by Joe Pistone
Burton Kaplan kissed his wife and daughter goodbye and, at 61, went on the lam with his girlfriend. He went to San Diego, Mexico, Oregon, and Las Vegas.
Eppolito and Caracappa had moved to Las Vegas in December 1994, following the heat from the Jerry Capeci story. Maybe their arrogant brains figured: out of sight, out of mind. The two men were living across the street from each other in a gated community. Caracappa was doing some private investigating stuff and selling George Foreman boxing machines on the QVC channel. Eppolito, wearing rings on every finger and often dressing in black with a white tie, was doing his Hollywood wannabe stuff. Eppolito had grabbed $45,000 from a former Las Vegas hooker. He agreed to write a screenplay about her experiences and get a movie made from it. She complained later on that he had scammed her because he had no skill in writing a screenplay. In the screenplay, Eppolito had written that this woman who had once had an affair with Frank Sinatra slept one night with a 300-pound man. She was outraged. “He wrote himself a part in my movie,” she complained.
Burton Kaplan contacted Eppolito and asked for a couple of meetings at a Smith’s supermarket to touch base with them to see if they were getting any heat from the feds. Eppolito said that they were feeling heat from the press and he had hired a lawyer, but they had not heard anything from the law.
In 1996 Kaplan returned to New York and was arrested. Refusing to cooperate, he lost his trial, got a 27-year sentence, went to jail, and there he lingered.
In April 1998 Betty Hydell’s other son, Frank, was gunned down on the sidewalk outside a Staten Island strip club. In July 1998 Gaspipe had been officially declared unusable as a witness and been sentenced to 455 years.
In September 2003 Betty Hydell tested the waters. Betty told NYPD Detective Tommy Dades about her identification of Eppolito from the Sally Jesse Raphael TV show, and her identification of Caracappa from a photo in Eppolito’s book. It was a dream come true for Dades, who shortly thereafter retired from the NYPD. Later Dades would refer to Betty Hydell as “the missing link.”
In 2004 Dades took a job as an investigator with the office of Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn DA. There he could work the case more closely with Joseph J. Ponzi, the DA’s seasoned chief investigator. The two of them put together a small team in a War Room to review every word in the mounds of material that was on record about Gaspipe, Kaplan, Santora, Eppolito, Caracappa, and all the Mafia Cop murders Gaspipe had talked about in his 1994 debriefing. The team of investigators that holed up in the War Room also included: former undercover Douglas Le Vien; William Oldham, a federal investigator with Brooklyn United States Attorney Roslynn R. Mauskopf; and Robert Intartaglio, who had investigated a gang of safecrackers and burglars known as the Bypass Gang (for their ability to bypass alarms). Intartaglio had a wired informant within the Bypass Gang. That informant was outed from inside the NYPD, and he was whacked.
First draft choice of the first round for the new team was Burton Kaplan. He had been in jail a long time and had had a lot of opportunity to think about the aging process and dream about life on the outside. There was no statute of limitations problem because murder is never time-barred. However, in order to sweeten the pot for Kaplan, they needed to be able to offer Kaplan the federal Witness Protection Program. For that they needed a federal RICO case. But for RICO, the last criminal act done to further the criminal enterprise, even if it’s a murder, had to have been committed within five years of the indictment. I’ve got to hand it to the investigators; they were thinking every step of the way. They decided to go fishing in the desert. They went out to Las Vegas to fish for some new crimes to extend the criminal enterprise from 1979 to practically the present.
In 2004 they went to jail and met with the short, balding, nearsighted 71-year-old Kaplan. They laid it out, did their magic, and with Joe Ponzi’s “skills of persuasion” they got the old swindler to agree to turn. It seems that all the hard work that a cast of thousands had performed over the years to bring down the Mafia continued to pay off—over and over again. As Burton Kaplan later explained his reason to flip: “I was in jail nine straight years. I was on the lam two and a half years before that. In that period I seen an awful lot of guys I thought were stand-up go bad, turn and become informants.”
He sure did.
For their fishing trip to Las Vegas to solve the RICO statute-of-limitations problem, they baited the hook with a wired accountant with a gambling addiction who was working off his charges. He had gotten caught for embezzling $5.4 million from his clients. The baited hook went right for Eppolito’s weak spot— Hollywood. Former CPA Steven Corso, working off his own unrelated charges, posed as a moneyman with Mafia drug money that he was intent on laundering in feature film investments. Corso paid Eppolito $14,000 that he said on tape had come from a Mafia drug deal. It was to jump start a script of Eppolito’s called “Murder in Youngstown.” I guess we’ll next see that script on eBay.
Eppolito bragged on tape to the accountant that he and his wife Fran hid a lot of income from the IRS. (Probably including that $45,000 he grabbed from the Vegas call girl.) Eppolito claimed on tape that even though he was retired he still had a mole within the NYPD should they ever need that resource. The fishing was spectacular.
One more thing the accountant needed was some crystal meth to entertain some “Hollywood punks.” Eppolito said, “No problem, I’ll have my son set it up. Tony can handle that for you.” And Tony did, delivering an ounce of crystal meth to Corso and receiving $900 from Corso. All on tape. The Mafia cops had now bridged the time gap from Gaspipe’s Crystal Ball to Corso’s crystal meth. They had made a federal case out of their lives.
Eppolito, his 24-year-old son Tony, his wife Fran, a friend of Tony’s who was in on the crystal meth transaction, and Caracappa were arrested in Las Vegas on March 9, 2005. At his arrest, Tony was found to be in possession of an additional ounce of crystal meth that he had planned to sell. Tony and his friend were indicted on Nevada drug charges. Eppolito and his wife were indicted on income tax evasion charges. Eppolito was found in possession of an old NYPD case folder involving a murder of a prostitute that ended in the conviction of a postal worker named Barry Gibbs who had admitted smoking crack with the prostitute and having sex with her but denied strangling her. Finding it strange that Eppolito had this piece of NYPD property, they did some investigating and talked to the eyewitness who had identified Barry Gibbs as the man who dumped the prostitute’s body. The witness, an ex-Marine and recovering drug addict, quickly recanted his identification and said that Eppolito had intimidated him into making it. Barry Gibbs, at 57, after seventeen years in jail, was freed by the Brooklyn DA’s office.
The indictment against Eppolito and Caracappa alleged that the rogue cops were engaged in a criminal enterprise with the Lucchese family as a secret asset of that crime family. Judge Jack Weinstein, then 85 years old and still nobody you would want to run into in a dark alley, warned the prosecutors that their case was “weak” and they should consider dropping their indictment and bringing state murder charges that had no statute of limitations.The judge saw that the Lucchese family participation had ended eleven years earlier in 1994 when Gaspipe gave the cops up. The Brooklyn United States Attorney’s office, still thinking every step of the way, re-indicted the cops, this time alleging that the long-standing partnership of Eppolito and Caracappa was its own criminal enterprise and corrupt organization under RICO. The partnership predated the association with Gaspipe, and it had begun in 1979 with cousin Junior and the Gambino family. After all, when Junior told Burton Kaplan about the dirty cops in Allenwood in 1982, the two-man partnership had already “done things” and were recommended by Junior as “capable guys.”
That new indictment was cake.
The day after the arrests in this case, coincidentally, there were sweeping arrests of thirty-two members and associates of the Gambino family, including one of the last of the old-time powerful Gambino capos, Greg DePalma. DePalma was one of a group of Mafia dignitaries that i
ncluded Don Carlo Gambino and future turncoat Jimmy the Weasel Frattiano who had all posed in a famous backstage photograph with Frank Sinatra. The arrests came as a result of what the press called a “two-year Donnie Brasco operation” pulled off by an undercover agent who went by the name of Falcone. An undercover and his little friend RICO had struck again.
And once again, I had special pride in having trained Falcone in the way of the wiseguy.
CHAPTER 19
THE MAFIA COPS’ POSITION
IN HIS SIX MONTHS OF DEBRIEFING, Burton Kaplan had come up with ten provable murders the Mafia Cops had knowingly facilitated. One for Kaplan and nine for Gaspipe, whom Kaplan called “a homicidal maniac.” To solve the problem of Burton Kaplan’s enormous “negative baggage,” the investigators and prosecutors did an outstanding job of digging up corroborative witnesses and one dead body.
The first murder victim was Israel Greenwald. He was a diamond merchant and a launderer of money for the Mafia. Burton Kaplan, like the undercover ex-CPA Steven Corso, got into trouble to begin with because of his severe gambling addiction. “I got sick with it,” Kaplan said. He placed his bets with future Lucchese consigliere and Gaspipe Casso’s “rabbi,” Christy Tick Furnari. Burton Kaplan always needed money that he had no way to earn legitimately in the garment industry. Soon, to pay off vig, Kaplan began doing favors for Christy Tick—a slippery slope that led him to launch his own life of criminal deals and schemes. These schemes included dealing in Peruvian passports, counterfeiting designer clothes, and selling hot appliances. In one of his schemes, Kaplan involved Israel Greenwald. It involved trafficking in U.S. Treasury Bonds. When an investigation was initiated, Kaplan became afraid that Greenwald would not stand up and would “go bad and turn.”
On February 10, 1986, Greenwald was pulled over and arrested on suspicion of a hit-and-run. The police asked Greenwald to accompany them to an auto body shop for an identification. If the witness cleared the bearded Greenwald he’d be released. Wearing a yarmulke and a pinstriped suit he was escorted into the body shop garage by Steve Caracappa, where Junior Santora shot him twice. Lou Eppolito waited in the car as lookout. Santora, Eppolito, and Caracappa split $30,000. Kaplan had no idea where the body ended up. Greenwald left behind a wife and eight-year-old daughter Yael who, in vain, expected her daddy to come home that night for dinner and many nights thereafter.
The Mafia Cops investigators followed up phone numbers from cousin Junior Santora’s 20-year-old address book. They came up with a 5’ 4” tow truck operator who owned a parking lot near an auto body shop. He confessed to them that he had befriended Santora, and that one day Santora called him over from his parking lot stall. The witness walked into a one-car garage and saw a man in a yarmulke who he had seen enter with a man who looked like Caracappa. Only now the man was dead. Santora tossed the tow truck operator a spade and ordered him to help dig a five-foot grave, throw the dead body in it, cement it over, and keep his mouth shut. The tow truck operator quoted Santora on that subject: “He said that if I told anybody he’d kill me and my family.”
On top of that, the man said he had met the lookout before. He said he knew him as a cop, Lou Eppolito. Put a cop into the crime and where does a citizen turn? He added, “I was afraid of Lou Eppolito.” In April 2005, based on the witness’ information, Israel Greenwald’s skeletal remains were recovered along with his yarmulke and pinstriped suit. I can only imagine the elation that Tommy Dades, Joe Ponzi, and the prosecution team must have felt.
The investigators interviewed cousin Junior Santora’s 33-year-old daughter, Tammy Ahmed, and she positively identified Kaplan and the Mafia Cops as men who occasionally came to her family’s home to meet with her father before he was gunned down by mistake when Tammy was 16.
On September 14, 1986, Jimmy Hydell was arrested in front of a coin laundry in Brooklyn. At a safe spot that provided privacy, Jimmy was transferred into the trunk of a car. With Jimmy kicking inside the trunk, the cops dropped the car off at the Toys ‘R’ Us parking lot in Flatbush and Gaspipe took over from there. In the basement of a house in Marine Park, Brooklyn, Gaspipe shot Hydell 15 times to torture out of him the names of his accomplices on the failed hit on Gaspipe. Hydell gave up the names of the rest of the Gambino shooters—Nicky Guido, Bobby Boriello, and Eddie Lino. Knowing he was about to be killed, Jimmy begged Gaspipe to “throw me in the street” so his body would be found and his mother Betty could collect on his life insurance policy. Gaspipe promised he would, then fatally shot Jimmy and threw his body anyplace but the street. About the Hydell hit for which the two detectives received $30,000, Eppolito remarked to Burton Kaplan, “We’re just doing our job.”
Later on, when the new investigation that was started by Betty Hydell became public, Gaspipe, never one to disappoint, offered to lead the investigators to Jimmy Hydell’s body in exchange for a twenty-year cap on his sentence. I’m not sure they even answered his letter. At any rate, as their case came together they dropped his name from the witness list. Who would a prosecutor rather have as a witness to corroborate Kaplan—the 33-year-old daughter of Junior Santora, or Gaspipe Casso?
On Christmas Day 1986, Nicky Guido’s mother Pauline had cooked homemade manicotti for her family, including her sons Nicky and Mike. After dinner 26-year-old Nicky, who worked for the phone company and was on the list for the New York Fire Department, asked his uncle Anthony to go out and take a look at his new red Nissan Maxima, which was parked on the block. Nicky got behind the wheel and Anthony got in the passenger seat when gunmen opened fire. Nicky threw his body across his uncle’s to protect him. No doubt the gunmen chose Christmas Day to lay in wait for Nicky because there wouldn’t be a lot of people on the street. Tragically, they had picked the wrong Nicky Guido. The one they wanted lived a few blocks away and was three years older.
Pauline was doing the dishes when Anthony ran in to say that Nicky had been shot. Pauline ran outside and saw her son covered in blood. She said, “I touched his fingers and he had just died. His fingers were cold.” Nicky’s older brother Mike said he had been inside with his parents digesting his dinner when “we heard the pops.” Every Christmas Day after that for the Guido family was the anniversary of Nicky’s murder in a certain parking spot in front of their house. Nicky’s father died three years later of a broken heart from unceasing grief. Until the case was broken nearly twenty years later, the family lived with the suspicion that neighbors thought that somehow Nicky had gotten involved in something bad with the Mafia. Nicky was buried in the nearby Green Wood cemetery; the oldest in the city, where such murdered Mafia figures as Crazy Joey Gallo are buried.
Steve Caracappa had made the mistake that killed a young innocent boy when he used his own ID to go into the police computer to get an address for the Nicholas Guido whose name had been given up by the tortured Jimmy Hydell. Despite their error, the Mafia Cops split $4,000.
A couple of weeks after Christmas 2005, Steve Caracappa appeared on 60 Minutes. Caracappa was asked about the charges and said, “Totally ridiculous. It’s ludicrous. Anybody that knows me knows I love the police department.” Even though it was an investigation that originated out of the NYPD and the Brooklyn DAs office, Caracappa blamed the feds. I guess he agreed with his lawyer Eddie Hayes, who said, “After the FBI blew 9/11, want to trust them now?”
Before trial the prosecutors offered a list of over 100 witnesses. Judge Jack Weinstein told them to forget that idea and pare their list to a manageable size. As a result, the government dropped two of the ten murders in the indictment, leaving seven murders that the two Mafia Cops had facilitated together and one more that was Eppolito’s alone. The two that were dropped were Bobby Boriello and Jim Bishop.
Jim Bishop was a Democratic Party District Leader and former head of the painters’ union. The Mafia Cops learned that Bishop had begun secretly cooperating with the Manhattan DA in an investigation of a painting contracting scheme. They passed that intelligence to Kaplan, who passed it to Gaspipe, and Bishop was
whacked in May 1990.
Initially, the Mafia Cops had been given the contract to kill Gambino soldier Bobby Boriello. But when another detective questioned why they were looking for Boriello, Eppolito and Caracappa decided to back off the direct kill and opt for the indirect kill. They provided Boriello’s address to Kaplan, who gave it to Gaspipe. In 1991, just before Mafia Cop hit the bookstores, Bobby Boriello was hit outside his house in Brooklyn. Boriello had been John Gotti’s driver and he was one of the shooters that Jimmy Hydell had given up during his terrifying time with Gaspipe.
When it was announced that the Bishop and Boriello murders were being dropped due to the judge’s pressure, Caracappa’s lawyer Eddie Hayes said, “It doesn’t make any real difference; Steve Caracappa’s position is he didn’t kill anyone.” Nothing for nothing, but the use of the word “position” makes me wonder. Imagine telling your wife that your “position” is you didn’t do it; it just wouldn’t fly.
Eddie Hayes and Eppolito’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, while not partners, have been longtime friends. Cutler is Hayes’s daughter’s godfather. Cutler, far more than Hayes, is well known as a Mafia lawyer. Cutler represented John Gotti in those cases that earned Gotti the nickname of the Teflon Don. Judge I. Leo Glasser did not permit Cutler to represent Gotti in Gotti’s last case because Cutler had begun to pal around with Gotti, as if he were on the fringes of the criminal enterprise himself. Cutler was frequently seen in surveillance tapes of the Ravenite Social Club and appeared to be house counsel for the Gambino family.
Cutler was famous at trial for denying that the Mafia exists, a defense strategy that we beat into the ground in RICO cases beginning with the Bonanno family trial in 1982. Eddie Hayes, not too shy when it came to speaking to the press, said about Cutler, “When we got into this, I called him up and told him, ‘Bruce, you got to say there is a Mafia and you hate them.’” Easy enough if all you are interested in, as you should be, is the client you have and not the next client you want to get. Hayes did very little Mafia defense work. His clients were people like Sean Combs and Robert DeNiro. Like Eppolito, Hayes had a part in Goodfellas as DeNiro’s Lawyer. Hayes could afford to say he hates the Mafia.