Friends of the Family (31 page)

Galpine could also testify that he had flown to the Caribbean to deliver $10,000 to Eppolito. The problem was that he had only spent two hours sitting at the airport waiting for a return flight, so he wasn’t even sure which island he was on. Galpine would be a valuable witness for the Feds. He had supported Kaplan throughout his life in crime, he had actually handed the cops cash from Kaplan, and now he was going to support him in his new life as a “rat.”

Mobster Al D’Arco, who had told Tommy Dades in a phone call months earlier that he really didn’t know anything about the mob cops, remembered that Casso had told him he had proof that Bruno Facciola was an informant and wanted him to whack Facciola. D’Arco admitted he’d shot Facciola in both eyes, stabbed him, shot him in the head, then stuck a frozen canary in his mouth. D’Arco never learned the names of Casso’s informants but knew they were “bulls,” mob slang for detectives.

Among several surprising discoveries made by investigators was the fact that Peter Franzone was not the only person who had been living in fear of former detective Louis Eppolito. Barry Gibbs, for example, was completing
the seventeenth year of his nineteen-year sentence for the murder of Virginia Robertson when investigators found the original NYPD case files in Eppolito’s Vegas home. In the past, several people had believed Gibbs’s claim that he had been framed, among them Peter Neufeld and Barry Scheck, founders of the Innocence Project, but there was nothing they could do to prove it because the NYPD had been unable to locate the case folder.

After the file had finally been found in Eppolito’s house, two DEA agents located the original eyewitness—but this time that witness told a very different story. This time he admitted that Eppolito had frightened him into identifying Gibbs. He had “bribed and intimidated” him, he said, threatening to go after the witness and his family if he refused to pick Gibbs out of the police lineup and testify against him in court. That statement made sense to Tommy Dades, who remembered the tape of Eppolito bragging to Corso that he had threatened to kill his contractor—and the man’s whole family.

The witness told the investigators that Eppolito had told him who to pick out of the lineup and that he had lied on the witness stand, knowing his testimony would convict an innocent man, but said, “I don’t want this cop after me. My family was on the line here. If I had to do it again, I’d do it again.” And if he hadn’t identified Gibbs, he said flatly, he’d be dead.

Court papers filed by his attorney quote this witness as saying he “believed and continues to believe that Barry Gibbs is not the person he saw disposing of the body.”

In late September Barry Gibbs walked out of prison a free man and a bitter man, telling reporters, “I was a legitimate guy. And I lost everything. What happened to me can happen to any one of you people and any one of your families.”

What nobody could figure out was why Eppolito had kept the folder all these years, except to make absolutely sure it could never be looked at again. There was some speculation that he was covering up for the real killer, a mob associate who could be linked to Robertson. But Bruce Cutler defended his client, claiming Eppolito had the file because he was writing screenplays about cases he’d worked. He didn’t address the fact that Eppolito apparently had been holding the file for two decades.

Joe Ponzi didn’t know what to think about the whole story. While the DA’s office was deciding what to do about Gibbs, the jailhouse snitch called
Ponzi. “He was really upset,” Ponzi explains. “He said, ‘How can they let that guy out of jail? You know he’s guilty.’ I told him to cool down and let the whole thing play out. And then I reminded him, ‘Nobody’s calling you a liar.’”

Ponzi had also spoken to the eyewitness who had recanted his testimony. And after that conversation he didn’t know what to believe—except that the witness was as unreliable now as he probably had been in 1988. “I don’t know if it’s from drug abuse or the school of hard knocks, but he was highly suggestive. There’s still a part of me that doesn’t believe completely that Gibbs was railroaded and framed.

“What I know for sure is that the verdict was predicated on the one witness’s account and that guy had either become unreliable or was unreliable back then. You just never know how much people change; that’s one of the real problems with cold cases. I believe the DA’s position was that Gibbs had served almost his entire sentence, so if he erred, it was on the compassionate side.”

“The Mafia cops case,” as the newspaper had begun referring to it, was getting the full American media treatment. Several participants in the case had signed book contracts. At least three movies about the case were announced. Even Eppolito’s autobiography, the now ironically named
Mafia Cop,
was optioned by a movie studio.
New York
magazine,
Vanity Fair,
and
Playboy
all ran cover stories about the case. Somewhat nostalgically
New York
decided “the Mafia Cops’ case could be the last of the red-hot organized-crime trials: equal parts titillating and chilling.” The
Vanity Fair
story erroneously reported that during the 1980s Kaplan had been a confidential informant for the FBI, a charge that, if true, could have destroyed his credibility, and with it the whole case. The FBI denied the story and it went no further than a few headlines. Vecchione assumed that information had come from the DEA agent quoted extensively throughout the whole story.

It seemed like there was a new revelation every day. Reading these stories, Tommy Dades felt vindicated. The case was leaking inside information like cheesecloth and the state had absolutely nothing to do with it. No one in Hynes’s office had even known that Jeweler #1 was a man named Israel Greenwald, for example, until they read it in the papers. In
all
the papers. The U.S. Attorney had used previous leaks as an excuse to sever the state
from the case, but the leaking continued long after Hynes’s office had been shut out.

It seemed like everybody was trying to get a piece of the action—especially Anthony Casso. Casso was sitting in his cell out in Supermax, the Feds’ impregnable prison in Florence, Colorado, with infamous criminals like Ted “the Unabomber” Kaczynski, Mafioso Greg Scarpa Jr., Oklahoma City federal building bomber Terry Nichols, traitorous FBI agent Robert Hanssen, and shoe bomber Richard Reid, watching the only real hope he had left disappear. A year earlier Mike Vecchione had offered him the opportunity to become the five-hundred-pound gorilla, an offer he’d rejected, so instead he had become the invisible man.

Casso was desperate, doing everything possible to inject himself into the trial. Supposedly he’d tried to negotiate a deal with Feldman in which he would tell him where he could find Jimmy Hydell’s body in return for a twenty-year cap on his sentence, an offer the U.S. Attorney found easy to refuse. The government already had a body that could be linked to the cops; they didn’t need another one.

In July Casso wrote to Mark Feldman claiming that Al D’Arco, who was listed as a prosecution witness, was lying. According to Gaspipe, D’Arco had absolutely no knowledge about the two detectives. His letter also claimed that one unidentified victim, who supposedly was whacked because Eppolito and Caracappa told Casso he was a rat, was actually not an informer.

Feldman paid absolutely no attention to the letter. Presumably, he felt it was so obviously absurd that he didn’t even bother passing it along to the defense.

But Casso wasn’t through; he was just waiting for the right opportunity. And the only thing he had was time.

With the massive publicity about the trial, Judge Weinstein realized there was insufficient seating in the recently opened new federal courthouse to accommodate the large number of reporters and spectators expected to attend, so he moved the trial back to the old courthouse, to a fourth-floor courtroom that provided seating for more than twice as many people. Fittingly for this cold case, it was out with the new, in with the old.

Ironically, one of the few people in law enforcement not paying close attention to this case was the man who had started it. After leaving Hynes’s
office Tommy Dades was spending much of his time at his PAL gym on Staten Island, trying to find the center to his life. He was suffering through some rough days. In a relatively short period of time he had lost his mother, his home at the police department and the DA’s office, and then his home and his family. He had been rejected by his father and finally had received that humiliating letter from Feldman’s office demanding he return everything he had in his possession relating to the case. He probably had been more hurt than insulted by that letter. “All I was trying to do was the right thing and I was left with nothing. As far as I knew they were still intending to call me as a witness in the case, but that didn’t have a lot of meaning to me. I was just trying to get through the day and sometimes that was tough. Some of it was my own fault, I knew that, but it was hard to understand how you could give so much to the system and get back so little.”

Joe Ponzi, meanwhile, had somehow managed to patch up his relationship with Feldman and Henoch—and had actually become involved in the case again. As he explained, “It took me about two months to get past the venom I had in my heart and soul. I had said some things to Henoch for which I was very sorry; he had said some things to me for which he was just as sorry and we got past that. Mark Feldman? I owe too much to him, I owe my career to him, so there’s probably nothing he can do that would make me hate him. My anger with him was always professional, never personal.”

Even with the rift between the Feds and the state, the U.S. Attorney continued to need the cooperation of Hynes’s office, and Ponzi served as the go-between. In preparation for the trial, Henoch made a steady stream of requests for materials that had not been covered by the subpoena, among them old wiretap transcripts, case folders, and access to the many people in the office who had done extremely valuable work on the case, people like Bobby I, Patty Lanigan, and George Terra. The wounds weren’t healed—that would take a long time—but at least a temporary salve was put over them. The resentments were never allowed to get in the way of the mutual objective.

So Joe Ponzi began speaking fairly regularly to the prosecutors. He wasn’t officially back on the case, but Henoch began confiding in him, telling him what was going on and even asking for suggestions about how certain sticky problems might be handled.

Ponzi, in turn, was keeping Mike Vecchione informed about the Feds’
progress. For Vecchione, it was sort of like watching his son go off to college; he’d done everything possible to get to this time, now all he could do was stand on the sidelines and root—and be prepared to step in if his help was needed.

That was still very possible. If Weinstein ruled that the U.S. Attorney was time-barred from making the RICO stick, the state would have to step in immediately. Vecchione and Ponzi wanted to be prepared for that eventuality, so they spent time deciding which crimes they would prosecute if the case came back to Brooklyn.

Vecchione, meanwhile, was already deeply immersed in another high-profile and extremely bizarre investigation. Not long after being thrown off the Mafia cops case, Josh Hanshaft got a call from the new owner of a funeral parlor complaining she had been defrauded out of $300,000. It seemed that the previous owner had accepted prepayment for funerals and kept the money, and bereaved families were showing up with deceased relatives demanding the funeral for which they’d previously paid. Hanshaft listened carefully; it sounded to him like a relatively simple case of fraud—until she added, “Oh, by the way, the old owners, they were doing something with the corpses, they were taking bones out of the bodies.”

Excuse me? As Hanshaft reported to Vecchione, “The best I can determine is that these people are stealing body parts.”

Just when Vecchione thought he had seen the worst of human scum, the next case had come along, and maybe these people were even a little worse. Although these cops were going to be tough to beat—what could be worse than killer cops?—by the time Eppolito and Caracappa got sentenced Vecchione was investigating people who stole diseased tissue and organs from bodies and allowed them to be used in more than a thousand transplantation procedures.

It was a modern horror story: Funeral directors were selling body parts and when necessary for showings they were actually replacing them with PVC tubing. So Vecchione’s division was working on that case while Eppolito and Caracappa waited for their trial.

Throughout the summer into the fall Weinstein ruled on numerous prosecution and defense motions as each side angled for the slightest advantage, and everyone waited for the only ruling that really mattered: Would the judge allow Henoch’s RICO to stand? “A ticking time bomb,” Weinstein
had called it, and obviously he was having difficulty accepting the prosecution’s creative solution.

Jack Weinstein finally answered that question in early December when he announced, “The case has to be tried and will be tried.” It was clear from his remarks that he wasn’t entirely convinced the jury-rigged RICO charge was valid, and certainly he wasn’t very happy about it, but the case against the cops was too important to throw out of his courtroom on a legal technicality. It was “vital” this trial take place, he said, “particularly in a case which raises such serious doubts about the police department and its relationship to the public.”

Besides, if he was wrong, if the RICO wouldn’t stand up, there would be ample opportunity later in the case for the defense to make that argument.

Mike Vecchione was neither surprised nor terribly disappointed when he heard about Weinstein’s tepid acceptance of the indictment. He’d done his job; without their work there would have been no case and Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa would have gotten away with murders. The disappointment he’d felt at not getting his chance to convict those two skells had mostly dissipated, and so long as they got the punishment they deserved, he would be very pleased.