Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  Casso was desperate, doing everything possible to inject himself into the trial. Supposedly he’d tried to negotiate a deal with Feldman in which he would tell him where he could find Jimmy Hydell’s body in return for a twenty-year cap on his sentence, an offer the U.S. Attorney found easy to refuse. The government already had a body that could be linked to the cops; they didn’t need another one.

  In July Casso wrote to Mark Feldman claiming that Al D’Arco, who was listed as a prosecution witness, was lying. According to Gaspipe, D’Arco had absolutely no knowledge about the two detectives. His letter also claimed that one unidentified victim, who supposedly was whacked because Eppolito and Caracappa told Casso he was a rat, was actually not an informer.

  Feldman paid absolutely no attention to the letter. Presumably, he felt it was so obviously absurd that he didn’t even bother passing it along to the defense.

  But Casso wasn’t through; he was just waiting for the right opportunity. And the only thing he had was time.

  With the massive publicity about the trial, Judge Weinstein realized there was insufficient seating in the recently opened new federal courthouse to accommodate the large number of reporters and spectators expected to attend, so he moved the trial back to the old courthouse, to a fourth-floor courtroom that provided seating for more than twice as many people. Fittingly for this cold case, it was out with the new, in with the old.

  Ironically, one of the few people in law enforcement not paying close attention to this case was the man who had started it. After leaving Hynes’s office Tommy Dades was spending much of his time at his PAL gym on Staten Island, trying to find the center to his life. He was suffering through some rough days. In a relatively short period of time he had lost his mother, his home at the police department and the DA’s office, and then his home and his family. He had been rejected by his father and finally had received that humiliating letter from Feldman’s office demanding he return everything he had in his possession relating to the case. He probably had been more hurt than insulted by that letter. “All I was trying to do was the right thing and I was left with nothing. As far as I knew they were still intending to call me as a witness in the case, but that didn’t have a lot of meaning to me. I was just trying to get through the day and sometimes that was tough. Some of it was my own fault, I knew that, but it was hard to understand how you could give so much to the system and get back so little.”

  Joe Ponzi, meanwhile, had somehow managed to patch up his relationship with Feldman and Henoch—and had actually become involved in the case again. As he explained, “It took me about two months to get past the venom I had in my heart and soul. I had said some things to Henoch for which I was very sorry; he had said some things to me for which he was just as sorry and we got past that. Mark Feldman? I owe too much to him, I owe my career to him, so there’s probably nothing he can do that would make me hate him. My anger with him was always professional, never personal.”

  Even with the rift between the Feds and the state, the U.S. Attorney continued to need the cooperation of Hynes’s office, and Ponzi served as the go-between. In preparation for the trial, Henoch made a steady stream of requests for materials that had not been covered by the subpoena, among them old wiretap transcripts, case folders, and access to the many people in the office who had done extremely valuable work on the case, people like Bobby I, Patty Lanigan, and George Terra. The wounds weren’t healed—that would take a long time—but at least a temporary salve was put over them. The resentments were never allowed to get in the way of the mutual objective.

  So Joe Ponzi began speaking fairly regularly to the prosecutors. He wasn’t officially back on the case, but Henoch began confiding in him, telling him what was going on and even asking for suggestions about how certain sticky problems might be handled.

  Ponzi, in turn, was keeping Mike Vecchione informed about the Feds’ progress. For Vecchione, it was sort of like watching his son go off to college; he’d done everything possible to get to this time, now all he could do was stand on the sidelines and root—and be prepared to step in if his help was needed.

  That was still very possible. If Weinstein ruled that the U.S. Attorney was time-barred from making the RICO stick, the state would have to step in immediately. Vecchione and Ponzi wanted to be prepared for that eventuality, so they spent time deciding which crimes they would prosecute if the case came back to Brooklyn.

  Vecchione, meanwhile, was already deeply immersed in another high-profile and extremely bizarre investigation. Not long after being thrown off the Mafia cops case, Josh Hanshaft got a call from the new owner of a funeral parlor complaining she had been defrauded out of $300,000. It seemed that the previous owner had accepted prepayment for funerals and kept the money, and bereaved families were showing up with deceased relatives demanding the funeral for which they’d previously paid. Hanshaft listened carefully; it sounded to him like a relatively simple case of fraud—until she added, “Oh, by the way, the old owners, they were doing something with the corpses, they were taking bones out of the bodies.”

  Excuse me? As Hanshaft reported to Vecchione, “The best I can determine is that these people are stealing body parts.”

  Just when Vecchione thought he had seen the worst of human scum, the next case had come along, and maybe these people were even a little worse. Although these cops were going to be tough to beat—what could be worse than killer cops?—by the time Eppolito and Caracappa got sentenced Vecchione was investigating people who stole diseased tissue and organs from bodies and allowed them to be used in more than a thousand transplantation procedures.

  It was a modern horror story: Funeral directors were selling body parts and when necessary for showings they were actually replacing them with PVC tubing. So Vecchione’s division was working on that case while Eppolito and Caracappa waited for their trial.

  Throughout the summer into the fall Weinstein ruled on numerous prosecution and defense motions as each side angled for the slightest advantage, and everyone waited for the only ruling that really mattered: Would the judge allow Henoch’s RICO to stand? “A ticking time bomb,” Weinstein had called it, and obviously he was having difficulty accepting the prosecution’s creative solution.

  Jack Weinstein finally answered that question in early December when he announced, “The case has to be tried and will be tried.” It was clear from his remarks that he wasn’t entirely convinced the jury-rigged RICO charge was valid, and certainly he wasn’t very happy about it, but the case against the cops was too important to throw out of his courtroom on a legal technicality. It was “vital” this trial take place, he said, “particularly in a case which raises such serious doubts about the police department and its relationship to the public.”

  Besides, if he was wrong, if the RICO wouldn’t stand up, there would be ample opportunity later in the case for the defense to make that argument.

  Mike Vecchione was neither surprised nor terribly disappointed when he heard about Weinstein’s tepid acceptance of the indictment. He’d done his job; without their work there would have been no case and Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa would have gotten away with murders. The disappointment he’d felt at not getting his chance to convict those two skells had mostly dissipated, and so long as they got the punishment they deserved, he would be very pleased.

  Besides, he had the parts of a thousand bodies to worry about.

  The trial was finally scheduled to begin in March 2006, a full year after the two cops had been arrested. In January, Eppolito and his wife, Frances, were indicted for failing to report income from several sources, including his work as a screenwriter. The most damning evidence came from Louis himself, who had bragged about hiding income to the undercover accountant. Just to apply a little more pressure, IRS agents arrested Frances Eppolito outside her Las Vegas home.

  In early February the Feds attempted to add several other crimes to the indictment, mostly minor stuff compared to the original charges. Both men were accused of literal
ly putting on masks and robbing neighborhood delis to pick up some quick cash, Caracappa supposedly used cocaine when he was working in narcotics, and Eppolito offered a bribe to a doctor in an attempt to receive a tax-free disability pension.

  It was also in February that Tommy Dades read in the newspaper one morning a prosecution announcement that neither he nor Bill Oldham would be called as witnesses in the trial. He wasn’t the slightest bit surprised; if anything, he was relieved. Weeks earlier defense lawyers had subpoenaed both his and Bill Oldham’s NYPD personnel records in a quest to discover any and all “disciplinary actions which concern their credibility.” Tommy knew what that meant; when he got on the stand they were going to question him about his affair. They were going to bring up the whole Internal Affairs investigation. It wasn’t his credibility they were going to try to destroy, it was his reputation. And the publicity just might have been the final blow for Ro, might have been the end of his marriage.

  Mauskopf’s announcement gave no reason for the decision, but it was obvious. Both Dades and Oldham had signed book deals; Dades had also made a movie deal. The U.S. Attorney was concerned that Cutler and Hayes would try to convince jurors that the two investigators had made up this crazy story so they could profit from it. Ed Hayes said exactly that: “The question is whether the government witnesses told Dades and Oldham what happened, or Dades and Oldham told the government informer what to say so they could sell the story.”

  The fact that this was complete bullshit wouldn’t stop the defense lawyers from making the argument. Isn’t it true, Detective Dades, that if my client isn’t convicted that movie will never be made? Who knows how much damage that suggestion might do to the prosecution’s case? The defense needed only one juror.

  Jury selection began on March 6. One week later, on March 13, Prosecutor Mitra Hormozi gave the opening statement. These two men “weren’t traditional mobsters,” she told the jury. “They were better. They were two men who could get away with murder. Why? Because they were New York City detectives…The defendants went into business together and the business was crime.”

  She skillfully outlined the case against Eppolito and Caracappa. She began with the murder of Jeweler #1, Israel Greenwald, describing how Santora told Patty Lanigan’s terrified witness, Peter Franzone, “Start digging or I’ll kill your family. Start digging or I’ll kill you. Franzone felt he was digging his own grave.”

  Then she told the jury about the murder of Jimmy Hydell, Tommy Dades’s case, the one that got this whole thing started. The cops were paid $30,000 to deliver him to Anthony Casso, who tortured him before killing him.

  Next she talked about “the most tragic victim,” Nicky Guido, another killing Dades had successfully linked to the cops. To emphasize the brutality of that murder, she showed the jury never-before-seen photographs of Guido’s bloody, bullet-riddled body slumped over the steering wheel of his new red Nissan Maxima.

  In his opening statement, Bruce Cutler attacked the witnesses who were expected to testify against his client, witnesses he called “the lowest form of life. They call each other tough guys, goodfellas, until you take away their gun…and the jail door slams behind them. Then they wet their pants and call their mommy, the government.” Playing as much to the packed spectator section, which was jammed with reporters, as the jury, he told them that the people who were going to testify against his client were men who “kill, kill, steal, make money, beat up, steal, kill, kill, make money” and were responsible for “at least ten murders, maybe twenty, five arsons, six tons of marijuana at least, kidnapping, extortion, union fixing…the swill, bottom of the barrel, the sewer.”

  Ed Hayes was equally tough, describing the prosecution’s witnesses as “pigs,” “animals,” and “disgusting.”

  The prosecution really began making its case against the cops the next day, when the mobster Joe Ponzi had flipped, Burt Kaplan, took the stand. “I paid them,” he said flatly. And then, with about as much emotion as if he were describing the new line of women’s clothing he was selling, the balding and bespectacled witness described his long criminal association with the two detectives. “They brought me information about wiretaps, phone tapes, informants, ongoing investigations, and imminent arrests. I passed it to Anthony Casso. If he got some information that had to do with him, if there were informants, he would have them killed.”

  Kaplan admitted that he had conspired with Eppolito and Caracappa to commit three murders: “Jimmy Hydell, Eddie Lino, and the jeweler. I don’t know the jeweler’s name.”

  Kaplan held back nothing. He confessed to a long list of crimes, he admitted he was a “degenerate gambler” who had lost more than $3 million in his lifetime, and he described himself as a “rat,” as a guy who had “gone bad.” “I know what I am,” he said sadly. “I’m being honest. I’m a criminal.”

  “He was the ideal witness,” Vecchione says. “In all the mob trials I’ve done I tell my witnesses, ‘Don’t hide anything. Don’t shade anything. Tell it exactly the way it was.’ I always tell them, ‘I don’t care what you did. That’s what makes you believable. You are the worst of the worst; tell that to the jury. Don’t try to look like a good guy, because you’re not. That’s why you’re in the position to know what you know.’ Kaplan admitted every bit of it. He didn’t hold back on anything. He identified himself as a rat. He understood who and what he was. There was no reason for the jury not to believe him.”

  Tommy Dades had absolutely no desire to attend the trial, but Joe Ponzi wanted to be there. He had known Detective Louis Eppolito for more than three decades, and he certainly wanted to see Burt Kaplan testify. And so he was sitting in the courtroom when Kaplan explained why he had decided to cooperate. “My wife and my daughter had been asking me to cooperate from the first day I was arrested. I didn’t do it…I was in jail nine straight years and I was on the lam two and a half years before that. In that period of time I seen an awful lot of guys that I thought were stand-up guys go bad, turn and become informants. As I told Steve the night I left to go on the lam. I asked him if he could guarantee me that Louie would stand up…”

  Watching Kaplan on the stand, it was hard for Ponzi not to think back to their first meeting. Kaplan had insisted he would never “go bad.” Ponzi had often wondered what it was that caused the old man to change his mind. What makes a hard case like Burt Kaplan flip? Until this moment it was the one question for which he had no answer.

  “…and Steve said, ‘Yeah, I could do that.’” But when Kaplan learned that there was strong evidence against the two cops, he said, “I didn’t think they would stand up and I was tired of going to jail by myself. I figured I would be at the defense table right now, and Steve and Louie would be sitting up here.”

  There it is, Ponzi thought. He couldn’t trust the cops.

  Kaplan admitted he hoped to have time cut from his sentence so one day he could hold his grandson. “I wanted someday to be able to spend some time with him, but I can’t honestly say I did this for my family. I did it, in all honesty, because I felt that I was going to be made the scapegoat in this case.”

  From time to time Ponzi would look at the defense table. “Eppolito and Caracappa rarely moved,” he says. “I could see that Louie had lost some weight, but Caracappa was still ‘the Stick,’ thin and taut. Truthfully, I wasn’t entirely comfortable sitting there. I never wanted those two guys to think it had become personal with me, because it was never personal. I knew what they had done and I knew they needed to be punished for it. But it was never personal with me.

  “Eppolito never even glanced in my direction; I never made eye contact with him. But on the second or third day of the trial I looked at the defense table and Caracappa was glaring at us. It was an angry, fixed glare. I thought that was bizarre; I thought, Fuck you, buddy, you did what you did. Now who do you think you are, looking at me like I betrayed you?”

  At one point during a break in the trial Caracappa was talking to a private investigator working for the def
ense while looking directly over the man’s shoulder at Ponzi. Caracappa covered his mouth with his hand as he spoke to the PI. Ponzi felt certain he was saying, “That’s Larry Ponzi’s kid.”

  Bobby I, who was sitting next to him, disagreed. “No, he’s talking about me.”

  But he wasn’t; Ponzi knew that.

  At night Ponzi would discuss the trial with his father. But as the trial proceeded Larry Ponzi began to realize how wrong he’d been about the two cops. “He knew Louie was a little out of his mind,” Joe explains. “But doing mob hits? No. He thought that Louie had Steve bamboozled and that he was overbearing and overwhelming and he sucked him in and maybe that’s what happened with Caracappa. But as the trial went on he became convinced he totally misread their relationship.” Larry Ponzi’s observation was shared by a lot of people: Rather than Eppolito running the show, it was the quiet, icy cool Caracappa who had made the decisions.

  “I always liked Steve,” Kaplan told the court. Burt Kaplan was on the stand for three days, for more than fourteen hours. Henoch skillfully led him through a litany of crimes he’d committed with Eppolito and Caracappa, from the day in prison Frank Santoro told him about them until he went on the lam years later. In response to Henoch’s questions he explained how the cops had provided confidential information; he described the kidnapping of Jimmy Hydell, who had begged Casso to dump his body in the street so his mother could collect the insurance; he remembered how Eppolito had shown up one night in his hospital room to describe the Eddie Lino hit; he told the absolutely transfixed courtroom about the murder of Jeweler #1, eventually linking the two cops to a dozen different murders. He told the jury how Casso paid them for a murder or for the information they provided; he talked about meetings at rest areas near exit 52 on the Long Island Expressway and in a Staten Island cemetery. Joe Ponzi had spent a lot of days in courtrooms, but rarely had he seen so strong a witness. It was a bravura performance. Kaplan provided detail after detail after detail. Watching him, Ponzi couldn’t help feeling just a little proud.