Friends of the Family (30 page)

Franzone was typical. Obviously he was relieved to finally be able to tell someone about the horror he’d been living with. He went through the whole story, shovel load by shovel load. The people listening to him had to act as if this was the most interesting story they had ever heard, and in this case it just might have been.

So when Franzone then started talking about a second murder, without being asked, without even pausing, everybody in the room sat up straight.
This was some big secret this guy had been keeping. The second murder had taken place a few months later; this was another murder the investigators knew almost nothing about. Santora had shown up at the place on Nostrand Avenue with Eppolito and several other men. Minutes later, just like before, the horror movie came true again. Santora called Franzone inside. The men were struggling to wrap the body of one of the men who’d walked in with them in a tarp and needed help. Franzone helped lift the body into the trunk of the car. Santora drove away, leaving Franzone living with that fear that never went away.

Lanigan listened patiently as his partner told him Franzone’s story. He was a cop; out of habit he never showed his excitement—he never wanted to give away that edge—but he was thrilled. The first body was obviously Jeweler #1. Jimmy Hydell’s body would have been perfect—it would have tied the whole prosecution together—but Casso had never told Kaplan what he’d done with the bullet-riddled corpse. But Kaplan had credited another body to the cops, a body that according to Franzone was still in the ground where it had been buried almost two decades earlier. Finding that body would prove Kaplan was telling the truth.

Lanigan knew how close they had come to missing it. If Franzone had remained silent, if he’d kept his secret, the body never would have been found. At best, there might have been an excavation in Pennsylvania, but nobody even suspected the garage. It was just Tommy’s itch that kept them searching for it. And without a body the case against the two cops would have been a lot tougher, a whole lot tougher.

Pete’s garage, the auto body shop with a line of rental parking garages directly behind it, was not far from the neighborhood in which Lanigan had grown up. He knew the streets very well. And now he knew where the body was buried.

The current owner of the site was less than cooperative, so the investigators had to get a search warrant. A recovery team was put together to dig up the body of Jeweler #1. It was a crime scene, a very old crime scene, but it still had to be treated as if the murder had been committed the day before. Whatever they found there was going to be used as evidence and had to be documented. Because of his familiarity with the area, Lanigan was assigned to coordinate the dig. He knew several members of the evidence-recovery team, having worked with them once before to dig up a body off
Bedford Avenue and Tenth. The team included crime scene investigators, a forensic photographer to document the chain of evidence, an entomologist who would verify that the body had been in the ground for decades by studying insect activity, a heavy-machinery driver to operate the backhoe, and a coroner from the City Medical Examiner’s office, as well as Lanigan’s partner and several other investigators.

The entire dig team met the evening before they were scheduled to put shovels in the ground. Lanigan took them to the garage and showed them where to dig. According to Franzone, the body was under the cement in the fourth garage from the rear of the body shop. Lanigan looked at the spot, just stared at the cold cement floor, and tried to imagine what had happened there nineteen years earlier. Finally, they were going to wake up the ghosts.

After visiting the staging area where they would meet at five thirty
A.M
. the following morning, they all went back to the Eastern District office to review exactly what was going to happen. Then they all went home. Lanigan was hoping to get to bed early; it was going to be a long day.

His cell phone rang on the way home. It was Joe Ponzi informing him that the Brooklyn DA’s office had been severed from the investigation.

Mike Vecchione had been in a conference room when Mark Feldman reached him. “I’m calling on behalf of the U.S. Attorney,” he said coldly. The message was pretty straightforward: You guys are out. Feldman explained that they believed Hynes’s office was the source of the leaks to the media and that those leaks had endangered the entire case. “From this day forward you’re off the case.”

Vecchione was beyond dumbfounded. He said evenly, “Obviously, you’ve made up your mind. You didn’t call to discuss it, you just make this pronouncement? It’s my opinion you never wanted to go along with the deal anyway.”

Josh Hanshaft was walking out of the Brooklyn DA’s office, on his way over to the U.S. Attorney’s office, when a detective called him over. “We hear you’re out,” he said.

Hanshaft misunderstood. “You guys are out? For what? For a day, a week, permanently?”

“All of us,” they told him. “You’re not even allowed to go back there.”

Hanshaft didn’t understand what was going on. He went back upstairs
to wait for someone from Mauskopf’s office to provide an explanation. That was just a common courtesy. Something like, “Sorry it didn’t work out, Josh, it didn’t have anything to do with you, we’ll work together someday.” But that call never came. A day later Vecchione told him officially that they were all off the case. All of them.

It was several days later, while walking through the lobby of the Brooklyn DA’s office building, that Hanshaft saw Rob Henoch on the phone. Henoch didn’t even put down the phone to say a few words to Hanshaft. Instead he simply shook his hand and smiled. Hanshaft walked away.

What surprised Hanshaft was a story that appeared in
Newsday
after he had been booted.
Newsday
reported that Josh had been escorted out of the building with his belongings by federal agents. That story was completely inaccurate; Hanshaft had never returned to that building. There was nothing in that office that he needed or wanted. But he got the irony; there was only one place that story could have been leaked from—and it wasn’t Joe Hynes’s office.

Joe Ponzi had been at an event with District Attorney Hynes when Feldman reached him. “This is one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make,” Feldman said. “But you guys are out.”

At first, Ponzi remembers, he couldn’t even process what Feldman was telling him. Then he said, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Then it began to sink in: For the first time in his career he was being booted off a case. He didn’t know if he was more insulted or angry. But he was very angry. He’d spent years working closely with the U.S. Attorney, he had been trusted in many cases with extremely sensitive information, and suddenly he couldn’t be trusted? He saw it as a direct attack on his integrity and that hurt. “All of a sudden a wall dropped down,” he remembers, “and I was an outsider looking in. It was a horrible feeling.”

Ponzi made a plea to keep Lanigan on the case. He offered to let them work out of the U.S. Attorney’s office: “They’ll stay over there,” he said. “The only person they’ll communicate with in this office is me, and I don’t have to brief anybody about what’s going on. If that’s the kind of Chinese wall you want, I can build it for you. But let my guys stay; they can help you.”

Feldman had made up his mind. He didn’t believe Ponzi could make that happen, he said, although he was nice enough to add that he was sorry
it had reached this point. Joe Ponzi and Mark Feldman had been friends since the day Ponzi began working in that office in 1977. Now Ponzi decided that he would never talk to Mark Feldman again.

It hurt the case. Eventually Henoch would admit to Ponzi, “Losing your guys was a huge blow to us.” But what made it even more painful for Ponzi was what happened several months after he had been “excised,” as he tactfully describes it, from the case. This case was one of those rare times he’d actually established a relationship with a source, and he remained sorry that he had never gotten the opportunity to tell Burt Kaplan why he’d suddenly disappeared. So one afternoon he asked a player still in the mix, “When you see him, say hello for me and tell him I hope he’s well.”

That person responded, “I’m sorry, Joe, I can’t do that. Kaplan is really pissed off at you. He blames you for a lot of things.”

Ponzi couldn’t believe it. After Brooklyn had been booted from the case several articles had appeared revealing private information about Kaplan, including a piece written by Jerry Capeci and a long and inaccurate article in
Vanity Fair
. Ponzi was proud of the fact that he had spoken to absolutely no one about Kaplan or the case. Publishers and movie companies were waving contracts at him, offering him a lot of money to come on board—which was perfectly legal—and he had refused every offer. So information about Kaplan could not possibly have come from him—or, for that matter, anyone from the state. Suddenly Ponzi realized that someone had suggested to Kaplan that either he or the DA’s office was the source of those leaks. Ponzi couldn’t believe Kaplan was blaming him. But once again, there was nothing he could do but swallow his unhappiness.

The most bitter investigator was probably Bobby I. Since joining the task force he’d been among its most active members. He’d established a strong relationship with Burt Kaplan and his wife. Intartaglia is one of those people who talks about himself in the third person; as he said to Ponzi, “How can he throw Bobby I off the case? It doesn’t make sense.”

Ponzi tried to explain. “Listen, he didn’t take Bobby I off the case. He threw the entire Brooklyn DA’s office off the case and we happen to be part of that institution. So we went with it.”

Tommy Dades wasn’t surprised by Feldman’s decision. He had warned Vecchione that he had been expecting “to get booted like a football” for a long time, but in his case the insults went a lot further. Tommy was in
the gym one afternoon when he got a call from Betty Hydell, who was very upset. Betty and her daughter Lizzie had been asked to come into Mauskopf’s office. When they got there, she said, they were treated more like prisoners than victims. Tommy was very familiar with the Feds’ arrogant attitude, that we’re-smarter-than-everybody-else demeanor. Apparently they had spoken to Betty and Lizzie in a very insulting manner. While she was being interviewed by a prosecutor from Mauskopf’s office, an FBI agent, and a top DEA official, Betty told him, “They said some very bad things about you.”

“What are you talking about?” Dades asked.

He found it difficult to believe what he heard. “[Dades] put words in your mouth. He suggested to you what to say, didn’t he?” the prosecutor had said to Betty and Lizzie.

Basically, they were accusing Tommy of making up the whole story, for whatever reasons, then feeding it to Betty, who went along with it to avenge her son. That was the kind of bullshit Dades expected to hear from the defense, but from federal prosecutors? Were they out of their minds?

Then they warned both Betty and Lizzie not to speak to Tommy Dades again.

Betty had replied, “We’ll talk to him anytime we want.” With that, Betty and Lizzie told them to go fuck themselves and walked out. The Feds had successfully alienated a key witness.

Tommy managed to smooth things over with Betty and Lizzy Hydell. Some of those people just don’t know what they’re doing, he said. Then he reminded them that making the case against Eppolito and Caracappa was too important to walk away from. “You got to talk to them,” he said. “Just ignore them as best you can.”

The first thing Tommy did was call Mark Feldman to tell him what was going on. He knew Feldman very well, and he knew Feldman had nothing to do with this. “No matter how you feel,” Tommy said, “if you want to have beers with me or throw me out the window, it don’t matter, but you never talk bad about another law enforcement officer in front of witnesses. That’s bullshit. How stupid were these guys? How could they say those things without knowing my relationship with Betty? They totally underestimated our friendship. Betty and Lizzie trust me; they don’t trust you people at all. You just underestimated them.”

Feldman was apologetic and agreed to try to find out what had happened.

But Tommy didn’t wait for Feldman to handle the situation. Instead, he called the DEA agent and warned he was going to “come over there and yank you out of that fucking office. How can you say that crap about me? I brought you into the case!”

The agent had no real answer. Tommy hung up, believing it would be impossible for the U.S. Attorney to be any more disrespectful to him and Vecchione and Ponzi and Bobby I, the whole New York City Police Department and the Brooklyn’s DA’s office, than they had already been. He didn’t want anything to do with them ever again; he just wanted to be left alone.

Several weeks later everyone in Hynes’s office associated with the case was served with a subpoena to turn over to the U.S. Attorney all the paperwork they had on hand, including notebooks, address books, files, anything and everything that concerned the case. As Tommy remembers, “These were the same people that I had been having weekly meetings with and they subpoenaed me under the threat of prosecution if I didn’t hand over everything that I had pertaining to this case. They were threatening to prosecute me!”

Vecchione was equally furious. “Basically, they treated us like we were criminals, that we were possessing materials we had no right to. I remember having to go upstairs to the office where all our detective investigators had packed up all their stuff, all their notebooks, reports, everything, to make sure it was all going to be sent over to the U.S. Attorney’s office. We sent over a mountain of material. And all of us felt like shit; these were some of the best detectives in New York and they were being told they couldn’t be trusted. It was unnecessary and shameful.”

Dades had been wrong about one thing. Mauskopf’s office had found a way to be more disrespectful.

The cold case that had been forgotten
for more than a decade had become the lead news story in America. To many people it seemed more like a movie plot than a true story: Two of the NYPD’s most honored gold-shield detectives had actually spent much of their careers moonlighting as hit men for the Mafia, often using their shields to set up victims, and in their bloody trail they’d left at least eight bodies. Probably more.

Cops as
The Sopranos
. The media loved it. The overweight Eppolito even looked a little like a badly aging James Gandolfini.
The United States of America vs. Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa
was shaping up to be one of those super-trials so beloved by the cable networks and tabloids. This was going to be the World Series of jurisprudence, and so it attracted an array of legal heavyweights.

Presiding over the trial was eighty-three-year-old Senior Judge Jack Weinstein, who had come off the streets of Brooklyn to become one of the most respected jurists in the nation. Lawyers have been telling this joke about Weinstein in the federal courthouse for more than two decades: God has been seeing a psychiatrist lately—because He thinks He’s Jack Weinstein.

During his almost thirty years on the federal bench Weinstein has ruled on everything from school desegregation cases to Agent Orange litigation. He’d sat on several high-profile organized crime cases, but this one, he would eventually say, “is probably the most heinous series of crimes ever tried in this courthouse.” He was the perfect choice: too old to care about getting his picture in
People,
yet sharp enough to guarantee a fair and orderly trial. And coincidentally, Weinstein and Kaplan had met several times in the courtroom. In 1967, Weinstein’s first year on the federal bench, he had sentenced Burt Kaplan to five years’ probation in a fraud case. In 1972 Weinstein put Kaplan in prison for four years when he was caught with a truckload of stolen goods—although the judge gave Kaplan an extra two months before he had to report to prison so he could work through Christmas to help support his family.

Robert Henoch was going to be assisted in the prosecution by Mitra Hormozi and Dan Wenner. It wasn’t a glitzy team, but they would be very well prepared and they would lay out their case in an extremely professional manner.

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 Henoch, “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.