The Good Rat (8 page)

When Seventeenth crossed Ninth Avenue, the street became mostly Irish and Italian. It didn’t have much more money than the rougher side of Ninth Avenue, but there was the odd twenty that set the block apart.

On the corner was a shop run by George the Arab, who sold peanuts and olive oil and fresh ground coffee that had the block smelling.

On his street Guido was known as “Nicky Daddy,” because his father always gave him enough money, a quarter, to buy a double cone from the Mister Softee truck. As he had the money, he didn’t have to run home first. He was usually first on line and had the cone in his mouth while all the others were waiting.

It was the street where Nicky had his first victory as a boy. He was given a silver team jacket for the Express softball team. He had waited so long to be a part of the team, been at every game at Prospect Park, sitting on the ground and clap
ping and shouting, and now he was given a jacket and told he would be a player. He put an arm into that jacket and pulled the rest of it on, and now he was on that blue bike in his silver jacket. He rode the streets as a conqueror, and his blue bike was a great white horse. And at the Express games, they sent him up to bat, and who cares what he did? The only true record they have is of him preening with pride as he came back to Seventeenth Street in a jacket he never took off.

Their summer resort was Coney Island, which people reached by walking two and three blocks to the subway and taking a short ride, ten, twelve minutes, to the beaches, with their vast crowds and the last yards of the Atlantic Ocean hissing over the wet sand. But an adult had to go with a kid to Coney, and on Seventeenth Street men worked and women had the house and maybe too many kids to take to the beach. It was not that simple for the woman to put hand into purse and pay for a day.

So Nicky Guido’s cousin Carmine, who lived at 514, turned the street into a summer place. He got a fire-hydrant spray cap from the desk officer at the precinct on Twenty-fifth Street, and at the hydrant in front of 513 Seventeenth Street he used his personal tool, a wire hanger wrapped around a sawed-off broomstick, to twist off the hydrant top and let the spray form a silvery arc for fifty shrieking kids dancing in and out. Among them was Nicky Guido, in the gaze of his mother, who sat on the stoop, and his aunt, who was in a rattan chair next door. Down the block was Carrie, the window sitter, who had the phone numbers of every mother on the
block in case she saw something wrong—get your hands off that girl, a fight, abuse—anything she didn’t like.

Nicky Guido’s Schwinn dazzled the neighborhood, and kids and even adults were out there snatching it every chance they got, and Nicky’s father and uncle, who was a cop, had to comb the neighborhood to get the bike back. His mother and father would not allow Nicky to ride off the block. When he rode with others and they turned the corner to race around the block, he had to stop and wait for them to return.

The block had one big tree, in front of Fariola’s house, and sometimes Nicky hid behind it on his bike, and while the others taunted him, he writhed over whether to dart out with the kids and spin around the corner or obey standing orders from his parents.

“He stood every time he started to cross,” Pete Carella remembers.

When he grew up, he took the New York City exam for firefighter, exam number 1162, and also the test for sanitation worker. Nicky Guido passed and was on the eligible list for firefighter, a long wait but worth every day of it, for this was the dream of somebody living in Park Slope. It is a civil-service neighborhood, with cops and firefighters and sanitation workers and court officers and so many waiting out lists to be appointed to jobs. Nicky Guido was set to be appointed as sanitation worker on April 10, 1985, but he turned it down. He worked his job installing phones and waited for a golden future, the fire department.

Our Nicky Guido was a celebrity on his block, Seventeenth Street in Park Slope, because of his love for his mother and his honesty with everybody else. But somewhere in a night office, a ferret came out of its hole at the base of a wall and started gnawing at Nicky’s life.

Later in his dark life, after he was arrested and tried and sentenced to life in prison, Gaspipe Casso went on television, the
60 Minutes
show, from the Florence, Colorado, maximum-security prison. The piece of film ran six years or more after he was interviewed, because the TV people were afraid of using Casso without outside corroboration. Casso said he shot Jimmy Hydell over a dozen times in the arms and legs to get him to name the people who shot Casso that night. Casso said Hydell gave him the name of Nicky Guido. Then Casso said he killed Hydell. He said the two cops, Eppolito and Caracappa, were with him. He must have had his reasons for telling all this, although surely he was the only one on earth who had them. He had merely thirty-six murders mixed into his dark hair. He was ready to testify for the government or the defense, whoever wanted him, but nobody did.

You could tell how many people disliked Stephen Caracappa by the amount of time he had to wait at the sixth-floor counter of the criminal-identification section in police headquarters. Someone who used the place as much as he did usually knew enough to call first and ask somebody—one of the women, for they are civilians and get paid very
little—if he could bring them anything. A container of coffee, a sandwich, Chinese food from the neighborhood outside. Offer to bring something, then mention why you were coming down. By the time you arrive at the sixth floor, the printouts are in an envelope at the counter, and you just sign some form and leave.

Caracappa never thought to call anybody first. This was a guy who only a few months before had run a computer check on the name Monica Singleton, who happened to be a woman he was about to marry. But who says you’re supposed to trust so many people, your future wife included?

So when Caracappa arrived this time, he had the name Nicky Guido from Casso. He handed in his square paper form, “Request for Record Check,” and then sat on one of the attached hard seats on either side of the short, narrow space.

SEARCH INFO

NAME OR TITLE: CARACAPPA STEPHEN
Major Case Squad

TAX NUMBER:
562810

All those names were suspects from one of Caracappa’s cases, in this matter Number 80. In the list of names for that case, he inserted the one guy he actually wanted, Nicky Guido. Sometimes in these searches, Caracappa even requested info on fake names. Now he wanted all there was on Nicholas Guido. He wanted age, addresses, phone number, make of car, license-plate number, photos, family. Everything you need to track a man and kill him. All for Gaspipe Casso.

A half hour, an hour, goes by. Caracappa has to wait his turn. He sits under a picture of John Dillinger and his fingerprints. The clerk at the counter hands the form to a detective, who goes to a computer terminal in an adjoining office and taps out the requests.

This is more than twenty years ago, the dim years when doing computer searches was like running fingertips on a cave wall looking for ancient scratches. Inside the sixth-floor office, the detective on the computer is putting Caracappa’s request into a system that is both wondrous and aging fast. Only the job remains the same: find him.

The search turned up two Nicholas Guidos. One was a career criminal, Bad Nicky Guido, who originally came from Bergen Street. That was virtually the same area as our Good Nicky Guido, who was from Seventeenth Street. Bad Nicky’s date of birth was 1/29/57. Good Nicky was born 2/2/60. Close enough.

The printout they handed to Caracappa showed that Bad Nicky had left Brooklyn and his new home address was in care of something called the Bureau of Child Welfare, Prevention of Cruelty to Children, Kingston, New York. This was a fake organization that sounded as though its business was to stop the beating of babies. Its real business was to enable certain people to get handgun licenses. These pistols are good for robbing and shooting people, and in particular shooting cops. The child-welfare scam took dues from Bad Nicky Guido and got him a new pistol and a new home address that you couldn’t decipher.

Steve Caracappa, who could find anything, was lost. He made a fatal mistake by deciding that the shooter must be the guy still living in Brooklyn. He would find out he had picked the wrong one only when he read of the killing in the newspapers.

Bruce Cutler, defending Lou Eppolito, recalls going over the Guido identification material and becoming mystified. “We didn’t understand how they had something so obviously wrong.”

• Q:
  What did Casso tell you he was doing?
  
• A:
  He wanted me to—to speak to Frankie and see if he could get a picture and an address of where Nicky Guido lived, and I asked Frankie if could he do that for me, and he said he would speak to his cousin, and Frankie
  came back and he said his cousin could do it, but he wants four thousand dollars, and I said, I can’t authorize that. I’d have to talk to Gas, and I went and told Gaspipe, and Gaspipe said, Gee, I just gave them a five-thousand-dollar bonus on the thing with Jimmy Hydell. He says, Tell them that they’re being very greedy and to keep it. I’ll get it my own way. And I was pretty embarrassed to have to go back and tell Frank Santora that. I was thinking of giving him the money myself, but I had no way to do this and give Casso the information. So I told Frankie, and Frankie says, You know, I agree with you. He says, They shouldn’t have asked for no money for this. And I never got any more on this from Louie and Steve.
  

Gaspipe fumed. They had given him nothing he needed on Nicky Guido. Where is his picture? You got no picture. Where does he live? Fuck the upstate address he gave, it’s a fugazy, a fake. Casso didn’t want to give Caracappa and Eppolito four thousand more for a new sheet on Guido. He did a thing that was far simpler. He went to the 19th Hole and found a gas-company worker who was there to either pay a shylock loan or take one out. He told the guy he wanted an address for a Nicky Guido who lived in Brooklyn. The gas-company man went through the billing department and found Nicholas Guido at Seventeenth Street in Park Slope—Good Nicky. Bad Nicky
was not even on the lists. He was on the lam. Good Nicky Guido was on the gas-company roll, because he’d been paying the bills for the house where he lived with his mother.

Here is Good Nicky Guido, age sixteen, all grown up and with the second ride of his life, a Chevy Nova his father got for him.

The young guys of the block who were not using drugs and were instead marking time until they were old enough to drink hung out in Joe’s Pizzeria. One of them was always working there. Nicky delivered pizzas with his car. Hustling in and out, doing thirty deliveries on a Friday night, making a hundred dollars a week. This put him up there. The stutter was hardly an issue now. Nobody taunts a bankroll.

Nicky and his friends drove the car around looking out the windows for girls. One evening in the summer, they drove down to Eleventh Avenue on the West Side of Manhattan, and on the corner by the Lincoln Tunnel entrance a prostitute as tall as a college center waved to them. Nicky pulled over.

“Do you,” the prostitute said. “Do you good.”

Nicky was starting to banter with her when his friend Pete Carella, who knew these things, saw the Adam’s apple and said to Nicky, “It’s a guy.”

“He was terrorized,” Pete remembers. Nicky got that car moving fast.

• Q:
  At that point in time, when you passed that information to Casso about Nicky Guido and Jimmy Hydell, what did you believe Casso was going to do with that information?
  
• A:
  He was going to kill Nicky Guido and everybody else’s name that was in there.
  

We are at a pause, and on all the computer screens in the federal courtroom in Brooklyn are two photos, one of the older Nicky Guido, the bad one, next to the good Nicky.

Our Nicky Guido has large eyeglasses and a delightful smile.

The other Nicky Guido is older, heavier, no need for glasses.

Lou Eppolito stands at the defense table during the break. There are the two Nicky Guidos on the computer screen in front of him. Just a few feet away, the same two photos are on the large screen set up at one end of the jury box, as if for screening a movie. Two Nicky Guidos stare at Eppolito. He doesn’t see them. He looks intently at the courtroom wall, trying to find a sign, an apparition, a voice coming through the wood that says not guilty. He must weigh more than three hundred pounds. He has the shoulders of a goat. Once he stopped bodybuilding, his front slid down like a slab off a collapsing glacier. He is almost bald, and the sparse hair is gray, matching the gray flesh of cheeks
and chin that seem to drip onto his chest. He has the sorrowful eyes of a cow.

Stephen Caracappa is at the end of the table, thin, furtive. It is impossible to decide whether he notices the pictures or anything else. His narrow, sharp face reveals less than a frosted window. He holds the left stem of his glasses to his mouth, as if pondering some unseen figure in the air.

The courtroom now turns into four o’clock on Christmas afternoon of 1986 on Seventeenth Street in Park Slope. Bill Laux, of 510 Seventeenth Street, was down the block at a friend’s house when his wife, Dottie Laux, called and told him to come home for Christmas dinner. At this hour they were cooking up and down the block, including at Good Nicky Guido’s house. Laux walked up as Nicky Guido and his uncle came out of the house at 512. Nicky had on a white zippered jacket that a girl had given him for Christmas. He and his uncle met their neighbor. Everybody said hello. Nicky took his uncle across the street, where he had his new Nissan sports car parked. They got in, and Nicky was gleefully showing his uncle the inside.