Friends of the Family (16 page)

Vecchione was astonished that the piece had gotten made. He guessed that the Attorney General’s office and the Bureau of Prisons hadn’t con
ferred about it, because there was no way the Feds could have benefited from it. The segment revealed no new information. Apparently Casso had mentioned the two cops in his interview but it had been edited out—at the time it was done Eppolito and Caracappa were not being investigated and any accusation of criminal conduct could have resulted in a huge slander suit against CBS. But the segment was still a strong accusation of malfeasance against the government.

What attracted his attention wasn’t so much what Caproni said as the way she said it. Firm. Unyielding. A roadblock of granite. It became obvious to Vecchione as he watched Caproni over and over how much the Feds had to lose if they gave Casso’s testimony any countenance. Only a few months earlier Caproni had become the FBI’s general counsel, the head lawyer. It would not do her, or Feldman, or Henoch, or any of them a bit of good if it turned out the Feds had failed to prosecute two of the dirtiest cops in history to protect their case against John Gotti. The best thing that could happen for all of them was that this prosecution disappear. And as long as the Feds controlled Casso and Kaplan, they had the ability to make that magic.

Vecchione sat at his desk long into the evening, wondering if that might actually be true. Had the Feds really buried the case against the cops? Was that possible? He no longer held many illusions about the law, as at that moment he was deeply involved in the prosecution of a judge for taking kickbacks in return for assigning a lawyer to profitable cases, but this? This was very hard to accept.

He called D. B. Lewis once again. Maybe there was some way around this dilemma. “You were right,” he admitted. “I’ve really gotten a lot of resistance.”

“I told you that was going to happen,” Lewis said. “They hate my client.”

Vecchione didn’t want Lewis to know about his suspicions. So he told him simply that he wasn’t convinced Casso’s plea agreement had been terminated for the announced reasons and that he was doing some more checking.

He tried to treat this as if it was simply a difficult negotiation, believing that it made too much sense for everybody not to work it out eventually, but his frustration level rose with each conversation. He had always taken great pride in his ability to move juries with stirring summations. He’d made
courtrooms cry with emotional appeals. But Feldman wouldn’t be moved. Vecchione spoke with him once again, by this time fighting to maintain his composure. “Let’s talk about this, Mark,” he said as impassively as possible. He laid out for him the whole strategy, reminding him how much work had already been put into this case and how close they were to making a major breakthrough. “I just don’t understand this. Why would we let this case go by the boards when I can take Casso to the grand jury, get an indictment, then God knows what’ll happen? Maybe the world’ll open up for us. Maybe one of them, maybe Caracappa, will flip. Who knows? C’mon, Mark, let’s take the first step. Let’s get the murder indictment and go from there.”

Feldman just wouldn’t budge. “I won’t give Casso anything,” he responded as calmly as any poker player holding all the cards in the deck. “We will give him nothing.” He paused and then finally allowed the first ray of hope to shine through. “I’ll tell you what though, here’s the best I can do for you. You can tell D. B. Lewis that we’re not interested in his client.”

Vecchione took a deep, calming breath. A guarantee not to prosecute Casso would have the same effect as official immunity, but with fewer potential political implications. Nobody’s butt would be on the line. “That’s terrific, Mark,” he said with as much enthusiasm as he could manage. “If that’s your position, how about putting it down on paper or at least talking to Lewis and telling him that? Maybe that’ll be enough for him.”

The clouds of reality obliterated that small ray of hope. “I’m not going to talk to anybody about Casso,” he insisted. “I don’t want to talk about him at all. I don’t care about Casso and we’re not giving him anything.”

Mike Vecchione hung up the phone and gathered himself. Then he picked it up again to take another shot with Lewis. There are times when persistence wins out. “Just look at this for a minute,” he told Lewis. “We’re going to convict these guys. We have the evidence. If your guy goes along with us he’s going to get credit for it. Let me make your guy look good. We’re an agency with credibility who believes your guy. We’ve corroborated enough of his story to make me understand he was truthful in what he said. I’m willing to put that in papers afterward. I’m willing to outline for you in motion papers what his cooperation was, why we believed him. It’s like I told you, I’m going to convict these guys and he’s going to be the center of our case. That’ll give you not only the papers, but you’ll have a conviction based on his testimony. He can go back and say to a judge, ‘See what I did?
I’m not a liar.’ If the state comes along and says we believe him, it’s got to help your guy.”

Lewis sighed. “I think that’s terrific. But you have to understand our position…”

Mike just sat there, shaking his head. Casso was doing thirteen life sentences. Did it really make a difference if the government gave him immunity on the Hydell murder? So what if he got convicted of that crime; how much more time could he do?

That’s when Vecchione made up his mind that he was going to indict Casso for his role in the Jimmy Hydell murder. He was going to put him with Eppolito and Caracappa. “I had Gaspipe’s confession on
60 Minutes,
” he says. “I had the ability to corroborate the crime; we got that from Betty Hydell. And we were starting to put together several other pieces to make the case.”

Meanwhile, Tommy Dades was making his own effort to get to Casso. His situation was considerably different than Vecchione’s. Mike needed him to testify in a courtroom; all Dades wanted from him was information. He figured Casso, or his attorney, would recognize the benefits that might accrue from cooperating with him. If Casso could convince Dades that he was essential to making the case against Eppolito and Caracappa, he might be able to negotiate a substantially better deal with the lawyers—and maybe even get Feldman to compromise.

Two different mornings Dades went to work believing he’d be meeting with Casso later that day. The first time, he discovered that Feldman had placed a block on Casso. Gaspipe had been brought to New York as a potential witness in a federal case, so no one could speak with him without Feldman’s permission.

Dades called Feldman, who agreed to let him speak to Casso—but only after the current trial was done. This was simple for Feldman, who told Dades, “You want to go talk to him, go talk to him.” As Feldman had promised, when the trial ended—Casso didn’t testify—he lifted the block. Again Tommy planned to go see Casso, but this time it was D. B. Lewis who wouldn’t let his client speak to anyone.

At about this same time the two Suffolk County detectives were meeting with Casso to talk about the trash-hauling murders. These detectives conferred with Dades, who suggested questions they might ask. The problem,
Dades discovered, was that Casso was lying to those detectives. In several instances he completely contradicted statements in his own 302. He never even mentioned Burt Kaplan’s name—until Dades told the detectives to ask him directly about Kaplan’s role. Only then did he remember his good friend Kaplan. As Dades told the Suffolk cops, “He admitted the truth was the truth.”

As far as Dades was concerned, that was it for Casso. The guy was no good and wasn’t smart enough to change, even when he had a last long shot at walking out one day. Gaspipe was still trying to play more angles than a billiards champion. Maybe he wasn’t lying; maybe he’d been lying so long he no longer remembered what was truth. And maybe Pam Anderson was born with that body. It didn’t matter anymore; Dades wasn’t going to waste his time trying to chase Casso’s lies.

This was just another incredibly frustrating dead end for Dades, who was struggling through a rough time both professionally and privately. He felt like his life was spinning and he couldn’t right himself. He was losing everything that mattered. Terrorism was the new hot thing in law enforcement and no one—particularly his new boss—was paying too much attention to organized crime. And OC was what he knew; in that world he was an expert. He’d already put in his retirement papers, so basically he was marking time until he had completed his full twenty. He’d become a dinosaur.

By now this was pretty much the only case he was working on and it seemed like every avenue was being blocked by the Feds. The continued emphasis on secrecy was making it impossible for him to contact people he felt he needed to interview, and Casso was now done.

Things were going badly at home too. Ro was finding it difficult to forgive him for his affair, and even when things between them had been good he’d felt excluded. Throughout most of his career Ro had gone to her parents’ on the big holidays—Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, even Father’s Day—and he’d been the guy volunteering to work. So he’d ended up alone, eating Chinese food, or going to his aunt’s house to wait for Ro to show up with the kids. More than two years had passed since his mother’s death and the emptiness she’d left didn’t seem to be going away. It didn’t seem like things could get a lot worse.

And then they did. One night Tommy was at the home of a close friend, retired Detective First Grade David Parello. The two of them had practi
cally grown up together, right through high school. After retiring Parello had become a private investigator, operating his business out of his basement. Parello had made himself a virtuoso on the computer; he could find any public record in the country in a few minutes. “I got a good idea,” he suggested to Tommy. “Let’s look up some of our old girlfriends and see where they ended up.”

Tommy had a different idea. When he heard the words coming out of his mouth even he was surprised. He didn’t even know the thought had been hiding in his mind. “Why don’t we throw my last name in there and see if we can find my father?”

“You’re kidding?” Parello asked.

Tommy shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

“Okay,” Parello agreed, “let’s try it.” Dades had spent his whole life not thinking about his father. “My mother and I were so close you figured that sometime we would have talked about my father,” he says. “I was thirty-nine years old when she died and in all those years maybe the conversations we had about him added up to an hour. I never asked about him and she never said much.”

He didn’t know where he was, what he was doing, even if he was alive. And he’d never cared. He wasn’t the slightest bit curious. At least that’s what he’d convinced himself of. He knew his parents had been married for three years but together for only one of them. He knew his father’s name was Peter Dades and he knew he had served in the marines for more than a decade, that he’d been in action in Vietnam and was stationed for a time in Germany. He knew he had been born in Athens, Greece, but he didn’t know where in America he had lived. He had several photographs of him his mother had kept—coincidentally in one of them his father was standing in front of an army headquarters building on Fifty-eighth Street and Second Avenue, precisely the same building Tommy had worked in while assigned to Intel. And he remembered one additional minor fact: While going through some paperwork after his mother’s death, he had found a transfer of title of a car from New York to Minnesota in 1962. It was an odd piece of paper for his mother to have kept, and it stuck in his mind.

Parello did a group search for the name Dades. Numerous Dadeses popped up, so they began by focusing on Dadeses in the state of Minnesota. They eliminated those people too young or too old, further narrowing the
search. And within minutes they found a Peter Thomas Dades within the appropriate age group. “That’s got to be him,” Tommy said, staring at the screen. Perhaps the most interesting thing to him was that he still felt no emotions at all. He didn’t feel happy or nervous, curious, or even satisfied. Nothing. That lack of feeling was pretty amazing.

There were no phone numbers listed for this Peter Thomas Dades. Tommy wrote down the numbers of several Dadeses in the same city. It wasn’t a particularly common name, so he assumed one of these people would know about Peter Thomas Dades. The next day he called the first name on his list. When an older woman answered he said, “Excuse me, I’m looking for a man named Peter Thomas Dades who lives in the city. Do you know him?”

She did, she admitted somewhat suspiciously.

“Look,” Tommy continued. “I don’t want to get you scared, but I’m not crazy. I believe that he’s my father. My name is Tommy Dades and I live in New York.”

The woman was intrigued but noncommittal. “Are you sure?” she asked.

No, he wasn’t, he admitted. “But let me ask you a few questions,” he said. Was Pete in the military? Yes. Was he in the marine corps? Yes. Was he born in Athens? Yes. Did he ever live in Brooklyn?

“Yes.”

It was him; Tommy knew it. Peter Thomas Dades. On a whim, he’d found his father. The woman began opening up to him, explaining that Pete Dades was her brother. Tommy asked if she had a phone number for him. Her answered surprised him. “No, I don’t really talk to him anymore.” She hesitated. “But I probably can get it for you.”

The following day his phone rang at home. A much younger-sounding woman asked, “Is this Tommy Dades?” Yeah, he answered; who’s this? “I’d rather not say.”

“Well, if you’re not going to tell me who you are this conversation isn’t going to go too far.”

After a brief pause, she said, “I’m your aunt Elaine.” Tommy had always known he had an aunt by that name. She asked him a few questions to confirm his identity, then admitted, “I know all about you, Tommy.” Then she began telling him about his father. Incredibly, he was a private investigator, having worked previously in the District Attorney’s office. He had met a
woman while stationed in Germany, divorced Tommy’s mother, and married her. They had two children, a girl named Maria and a son, a son he had named Thomas Peter Dades.