Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (95 page)

Immediately after his defection, the FBI advertised Casso as a prized catch, equal to Sammy the Bull Gravano in his ability to provide them with ammunition to defeat the Cosa Nostra. In fact, except for his appearance in May 1996 before a Senate subcommittee exploring the Mafia’s alliance with Russian gangsters to steal gasoline excise taxes, Casso’s potential testimony went unused. Prosecutors never called him as a witness before a grand jury to obtain a Mob indictment nor at a trial to help convict a single mobster.

Gradually, the cooperation deal unraveled. The ultimate blow to Casso’s bargain came in August 1997, when prosecutors summarily rescinded the agreement and banished him from the Witness Protection Program. He has the
unenviable distinction of being the only major Mafia defector thrown out of the program. The extraordinary step, prosecutors said, was brought about by Casso’s duplicity, lies, and crimes committed after signing the cooperation agreement.

Citing a list of infractions occurring after his guilty plea, the government accused Casso of resorting to his old habit of bribing guards and prison employees for special treatment. He gave them cash, theater tickets, and new auto tires in exchange for their smuggling into his prison quarters assorted delicacies, including vodka, wine, sushi, steaks, turkey, veal cutlets, a disposable camera, radios, and toiletries. A second charge was an alleged assault on another Mob
turncoat
in the protective-custody unit, a former Colombo soldier with whom Casso was feuding.

The government’s timing and decision to remove Casso, however, undoubtedly rested on a more contentious matter: his attempt to discredit two celebrated Cosa Nostra traitors, Sammy Gravano and Al D’Arco. Shortly before Casso was booted out of the program, he sent prosecutors a letter challenging testimony offered at important Mob trials by Gravano and D’Arco. Disputing the government’s stellar witness at John Gotti’s 1992 conviction, Casso claimed that Sammy the Bull lied when he swore to never having trafficked in narcotics. In the 1970s, Casso said, he had sold large amounts of marijuana to Gravano, and later Gravano offered to sell him a cache of heroin from China for $160,000.

Casso’s letter also accused Gravano of ordering the stabbing of the Reverend Al Sharpton, a controversial political activist, in January 1991, while Sharpton was leading a protest march of mainly black youths through Bensonhurst, a white neighborhood with numerous Mob hangouts. At first, Casso insisted that on the day after the Sharpton stabbing, Gravano met with him in Brooklyn and told him about his involvement. Easily disproving this assertion, prosecutors pointed out that on the day of the assault and for months afterward, Sammy the Bull was locked up, awaiting trial as a codefendant in Gotti’s RICO trial.

As for his former flunky Al D’Arco, Casso ripped into him, describing his testimony as replete with lies and exaggerations about crimes and events, including his claim that he had been appointed the family’s acting boss. Casso wrote that prosecutors and the FBI allowed D’Arco to misrepresent his rank because it escalated his prestige and importance as a government witness. Dismissing Casso’s assertions as “a litany of false accusations,” prosecutors fired back that his misconduct spelled finus to the possibility of their submitting a recommendation, known in federal courts as a 5K1.1 application, for a reduced sentence in return for his cooperation. Almost from the start of his presumed
“turning,” prosecutors said, they believed Casso had been withholding information and misleading them about his participation in crimes. Two lie-detector tests administered to him in the early days of his defection indicated that he had been deceptive about the extent of his concealed money and about his attempts to kill Judge Nickerson and Charles Rose. (It was odd, however, that the prosecutors belatedly cited the lie-detector results after allowing Casso to remain in the protection program for almost four years.) Classifying Casso as a discredited outcast of no further value to them, the Justice Department wanted him finally sentenced on the full seventy-two-count indictment he had pleaded to in 1994.

Before the sentencing, Casso sent three more handwritten letters, totaling thirty-two pages, to Federal Judge Frederic Block, offering a minutely detailed rebuttal to the government’s condemnation. Pleading for reinstatement in the protection program, Casso characterized himself as having been an honorable, decent mafioso. Adopting a Nuremburg-style defense, he attributed most of his crimes to the compulsion to follow Cosa Nostra orders. He saw himself wrongly impugned as a psychopathic killer, insisting that he had actually pulled the trigger and murdered only two men, not the vast numbers cited by the prosecution. One of these two acknowledged victims, Jimmy Hydell, had first tried to kill him in an ambush, he pointed out. Implying that Hydell deserved to die for an added reason, Casso wrote that Hydell had abducted, raped, and killed a young woman shortly before trying to murder him.

Casso conceded that he had wrongly implicated Sammy Gravano in the stabbing of Reverend Sharpton. But it was an honest mistake, a flawed memory of a long-ago conversation with other mobsters about the incident. Otherwise, he resolutely clung to the rest of his story that Gravano had engaged in drug deals, and that Gravano and Al D’Arco had committed perjury in several Mob trials.

Regarding allegations that he had bribed guards for special treatment, Casso asserted that he had been subjected to an unfair double standard. It was through him, he pointed out, that the government learned about widespread smuggling and other crimes committed by Mafia turncoats in prison special-protection units. FBI agents, he continued, cautioned him to keep quiet about these matters because they needed testimony from the defectors and were determined to keep their songbirds comfortable and happy.

Casso was certain he had been singled out for draconian punishment, after three and half years of cooperation, solely because of his allegations about Gravano. His letter to the judge suggested that prosecutors feared he could invoke
a nightmare for the Justice Department by impugning Gravano and overturning John Gotti’s conviction. To test his truthfulness, Casso asked for an independently administered lie-detector test before sentence was imposed.

His limited education, Casso wrote, made it difficult to explain himself. “I’m not denying my passed [sic] life of crime.” Imploring the judge for a second chance in the Witness Protection Program, he offered a single motive for becoming a cooperating witness. “Only because I wanted the opportunity to experience a whole new lifestyle for myself.”

Casso’s petitions were no match for the combined credentials of prosecutors and FBI agents, who categorically refuted his assertions that they had unjustly revoked an agreement with him.

Yet a puzzling question arose from the blowup over the plea bargain. Why would Casso—an intelligent criminal—lie and disparage Gravano and D’Arco when he apparently had nothing to gain by defying the authorities who held the key to his own future? Prosecutors and agents offered several explanations for his turnabout. They theorized that he acted out of perverse jealousy, that unlike Gravano and DAJCO, he would not be a center-stage, headlined witness, glorified as a reformed mobster. He had expected to be used in at least one high-profile case, the potential trial of the Genovese godfather, Vincent Gigante. But the government decided Gaspipe’s record was too blemished to qualify him as an effective witness in any trial. “Using him would be like putting Adolf Hitler on the witness stand,” O’Connell commented. “It was impossible to overcome his history and make him sound credible.”

At that point, according to the prosecutorial analysis, Casso realized his sentence would not be sharply reduced, and he declared war against the government. Lawyers and agents speculated that in order to guarantee his survival in prison, he decided to curry favor with the mafiosi by claiming that he had returned to the fold, and had attacked the two prominent Mafia traitors Gravano and D’Arco.

George Stamboulidis, the victorious prosecutor in the Colombo family trials, who was brought into Casso’s case, pointed out that Gaspipe had been given a golden chance to turn over a new leaf, even though he had “more horrendous baggage than virtually any cooperating witness the government has ever signed up.” The government acknowledged that Casso had provided valuable information. But the crimes he committed in protective custody automatically violated the cooperation agreement and destroyed his usefulness as a truthful witness, Stamboulidis argued in a court brief.

In July 1998, Judge Block accepted totally the prosecution’s position, rejecting Casso’s motion for a reduced sentence and a return to the Witness Protection Program. “Simply put,” Block ruled, “criminal behavior by cooperators should be condemned, not condoned, and repudiation of the Government’s obligations under a cooperation agreement is an effective means of delivering such an important message.” The other message the judge gave the fifty-six-year-old Casso was a sentence of thirteen consecutive life sentences, a monumental 455 years in prison. Casso also forfeited $1.5 million in assets seized by the government as having been obtained through criminal acts.

“My original prosecutors told me not to worry,” Casso grumbled as he was led away. “But they never had any intention of keeping their promises.”

For years afterward, Casso’s lawyers continued their battle for his sentence reduction and his restoration to the Witness Protection Program. The first appeal by attorney Matthew Brief condemned prosecutors for acting in bad faith and reneging on the plea-bargain solely because of Casso’s narcotics allegations against Sammy Gravano.

When that tactic failed, a new lawyer, John D. B. Lewis, raised a claim that a conflict of interest had prevented Brief, the lawyer picked by prosecutors, from adequately representing Casso during the plea-bargaining period. Brief said in an affidavit that prosecutors Rose and O’Connell would brook no delay in getting Casso’s guilty plea formalized before a judge, and contended that they threatened to bring ethical and disciplinary charges against him when he tried to withdraw from the case before Casso signed the cooperation deal. Brief stayed on, though troubled by the hasty arrangements, the lack of time to confer properly with Casso, and the absence of any tangible promises of leniency.

Despite voluminous motions by Lewis, the appeals courts denied Casso’s numerous claims of prosecutorial misconduct, and that he had been railroaded primarily for denigrating Sammy the Bull Gravano as a narcotics profiteer. In 2002, four years after he was dismissed as an untrustworthy liar, his credibility was remarkably strengthened when Gravano pleaded guilty to engaging in large-scale Ecstasy drug sales. Suddenly, at least one aspect of Gravano’s trial testimony for the government was suspect, and Casso’s statements became more believable.

“From day one, Casso told the truth that Gravano had a long history of being involved in drugs, and it was rejected out-of-hand by the feds,” Lewis said.
The lawyer stressed that after years of disbelieving and ridiculing Casso, the government eventually accused Gravano of being the number-one drug dealer in the Southwest. “Gravano obviously knew the ins and outs of the drug world, and it was just one of the many areas in which Casso was telling the truth and the government didn’t want to hear it,” Lewis added.

But there was a novel—and dramatic—twist in Casso’s battle with the government.

After Casso’s eleven years of trying to become a cooperating witness, an explosive indictment complicated his struggle for a shorter sentence. In March 2005, the two detectives he had pinpointed in 1994 as mercenaries were officially identified as Mob hit men.

Now retired, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, were charged with personally committing one murder for Gaspipe and helping him track down and slay seven other enemies. A federal indictment in Brooklyn alleged that the detective partners happily worked for Casso from 1985 until his capture in 1993. They received as much as $4,000 a month, with bonuses for exceptional spying and homicide tasks, according to the accusations.

Details in the indictment differed in some degree from Casso’s assertions in court documents and in interviews with the author of how the crimes were committed and his motives for carrying them out. Nevertheless, the indictment and prosecutors’ statements in effect proclaimed that Casso had provided substantially accurate accounts about recruiting and corrupting the detectives.

The charges specified that the two detectives personally executed Frank Lino, the Gambino capo, who was gunned down after being stopped on a Brooklyn highway. They were also cited in another particularly heinous act: abducting James Hydell and delivering him in a car trunk to Casso, who proceeded to torture and kill him. Hydell was brutalized by Casso in revenge for his assassination attempt.

The arrests resulted from new witnesses coming forward and the reopening of the police-corruption case by the district attorney and the U.S. Attorneys’ office in Brooklyn. Five investigators said they uncovered fresh evidence, including audio- and videotapes involving Eppolito. None of the new witnesses was immediately identified. But defense lawyers speculated that one of them was Burt Kaplan, the Mob associate named long ago by Casso as his intermediary to venal lawmen he classified as “my detectives.” After eight hard years in a federal
penitentiary, at age seventy, Kaplan reportedly had a change of heart about becoming a canary and testifying that he was Casso’s contact man with the bribed cops.