by Joe Pistone
The two shooters of Robert Kubecka and Donald Barstow, whom Gaspipe had fingered in his debriefing, were plea-bargained considerably. One despicable killer got four years. There was no physical evidence even linking him to having been in the state of New York on that day, much less linking him to the crime scene. The other coldblooded killer, the one who had been injured by Robert Kubecka in the struggle and whose blood was finally matched when he was caught in 2002, got fifteen years, but by then he was 76 years old and so that was a life sentence.
CHAPTER 18
THE MAFIA COPS
THE INVESTIGATION NOBODY in law enforcement wanted to lose as a result of Gaspipe’s self-destruction as a halfway-credible witness was Gaspipe Casso’s “Crystal Ball.” As Gaspipe, while in prison, heaped more and more “horrendous baggage” onto his future role as a witness, potentially the crown jewel of his cooperation—the fingering of two NYPD detectives, Lou Eppolito and Steve Caracappa, as being his Crystal Ball—got tossed to the curb. It was his word against theirs, and Gaspipe had no word left. Moreover, Gaspipe had never dealt directly with the two cops, and claimed to have only seen them once in a Toys ‘R’ Us parking lot and that glimpse was from afar. Gaspipe claimed that he recognized the cops when Detective Louis Eppolito and co-author Bob Drury published a book about Eppolito’s life, Mafia Cop:The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob. The book had lots of photos of Eppolito, and one photo of Eppolito and Caracappa together in the Brooklyn Robbery Squad where they met and had been partners. Lou Eppolito was a very large flamboyant man with a big head of hair. He had been a bodybuilder and was a former Mr. New York City. Steve Caracappa had very short hair, a neat mustache, and was so skinny they called him The Stick.
Clearly, Gaspipe did have a Crystal Ball. From his days as a drug dealer when the list of license plates from unmarked surveillance cars was found in his car the night he was shot, to the day he and Amuso went on the lam, it was apparent that Gaspipe had his own information pipeline into law enforcement. But were these two detectives that Crystal Ball? Gaspipe had said in his 60 Minutes interview that the two detectives “wanted to kill for me.”
In his very first round of debriefing at the Valachi Suite, Gaspipe told prosecutor Charles Rose that while he was on the lam, through his intermediary, he had passed along a contract to Eppolito and Caracappa to tap Charles Rose’s phone and whack him. Gaspipe explained that he suspected the prosecutor had been the one who leaked a story to the press that Gaspipe had tortured and killed his architect for having an affair with Gaspipe’s wife. Charles Rose, whom we later lost to cancer, God bless him, just looked at Gaspipe and said, “I forgive you, Anthony, let’s continue.”
The fingered detectives clearly ignored that nutty opportunity to hit a federal prosecutor. But Gaspipe claimed there were many other opportunities the NYPD partners grabbed. According to Gaspipe, in addition to supplying information for a price, they supplied victims. Gaspipe alleged that the Mafia Cops used confidential police computer banks to identify the whereabouts of men that Gaspipe wanted hit. As is often the case in the Mafia, you might know a guy for years and pull score after score, even hits, with him, and not know his name. You would know his nickname or maybe his first name. But you would not know his full name or where he lived. The only reason Lefty got to know my last name of Brasco is because I was best man at his City Hall marriage and he needed my full name for the certificate.
The intermediary Gaspipe used in dealing with the detectives was an old-time gambler, garment-industry guy, and drug trafficker named Burton Kaplan. It was Kaplan and only Kaplan who dealt directly with the detectives, and only Kaplan who knew their names. Kaplan was no dummy. Once he revealed the names of the crooked cops, Kaplan would have become disposable goods.
As the story goes, in 1982 Kaplan had been turned on to them in jail in Allenwood, Pennsylvania, by Frank Junior Santora, a Gambino family soldier and Eppolito’s cousin. Santora highly recommended his cousin and his cousin’s partner, Caracappa, as potential collaborators in crime. When Burton Kaplan got out of jail he told Gaspipe about the crooked cops.
And that began the criminal enterprise among Gaspipe, Kaplan, Santora, Eppolito, and Caracappa. In the beginning, according to Gaspipe, Kaplan dealt through cousin Junior Santora. But when cousin Junior was whacked by mistake in 1987, Kaplan began dealing directly with the two cops.
Gaspipe admitted he was hellbent on using the cops to help him discover who had tried to kill him on September 8, 1986. They say the most dangerous animal is a wounded animal. Gaspipe had recognized one of the shooters as 28 year-old Gambino associate Jimmy Hydell, but did not know where Hydell lived or hung out.
Gaspipe explained during debriefing at the Valachi Suite that the dirty cops brought Jimmy Hydell to a Toys ‘R’ Us parking lot in Brooklyn on September 14, 1986—six days after the attempt on Gaspipe’s life. Hydell was in the trunk of a car. The car was dropped in the lot by the cops, who were then driven away by Kaplan. Gaspipe was some distance away, but saw the cops’ faces. Jimmy Hydell was taken to a basement where Gaspipe personally tortured him until Hydell gave up the names of his three partners in the attempted hit. Hydell was then whacked. His body was never found.
There was a lot more that Gaspipe claimed about Eppolito and Caracappa, but what good was it? The key to prosecuting them would have been Burton Kaplan’s indispensable testimony. After all, he was the man who gave the cops their assignments and paid them afterwards. But despite a 27-year sentence in 1997 for cocaine and marijuana trafficking, and getting a full-court press from several law enforcement agencies, Burton Kaplan, old school that he was, refused to cooperate and corroborate this outrageous story of police corruption that Gaspipe had given the government prosecutors during his debriefing in 1994.
Eppolito had retired from the NYPD in February 1990, and Caracappa had retired in November 1992, both with full pensions, years before Gaspipe publicly identified them as hit men. Nothing for nothing, but Caracappa retired the same month Big Joey Massino got out of jail (on Friday the Thirteenth of November 1992) and took over as boss of the Bonanno family.
Without Kaplan, and with Gaspipe unusable as a witness, the investigation sputtered and died.
Betty Hydell had two grown sons who still lived at home in Staten Island. They could never be made men because, while she was Italian, their father was not. On September 16,1986, her son Frank walked in the door and told his mother that a blue car with two men in it had been following him and he thought that the blue car was now parked out front keeping an eye on their mother’s house. Frank had been driving his brother Jimmy’s car.
Betty Hydell went out and got in her car to confront the situation. She spotted the blue car with the two men in it. She pulled alongside the car and asked them what they were up to. Both of the men appeared to be of Italian descent. The driver was a big guy with a full head of hair, a white shirt, and a necklace. The passenger was a skinny guy with very short hair and a mustache. The big guy flashed an NYPD badge at her.
“You should let people know who you are and what you’re doing,” Betty Hydell said.
And that was the end of that. Except that the last contact she had with her son Jimmy was when he called her that day from a pay phone across the harbor in Brooklyn. Jimmy went missing and, for people tied in with the Mafia, that means that he was dead. Still, for a while, anyway, Betty Hydell had the thin hope that he would simply walk in the door one night and tell her where he’d been and why he hadn’t called.
One afternoon six years later, when all hope of her son’s return was gone, Betty Hydell was sitting at home watching daytime talk TV.The Sally Jesse Raphael show had a retired cop on who had just published a book, Mafia Cop.The author, Lou Eppolito, had had a bit part as a gangster in the movie Goodfellas, and was launching an acting, producing, and screenwriting career. Betty recognized him immediately as the distinctive-looking cop who had flashed a badge and had followed her son Jimmy’s car to their Staten Island home.
Eppolito’s other uncle was a Gambino family soldier named Jimmy the Clam. His cousin Jim-Jim, Jimmy the Clam’s son, had set up a phony charity for the hungry children of the world called the International Children’s Appeal. Jim-Jim had gotten public endorsements from President Jimmy Carter’s wife and from Senator Edward Kennedy. Jim-Jim’s scam was exposed on TV and it made Carter and Kennedy look bad. The publicity also mentioned that Jim-Jim was with the Gambino family and was the son of Jimmy the Clam. It was 1979, while I was still under and before President Reagan declared war on organized crime in his 1982 speech. In 1979 Big Paul Castellano did not need the president of the United States to authorize him to seek revenge against anyone in the Mafia. Uncle Jimmy the Clam and Jim-Jim were found shot to death in a car in Brooklyn in October 1979.
As his father used to say to Lou Eppolito, “Nobody never gets killed for no reason.”
Except that years later Jimmy the Clam’s former bodyguard, cousin Frank Junior Santora, the Gambino soldier who’d been in Allenwood Prison in 1982 with Burton Kaplan, was whacked by mistake on September 3, 1987. The shooter mistook cousin Junior for Carmine Variale, with whom Junior was walking. So, almost “nobody never gets killed for no reason.” But then maybe it all worked out in the end when the shooter, or maybe the finger man who pointed out the wrong target, or both, ended up getting killed for a good reason.
Betty Hydell instinctively knew looking at the TV that she couldn’t breathe a word about her shock of recognition. It was bad enough the guy was a cop and they all stick together, but he was a Mafia cop who claimed that he was the white sheep in a family of black sheep. Baa. Betty wasn’t born yesterday. She’d like nothing better than to stick a pin in that “baloney” that was coming out of the side of his mouth. But she had her son Frank to think about. Frank would be a sitting duck the moment she went to the police with this.
And if Betty needed any more motive to clam up, Lou Eppolito was telling Sally Jessey about the time in 1984 that he was “wrongfully” accused of leaking confidential NYPD information to Rosario Gambino. This was the heroin trafficking nephew of the deceased boss, Don Carlo Gambino, and a member of the same Mafia family as Luigi the Napolitan, Fat the Gangster, Uncle Jimmy the Clam, Jim-Jim, and cousin Junior Santora. When the FBI executed a search warrant on Rosario Gambino’s home in New Jersey, they found a photocopy of Gambino’s highly classified NYPD folder. The copy machine at Eppolito’s precinct had been used to copy the folder’s contents. Eppolito was the last person to sign the folder out from the ultra-secure Intelligence Division, the heart of organized crime data, where you have to give your fingerprint to enter. When the New York press reported the story, two wiseguys were picked up on a tape saying they couldn’t call on their cop source for something “because he’s in trouble now.” But Eppolito had a reason for having the folder. In fact, he had been ordered to get it. With the help of his union and his record of commendations, Eppolito beat the charges at a departmental hearing.
In hindsight, had Eppolito been like the crooked cop who responds to an elderly lady’s apartment, finds her dead, and removes her diamond ring and pockets it? He didn’t kill her; he just seized the opportunity. Had Eppolito found himself in possession of a Gambino family folder for a legitimate reason and seized the opportunity? Cousin Junior was still alive then to facilitate.
To the nose of an honest cop, and with rare exception that means the rest of the NYPD, Eppolito’s book itself smelled rotten. Eppolito charged that he had been the victim of bias because of his family tree, that old “ugly stereotype” argument again that Governor Cuomo was so fond of. “As frightening as it may sound,” Eppolito wrote, “I found more loyalty, more honor, in the wiseguy neighborhoods and hangouts than I did in police headquarters.”
There were many other things that were more frightening in the book, although not intended. Eppolito talked about how he would go into a social club, throw his weight around, and demand answers on a wiseguy homicide investigation. He would know that the room was bugged, so he said he would “be nodding and winking to show that it was all a big joke.” Although he doesn’t point this out to the reader, by “nodding and winking” he is giving away the existence of a secret bug. He does tell the reader, however, why he wasn’t taking the investigation seriously. “For all my time on the job, I never really lost sight of my old man’s credo that nobody got killed for no reason.” In other words, while under oath as a cop he conducted organized crime homicide investigations as if it were perfectly okay for the Mafia to murder its own.
In another episode described in the book, Eppolito charged into a social club and put a sawed-off shotgun into the mouth of a wiseguy who had threatened him on the phone. Eppolito admitted, “Suddenly, I knew what it felt like to be my father. I was walking like a wiseguy, talking like a wiseguy. The power surge was what I had felt at times as a cop, yet somehow different.” But the most powerful surge came from what Eppolito told the wiseguy with the shotgun in his mouth. It was the confluence of two powerful rivers coming together to form an even more powerful river, the power of the wiseguy combining with the power of the cop, the very idea behind the Mafia cop when he said, “Guess whose job it’s going to be to find out who killed you? Mine, Frankie.”
The strangest episode was a meeting Eppolito described that he had with Big Paul Castellano at the White House in 1979. After Uncle Jimmy the Clam and Jim-Jim had been whacked, Eppolito was asked by his cousin Junior Santora to attend a meeting with Big Paul. Eppolito claimed that Big Paul had called for the sit-down to make sure that there were no hard feelings. Eppolito admits that when it was his turn to speak, he called Big Paul “Godfather” like out of the movies. Big Paul laughed at the gesture and said, “I am not Don Corleone.”
At the meeting, Big Paul tacitly admitted that he was behind the hits on Uncle Jimmy and Jim-Jim, and Big Paul hoped that Lou Eppolito understood. Why the feelings of Lou Eppolito had to be dealt with at the level of the boss, and why the boss spoke so freely to a supposed cop are mysteries to me. Eppolito claims that Big Paul seized the opportunity to offer to put Eppolito on the Gambino family payroll. Eppolito claims to have been insulted by the offer.
None of this, if it happened at this meeting, was ever reported by Eppolito to the NYPD as is required by the most basic principles of police work. I don’t know what happened at that meeting. I do know that it took place in 1979, and 1979 was the first time Eppolito had been caught cooperating with a wiseguy. Eppolito had supplied the wiseguy mug shots of criminals who looked like the wiseguy so that they could be used at trial to cast doubt on an eyewitness identification. Eppolito was let off with a warning. That was also the year that Eppolito and Caracappa met and became partners in the Brooklyn Robbery Squad. Whatever happened at this meeting at the White House, we do know that according to Lou Eppolito, he met with the boss and the boss treated him with respect. It appears that the future Hollywood wannabe cop began playing a new role the night he was treated with respect by Big Paul.
The book quotes Eppolito’s wife, Fran, at length about the “weird” personality changes in Eppolito following his meeting with Big Paul Castellano at the White House. Fran said, “From that day on Louie was a different person. It was like he now had a little more pride in what his uncle was. . . . Then I notic
ed that he began picking up some Italian mannerisms that he never had before. . . . He started talking with his hands. . . . Then I noticed that he also began talking about his Italian heritage all the time. Bragging about how Italians did this, Italians did that. . . . I used to laugh as he sat the girls on his knees and told them . . . about how important family ties were. The kids were babies and they looked at him like he was nuts.”
Fran admitted that she found “Lou’s new persona a little weird. I mean when Steve Caracappa came over you’d think there were two godfathers sitting at our kitchen table. The talking with the hands. The drinking of the double espressos. ‘Salud’ing each other to death after every sip. And now Louie was starting to kiss everybody on the cheek. . . . Now it was kiss city.”
Kiss of death city.
Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob came out two years before Gaspipe identified Eppolito and Caracappa as his Crystal Ball. Jerry Capeci, in an article for the New York Daily News, broke the story in 1994 and named names. Betty Hydell’s identification was now confirmed in her mind. Both Betty and Gaspipe had identified the corrupt cops from the same photo of them in Eppolito’s book. But still Betty remained silent. After all, her son Frank was out there on the street.
Burton Kaplan was soaking in his bathtub when he heard the news that Gaspipe had identified Eppolito and Caracappa as his Crystal Ball. Kaplan had the drug trafficking charges hanging over him that would eventually send him to jail. And now Gaspipe had turned and was providing evidence against the cops, and no doubt against him.