Friends of the Family (5 page)

Joe Ponzi had spent two decades in the Brooklyn DA’s office, gaining a reputation as one of the best interviewers and polygraph operators in the business. He had the gift for making bad guys want to talk to him. He’d been responsible for an impressive number of confessions. People used to say Ponzi was so smooth he could talk an oyster into giving up its pearl. After meeting more than a decade earlier, Dades and Ponzi had almost immediately become close friends. As Tommy summed up their friendship, “The day we met I would have given him my kidney.”

Ponzi also had a personal investment in the case. The flamboyant Eppolito had met the immaculately dressed Caracappa in 1979 when both
detectives were assigned to the Brooklyn Robbery Squad, which was then commanded by Ponzi’s father. Sergeant Larry Ponzi had been their boss for about two years. In fact, in his introduction to
Mafia Cop,
Eppolito acknowledged, “Sergeant Larry Ponzi…who taught me how to be a detective, I send my respect.”

Joe Ponzi knew Eppolito very well. “I would see both of them, Eppolito and Caracappa, in social settings. When the precinct had a 1013, a fundraising party for cops having financial problems or medical problems, or a promotion party, I’d see them there. Louie more than Steve. I didn’t know Steve that well; he was always a mysterious character as far as I was concerned.

“But Louis…I can remember Louis coming into the Homicide Bureau on the fourth floor of the Municipal Building with his tie draped loosely around his neck and wearing a flashy chain and a snake ring and holding court. He’d tell joke after joke about the broads he’d banged and the crazy things he did. He was out of control.

“My dad was fairly close with both of them. One time Louis volunteered to fight in an exhibition boxing match. My father was his cornerman that night. Louis talked a good fight, but if he couldn’t knock out his opponent in the first thirty seconds he was finished. The guy he was fighting that night didn’t like him at all. He toyed with him. He just took him apart. In the dressing room they had to give Eppolito oxygen. But he still told people he won.

“I knew everything about the case before Tommy called me. I saved every newspaper that was ever written about Casso’s allegations. I talked to my father about it: ‘What do you think? You think it’s possible?’

“My father didn’t know. ‘You know what, I don’t know them like that. I just can’t fathom them in that context. Casso’s crazy as a fucking loon. The government wouldn’t have dropped the case if they had anything.’

“When Tommy called and told me what he had and asked me to get involved, I hesitated. Before I committed myself to this I needed to get my father’s approval. That was critical for me. I needed him to be comfortable with the idea that I would be investigating cops. My father is my best friend, my mentor, and in my life it’s always been taboo to hunt cops. I’ve steered clear of it for twenty-nine years; this was going to be the first time. But this…this was so far over the line. I told him, ‘If they didn’t do it,
that’ll play out, but if they did these things there’s no way they should be able to just walk away from it. I don’t know that anybody’ll be able to put together something a prosecutor will deem court-worthy, but it’s something I want to do.’

“My father told me it was something I had to do. He was a great cop and if this was true, he wanted these guys to pay. He gave me his blessing.”

Ponzi had already had a small taste of the case. After the mob found out that Frankie Hydell was cooperating and killed him, Ponzi had run an internal investigation trying unsuccessfully to find the leak. So when Tommy told him about his conversation with Betty Hydell he immediately understood its relevance. It was a flimsy foundation on which to build a murder case against the two detectives, but it was a start. He owed it to his father, to himself, to every cop who had ever put on the uniform, to see where it went. “I’m in,” he said.

Ponzi quietly gave Tommy a tiny office with a desk, a phone, and a computer on the eighteenth floor. They were investigating cops, so nobody else knew about it. He and Tommy had the only keys. Even the cleaning staff wasn’t permitted to open the door.

Vecchione and Ponzi sat down to figure out how they’d work the investigation. Both men supervise relatively large departments. Vecchione runs the prosecutorial side of the Rackets unit; Ponzi is in charge of the investigative side of the entire DA’s office. This was a really unusual situation: As a chief Ponzi rarely had time to get personally involved in investigations. Vecchione was already in the midst of several major cases. “What do you think?” Ponzi asked.

“You kidding me?” Vecchione replied. “Of course we’re going to do this. I’m gonna do it myself. I’m going to try this case and put those two motherfuckers behind bars. What are you gonna do?”

Ponzi nodded firmly. “Let’s do this one.”

Dades’s team was now three strong. The strategy was pretty straightforward: Dades and Ponzi would handle the actual investigation; Vecchione would clear the legal path for them.

Mike Vecchione’s concern from the very beginning was how to keep this investigation on the state level rather than making a federal case out of it. That was going to be a little tricky, because they would need to get carloads of old files from the Feds, and eventually they would need to speak
with Gaspipe Casso, who was still in federal custody. But with a little luck and a lot of hard work he felt it could be done.

It wasn’t just ego that made Vecchione want to keep the case in Hynes’s office. It was obvious from that first day that this was going to be a difficult investigation with only a limited chance of success, but he was convinced that legally it would be substantially easier for the state to get a conviction. Vecchione was going to use Betty Hydell’s statement to try to make the Jimmy Hydell murder case against Eppolito and Caracappa. Any additional charges he could make stick would be a nice bonus, but a murder conviction would put them away for twenty-five years to the rest of their lives.

The federal government couldn’t prosecute Jimmy Hydell’s murder. There is no straight murder statute on the federal level. In extreme cases the federal government uses the civil rights laws to bring murderers to justice, based on the concept that they have deprived an individual of his or her civil rights by killing them, but in this situation that would be a tough charge to make stick. The only charge under which the Feds could prosecute the two cops was a RICO. RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, was passed in 1970 to give law enforcement a potent legal weapon to fight the Mafia. RICO allows the government to prosecute people for a pattern of criminal activity rather than specific crimes. They could be prosecuted for being a member of the Mafia. Specifically, to be found guilty under the RICO statute an individual has to commit a minimum of two “predicate acts,” or crimes, in cooperation with at least some of the same people over a substantial period of time. One crime, no matter how heinous it might be; several criminal actions committed within a very short time span; or a series of criminal actions that can’t be connected in some way don’t qualify for prosecution under the RICO statute.

Vecchione didn’t see how the Feds could charge Eppolito and Caracappa under RICO. The two or more underlying crimes that constitute a RICO violation have to be committed within ten years of the indictment. No matter what crimes the two cops committed for Casso, their relationship with him had ended more than a decade earlier. Casso had been arrested in January 1993. Eppolito had retired in 1990, Caracappa two years later. Dades had learned that the two cops were living out in Las Vegas, presumably no longer involved with the Lucchese crime family. Unless they were still committing crimes in the desert for the Luccheses, the statute of
limitations had run out for a RICO. And if the Feds couldn’t make a RICO case, they couldn’t prosecute the cops.

But on the state level there is no statute of limitations on murder charges.

Vecchione knew that the Feds might be extremely unhappy if the Brooklyn DA was able to make a murder case against cops that the Eastern District had in its hands years earlier but failed to pursue. That’s not exactly the type of publicity any U.S. Attorney wants. So they might make it difficult for the state to proceed, but they wouldn’t dare risk blocking the investigation. Eventually they would hand over whatever materials they had.

Network television has recently popularized the concept of a “cold case,” a case that hadn’t been solved within a reasonable period of time and is no longer the subject of an active investigation. In other words, a case nobody is losing any sleep over. The media has made cold cases a hot concept. And law enforcement has plenty of them to solve. It is estimated that there are more than a hundred thousand unsolved murders in the United States. Cold cases. It’s an old theme with great dramatic possibilities.

Cold cases live forever on paper, in neglected files crammed into overstuffed file cabinets. The first thing Tommy Dades and Joe Ponzi needed was all the old files. They contained every bit of evidence that had been gathered against the cops. This included Casso’s 302s and all the supporting documents, the reports of any independent attempts to verify Casso’s claims, transcriptions of interviews, the cops’ personnel folders, maybe some newspaper clippings, and all the official reports and notes on the investigation of the murder of Jimmy Hydell. The Feds had a lot of the material. The Brooklyn DA’s office had some of it in its archives; Tommy had his own files, consisting of his own notes and newspaper clippings collected throughout his career, and Ponzi had his clippings. But the Feds would have the most complete files; as far as anybody knew they hadn’t been touched in a decade and they were probably stuffed into the back of a cabinet, maybe like a Sleeping Beauty, just waiting for the right prince to come along.

To begin, Ponzi, Dades, or Vecchione would have to make an official request for the files to the United States Attorney’s Office, Eastern District, specifically to federal prosecutor Mark Feldman. For Vecchione that was a slight problem.

Mark Feldman was another kid from Brooklyn who went way back with
all the big players in this case—including Eppolito. Years earlier he had run the Rackets Bureau in the Brooklyn DA’s office. And just as Vecchione had gotten to know Detective Tommy Dades, Feldman had gotten friendly with Detective Louis Eppolito. “One of the reasons we all knew Louis so well,” Feldman was quoted as saying in
Mafia Cop,
“was because his relatives kept turning up dead.”

In his book, Eppolito describes Feldman as “a tough Jew if I ever met one.” Their relationship, apparently, was cordial, respectful, and strictly professional. When Eppolito needed legal advice, just as Dades turned to Vecchione, Eppolito turned to Mark Feldman.

Dades agreed with Eppolito’s assessment of Feldman, believing, he says, “Mark was probably the best prosecutor of organized crime cases in New York. Bar none. We got to know each other in the 1990s, while I was part of a unique organized-crime task force in the early 1990s. Everybody hears the stories about the battles between the Feds and the state, but this was an unbelievably productive team, consisting of FBI agents and DEA agents and NYPD detectives. It was run by a U.S. Attorney named Jim Walden and Chris Blank, who was cross-designated from the Brooklyn DA’s office.

“We probably created the biggest marriage between the state and the Feds that they’ve had in years. It was one big happy family. We were taking down cases left and right with no arguments, no problems, because it was a complete team effort. We knew all the players in organized crime. We had lists of old homicides. We’d decide, let’s solve this one—and we did. It was an amazing group and it worked because nobody was fighting for glory. Eventually we indicted forty Luccheses.

“Mark Feldman was a big part of that team.”

While Dades and Feldman were friends, Mike Vecchione’s relationship with Feldman was strained. At best. The two men had started their careers in the Brooklyn DA’s office at roughly the same time. For several years both Vecchione and Feldman had worked in the Homicide Bureau. Vecchione remembers very well how supportive Mark Feldman had been on the toughest day of his legal career. “I was trying a paroled criminal for the cold-blooded murders of two police officers. I had reliable witnesses and I had substantial forensic evidence—but I also had a racially mixed jury at a time when Brooklyn was on the edge of exploding.

“The trial lasted five weeks and the jury reached its verdict on a Satur
day morning. Not guilty. I couldn’t believe it. Not guilty? I was stunned. This scumbag had killed two police officers and he was going to walk out of that courtroom. I was just overwhelmed with emotion; it was my responsibility to speak for those two cops and I’d failed. For whatever reasons, I’d failed. After the verdict was announced I went into this little office outside the courtroom, closed the door, and started crying. That was the lowest point in my professional career. It was Mark Feldman’s day off, but he had cared enough to come to court to lend his support. The only person in the office who was there.”

Mike had left the DA’s office in 1980 to run the NYPD Advocate’s Office, but Feldman stayed and eventually became head of the Rackets Bureau under DA Elizabeth Holtzman. When Joe Hynes was elected Brooklyn DA in 1989 he wanted to put his own people in leadership positions and Feldman left, maybe with a little bitterness, eventually landing in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Vecchione and Feldman got along with each other until 2001, when Vecchione took over the Rackets Division. Vecchione was city, Feldman was federal. There is a great deal of competition in New York between the U.S. Attorney’s office and the DA’s office in each borough. It’s a potent brew of ego, ambition, and power, fueled by publicity. Several prosecutors, most recently Rudy Giuliani, have used the publicity generated by high-profile prosecutions to build political careers. So when jurisdictions overlap, egos get stepped on.

Feldman’s boss for almost two years was U.S. Attorney Alan Vinegrad. Vecchione had a history with him too. When Vinegrad had been an assistant in the U.S. Eastern District office Vecchione had tried a difficult case with him. An ultra-Orthodox rabbi had kidnapped a young boy, whom he believed to be the Second Coming, from his mother. The Feds did not have jurisdiction because the rabbi had not taken the boy across state lines, but the rabbi could be charged under New York State law for secreting the boy in a place he could not be found. Working together, and sharing the publicity, Vecchione and Vinegrad had convicted the rabbi and his wife, and while doing that they had become friendly.