Friends of the Family
Read Friends of the Family Online
Authors: Tommy Dades
and
Michael Vecchione
with
David Fisher
Friends of the Family
The Inside Story of the Mafia Cops Case
To my beloved mother, Della, you will forever be in my heart. Thank you for everything. To my daughter, Nicole, and my son, Frankie, I love you both. You are my life, God bless both of you. And to my sweet Lorraine, thank you for your trust and your love. God created an angel when he made you.
TOMMY DADES
To Mom and Grandma Rachel, although you’re not here, I know you’re with me all the time. To Pam, my wonderful sister, I know your hand will always be on my shoulder. I miss you and I will always love you. To my Dad, who throughout his life has taught me by example to always do the right thing, and to my sons, Brian and Andrew, for being the best sons a father could ask for.
MICHAEL VECCHIONE
This is the way the Eddie Lino hit came down:…
Tommy Dades didn’t bother knocking. He’d earned walk-in privileges a…
Good cops live for the rest of their life with…
Mike Vecchione was frying judges that day in late September…
During his career Tommy Dades had seen the potpourri of…
The first hint of a problem came from an innocuous…
The task force met in secret in a conference room…
The task force met each Tuesday morning. While some of…
As the investigation expanded into new and promising directions, trying…
In Las Vegas, the current investigation was progressing into the…
On May 26, 2004, Burt Kaplan was sitting in a…
“Isn’t it true, Mr. Kaplan, that in exchange for your…
The indictments were written but remained sealed as Roz Mauskopf’s…
The cold case that had been forgotten for more than…
June Lowe, Weinstein’s courtroom deputy, faced the jury, read the…
This is the way the Eddie Lino
hit came down: Lino was a capo in the Gambino crime family, John Gotti’s main guy. Lino was a made man; his greatest claim to infamy was that he had gunned down the Godfather, “Big Paulie” Castellano, in front of Spark’s Steakhouse in 1985. On the night of November 6, 1990, a little after seven
P.M
., Eddie Lino left the Cabrini Social Club on Avenue U in Bensonhurst. Supposedly he was on his way to a Gambino induction ceremony. Somebody was going to get made that night. He was driving his new Mercedes on the service road of the Belt Parkway. He probably never noticed the dark sedan following him.
Louis Eppolito was driving. Eppolito was a big guy, in both size and personality; he liked to tell people he was the most decorated detective in the history of the NYPD. Sitting next to him was his former partner, Steve Caracappa, the skinny guy. At that time Caracappa was assigned to the Organized Crime Homicide Unit inside the NYPD’s prestigious Major Case Squad, so he had access to all the verified information, gossip, and speculation about every wiseguy in the city.
Who knows if they had a plan or were just waiting for the right spot. But as Lino approached the Ocean Parkway exit, Caracappa slapped the red flasher on the dashboard and turned it on.
Lino had to notice it right away. Chances are he figured it was just another one of those pain-in-the-ass bullshit harassment stops. Some cops just busting his balls. But it was the cops, so he knew he had to stop. He pulled over to the side of the service road. Apparently he put the car in neutral and kept his foot on the brake. Whatever this was, it wasn’t going to take long. Probably Lino was looking in the rearview mirror as both doors of the unmarked cop car opened and two guys got out and walked toward his car. Lino rolled down the window.
Maybe they had met before. Wiseguys and detectives often get to know each other. It’s part of their business. Ships crashing in the night. As Caracappa walked the cop walk with Eppolito toward Lino’s car he probably kept his hand in his coat pocket, so Lino never saw the gun. Eppolito said in his big cop voice, “Hey, Frankie, how are you?”
Lino knew he was right; this was just a ball buster. They had stopped the wrong guy. These cops were looking for his cousin, Frankie “Curly” Lino, a Bonanno soldier. So maybe he relaxed a little bit. Maybe he even laughed at them a little, the jerks. “You got the wrong guy,” he said. “Frankie’s my cousin.”
Eppolito pointed toward something on the passenger-side floor. “What’s that on the floor?”
It was nothing. Some garbage. Lino leaned across the seat to pick it up.
As Lino turned his head Caracappa pulled out his gun, extended his arm, and aimed directly at the back of his skull. And pulled the trigger. Boom. Boom. Boom. Traffic racing home on the Belt more than smothered the sound. Caracappa kept firing into Lino’s body. Boom. Boom. Nine times.
Lino bled out all over the new leather seats. His foot slipped off the brake and the car rolled forward, dead man driving, until it crashed into a fence.
Caracappa put the gun back in his pocket and the two New York City police detectives walked casually back to the car. Just another night in the life of the two dirtiest cops in NYPD history.
Christmas Day 1986 was a
beautiful day for twenty-six-year-old Nicky Guido. As usual, his whole family was together at his parents’ house in Brooklyn, on Seventeenth Street in the Windsor Terrace neighborhood.
Nicky’s mother, Pauline, had given him a gold Christ head and then made her special manicotti. Things were going great for Nicky: He was working at the telephone company but he’d put in his papers for a city job with the fire department. But more than anything, he was thrilled about his new wheels, the bright red Nissan Maxima that was parked right outside the house. After dinner he brought his uncle Anthony outside to show off the car. It was overcast but warm for Christmas.
Nicky slid into the driver’s seat, and Anthony got into the passenger seat. Everything about Nicky was legitimate; he was a good kid working hard and earning a living, so there was absolutely no reason for Nicky Guido to pay any attention to the Cadillac that was drifting slowly down the block. When that big car pulled up right next to him and stopped just a few feet away, maybe he turned curiously to see what was going on, maybe he saw the three men in that car, and maybe he even saw the guns before they opened up at him from point-blank range. Nicky dived across the front seat, trying to protect his uncle—but he never had a chance. These shooters were from another world, a world that Nicky had no connection to.
The family heard the shots from inside the house. They came running outside. His mother, Pauline, looked into the bullet-riddled car. “I saw his heart was bleeding,” she said. “I went to touch his hand, but he must have died, because his fingers were cold…”
To the police none of this fit. This was clearly a mob hit, but Nicky was an innocent kid. Totally innocent. They looked hard, but they couldn’t find any connection. None. Why would the mob decide to go after this kid? The thing made no sense. So the case sat there, unsolved, for more than a decade.
Even after the whole thing
was done and the Mafia cops had been put in a cell to rot forever, there was still one question that never got answered: At the beginning, were these guys killers who became cops or were they cops who became killers? One thing for sure, though: They were the two worst men ever to wear the badge of the New York City Police Department.
Tommy Dades didn’t bother knocking. He’d earned
walk-in privileges a long time ago. He and Mike Vecchione had become close friends while solving a series of freezing cold cases. The two men formed a great team: Dades the detective, Vecchione the assistant DA in Brooklyn District Attorney Joe Hynes’s office. Tommy investigated and Mike prosecuted, real-life law and order. Mike looked up from the pile of papers stacked neatly on his desk. As always, he was dressed impeccably in a tie and jacket. “Hey, Tommy, what’s going on?”
Tommy settled down in the comfortable wooden chair on the visitor side of Vecchione’s neat desk. As always, his black leather jacket was hanging open and he was wearing a pair of absolutely spotless white sneakers. In his streets-of-Brooklyn accent he said, “I think I got another Dades Special.”
“Dades Special” was the catchphrase the two of them had invented to describe some unsolvable cold case that Dades had dug up from somewhere and decided to solve. Sometimes it came the other way, from Vecchione’s desk, and those were “Mike Specials.” Whatever this one was, Vecchione knew it was going to be good. One thing Mike knew for sure: Whenever Detective Tommy Dades got involved, life was always going to be interesting.
Maybe this story actually began the day they shot the union rep in the ass and accidentally killed him. Or maybe it began the day “Gaspipe” Casso tried to blow up John Gotti and got the wrong guy, a guy who made the mistake of dressing too well. Or it could have started when Mickey Boy Paradiso tried to kill Gaspipe, who escaped by running into the basement of a Chinese restaurant. Who knows, the whole thing might have started when Burt Kaplan, the One-Eyed Jew, went to jail in 1980 for conspiring to sell a million dollars a week in quaaludes. But for Tommy Dades it started, just like all the important stories of his life, with the mother.
Wherever it started, whenever it started, there is no question where it ended; it ended with the worst scandal in the history of the New York City Police Department. It ended with killer cops. Two highly decorated retired detectives charged with providing information to the Mafia that resulted in eight dead bodies—including a couple on which the cops were the triggermen. It ended with Detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa convicted of being on the Mafia payroll—$5,000 a month, with bonuses for extra work like a murder, for betraying more than forty thousand fellow New York City police officers. It ended with two lowlifes, two skells, disgracing the badge.
That’s a very big thing, the
worst
scandal in NYPD history. That history covers more than a century, and it includes half a million cops. Maybe more. The last time anything close happened was 1914, when Lieutenant Charles Becker—an associate of the street gangs who were running the city in those days—was charged and eventually executed for the murder of a gambling-club owner, Beansie Rosenthal, who was threatening to testify against him.
Police Lieutenant Becker ran his district tougher than a king, and he killed at least that one guy. But compared to these two cops that was nothing. That was a minor scrape. The extent of the damage that Eppolito and Caracappa did to the department may never be completely totaled. They gave up informants to the mob, who then murdered them. They informed the mob about wiretaps and investigations, they warned men who were about to be arrested to go on the lam, they forced innocent people to confess to crimes they hadn’t committed by threatening to kill their families, they provided whatever information the mob needed, they kidnapped people and turned them over to the wiseguys to be tortured and killed, and finally
they put on their badges, pulled their guns, and murdered at point-blank range. There’s no possible way of figuring how many investigations they destroyed, how many people died because of them. They were the absolute worst. No contest.
And like Charlie Becker, for a long time it looked like Eppolito and Caracappa would get away with murder. Both Eppolito and Caracappa had retired and were living in Las Vegas when a woman named Betty Hydell called Tommy Dades in 2003. Eppolito and Caracappa had bought large houses across the street from each other in a pristine subdivision named Spanish Palms. Things seemed nice and comfortable for them. “The Stick,” as the slender and taciturn Caracappa was occasionally called, was working for a security firm. He was known around Spanish Palms for rescuing stray animals and going to bed so early that his wife was always complaining about it. But his partner, from all reports the guy who gave the orders, Louis Eppolito, was still trying to catch the spotlight.
Even when he was a cop everything about Eppolito had been big and loud; his bodybuilder’s physique, his booming voice, his flashy clothes and expensive jewelry. He raised exotic snakes as pets and wore a serpent-head ring. Tommy Dades remembers meeting him twice, at Christmas parties two years in a row. The first year, Eppolito was wearing a black shirt with a white tie and was loaded down with jewelry. Dades remembers, “He looked like he was going to a Halloween party dressed as a gangster. He had nine bracelets, sixteen rings; he definitely wanted to be noticed. He was the kind of guy people either loved him or hated him. There was no in-between. I didn’t know him to judge him, but going by first impressions, I didn’t like him.”
Mike Vecchione knew him a lot better. “I had known about Louis Eppolito most of my life. I’d grown up in Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights with the white sheep of the Eppolito family.
“Everybody in the neighborhood knew all about the Eppolitos. There were four brothers; three of them ended up associated with the Gambino crime family, while the fourth brother was totally straight. In fact, to completely disassociate himself from his brothers, Joe Ippolito even spelled his name differently, starting it with an ‘I’ rather than an ‘E.’ My family was friends with the Ippolitos. We always referred to Joe and Ray and Paul as ‘the good Ippolitos.’ We all knew that ‘the bad Eppolitos’ were the mob
sters, even if at that age I wasn’t sure what a mobster was. Joe’s wife, Ray, worked closely with my mother and my aunt helping the nuns from the local church, St. Teresa of Avila. We were always at each other’s houses. I grew up playing with Louis Eppolito’s cousin Paul.
“I knew that Louis Eppolito had become a cop. Believe me, that was not a career choice anybody expected the son of one of the ‘bad Eppolitos’ to make. I’d never met him, but I guess I figured it was possible that crime didn’t run in his genes. Maybe Louis had rejected his family background.”
Eppolito had grown up in the Mafia. His father, Ralph, was a soldier in the Gambino family known as Fat the Gangster. An uncle, Jimmy the Clam, was a capo. Another uncle was also with the Gambinos. Louis supposedly had turned his back on his family to become a cop. Supposedly.
In Vegas Eppolito bought a $360,000, four-thousand-square-foot two-story house with a five-foot-high fountain on the lawn, two white pillars at the front, and the first swimming pool in the neighborhood. After retiring, he’d written a book about his career, ironically titled
Mafia Cop
. Maybe that title was an inside joke he shared with Caracappa. To earn a living he got bit parts in fourteen movies—his once-muscular build long gone, he had played a wiseguy appropriately named Fat Andy in
Goodfellas,
a drug dealer in
Company Business,
and an assassin in
Da Game of Life
—and had written the screenplay for a Charles Durning film called
Turn of Faith,
which had been financed by former boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini and actually received decent B-movie reviews, particularly for the “authenticity of the dialogue.” By 2003 he was pretty well known in Vegas. He was hustling to raise money to produce his screenplays and telling friends that
Mafia Cop
was about to become a TV series. Photographs he’d taken with celebrities hung all over his office walls and he proudly entertained cast members of
The Sopranos
at the house. Louis Eppolito was still trying desperately to run with the fast crowd. The one thing neither he nor Caracappa seemed worried about was the past catching up to them.
While Eppolito and Caracappa were out in Vegas, Detective First Grade Tommy Dades was running out the string on his extraordinary twenty-year career. He was assigned to the Intelligence Division in Brooklyn, basically trying to stay out of the way of his new boss. “I’d had great bosses for most of my career. But after 9/11 the whole business changed. We ended up with a deputy commissioner who came out of the CIA and his only concern
was terrorism. Nothing else mattered. Terrorism, that was it. We’d done great things. We’d solved twenty-five murders; we’d put at least a hundred wiseguys in prison. We’d established a better working relationship with the FBI and DEA than anybody in the history of the department. But the only thing this new boss wanted to know about my squad was when were we all retiring. He couldn’t care about anything else. He didn’t want to know from organized crime. When they finally closed our unit most of our files, years of work, just got thrown out in the street. It was a shame. I stood in the street going through the garbage and I actually found a tape that ended up being used in a federal trial.”
Tommy Dades was spending his last months on the job he loved deeply cleaning up old business when Betty Hydell called just to say hello—and within a few sentences the very old business became his future.
Betty Hydell was one of the mothers. Throughout his career Tommy had often taken the time to forge special relationships with the mothers. Mothers of victims, mothers of suspects, even mothers of killers. Long after his work on the crimes that had brought them together ended he kept in touch with them. If they needed help with something, navigating the system, figuring out where to get the best price on car repairs, even running the occasional errand, they called and he responded. Tommy was one of those people who had made friends everywhere. He had his own network, the Tommy Network. He helped people and they helped him. Whatever needed to be done, Tommy had a friend he could call to get it done. Sometimes his relationships encompassed the other family members, the father, brother, or sister, but the mother was always the heart of it. A lot of them loved him for it. They had his home number and they called him often, knowing he really cared. Knowing that their husband, their son, was more than a forgotten file somewhere. Each Christmas Tommy and Ro, his wife, received cards, flowers, and gifts from the families of cases he’d worked. With Tommy, it wasn’t hard to figure out where the caring came from.
Tommy had never met his father. His whole life he had believed he was an only child, raised by his mother. The two of them became extremely close; he remembers, “When I couldn’t find her, I’d get panicky. She was an amazing woman, and beautiful, really beautiful. She worked for her whole life at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, ending up as an administrator in the mental health department. The same hospital where I was born. She
earned a decent living, so we weren’t starving, and she was satisfied as long as she had enough money to buy nice clothes and play the numbers. We lived in Brooklyn, in the same code forever.
“I was a tough kid, an aggressive kid. I was basically on my own from the time I was eight or nine years old. Starting when I was thirteen she’d run to Atlantic City for weekends with her loser boyfriends, leaving me alone. I easily could’ve gone the other way. I was offered a lot of opportunities to do the wrong thing, but most of the time I walked away. Most of the time. But the truth is that I stole a few cars, I stole copper from construction sites. Things of opportunity. I never planned anything illegal. There were times when it was tempting; I had no money. I used to stand with my friends on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street in Brooklyn. The people I was with were selling anything anybody wanted, pot, coke, whatever. They were my friends. One of my best friends growing up is a made guy today in Queens. We see each other—not as much as we used to—but we never talk about what we’re doing. I could have easily been in that mix; I don’t know why I didn’t do it. I think I just didn’t want to make life any tougher for my mother.
“We had this amazing connection, me and my mother. The morning she died I was working. She’d been sick but lately had been feeling a little better. For some reason about seven o’clock in the morning my throat started to close up, I started hyperventilating. I was having a complete anxiety attack. I told my partner Jimmy Harkins that I must’ve eaten something bad, because I’d never felt that bad before. I said, ‘Maybe I should go to the hospital and get a shot before I end up dying in the car with you.’ Instead I signed out early and figured I’d stop at the hospital near my house. But I started feeling a little better and decided I’d take a nap and see how I felt. I was half-asleep when my aunt called to tell me she couldn’t get in contact with my mother.
“I started calling my mother’s house but nobody answered. I was trying to ignore this whole thing, pretend if I didn’t pay attention to it everything would be okay. I called my close friend and partner Mike Galletta and asked him to go by my mother’s house. I couldn’t do it myself, I just couldn’t. Instead I went to the doctor’s office. This was a doctor I didn’t know so the nurse gave me some forms to fill out. One of the questions was ‘Are your parents alive?’ I put down for my father ‘Unknown,’ and for my mother I
put down ‘Yes.’ But as I was checking the box I knew the answer was going to be no.
“All the dead bodies I’d seen in my life, all the murder victims, I couldn’t go to the house. When EMS got there they said she’d been dead about five hours. Which was almost exactly the time I started hyperventilating. That’s a fact, that’s exactly the way it happened.”
Growing up Tommy learned what the streets could do to a kid—and to that kid’s mother. So even when he found himself dealing with a real lowlife, he tried to make reality a little easier for the mother. “When you speak to the mother,” he said, “it’s not about the kid. You’re doing it for her.”
Through the years the Dades had become especially close to Betty Hydell. Betty Hydell’s two sons, Jimmy and Frankie, went bad early. Real bad. Jimmy Hydell was a stone-cold killer. He had even arranged the murder of his longtime girlfriend, an innocent young woman named Annette DiBiase, after he beat her up and she started talking out loud about him. A friend of his shot her in the head five times and buried her in the woods. It probably was a favor. But by the time Tommy met Betty, Jimmy was long gone. All that was known about his disappearance was that one day he’d walked out of his house on Bangor Street on Staten Island to go to a meeting in Brooklyn and no one ever found his body. Nobody cared too much about another dead wiseguy either, nobody except the mother.