by Joe Pistone
Later that week Lin got court approval to be out late on the Fourth of July so he could watch the fireworks display and celebrate the independence of the nation he dedicated his career to. I understand a very tiny bit of how Lin must have felt, from the time Tony Mirra accused me of stealing drug money.
In the next scene, Angela failed to appear at the NYPD stationhouse to help “vigorously” pursue the assailant. Angela had two appointments with a sketch artist and blew them. She claimed to have kept the assailant’s notes in the back seat of her car, but they never turned up. Maybe the intimidator saw the envelope and took it. Angela Mosconi, the crime reporter that Angela had called “Just in case” wrote in the New York Daily News that Angela “also gave police varying accounts of what her assailant looked like.”
Angela responded immediately by claiming she had been in another state helping her ailing mother who had suffered a stroke. She said, “Never once did I fail to cooperate.” She blamed the cops and the stroke, but not the FBI. That’s progress.
Unfortunately, frames are very hard to expose and the judge may keep all of Angela’s hi-jinks out of the case as irrelevant to the charges. Because it is not that hard to frame an innocent man, it is vital that prosecutors exercise sound and sober judgment in evaluating witnesses. This case of changed testimony and incredible charges of corruption should have been squashed within the four walls of Vecchione’s office. That is, unless Vecchione had something else on his mind and in his heart when he first heard the details of Angela’s package.
In the middle of all this melodrama, I was reminded of the real world and the job Lin DeVecchio did supervising the Mafia Commission Case. In the early summer of 2006 Good-looking Sal Vitale and Frank Lino testified against my old friend, the zip Baldo Amato, for murdering a supervisor at the New York Post fifteen years ago. Good-looking Sal was concerned that the victim would cooperate and expose the Bonanno family’s stranglehold on the Post’s delivery operation—the no-show jobs and the like, one of which Sal’s son had. The Bonanno family underboss and the very man who ordered the hit, Good-looking Sal, testified for the prosecution. “Baldo turned around and says to me, ‘Mr. Sal, I’ll take care of it, don’t worry about it. You bring the guy and don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it. I’ll kill him.’”
Capo Frank Lino testified that he griped because Baldo did not take care of it. The victim was still alive when Frank got the body to bury. They had to finish the victim off with an ice pick through his ear. Frank complained to Good-looking Sal, “Next time you send somebody to get killed, make sure the guy is dead—when we walked up there, the guy was alive, he could have shot us.”
One of Baldo’s co-defendants took the stand and testified that he had never become a made man in the Bonanno family; therefore, he was not part of the corrupt organization under RICO. This kind of testimony, with its admission that there was such a thing as a made man and a Bonanno family had always been forbidden testimony. Jerry Capeci was quoted on the testimony the next day in the New York Times. “If the Bonanno crime family still exists, he would need permission.”
Baldo Amato had been Carmine Galante’s bodyguard when Galante got whacked at Joe and Mary’s in July 1979. Everybody with any sense knew he had to have been part of the conspiracy, but it was never proven. We got Baldo in the Pizza Connection Case, and now we got him again for murder.
Baldo got convicted, and Lin was out on bail. And Lin deserved some of the credit for Baldo’s conviction based on the job he did on the Mafia Commission Case twenty years before.
That early summer I got another reminder about the real world while watching the NBA All Star game. Bobby Delaney was a referee in the game. While a young New Jersey State trooper many years ago, Bobby infiltrated the Mafia. At halftime, they did a segment on Bobby about how dangerous his undercover assignment had been, and how dealing with the tempers of NBA players was child’s play compared to what he had been through. For Bobby’s segment they interviewed me, not as a high school basketball star, but as an undercover who knew the dangers first hand. Watching myself on TV always reminds me of those dangers.
I recalled the time, before Galante got killed, when Lefty and I were under Mike Sabella and I had been called in by Lefty for a meeting about Milwaukee boss Frank Balistrieri and undercover agent Tony Conte—a meeting I thought could be my last. I was in Chicago pretending to be waiting for Tony Conte to return to the hotel with his share of an art heist. Lefty knew Tony would not come back. Lefty wondered out loud if Tony was an agent. Lefty called me in to a remote bar on the Upper East Side of New York. In pursuit of the day that there would be a Mafia Commission Case, I attended the meeting anyway. I just didn’t tell Jules about it.
I recalled something I’d forgotten. Funny how there was so much danger that not all of it springs to mind. But there was an additional real-world danger during that whole last two years when I was working to gather evidence on the Mafia hierarchy and structure—harvesting the crop from the seeds I had planted. At first, Lefty and Mike Sabella and I had no known reason for Milwaukee boss Frank Balistrieri not returning their calls. But three months after Galante got whacked, an FBI handler got word from his high-level informant that Frank Balistrieri in Milwaukee had discovered that Tony Conte was an agent and that Balistrieri was “spooked” by it. Balistrieri had cut off contact with us, not because Conte had flirted with his girlfriend as we had guessed, but because of this discovery. These high-level informants, like Scarpa had been for Lin, were worth whatever you paid them.
Headquarters wanted to pull me out at once. If Balistrieri knew Conte was an agent, he also knew I was the one who had vouched for Conte. That made me a dead man. This was close to two years before I surfaced. I was now with Sonny Black and cementing my relationship with him. It was way too early for me to come out if we ever expected to topple the Mafia from the top down.
“Believe me,” I said. “Balistrieri is embarrassed. He won’t want anybody in New York or Chicago to know that he was careless and was taken in by Conte. He could get whacked for that. With his ego, the way he bosses his own sons and his brother, he wants this covered up.”
I persuaded Headquarters to let me continue to risk my life. Every time I was called in for a meeting with anybody in the family, I wondered whether it might be because Balistrieri had finally passed on the information and my number had come up.
This was the real world that Lin was an important part of, and he was on our side with every step we took.
Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn the Mafia Cops appeared to be getting what they deserved.
On June 5, 2006 Lou Eppolito and Steven Caracappa got life without parole. “This is probably the most heinous series of crimes ever prosecuted in this courthouse,” Judge Jack Weinstein said.
Before sentencing, they had fired their trial lawyers and had gotten new lawyers who turned on those trial lawyers, claiming incompetency of counsel as grounds for a reversal.
Caracappa’s fired lawyer, Eddie Hayes, was accused of getting a $200,000 fee while he made “no serious effort to prepare for trial and remained unfocused throughout the trial. . . . The only effort by Mr. Hayes to present a theory of defense before the jury was the totally confusing and disjointed effort to blame the prosecution on an undefined conspiracy emanating from Washington, D.C.”
Eppolito’s fired lawyer, Bruce Cutler, was accused of getting a $250,000 fee, and for that money Cutler “spent the majority of Mr. Eppolito’s closing argument speaking about himself.”
Later that month, the fired trial lawyers and the Mafia Cops were brought in for hearings. Eppolito admitted on cross-examination that he would have no problem telling a lie “if it will help me get a movie done.” Judge Weinstein ruled that the trial lawyers were both “highly professional” and had done an “excellent” job. The judge accused Eppolito of “immorality and a lack of credibility.”
To the relief of the victims’ family members who had waited so long and grieved so hard, it appeared to be
finally over. After the hearing on all the motions, the family members had the privilege of reading in the paper that Caracappa’s new lawyer had advised his client that there wasn’t “a snowball’s chance in hell” of getting the case overturned by Judge Weinstein.
Meanwhile, another hopeful book deal surfaced. Lou Eppolito, Jr., the son from Eppolito’s first marriage, was going to write a book on being the gay son of the Mafia Cop and the gay grandson of a Gambino family made man.
Then the judge, who a month before had thrown the book at the Mafia Cops, now overruled his pre-trial decision and the trial jury’s specific verdict on the statute of limitations issue and, on July 1, 2006, entirely reversed all 70 convictions.
This was a RICO conspiracy case with a five-year statute of limitations, requiring the last act of the conspiracy to have been committed within the last five years—not a murder case with no statute of limitations. Although the government indictment claimed and the jury found that the corrupt organization was the partnership between Eppolito and Caracappa to commit crimes—some of which were committed with the Lucchese family and some were committed years later on their own in Las Vegas after their retirement from the NYPD—the judge decided it was a Lucchese family enterprise, period.
In a 77-page opinion Judge Weinstein wrote, “It will undoubtedly appear peculiar to many people that heinous criminals such as the defendants, having been found guilty on overwhelming evidence of the most despicable crimes of violence, should go unwhipped of justice.
“The evidence presented at trial overwhelmingly established the defendants’ participation in a large number of heinous and violent crimes, including eight murders. While serving as New York City police detectives, the defendants used their badges not in the service of the public, but in aid of organized crime. They kidnapped, murdered and assisted kidnappers and murderers, all the while sworn to protect the public against such crimes. . . . It is unclear precisely when this conspiracy came to an end. . . . Once the defendants had both retired from the police force and re-established themselves on the opposite side of the country, the conspiracy that began in New York in the 1980s had come to a definite close. . . . The defendants were no longer in contact with their old associates in the Lucchese crime family.”
The judge called the 2004 drug deal and laundering of Mafia drug money to be “sporadic acts of criminality.”
We finally had a film editor. Judge Weinstein preferred The Godfather storyline that dealt with the Mafia family as the corrupt organization of RICO and not the Butch and Sundance theme of a partnership that began in the hills of Wyoming, had a lull while they lay low doing tricks on a bicycle with Katherine Ross, and resumed in Bolivia. The media calling them the Mafia Cops may have backfired. If they had been called the Two-Man Crime Wave it would have been a different story line. The criminal partnership that began with the Gambino family—even before the Lucchese association began—would have been understood by the filmeditor judge to have had a lull due to adverse publicity from Gaspipe Casso and to have resumed in 2004 in Las Vegas with the drug deal and the laundering of Mafia drug money. Last I knew, even a two-man partnership was a business organization. But as an experienced film producer I can see how the storyline is neater, cutting it off around 1990 with the hit on Eddie Lino on the Belt Parkway.
It shocked one and all, including yours truly, and including the jury. The jury was asked to decide and did decide, “precisely when this conspiracy came to an end,” and precisely whether the two-man partnership was a corrupt organization. The Draft Board was done away with, except for jurors, so to speak. These poor jurors lost time from their lives, got a pittance for the privilege of serving, and then got what one juror called a “slap in the face. I don’t think twelve people could not understand the letter of the law . . . . I know we didn’t misunderstand it. The conspiracy went on. . . . There was a conspiracy here. There was a conspiracy even when these guys left the force. That was the first thing we hit head-on.”
Another juror who was interviewed raised an obvious point. “We should have probably known upfront that this was going to happen if this was a problem.”
Why didn’t the judge decide against the prosecution in the first place when the defense first made their statute of limitations motion before trial? Why didn’t the judge avoid putting the families and the jury through all this aggravation?
“It’s taken the breath out of everybody. It’s just shocking. I’m still in shock, honestly,” said victim Israel Greenwald’s daughter.
“I never heard of anything so stupid,” said Betty Hydell, the woman who brought the first lead in the case to a top-notch investigator and good man, Tommy Dades, who was later barred from the case because he had the conflictof-interest of a book deal on it. Betty’s daughter Linda said, “There’s no closure on this for my family. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.”
From his 6x6 jail cell Eppolito admitted he was “completely stunned,” and praised the judge because he “stood up like a man.” Eppolito said, “The judge’s statement is that he believes I’m guilty.” But Eppolito cleared that up by explaining that there is a conspiracy here involving the FBI and the NYPD, and “. . . when I get out your head’s going to spin around. There was always somebody behind this case pulling the strings of the marionettes.” I hope he didn’t mean retired FBI agents. That conspiracy has already been taken.
When told of the decision, Eddie Hayes was reported to be speechless. When he composed himself, he went back to the Washington D.C. conspiracy. “But this is a Justice Department that more than any in my lifetime has shown a mad-dog desire to control everything.”
Or maybe the star witness, Burton Kaplan, was a sentenced federal prisoner who needed considerations that the federal authorities could best provide, and maybe that’s one reason that Bill Oldham of the “mad-dog” Justice Department was brought into the team early on by the Brooklyn DA’s investigations division. Not to mention the need for federal “mad-dog” activity in Las Vegas to run a Hollywood drug and drug money sting on tape to deprive Butch and Sundance of any reasonable defense at trial.
Caracappa’s new lawyer said, “Mr. Caracappa is a realistic man. Obviously, he’s pleased with the decision, but this is just one stage along the way.”
In an editorial the next day in the July 2, 2006 edition, the New York Daily News explained why the realistic Mr. Caracappa was not jumping for joy in his jail cell. “For the time being government prosecutors will appeal. . . . And once those federal judicial processes are concluded, and if Weinstein’s ruling is ultimately upheld, then the Brooklyn District Attorney will be free to slam Eppolito and Caracappa with state murder charges, no statute of limitations attached.”
On July 4th Lin DeVecchio took advantage of the judge’s order and stayed out past his 9 p.m. curfew to watch the fireworks.
And now it is likely that, after a judge appointed by LBJ allowed taxpayer money, victims’ emotions, and jurors’ sweat to be spent on a trial that he could have nipped in the bud before it began, the Two-Man Crime Wave, the Butch and Sundance of Brooklyn and Las Vegas—the Mafia Cops—will be tried in the same courtroom by the same prosecutor as Lin DeVecchio.
Or not.
A mere ten days after the judge decided that the Mafia Cops would go “unwhipped of justice” it was revealed that the Brooklyn DA’s office had a little stumbling block to doing any future whipping.
It turned out there was yet another book deal out there that the public didn’t know about. Unlike Louis, Jr.’s book on the gay son and the Mafia, this book already had a prominent publisher. It was due out in January. It was Michael Vecchione’s book deal. It promised to be “the full inside story of the investigation” into the Mafia Cops case. It would be called “Mafia Detectives” and it would contain “never-before-released documents and information.”That insider trading and personal use of information that belongs to the people of Brooklyn would give this book a huge advantage over the others by Bill Oldham, Nick Pilegg
i, Jimmy Breslin, whomever. “Mafia Detectives” would have the added advantage of being written with Tommy Dades, who, although tossed off the case because of a conflict-of-interest, still works for the Brooklyn DA’s office.
Jerry Schmetterer, the flak for the DA’s office, said that the DA Charles Hynes had “absolutely” approved Vecchione’s book deal.
The American Bar Association’s model code of professional responsibility forbids a prosecutor from entering into any media deal until all appeals are exhausted and a case he worked on is truly and finally over.
Schmetterer said that the detail of when the deal was entered into was “a personal matter.” At least until the defense lawyers tear into this issue.
When asked his opinion, legal-ethics expert Professor Monroe Freedman was quoted as saying, “It’s really egregious judgment, because it’s the kind of thing every prosecutor should know. It clearly puts the prosecutor’s personal interest in self-promotion and making money ahead of his obligations as a public official.”
And Professor Eugene O’Donnell of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice offered that, “It would be absolutely inappropriate for a prosecutor involved in a case to be speaking in terms of furthering personal interests. No district attorney should tolerate a member of his staff discussing the business of the office in connection with any commercial benefit.”
Nothing for nothing, but what are the odds that before the ink was dry on his “Mafia Detectives” book deal, Vecchione harbored a dream in his heart of a second book deal on a “not unrelated” case of a murdering FBI agent—let’s call it, “Mafia Agent”? What are the odds that his publisher reads the newspaper and knows that Vecchione is prosecuting Lin’s case and has discussed it with Vecchione?