PART 1 OF 2
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THE CIRCUS COMES TO BROOKLYN
The arrest of Caracappa and Eppolito made headlines around the world. "Among the most startling allegations of police corruption in memory," said the New York Times. "Could be the last of the red-hot organized crime trials ... equal parts titillating and chilling ... a courtroom pageant for the ages," predicted New York magazine. "The most shocking scandal to hit the New York Police Department for a century," said the BBC.
The federal government was feeling triumphant in the aftermath of the bust. "This indictment is an indication that the passage of time is never a safe haven for those who violate the law," the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency said in a press release. "With the charges announced today," U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District Roslynn R. Mauskopf said, "these defendants will rightfully face justice, ensuring that their conduct will never tarnish the reputation of a proud and honorable police department." Mauskopf emphasized that the arrest did not mean that the investigation was complete. The capture of Caracappa and Eppolito gave the government the opportunity to accumulate more evidence as people with information came forward or were found by the cadre.
News of the arrests caused a chemical reaction in the country's entertainment industries, many of them centered in the same city where the story was located. The words NYPD, murder, and mafia set in proximity to one another fused to become a new substance -- an enticing media property. Hollywood producers, Manhattan literary agents, and newspaper reporters began to prowl around the case looking to make deals; all were claiming special access to the main players who had inside information. Detective Tommy Dades, now retired and spending evenings working with kids boxing in a gym in Staten Island, suddenly became prominent, having emerged in reports as the easy-talking sleuth who had "broken" the case. "Dades' relentless investigation of Eppolito and partner Stephen Caracappa resulted in the arrests Wednesday of two of the allegedly dirtiest cops ever -- cops who thought they had gotten away with murder," the Daily News reported. The work of Oldham and other members of the cadre went largely uncredited.
The subterranean skirmishing between the Eastern District and the Brooklyn DA finally came into the open on national television on the CBS show 60 Minutes on Sunday, April 10, 2005. Denied the chance to prosecute Caracappa and Eppolito by the Eastern District, unnamed sources in the Brooklyn DA's office contrived to put forward a version of events that gave credit for the case against the newly dubbed "mafia cops" to a single investigator: Tommy Dades. The 60 Minutes segment was reported by Ed Bradley, and began with a review of the show's closeness to the case over many years. "I spoke to Anthony 'Gaspipe' Casso in 1998 in prison where he began serving a life sentence after admitting to thirty-six murders," Bradley said. "Casso's claims couldn't be substantiated at the time, so we couldn't air them until now, now that the detectives have been indicted."
The videotape of Gaspipe Casso appeared onscreen next. Dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit, Casso described the kidnapping and killing of Jimmy Hydell in 1986. "Louie and Steve made believe they were going to arrest him," Casso said. "The kid thought they were taking him to the station house. But they took him to a garage. They laid him on the floor, tied his feet, put his hands in cuffs, and they put him in the trunk of the car. The guy is kicking in the trunk, making noise. I took him to a place I had prearranged. It was somebody's house I could use. I sat him down. I wanted to know why I was shot, who else was involved, who gave him orders. After that, I killed the kid myself."
"You killed him?" Bradley asked.
"Right," Casso said.
"With just one shot to the head?"
"No," Casso said, a sly grin creasing his face. "I didn't shoot him in the head. I was in somebody's house. You'd make a mess that way. I shot him a couple of times. I didn't torture the kid. Maybe I shot him ten, twelve times. I gave Louie and Steve I think $45,000 for delivering him to me."
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes was then interviewed. "I've seen organized corruption cases but the allegations that two cops were hit men in addition to giving up people for hits is absolutely shocking," Hynes said.
The clip of Eppolito in Goodfellas was played, followed by a shot of the cover of Mafia Cop. Bradley reported that Gaspipe Casso had been deemed an unreliable witness and his cooperation agreement had been breached by prosecutors. But only after an ex-cop named Tommy Dades "helped break the case wide open" did prosecutors start to believe Casso's stories about Eppolito and Caracappa.
Next came a Bradley interview of Dades.
"You sat for months by yourself poring through records, computer files, phone logs?" he asked.
"I would go over as much information as I could, to try to come up with a mistake that they made here, a mistake they may have made there."
"Was there a moment when you said, 'I got them'?"
"There was a moment that got me very excited, that I knew I was on the right track," Dades said.
Bradley reported that Dades had discovered how Caracappa had run a search on an NYPD database for a man named Nicky Guido.
EXIT OLDHAM
The obsession with who should get credit for the arrests obscured and infected the ongoing investigation of the case, which, now that a trial loomed, rapidly took on greater urgency. The first order of business was continuing to debrief Burton Kaplan. For prosecutor Robert Henoch, the process required a stringent protocol. Over the months to follow, he would get to know Kaplan's life story in as much detail as humanly possible. Yet Oldham was increasingly isolated. He didn't want to sit in a room and listen to Henoch ask Kaplan one question after another. Henoch was good at giving orders. Oldham was terrible at taking them.
"The other guys were resentful because I wasn't doing my share of the shit work," Oldham said. "But I'd been doing it for years. I thought I had equity in the case. Among other things, we fought about the Eddie Lino charge. Henoch thought we needed to do a DNA test on the watch found down the road from Lino's car, to see if it was Caracappa's. I disagreed. I told him it wasn't Steve's watch. I was in Major Case with Caracappa at the time of the Lino hit. I knew Steve wouldn't wear a cheap watch like a Pulsar. His taste ran more to the expensive -- he wore suits hand-tailored in Hong Kong. More to the point, if you run a DNA swipe on the watch and it comes back negative, then it looks to the jury like you don't know what you're doing."
The claim that Tommy Dades had "made" the case upset investigators in the Eastern District as well as many in the Brooklyn DA's office. Dades had quit six months before the arrest of Caracappa and Eppolito; he had left of his own volition. He had nothing to do with Kaplan, before or during or after his proffer. The assertion that Dades "made" the case was absurd to many insiders. But tensions remained between those involved, as frequently occurred in the rough and tumble of New York City OC cases. Much of the dispute inside the Eastern District revolved around semantics. What did "making" the case mean? What was the "case"? Was it "made" when Kaplan flipped, or did "making" the case demand the yearlong investigation to corroborate Kaplan and then present the evidence to the jury? To a large extent, the term meant different things to different investigators and lawyers. For Oldham, the case was "made" when Kaplan agreed to talk. There was an enormous amount of work to be done, but once Kaplan agreed to divulge the actions of Eppolito and Caracappa the key pieces of the puzzle had been put in place. For Robert Henoch and his team of attorneys inside the Eastern District, "making" the case meant securing a conviction. Both definitions of "making" a case were arguably valid.
The task of placing the case before a jury fell to Henoch, and his two associates, Mitra Hormozi and Daniel Wenner. Kaplan's narration of events was critical, and his testimony would make or break the trial, but it was also vital that every shred of evidence that corroborated Kaplan, including Caracappa's check of the wrong Nicky Guido, be amassed, structured, and prepared for presentation to a jury. In addition, other witnesses would have to be interviewed and prepared.
The lead resources for Henoch in the months after the arrest were Bobby Intartaglio and Joel Campanella, both experts on organized crime. Oldham chafed. He and Henoch started to argue even more. Oldham had chosen Henoch, and now Oldham felt pushed to the margins.
"The Caracappa and Eppolito case was an orphan for years," Oldham said. "Many people wanted to get them but no one thought it could be done. The FBI and DEA wouldn't put any resources into it. Mark Feldman gave it to the Brooklyn DA's office. But once the case was made, there was a gold rush. Everyone wanted to jump on the bandwagon. It was getting crowded and I wanted off."
Oldham was also caught up in other cases. He got a letter from an inmate in the New York state system named Oswaldo Medea saying he wanted to talk about the murder of a police officer in the past. "I researched his claim and I couldn't find a murder of a police officer that was unsolved. The NYPD claimed we had solved every murdered officer case but two. Then I realized that the NYPD had absorbed the New York Housing Police in 1995. The cop Medea was talking about was a housing cop, so he wasn't technically a cop. I brought Medea down from Attica. He was doing multiple life sentences. He was a very scary guy. Wiry and mean, you could see he would kill you if he got riled. Another inmate had told me he had twenty-three bodies. Medea told me it was actually more like forty. He was very serious about being who he was. Medea had a code of honor. He said he would snitch on himself but no one else. He admitted he killed the cop. It was a coup, closing an old murder of a police officer. All Medea wanted for his cooperation was to spend ten years in federal prison in Florida. He knew he was never getting out, but he wanted to retire to a cell in a warm-weather state. In return we would close the murder of a police officer, which means something to my kind. We don't like open police murders. They send the wrong message. Every cop wants to close those cases, even if takes thirty years. But the front office wouldn't sign off on the deal. They didn't want it to seem like the government was rewarding Medea's behavior.
"The fights were enervating. I was feeling depleted -- not just physically but like my beliefs were out of date. They called us dinosaurs around the office, the law enforcement counterparts to Burt Kaplan and the last of the old-school hard cases. The office politics were killing me. I knew I wasn't going to get better cases than Louie and Steve, and a guy who professed to have killed forty people plus a cop. On the flip side, it couldn't get any worse. For the first time in the Eastern District I was being told what to do. I was told to stay away from organized crime cases. I was ending up where I began when I first came to the Major Case Squad and Caracappa locked me out of the Organized Crime Homicide Unit. Working on Steve and Louie didn't win me any friends. The opposite.
"The years had taken a toll. Detectives will tell you there is only so much murder and misery you can take. There comes a time when you either submit and you will be diminished if you stay on the job, or you get out and try something else in life. I decided it was time to retire. I was done. I was finished. Tired, worn-out, ready for a new challenge." [1]
A BODY APPEARS
On the morning of March 31, 2005, three weeks after the arrest of Caracappa and Eppolito, NYPD helicopters hovered above a parking lot on Nostrand Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. Below, Dr. Bradley Adams from the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner excavated the earth underneath a covered parking shed. A leading forensic anthropologist, tasked during the nineties with exhuming the remains of more than fifty American servicemen buried during the Korean and Vietnam wars, the youthful and earnest scientist diligently sifted through the soil looking for evidence of disturbance. Adams dug slowly, carefully, using his hands and a masonry trowel in the sandy silt and clay. Signs of digging, or compaction, would indicate that he was looking in the right spot. The only clue Adams had was a report that a body was buried in the earth under one of the parking sheds.
The lead had come from a tiny, seemingly insignificant document buried inside an NYPD murder file nearly twenty years old. Going through the evidence boxes related to the 1987 homicide of Frank Santora Jr., the cadre had come across Santora's phone book. At the time, Burton Kaplan was being debriefed by Henoch in a New Jersey motel. During the proffer sessions, Kaplan had said that when Caracappa and Eppolito snatched Jimmy Hydell in the fall of 1986, they had taken him to a parking lot in order to transfer him to the trunk of their car for the hand off to Casso at the Toys 'R' Us at the end of Flatbush Avenue. Kaplan remembered that Santora and Eppolito had a connection inside the Brooklyn lot where they had taken Hydell that day. It was noticed that Santora's telephone book contained an entry for "Pete's tow truck" and two numbers, one in Brooklyn, the other in Pennsylvania. Oldham and his cadre colleagues tracked down the numbers and found they led to a parking lot on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. Further inquiries had identified a man named Pete Franzone as the operator of the lot in the eighties.
On the day Caracappa and Eppolito were arrested in Las Vegas, Henoch had instructed FBI Special Agent Michael Wolf to approach Franzone and inquire about his knowledge of the two retired NYPD detectives. Panicked, Franzone denied any connection. He was terrified that Special Agent Wolf was, in fact, an impersonator sent by Caracappa and Eppolito to see if Franzone would rat on them -- and kill him if he did. After Wolf left, Franzone picked up the yellow pages and called the first attorney he saw in the book, Alan Abramson, a lawyer who just happened to be a former assistant district attorney for the Brooklyn DA. Franzone told Abramson that a man was buried under a concrete slab in one of the parking sheds he used to manage. Abramson convinced Franzone that he needed to tell law enforcement what he knew about the two "mafia cops" making headlines at the time.
On April 1 Dr. Adams returned to the site and began excavation in an adjacent garage. The FBI Evidence Response Team brought a small backhoe to expedite the process. A large block of concrete formed the floor of the garage. The slab was removed. As he began to dig, Dr. Adams quickly saw indications of white material flecked in the soil. He thought it was lime, a substance believed by many to speed the process of decomposition -- when in fact the chemical composition slows insect activity and therefore keeps a body intact longer. He began to dig with great care. As he went deeper he encountered a piece of black fabric. Dr. Adams probed further, the hole reaching down three and then four feet. The soil was extremely loose. Moving his hands through the earth, Dr. Adams felt the shape of a shoulder blade. Gently removing the remaining dirt, he revealed the decomposed corpse of a man lying in the fetal position, his head bent and arms and legs folded under his torso.
The pit measured twenty-nine inches in diameter and was precisely five feet deep. Dr. Adams removed the body. The man's head was disconnected, part of normal decomposition, and stuck in a plastic Shop Rite shopping bag. The remnant of a yarmulke clung to his head. His wrists were tied behind his back. He was wearing rubber galoshes over his shoes, indicating he had been killed in the winter. A wallet was removed from his pocket. The American Express card inside was for one Isidor A. Greenwald of Blue River Gems Inc. He had been shot twice in the back of the head. One slug exited through his forehead. The other slug exited through his left eye. For nearly two decades, this had been the unmarked grave of the jeweler Israel Greenwald.
BEFORE THE JUDGE
The federal courthouse of New York City's Eastern District is located at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. It is a landmark for both sides of the organized crime industry -- gangsters and cops. Over the decades, hundreds of Brooklyn wiseguys have entered the courthouse's revolving doors, some acquitted and returned to the streets, the vast majority convicted and transported on a Bureau of Prisons bus to a penitentiary on the outskirts of a town in middle America.
In their first appearance in court, Caracappa and Eppolito seemed dazed as they emerged from the holding cells. The two former detectives had been held in Las Vegas and then transferred to Atlanta and from there to Brooklyn and the Metropolitan Detention Center. Both men appeared shaken as they gazed at the onlookers packed in the gallery. Caracappa was sickly, pale, and disoriented. Eppolito appeared in worse condition. Dressed in prison garb -- T-shirt, cotton slacks, slip-on sneakers -- Eppolito had the pallor of a man at death's door.
Judge Jack Weinstein stared back at them with cold solemnity. Eighty-three years old, tall, still muscular, his face distinguished by a hawkish nose and prominent eyebrows, Weinstein was arguably the best trial judge in the country. A longtime professor at Columbia University and author of an authoritative text, Weinstein on Evidence, he had been appointed to the bench in 1967 by President Lyndon Johnson. In the decades since, he had established a reputation for maverick decisions, often of a liberal bent, and a courtroom manner that moved quickly from courtly gentility to sharp irritability. The august cadences of his voice suggested the dispassionate grandeur of the late actor John Houseman. Born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1922, Weinstein had been raised in Brooklyn and in the thirties appeared as an actor on Broadway, in productions of Subway Express and I Love an Actress, as well as auditioned for a part in the 1928 production of Peter Pan starring famed lesbian actress and theatrical impresario Eva Le Gallienne.
Judge Weinstein was no innocent. During his teenage years, he drove a truck on the docks of Brooklyn, exposing him to the criminal forces that controlled the commercial underworld and shaped Gaspipe Casso, junior and senior. Weinstein had served as a submarine officer in the Pacific during World War II. In the final days of the conflict, after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the subsequent Japanese surrender, Weinstein's submarine got an enemy ship in its sights while on patrol. The war was over but hostilities had not officially ceased. The captain of the American submarine trained his torpedo sights on the ship. Weinstein, a junior officer, asked if it was necessary to sink the ship -- and kill the men aboard. The captain replied that he was still under orders. The ship was struck, and the crew perished. The experience seared Weinstein, and provided the impetus for a lifelong interest in the existential question of what a man with power should do when literal adherence to the letter of the law seemed to thwart justice. It would be a question that would find its way into the fates of the men who now appeared before him.
Vigorous in his great age, often rising with the dawn to row or swim in Long Island Sound near his suburban home, Weinstein remained perhaps the most prolific judge in the Eastern District. Intellectually, he was the equal of any sitting judge in the country -- and known for wanting to be known as such. As he heard both criminal and civil matters, as do all federal trial judges, many of Weinstein's decisions were animated by the dilemmas created when courts are confronted by large social questions. For years Weinstein refused to enforce draconian mandatory drug sentences, which frequently imprisoned low-level mules and couriers caught with small amounts of narcotics for decades. He had been instrumental in the creation of class-action lawsuits, deciding cases involving veterans of the Vietnam War who had been exposed to Agent Orange, illnesses caused by asbestos, and the impact of antidepressants on mental health. Over the years, hundreds of writs for habeas corpus -- claims of convicts saying they had been unjustly convicted -- had piled up in the dockets of the judges in the Eastern District, a backlog thought impossible to clear. Single-handedly, Judge Weinstein took all of the claims and worked through more than five hundred in one year. Most were frivolous but approximately a dozen inmates had their claims vindicated. He was, in sum, a man of Olympian talent and industry, fearsomely independent in habit and mind.
Like all Brooklyn judges, Judge Weinstein had encountered his share of organized crime cases. Over the years members of all five New York crime families had appeared before him, as had the various populations of the OC industry in Brooklyn -- criminals, cops, reporters, attorneys, judges. It had been Jack Weinstein who had tried the case of Vincent Chin Gigante in 1996. [2] In a profile by the New York Times after the Gigante conviction, it was noted that at trial Weinstein had finally managed to get Gigante to stop wearing pajamas and a bathrobe and to dress appropriately for court. "To liberals," said the article, "Weinstein is the emblem of the 1960's notion that the country's problems can be solved by good intentions and that the legal system can be a tool for reform. To conservatives, he is the epitome of judicial power run amok." A legal scholar from Yale Law School was quoted saying of Weinstein, "He thinks of himself as a man who can integrate the formal requirements of the law with the practical requirements of justice." He is known in legal circles for his prodigious ego; the New York Times reported that a courthouse joke about the judge went, "God has been seeing a psychiatrist lately because He thinks He is Jack Weinstein." Friends of Weinstein's were interviewed, and it was said that beneath the gruff, confident exterior he did not believe he had lived up to his own goals in life. Evelyn, his wife of nearly sixty years, who worked as a psychiatric social worker, said that she didn't recognize the person lionized by his colleagues. "I always think he doesn't think he's done enough," she said.
United States v. Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito would be Judge Weinstein's last great case, perhaps drawing more worldwide media attention than any matter that had ever come before him. It was a trial Weinstein was uniquely qualified to oversee for many reasons, not least of which because he had a long-standing and intimate awareness of the criminal career of Burton Kaplan. In the early seventies and again in the early eighties, Weinstein had tried and sentenced Kaplan. Kaplan's wife and daughter, Eleanor and Deborah, had gone before Weinstein to plead for leniency. In 1973, Kaplan had written to Weinstein from Lewisburg Federal Prison seeking leniency. "I have never been involved in any violence in any form, physical or verbal, in my life," Kaplan wrote. "I detest it and all it stands for." Weinstein, it may be assumed, remembered this as "the cops" stood before him.
In a series of pretrial decisions, Weinstein appeared to live up to his reputation for liberality on the bench. The statute of limitations and the fiveyear time limit to bring a RICO prosecution troubled him in particular. The government's case was weak, Weinstein said, and there were significant problems with the way that the indictment was structured. Tying criminal acts in the eighties and early nineties in New York City to the criminality in Las Vegas in 2004 strained the plain meaning of the words of the law, Weinstein said. Henoch argued that the acts in New York and Las Vegas were connected for several reasons. The core players were the same. Eppolito continued to utilize his mob bona fides to make money for himself and Caracappa. They continued to commit crimes together, when the opportunity arose. They continued to associate with each other, in the pursuit of lawful and unlawful enterprises.
The scope of the case the government could present had to be determined. Over the years, Oldham had collected voluminous evidence regarding the character of the two cops. Caracappa had been known as "Stevie Aces" as a young man on Staten Island, caught during a burglary on a lumber yard. While Caracappa was partnered with Eppolito in the Brooklyn Robbery Squad, they had stuck up bodegas with paper bags over their heads, according to Kaplan. The evidence, if presented to a jury, would form the basis for a judgment about the kind of man Caracappa was -- despite his illustrious career on the NYPD.
The same was true for Eppolito. Mafia Cop was a study in the character of Eppolito -- reading its glorification of violence, crime, and the mafia was not likely to endear him to a jury. Within the dozens of hours of recorded conversations with accountant Steven Corso in Las Vegas, Eppolito had proved himself to be an ardent racist. He talked about "niggers" nearly as constantly as he avowed his love for violence and killing. If this information became evidence in a trial, the prejudicial effect would be enormous. Eppolito would be a deeply unsympathetic character -- especially to a jury likely to include a significant number of African- Americans.
Weinstein leaned heavily in favor of the defense. He decided to disallow" character evidence." This meant the two retired detectives would not be allowed to call witnesses to prove what exemplary members of the force they had been. If such evidence was submitted by the defense, it would "open the door" to the prosecution countering the testimony with their proof of Caracappa and Eppolito's bad character. Thus, the contents of Mafia Cop were excluded from trial. The tapes of recorded conversations in Las Vegas between Corso and Caracappa and Eppolito were to be edited to only the portions that bore directly on proof of guilt of the charges that they had trafficked narcotics and laundered money. Weinstein effectively split the difference, Solomon-like, forcing both sides to concentrate on the substance of the indictment.
Even with the strict limits placed on the government, Henoch proposed putting one hundred witnesses on the stand against Caracappa and Eppolito. The trial would last three to four months, Henoch told Weinstein.
The judge rejected the notion.
"Rethink your trial strategy," Weinstein said testily. He would not countenance the prosecution putting on a case that veered away from the charges. Many judges permitted the government to shape their evidence as they pleased, affording the defense the same opportunity. The approach appeared fair, but too often trials got out of control if attorneys were given too much leeway. Henoch was forced to cast a critical eye over his evidence. "What I was going to leave out was as important as what I was going to put in," Henoch recalled. "We reconfigured the indictment in order to more accurately reflect Steve and Louie's criminal scheme. The focus was properly placed on them, and less on cosa nostra. The two of them were their own criminal enterprise. Associates like Frank Santora, Burton Kaplan, Gaspipe Casso, Steven Corso, and Guido Bravatti came and went in their conspiracy, but the enterprise was ongoing. The case law was solid that a RICO enterprise can consist of two people. It had been done before. It wasn't that novel in that regard. We aimed to capture the essence of who they were and what they did."