Friends of the Family (6 page)

As far as Vecchione was concerned, the already complicated relationship between the Feds and the state had begun deteriorating when Mark Feldman joined the U.S. Attorney’s office. More than ever before, the Feds were taking cases and informants from the state. Vecchione assumed Feld
man was still mad at Hynes for forcing him out of the Brooklyn DA’s office. Feldman believed that Vecchione had complained about that to Vinegrad, blaming him specifically for the deteriorating relationship.

So it was against that background that the state had to approach the Feds to get the old files on Eppolito and Caracappa. Tommy Dades made the first call to Feldman. “What’s up, Tommy?” Feldman asked when he called. Like everybody else, Feldman knew Tommy was always on the edge of an adventure.

“Listen to me for a second, Mark. I got some information on the Jimmy Hydell murder,” he said. “So if I was looking to jump in and reopen the Eppolito and Caracappa investigation, and I thought I could corroborate Casso, would you give me the paperwork you guys had when you were investigating? I want to take a shot at doing a state murder case.

“I got to ask you one thing though: If I come to you and ask you for everything you’ve got on it, you gotta give me your word you won’t interrupt me, you won’t force the FBI down my throat, and you’ll let me work on it alone. Can you do that?”

Feldman told him, “I’ll call you back in a half hour.” True to his word he called back less than a half hour later and told Tommy, “Go see Bill Oldham and take whatever you need.” Oldham was a veteran investigator in the U.S. Attorney’s office, another guy who knew his way around. He had been working in that office when Casso had originally made his claims, so he was very familiar with the case.

Several nights later, Dades, Ponzi, and Mark Feldman had dinner at a local restaurant named Two Toms. It was more social than business; the three men were friends with a shared love of the law enforcement world and got together often. Somewhere between the veal and the pasta they began discussing this case. Dades had a lot of respect for Feldman and told him about his conversation with Betty Hydell. “There wasn’t any other reason for Eppolito and Caracappa to be looking for Jimmy Hydell,” he said. “There was no investigation going on, they weren’t even supposed to be working together, there was nobody that even knew Jimmy Hydell was part of the crew that shot Casso, there was nothing else out on him. What happened was that they don’t know what Jimmy looks like so they pick up Frankie by mistake, then they let him go. No harm, no foul. But while they’re waiting for Jimmy to come home Betty catches up with them and has that conver
sation with them. A little while later Frankie sees them going over the Verrazano to Brooklyn. The last place anybody knows Jimmy was alive was in Brooklyn less than an hour later.” Tommy shrugged. “What else could they have been doing but picking up Jimmy, just like Casso says?”

Feldman was a prosecutor. He’d been involved with hundreds of cases. That seemed like a lot of speculation to him, a lot of blanks to fill in. No one except Casso had seen the two cops with Hydell. Maybe it made sense over a table at Two Toms, but Feldman knew that the only possibility the state had to make the case was to convince Casso to testify—and that Casso was not going to testify.

The only other guy who could make the case was the go-between, Burt Kaplan. But Feldman knew from his own experience that Kaplan fancied himself a stand-up guy. He was in jail pretty much for the rest of his life. In 1998 he’d been convicted of marijuana trafficking and sentenced to twenty-seven years in federal prison. He was sixty-five years old. After his conviction he’d been given an opportunity to corroborate Casso’s testimony and maybe walk out of prison, but he’d turned down the government’s offer. He made it clear that he wasn’t “a rat.” He wasn’t a “stool pigeon.” He was an old-time, hate-the-coppers stand-up guy. He wasn’t talking to anybody.

“Don’t even think about Kaplan,” Feldman told them. The odds against them making the murder case weren’t exactly astronomical, and it wasn’t a bet anybody with good sense would make. Especially without Casso or Kaplan. “Betty Hydell isn’t enough,” he said. “You’re going to need a lot more.”

Tommy remained the optimist. “Yeah, I know. But we’ve made tougher cases.” They all knew that Tommy and Mike had turned an unidentified skull fished out of a creek in 1999 into a murder conviction. All the teeth except one molar had been knocked out, and it proved impossible to extraxt a usable DNA sample, so there was no way of identifying it. It sat on a shelf in the Medical Examiner’s office until 2003, when a guy Tommy flipped gave up a murder he knew about, hoping to make a deal. The story was that a kid had been shot and beaten to death and his body was left out in the woods under a pile of old tires for several years. But when the killers found out somebody was planning to put up a mall in the area they went back for the now decomposed body. They broke the skull off the backbone and tossed it in a creek.

Tommy took that story to Mike. At first he didn’t know about the skull. But when he began doing his research he discovered that a skull had been found not far from the site of the murder. Now they had a victim’s name and a skull, but no way of proving the skull had belonged to the name. Checking the victim’s rap sheet, Tommy learned he had been in prison. He said to Mike, “Let’s take a shot and see if he had dental work done in the can.” Incredibly, they found his dental records. A forensic dentist made the match to the skull. They were able to put the killer away.

Feldman knew all about Tommy’s persistence, but he also knew that without Casso or Kaplan he could spend the rest of his life banging on doors and he wasn’t going to convict the two cops. He offered whatever cooperation he could give them; he had absolutely nothing to lose. In fact, at one point he told Dades that his office was time-barred from bringing a RICO case against the cops. And he also suggested that they add Bill Oldham to their team. Not only did Oldham know the case, he pointed out, but he knew how to maneuver inside the federal system. As an investigator for the U.S. Attorney’s office he had routine access to federal facilities that state investigators did not have. He could save everybody a lot of time.

It made sense. Bill Oldham became the fourth member of the team.

The question of jurisdiction continued to bother Vecchione. While he didn’t say anything, he didn’t trust the Feds to stay out of the case, particularly if it looked like Brooklyn might be able to get an indictment. Two cops indicted for committing murders for a Mafia capo? That was going to make big bold headlines. Big bold headlines make careers. Mark Feldman was an ambitious guy.

But both Dades and Ponzi assured him that Feldman’s word was gold. Better than gold. Besides, they told Mike, Feldman knew and accepted the fact that the U.S. Attorney couldn’t bring murder charges against the cops. “Why don’t you go ahead and speak to Mark yourself?” Ponzi suggested to Vecchione. “You guys are the lawyers; get it all squared away.”

“So I called Feldman,” Vecchione remembers. “This was business, and we’re both professionals. We started talking about the case and he told me, ‘Look, I think we’re time-barred. The acts look like they’re too far in the past for us to be able to make a case. We don’t have any indication that these guys have been involved in any kind of continuing criminal enterprise, so it’s a single murder. We don’t have a statute for that. So go ahead, knock yourself out.’

“‘That’s great, Mark,’ I told him.

“‘Just one thing though,’ he added. It was almost as an afterthought. ‘If it turns out that somehow we can make a RICO out of this, you guys can keep the Hydell murder, but we’ll do the RICO.’ That sounded reasonable to me. I knew that Feldman was protecting his claim, but he didn’t sound optimistic.

“‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘As long as we can do the murder.’”

That was the plan. The state would go first, prosecuting the Jimmy Hydell murder, and then, if the Feds could find a RICO charge in there somewhere, the state would then hand over all its evidence and the federal government would proceed. It was an easy deal for Feldman to make. As it might have been described on the streets, it was nothing for nothing.

When Mike hung up he figured maybe he was wrong, maybe Tommy and Ponzi were right, maybe the Feds weren’t going to get involved. From nailing the two cops to jailing them, this was going to be all Brooklyn. But Vecchione still had this feeling, this little legal itch that just wouldn’t go away, that it wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded.

Besides, Feldman had already proved his word was good. The day after his initial conversation with Tommy Dades, he handed over the investigative material the Feds had in storage. Less than an hour after Dades had parked his car in front of the U.S. Attorney’s office at 1 Pierrepont Street he was trying to figure out how to fit five very large boxes in his trunk and backseat. He had no idea what he might find inside those boxes. Apparently the Feds had taken Casso very seriously, at least until he’d threatened the Gotti conviction with his accusations against Sammy Gravano. So it was likely there was a lot of valuable information in those boxes in the back of his car. Right then, right at the beginning, before Tommy carried those boxes up to the eighteenth floor and opened them up, he felt like a little kid on Christmas morning, waiting excitedly to see what surprises he would find.

A lot of cops aren’t great readers. It’s a job that promises action; it doesn’t require going into the office, sitting behind a desk, and working through a pile of papers. So much of the time the type of kid who decides to become a cop is looking for action more than intellectual challenge. Even on the job there are numerous assignments that don’t require a lot of reading.

Anybody looking at Tommy’s background would have figured he wasn’t much of a reader. He came from a broken home and spent as much time on the streets as in school. He was never a great student; he’d dropped
out of school after his freshman year in high school to join the marines—although instead of taking the oath he’d ended up working in Vegas. But it turned out that Dades was an avid reader. That was just another one of those little surprises about Tommy Dades.

That came from his grandfather. His name was Eddie Schwartz—“Blackie” they called him on the loading docks of the
New York Daily News,
where he worked for most of the forty years he spent with the paper, because of his dark complexion. Blackie Schwartz was a self-educated guy from the Lower East Side who ended up foreman, and every night he’d bring home a fresh-smelling copy of the “night owl,” the first edition, for his grandson. The
Daily News
wrote about the two things that most interested Tommy, crime and boxing. Tommy read anything to do with organized crime, anything. When the other kids were reading books about sports heroes or the children’s classics, Tommy was reading the biography of Monk Eastman, a tough guy from the nineteenth-century Five Points gang that once owned the city. Rather than collecting baseball cards, Tommy kept stories about mob guys. Learning about organized crime was his hobby long before it became his profession.

But he didn’t stop when it became his profession. He continued to read everything he could find about organized crime and remembered it, and in his mind he made the connections. Tommy was a great talker; he collected informants like Trump collected rent. Few men who haven’t had a mass card burned in their hand and taken the oath of omertà knew more about organized crime than Tommy Dades.

But as much as Dades loved being on the streets, it was this ability to mine documents that made him a great detective. He’d read piles of documents to figure out how the pieces fit. He’d find the anomalies that other detectives had overlooked. He remembered the names and the connections and the crimes that went with them. He had the necessary patience to sit and read and the talent to understand every word of it.

To the five boxes of dusty material he’d carried into the war room he added his own collection of clippings. And then he opened the boxes and went to work learning about the incredible betrayal of Detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa. If there was a nugget in the piles of papers and tapes and transcriptions that would enable him to put those guys away, he was going to find it.

When Dades sat down at the very beginning of the investigation the investigators already knew quite a bit. They knew that officially Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa had both retired from the NYPD with their full pensions, meaning that any outstanding problems they may have had were resolved: Their records were clean. They knew that Eppolito claimed in his book to have been the eleventh-most-decorated officer in department history. He also wrote about participating in several gunfights. Describing the first one, in which he was one of several officers who killed a bank robber, he claimed, “I learned something about myself during that gunfight. I not only had the capacity to kill, I had the capacity to forget about it, to not let it bother me.”

That’s strange,
Dades thought. According to Eppolito’s records cited in the federal indictment, while on the job he hadn’t been involved in a single shooting.

They knew that Louis Eppolito had come from a mob family, that three members of the Eppolito family had been murdered in mob hits. They knew that he liked playing the role of a wiseguy; he dressed large, spoke loud, and carried a big ego. In
Mafia Cop,
Eppolito’s coauthor wrote that Eppolito told him he had committed “a litany of felonies while wearing the badge, but they were all in the name of ‘honor’ and ‘respect.’”

Caracappa, they knew, fit the role of the quiet sidekick. Caracappa played Ed Norton to Eppolito’s Ralph Kramden—if those two TV characters had been cold-blooded killers rather than city workers.

They knew that Eppolito and Caracappa had attended the police academy at about the same time and first worked together under Larry Ponzi in the Brooklyn Robbery Squad. And that in 1984 Caracappa had become a member of the Major Case Squad, an assignment that gave him easy access to the department’s most sensitive investigative information. And that three years later he assisted in the founding of the Organized Crime Homicide Unit inside the Major Case Squad, giving him routine access to highly confidential intelligence about the FBI and the NYPD’s plans to attack the Mafia—particularly the Lucchese family.