Friends of the Family (9 page)

“I’d never experienced anything quite like it. It wasn’t just the success. It was the camaraderie; every day we were putting our lives up for grabs and you couldn’t do that unless you had complete trust in the people you were working with. From those guys you learn the meaning of trust and loyalty and sacrifice. The badge represents all of that and the pride you take in wearing it is unbelievable.”

After three years Dades was transferred to the Sixty-eighth Precinct detective squad. The NYPD offers a variety of training courses for young detectives. “Investigating Homicides” was two weeks long. “Sex Crimes” was one week. It all helped—by the conclusion of each course he could fill out all the proper paperwork—but the real training was done on the job, given by the people who had been doing it. “I worked with legends,” Tommy says, “men with thirty years or more on the job. You’d sit around listening to these guys tell their stories and you’d learn more in an afternoon than you could reading three textbooks. They made me understand that I was becoming a part of something that mattered.”

They spent as much time talking to him about the past, about their
experiences, about the legends of the department, as they did teaching him how to pay an informer and keep a secret. They taught him the skills to succeed, but more importantly they imbued in him an understanding of the tradition that he would carry forward. He was one of the elite, a detective in the greatest police department in the world.

That was an impressive thing to be, and Tommy Dades took tremendous pride in his accomplishment. He knew where he came from; a street kid from a single-parent home, a kid with a ninth-grade education, had made it all the way to detective. And he knew what it had taken to get there. He knew that the only people in the world who had experienced it all, every bit of it, from the incredible joy of breaking a big case to the seemingly endless petty hassles of dealing with the bureaucracy, were the guys who wore the same uniform. These were the guys who knew what it felt like to stand alone in the cold on a deserted street at two o’clock in the morning, guys who were willing to trust their partners with their lives on a regular basis. These were the men and women who knew exactly what it felt like to have to tell a parent their kid is dead or to have to stand and take it when somebody is shouting in your face and the nicest thing they’re calling you is a pig; at one time or another most of them had cleaned up vomit in the backseat of the squad car, tried to reason with a belligerent drunk claiming to know powerful people, seen death in too many shapes, and felt absolute fear—yet kept moving forward. These were the only people who knew everything he had experienced in his twenty years—these were his friends, his partners, his comrades, his brothers and sisters in life, a family held together by the badge, and he loved them for it.

Eppolito and Caracappa had treated all of them like they were garbage. They had crapped on that badge. They had used it to facilitate murders. They had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars to betray the same cops who would have risked their own lives to help save them—and then they probably laughed at the stupid suckers taking home $880 a week and turning down a free cup of coffee.

So this time, this time it really was personal.

As Dades read this material he realized there was only one person who could corroborate Casso’s claims, one person who knew the full extent of the cops’ cooperation with the Mafia, and that was Burt Kaplan. Casso had never met them; he’d only seen them once. But Kaplan? Kaplan and
the cops were practically partners. The cops used to go to Kaplan’s house for meetings, and when Kaplan got nervous about that he started going to their houses.

One thing was obvious: If Gaspipe’s 302s were the Bible they would follow throughout the investigation, flipping Burt Kaplan was the Holy Grail. Nobody, not even Casso, knew more about Eppolito and Caracappa than Kaplan. He was their contact; he relayed Casso’s requests to them and reported the information they provided to Casso.

Tommy knew almost nothing about Kaplan. He’d heard the name for the first time in the mid-1990s when Frank Drew, a DEA agent with whom Tommy had worked on several cases, accidentally picked up Kaplan during the investigation of a drug dealer. Initially, he hadn’t been considered a major player, just another wannabe earning a living by hustling drugs.

But Dades began learning a lot more about Burt Kaplan in September 1996 when Kaplan was arrested for marijuana trafficking, a crime for which he was eventually sentenced to twenty-seven years. The U.S. Attorney handling Kaplan’s prosecution, Judy Lieb, had called Tommy to ask him some questions about the homicides committed by Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. Apparently Lieb suspected Kaplan had a connection to Gravano.

Pretty much everybody in the NYPD knew that Tommy Dades was the guy to see if you wanted to know about Sammy the Bull. His interest in Gravano had begun in 1990, when he caught a mob hit on a guy named Eddie Garafola that was credited to Sammy. From that moment on he studied Gravano like Warren Buffett studies annual reports. He memorized the names of his victims and the dates they died and the motives for every one of the nineteen murders Gravano was accused of committing. He knew Sammy’s associates and hangouts, and in at least a few cases, he knew where the bodies were buried. Tommy got to know the two FBI agents who flipped Sammy and they put the detective and the killer together on the phone. Somehow, Dades and Gravano eventually became friendly. The oddest couple.

But one morning, as Dades sat in Leib’s office describing in detail the many murders of Sammy Gravano, she began talking about Burt Kaplan. Kaplan was with Gaspipe Casso, she explained, and her office was trying to flip him. “You know he’s better than Casso regarding those two detectives,” she said.

Tommy recalls, “I didn’t know the details of what happened after that, just that Kaplan had refused to cooperate. Instead of flipping on Casso and the cops, he had decided to spend the rest of his life in prison. You couldn’t argue that he wasn’t a stand-up guy, but he was standing up for the wrong people, a homicidal maniac and two dirty cops. I didn’t know how much pressure the Feds actually had put on the old man to testify. Maybe the last thing the government wanted to do right at that time was prove Gaspipe Casso was telling the truth. That could have caused some really embarrassing problems for both the Feds and the NYPD. Maybe they figured that it was better for everybody if Casso stayed buried.”

Kaplan was the shovel. Tommy wondered what the Feds had really offered him. On some level Tommy had to admire Kaplan’s misguided loyalty; even Casso had flipped faster than a short-order hamburger when his life was on the line. If everything the government said was true, Kaplan had chosen to die in a cage to protect the guy who’d ratted him out. If he’d refused to cooperate way back when to save himself, there was little reason to believe he’d ever change his mind. There certainly was no question that Mark Feldman believed Kaplan was a dead end, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so certain this investigation was going to fail.

But Tommy Dades has always been an optimist. He wanted to learn the details for himself. Maybe there was something somebody somewhere had missed. It wouldn’t be the first time. He began by calling DEA agent Frankie Drew, who’d arrested “the old man” initially, to begin his education in the world of Burt Kaplan.

As Drew explained, he had stumbled over Kaplan during the Frankie Puglise investigation. Not only hadn’t Kaplan been a target, his name hadn’t even been in the program. Puglise was a Bonanno/Lucchese associate running a large cocaine and marijuana operation. The DEA agents were listening to wiretaps and eventually they heard several references to a guy who just didn’t fit the wiseguy script. He was referred to only as “the old man,” but it was clear he was a major supplier. He brought in tons of product. What caught the attention of the agents was the fact that Puglise showed “the old man” respect. That was a big thing, an associate showing respect to some nameless supplier; it meant he was somebody important.

That was Kaplan. Coincidentally, the U.S. Attorney’s office knew all about Burt Kaplan from Casso’s 302s. When they learned he had been ar
rested on drug charges they tried to nail him, figuring if they put enough pressure on him he would flip. As Judy Leib had told Dades, if Kaplan had agreed to cooperate he would have been a better witness than Casso. They convicted him on cocaine, marijuana, and money laundering charges and the judge hit him with twenty-seven years. After his conviction the DEA, the FBI, and NYPD Internal Affairs all offered him a ticket out, figuring because of his age, because he wasn’t a made guy, he’d accept the offer, but he had turned them down. As Drew told him, the guy was a real hard case.

But there was one more thing the DEA agent Frankie Drew remembered. The Puglise investigation had been compromised. On one of the phone taps someone had mentioned receiving a warning from the “crystal ball.” The agents had no idea what that meant, but after that conversation everything changed. Phones went dead, meetings were canceled, people basically disappeared. It was obvious somebody had been tipped off.

One of the men eventually convicted in this case, Bobby Molino, flipped and told investigators that he had seen Puglise speaking with Kaplan, and after they finished, Puglise had come over to Molino and told him, “We’re hot.” Somehow Kaplan had found out all about the investigation; maybe he didn’t know the details, but he had told Puglise that undercover DEA agents were buying drugs, and that their phones were tapped. “We never figured out how Kaplan found out about it,” Drew told Dades. “And he wasn’t interested in talking to us. The guy didn’t flip seven years ago, why’s he gonna go now?”

Tommy knew that eventually he was going to have to take a shot at flipping Kaplan. He asked Drew for the names of people who were around Kaplan way back when, people he might approach who had some information on the case. Anything that might help him. Drew gave him the names of guys who had already flipped and might have some additional information about Kaplan, as well as some of his own contacts who could help.

“Look,” Tommy told him, “I’m doing this case and I’d like to keep it within the DEA because you were the guys who got Kaplan. If he flips it’s only right it goes back to you and not the police department, not the FBI, not anybody. So give me the name of a big boss I can call in New York and in Vegas. Let me see what they want to do.”

“Call Timmy Moran in Vegas. John Gilbriet’s the guy you want to speak to in New York. They’ll get you whatever you need.”

Tommy added those names to the long to-do list he was making.

Like an old engine slowly grinding into life, the cold case was starting to chug along. At that moment it was only Dades, Ponzi, Oldham, and the assistant DA Vecchione. It was just four men, a pile of paper, and a whole lot of hope and determination.

Meanwhile, in Vegas, Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa apparently had absolutely no knowledge of the investigation taking place back in Brooklyn. Both retired detectives had settled into comfortable lives. Eppolito lived with his wife, three children, and mother-in-law in his home on Silver Bear Way. No one was certain where his money was coming from, but he reportedly had been paid a substantial sum by the elderly benefactor of former stripper Sandy Murphy—who had been convicted with her lover of killing her wealthy live-in boyfriend, casino owner Ted Binion—to write a screenplay showing that she was innocent. Sandy Murphy’s sensational trial had been televised by Court TV. Supposedly Eppolito had visited Murphy in prison at least thirty times while researching the story. Eventually both Murphy and her lover’s murder convictions were overturned, but they were convicted of trying to steal $7 million in silver bars and coins Binion had buried in the desert. It was the perfect TV movie story: Vegas, strippers, sex, murder, and money.

Eppolito was also commissioned by at least two older women to write screenplays of their life stories and get them produced. That sounded like a hustle. And one of those women, Jane McCormick, complained to the media that she’d borrowed $45,000 to pay Eppolito to write a screenplay detailing her past as a Vegas casino hostess and stripper who partied with Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack. The screenplay was called
Reflections in the Mirror,
but it never got made. “I was a sucker enough to go for it,” she admitted. “He put up a good front, a good game, and took my money.” Apparently she didn’t like the screenplay: “He couldn’t even spell, his English stunk, and he got a lot of the facts wrong.”

Caracappa was living a much quieter life with his wife, his daughter, and two cats across the street from his former partner on Silver Bear Way. After serving as assistant chief of security for a private company running the prison in which, perhaps coincidentally, Sandy Murphy was incarcerated, he opened his own private investigation business, Argus West. Friendly neighbors reported that he got up early each morning to go to work and usually was in bed so early that “his wife was always complaining.”

Not surprisingly, Eppolito and Caracappa had remained close friends. As far as their neighbors knew, the two were simply retired detectives from New York who were leading the good life in Vegas. But Eppolito remained cautious that his past might still have reach. At one point he was recorded telling a cooperating government witness that he never spoke on the telephone, because he was fearful that the Feds had tapped his phone. No one knew if that was simply another example of Eppolito trying to impress a potential backer for one of his movie projects or if in fact he actually had learned about the investigation.

That just didn’t seem possible. There was no identification on the door of the small office where Tommy worked and nobody mentioned the investigation outside of that office. The door was always locked when no one was there, and Tommy held the key. There was a good reason for these precautions: Too many previous investigations involving these two guys had been compromised. The fact was that there still were a lot of cops on the job who had worked with Eppolito and Caracappa. Eppolito in particular was one of those boisterous guys with as many friends as enemies. He was a good-time guy and a lot of people liked him. Caracappa reportedly came back to New York each year for the reunion of the Major Case Squad. There was nothing to be gained by alerting the two cops that the investigation was revving up.