts of murder-for-hire stick. When he first heard Weinstein’s comments he thought, It’s all over. We’re getting it back. As he says, “The federal government had other statutes they could use against the cops if they wanted to; they could do what Weinstein suggested, for example, or they could charge them with conspiracy in the furtherance of murder. It’s my belief that the Feds insisted on the RICO because they had to vindicate taking the case away from us.

  “There is a state parallel to conspiracy; it’s called murder. But if the Feds were going to charge them with conspiracy there would have been no valid reason to take the case away from us.”

  Seeing the government confusion, Cutler sensed victory. He told reporters that he and Hayes were filing a motion to dismiss the charges. “It’s the same can of soup,” he said. “Just a different label. Now they’ve created a fantasy crime group.”

  After pleading not guilty to the tenth murder, Eppolito agreed. “I’m glad [Cutler] smells what the government is shoveling,” he said. “It’s disgusting what they’re doing to me.”

  While the legal maneuvering continued in preparation for the trial, investigators were searching for additional evidence against the cops. In late spring, Kaplan’s “kid,” Tommy Galpine, had seen the light and taken a deal. Prosecutors agreed to make their best effort to get his sixteen-year sentence reduced if he cooperated completely. Galpine had been with Kaplan for every crime along the way. He could corroborate most of Kaplan’s testimony, as well as add his own encounters with the two cops. Galpine described his job as doing whatever Kaplan told him to do: “I’m a doer, not a talker.”

  But he proved to be a very valuable talker. He told prosecutors that he had delivered to Frankie Santora a Plymouth Fury tricked out to look exactly like an unmarked police car—presumably the car parked at Pete’s garage that might have been used to pick up Jimmy Hydell or stop Eddie Lino. According to Galpine, the car looked so real that when he was driving it through Brooklyn some kid had come running up to him screaming, “I need help!” Galpine told him, “Call the cops,” and drove off.

  Galpine could also testify that he had flown to the Caribbean to deliver $10,000 to Eppolito. The problem was that he had only spent two hours sitting at the airport waiting for a return flight, so he wasn’t even sure which island he was on. Galpine would be a valuable witness for the Feds. He had supported Kaplan throughout his life in crime, he had actually handed the cops cash from Kaplan, and now he was going to support him in his new life as a “rat.”

  Mobster Al D’Arco, who had told Tommy Dades in a phone call months earlier that he really didn’t know anything about the mob cops, remembered that Casso had told him he had proof that Bruno Facciola was an informant and wanted him to whack Facciola. D’Arco admitted he’d shot Facciola in both eyes, stabbed him, shot him in the head, then stuck a frozen canary in his mouth. D’Arco never learned the names of Casso’s informants but knew they were “bulls,” mob slang for detectives.

  Among several surprising discoveries made by investigators was the fact that Peter Franzone was not the only person who had been living in fear of former detective Louis Eppolito. Barry Gibbs, for example, was completing the seventeenth year of his nineteen-year sentence for the murder of Virginia Robertson when investigators found the original NYPD case files in Eppolito’s Vegas home. In the past, several people had believed Gibbs’s claim that he had been framed, among them Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, founders of the Innocence Project, but there was nothing they could do to prove it because the NYPD had been unable to locate the case folder.

  After the file had finally been found in Eppolito’s house, two DEA agents located the original eyewitness—but this time that witness told a very different story. This time he admitted that Eppolito had frightened him into identifying Gibbs. He had “bribed and intimidated” him, he said, threatening to go after the witness and his family if he refused to pick Gibbs out of the police lineup and testify against him in court. That statement made sense to Tommy Dades, who remembered the tape of Eppolito bragging to Corso that he had threatened to kill his contractor—and the man’s whole family.

  The witness told the investigators that Eppolito had told him who to pick out of the lineup and that he had lied on the witness stand, knowing his testimony would convict an innocent man, but said, “I don’t want this cop after me. My family was on the line here. If I had to do it again, I’d do it again.” And if he hadn’t identified Gibbs, he said flatly, he’d be dead.

  Court papers filed by his attorney quote this witness as saying he “believed and continues to believe that Barry Gibbs is not the person he saw disposing of the body.”

  In late September Barry Gibbs walked out of prison a free man and a bitter man, telling reporters, “I was a legitimate guy. And I lost everything. What happened to me can happen to any one of you people and any one of your families.”

  What nobody could figure out was why Eppolito had kept the folder all these years, except to make absolutely sure it could never be looked at again. There was some speculation that he was covering up for the real killer, a mob associate who could be linked to Robertson. But Bruce Cutler defended his client, claiming Eppolito had the file because he was writing screenplays about cases he’d worked. He didn’t address the fact that Eppolito apparently had been holding the file for two decades.

  Joe Ponzi didn’t know what to think about the whole story. While the DA’s office was deciding what to do about Gibbs, the jailhouse snitch called Ponzi. “He was really upset,” Ponzi explains. “He said, ‘How can they let that guy out of jail? You know he’s guilty.’ I told him to cool down and let the whole thing play out. And then I reminded him, ‘Nobody’s calling you a liar.’”

  Ponzi had also spoken to the eyewitness who had recanted his testimony. And after that conversation he didn’t know what to believe—except that the witness was as unreliable now as he probably had been in 1988. “I don’t know if it’s from drug abuse or the school of hard knocks, but he was highly suggestive. There’s still a part of me that doesn’t believe completely that Gibbs was railroaded and framed.

  “What I know for sure is that the verdict was predicated on the one witness’s account and that guy had either become unreliable or was unreliable back then. You just never know how much people change; that’s one of
the real problems with cold cases. I believe the DA’s position was that Gibbs had served almost his entire sentence, so if he erred, it was on the compassionate side.”

  “The Mafia cops case,” as the newspaper had begun referring to it, was getting the full American media treatment. Several participants in the case had signed book contracts. At least three movies about the case were announced. Even Eppolito’s autobiography, the now ironically named Mafia Cop, was optioned by a movie studio. New York magazine, Vanity Fair, and Playboy all ran cover stories about the case. Somewhat nostalgically New York decided “the Mafia Cops’ case could be the last of the red-hot organized-crime trials: equal parts titillating and chilling.” The Vanity Fair story erroneously reported that during the 1980s Kaplan had been a confidential informant for the FBI, a charge that, if true, could have destroyed his credibility, and with it the whole case. The FBI denied the story and it went no further than a few headlines. Vecchione assumed that information had come from the DEA agent quoted extensively throughout the whole story.

  It seemed like there was a new revelation every day. Reading these stories, Tommy Dades felt vindicated. The case was leaking inside information like cheesecloth and the state had absolutely nothing to do with it. No one in Hynes’s office had even known that Jeweler #1 was a man named Israel Greenwald, for example, until they read it in the papers. In all the papers. The U.S. Attorney had used previous leaks as an excuse to sever the state from the case, but the leaking continued long after Hynes’s office had been shut out.

  It seemed like everybody was trying to get a piece of the action—especially Anthony Casso. Casso was sitting in his cell out in Supermax, the Feds’ impregnable prison in Florence, Colorado, with infamous criminals like Ted “the Unabomber” Kaczynski, Mafioso Greg Scarpa Jr., Oklahoma City federal building bomber Terry Nichols, traitorous FBI agent Robert Hanssen, and shoe bomber Richard Reid, watching the only real hope he had left disappear. A year earlier Mike Vecchione had offered him the opportunity to become the five-hundred-pound gorilla, an offer he’d rejected, so instead he had become the invisible man.