Friends of the Family (32 page)

Besides, he had the parts of a thousand bodies to worry about.

The trial was finally scheduled to begin in March 2006, a full year after the two cops had been arrested. In January, Eppolito and his wife, Frances, were indicted for failing to report income from several sources, including his work as a screenwriter. The most damning evidence came from Louis himself, who had bragged about hiding income to the undercover accountant. Just to apply a little more pressure, IRS agents arrested Frances Eppolito outside her Las Vegas home.

In early February the Feds attempted to add several other crimes to the indictment, mostly minor stuff compared to the original charges. Both men were accused of literally putting on masks and robbing neighborhood delis to pick up some quick cash, Caracappa supposedly used cocaine when he was working in narcotics, and Eppolito offered a bribe to a doctor in an attempt to receive a tax-free disability pension.

It was also in February that Tommy Dades read in the newspaper one morning a prosecution announcement that neither he nor Bill Oldham would be called as witnesses in the trial. He wasn’t the slightest bit sur
prised; if anything, he was relieved. Weeks earlier defense lawyers had subpoenaed both his and Bill Oldham’s NYPD personnel records in a quest to discover any and all “disciplinary actions which concern their credibility.” Tommy knew what that meant; when he got on the stand they were going to question him about his affair. They were going to bring up the whole Internal Affairs investigation. It wasn’t his credibility they were going to try to destroy, it was his reputation. And the publicity just might have been the final blow for Ro, might have been the end of his marriage.

Mauskopf’s announcement gave no reason for the decision, but it was obvious. Both Dades and Oldham had signed book deals; Dades had also made a movie deal. The U.S. Attorney was concerned that Cutler and Hayes would try to convince jurors that the two investigators had made up this crazy story so they could profit from it. Ed Hayes said exactly that: “The question is whether the government witnesses told Dades and Oldham what happened, or Dades and Oldham told the government informer what to say so they could sell the story.”

The fact that this was complete bullshit wouldn’t stop the defense lawyers from making the argument.
Isn’t it true, Detective Dades, that if my client isn’t convicted that movie will never be made?
Who knows how much damage that suggestion might do to the prosecution’s case? The defense needed only one juror.

Jury selection began on March 6. One week later, on March 13, Prosecutor Mitra Hormozi gave the opening statement. These two men “weren’t traditional mobsters,” she told the jury. “They were better. They were two men who could get away with murder. Why? Because they were New York City detectives…The defendants went into business together and the business was crime.”

She skillfully outlined the case against Eppolito and Caracappa. She began with the murder of Jeweler #1, Israel Greenwald, describing how Santora told Patty Lanigan’s terrified witness, Peter Franzone, “Start digging or I’ll kill your family. Start digging or I’ll kill you. Franzone felt he was digging his own grave.”

Then she told the jury about the murder of Jimmy Hydell, Tommy Dades’s case, the one that got this whole thing started. The cops were paid $30,000 to deliver him to Anthony Casso, who tortured him before killing him.

Next she talked about “the most tragic victim,” Nicky Guido, another
killing Dades had successfully linked to the cops. To emphasize the brutality of that murder, she showed the jury never-before-seen photographs of Guido’s bloody, bullet-riddled body slumped over the steering wheel of his new red Nissan Maxima.

In his opening statement, Bruce Cutler attacked the witnesses who were expected to testify against his client, witnesses he called “the lowest form of life. They call each other tough guys, goodfellas, until you take away their gun…and the jail door slams behind them. Then they wet their pants and call their mommy, the government.” Playing as much to the packed spectator section, which was jammed with reporters, as the jury, he told them that the people who were going to testify against his client were men who “kill, kill, steal, make money, beat up, steal, kill, kill, make money” and were responsible for “at least ten murders, maybe twenty, five arsons, six tons of marijuana at least, kidnapping, extortion, union fixing…the swill, bottom of the barrel, the sewer.”

Ed Hayes was equally tough, describing the prosecution’s witnesses as “pigs,” “animals,” and “disgusting.”

The prosecution really began making its case against the cops the next day, when the mobster Joe Ponzi had flipped, Burt Kaplan, took the stand. “I paid them,” he said flatly. And then, with about as much emotion as if he were describing the new line of women’s clothing he was selling, the balding and bespectacled witness described his long criminal association with the two detectives. “They brought me information about wiretaps, phone tapes, informants, ongoing investigations, and imminent arrests. I passed it to Anthony Casso. If he got some information that had to do with him, if there were informants, he would have them killed.”

Kaplan admitted that he had conspired with Eppolito and Caracappa to commit three murders: “Jimmy Hydell, Eddie Lino, and the jeweler. I don’t know the jeweler’s name.”

Kaplan held back nothing. He confessed to a long list of crimes, he admitted he was a “degenerate gambler” who had lost more than $3 million in his lifetime, and he described himself as a “rat,” as a guy who had “gone bad.” “I know what I am,” he said sadly. “I’m being honest. I’m a criminal.”

“He was the ideal witness,” Vecchione says. “In all the mob trials I’ve done I tell my witnesses, ‘Don’t hide anything. Don’t shade anything. Tell it exactly the way it was.’ I always tell them, ‘I don’t care what you did.
That’s what makes you believable. You are the worst of the worst; tell that to the jury. Don’t try to look like a good guy, because you’re not. That’s why you’re in the position to know what you know.’ Kaplan admitted every bit of it. He didn’t hold back on anything. He identified himself as a rat. He understood who and what he was. There was no reason for the jury not to believe him.”

Tommy Dades had absolutely no desire to attend the trial, but Joe Ponzi wanted to be there. He had known Detective Louis Eppolito for more than three decades, and he certainly wanted to see Burt Kaplan testify. And so he was sitting in the courtroom when Kaplan explained why he had decided to cooperate. “My wife and my daughter had been asking me to cooperate from the first day I was arrested. I didn’t do it…I was in jail nine straight years and I was on the lam two and a half years before that. In that period of time I seen an awful lot of guys that I thought were stand-up guys go bad, turn and become informants. As I told Steve the night I left to go on the lam. I asked him if he could guarantee me that Louie would stand up…”

Watching Kaplan on the stand, it was hard for Ponzi not to think back to their first meeting. Kaplan had insisted he would never “go bad.” Ponzi had often wondered what it was that caused the old man to change his mind. What makes a hard case like Burt Kaplan flip? Until this moment it was the one question for which he had no answer.

“…and Steve said, ‘Yeah, I could do that.’” But when Kaplan learned that there was strong evidence against the two cops, he said, “I didn’t think they would stand up and I was tired of going to jail by myself. I figured I would be at the defense table right now, and Steve and Louie would be sitting up here.”

There it is,
Ponzi thought.
He couldn’t trust the cops.

Kaplan admitted he hoped to have time cut from his sentence so one day he could hold his grandson. “I wanted someday to be able to spend some time with him, but I can’t honestly say I did this for my family. I did it, in all honesty, because I felt that I was going to be made the scapegoat in this case.”

From time to time Ponzi would look at the defense table. “Eppolito and Caracappa rarely moved,” he says. “I could see that Louie had lost some weight, but Caracappa was still ‘the Stick,’ thin and taut. Truthfully, I wasn’t entirely comfortable sitting there. I never wanted those two guys
to think it had become personal with me, because it was never personal. I knew what they had done and I knew they needed to be punished for it. But it was never personal with me.

“Eppolito never even glanced in my direction; I never made eye contact with him. But on the second or third day of the trial I looked at the defense table and Caracappa was glaring at us. It was an angry, fixed glare. I thought that was bizarre; I thought,
Fuck you, buddy, you did what you did. Now who do you think you are, looking at me like I betrayed you?
”

At one point during a break in the trial Caracappa was talking to a private investigator working for the defense while looking directly over the man’s shoulder at Ponzi. Caracappa covered his mouth with his hand as he spoke to the PI. Ponzi felt certain he was saying, “That’s Larry Ponzi’s kid.”

Bobby I, who was sitting next to him, disagreed. “No, he’s talking about me.”

But he wasn’t; Ponzi knew that.

At night Ponzi would discuss the trial with his father. But as the trial proceeded Larry Ponzi began to realize how wrong he’d been about the two cops. “He knew Louie was a little out of his mind,” Joe explains. “But doing mob hits? No. He thought that Louie had Steve bamboozled and that he was overbearing and overwhelming and he sucked him in and maybe that’s what happened with Caracappa. But as the trial went on he became convinced he totally misread their relationship.” Larry Ponzi’s observation was shared by a lot of people: Rather than Eppolito running the show, it was the quiet, icy cool Caracappa who had made the decisions.

“I always liked Steve,” Kaplan told the court. Burt Kaplan was on the stand for three days, for more than fourteen hours. Henoch skillfully led him through a litany of crimes he’d committed with Eppolito and Caracappa, from the day in prison Frank Santoro told him about them until he went on the lam years later. In response to Henoch’s questions he explained how the cops had provided confidential information; he described the kidnapping of Jimmy Hydell, who had begged Casso to dump his body in the street so his mother could collect the insurance; he remembered how Eppolito had shown up one night in his hospital room to describe the Eddie Lino hit; he told the absolutely transfixed courtroom about the murder of Jeweler #1, eventually linking the two cops to a dozen different murders. He
told the jury how Casso paid them for a murder or for the information they provided; he talked about meetings at rest areas near exit 52 on the Long Island Expressway and in a Staten Island cemetery. Joe Ponzi had spent a lot of days in courtrooms, but rarely had he seen so strong a witness. It was a bravura performance. Kaplan provided detail after detail after detail. Watching him, Ponzi couldn’t help feeling just a little proud.

At one point Kaplan talked about his disdain for all the other wiseguys who had “gone bad,” who had become informers. Now he was one of them, at different times describing himself as “a rat,” “an informant,” and “a stool pigeon.” But the closest he came to admitting he had any regrets about his past was telling Henoch, “As I look at my life in retrospect, I did a lot of unsettling things.”

There was only one slight hiccup in his testimony. When responding to questions about the Nicky Guido murder, Kaplan claimed that the cops had demanded $4,000 for providing Casso with information about Guido. Casso refused. “Gee,” he said, according to Kaplan, “I just gave them a $5,000 bonus for that thing with Jimmy. Tell them they’re getting pretty greedy.” According to Kaplan, Casso eventually got the address of Nicky Guido—the wrong Nicky Guido—from someone at the local power company.

Dades laughed when Ponzi told him about Kaplan’s testimony. “If you look at the timeline it hits you right in the face. Casso gets the names of the shooters from Hydell. At that time there were only eight Nicky Guidos in New York State. We know that because George Terra had run a group search. But only one of them lives in downtown Brooklyn. Right after Jimmy disappears Caracappa punches up this Nicky Guido on the computer. Six weeks from the day Caracappa runs Nicky Guido, the kid is killed. What’s the coincidence of that happening?

“A couple of years later, in 1989, the day it was announced that Feldman had indicted the real Nicky Guido for shooting Casso, Caracappa runs another computer scan for the name. That’s the day he found out they’d killed the wrong person.

“But the best way to introduce this in the trial was through my testimony, and there was no way that Feldman or Henoch wanted me to testify. Joe Ponzi and I were barely mentioned in the trial. They shut us out totally. So I don’t believe they got Nicky Guido’s name from the power company,
the phone company, or anywhere else except Steve Caracappa.”

At various stages in Mike Vecchione’s career he had defended clients he believed to be guilty. Once, he’d saved the job of a cop who had been caught shaking down drug dealers, then selling the drugs he’d confiscated out of his squad car. On another occasion he’d successfully defended a hold-up man whose partner had killed a cabbie. That was the job of the defense attorney; give your client the best defense possible within the law. So he knew all the back alleys familiar to defense lawyers. But he didn’t have the slightest idea how Cutler or Hayes could attack Kaplan’s testimony. Burt Kaplan had been superb on the stand. A witness’s demeanor is as important as his testimony; if a jury doesn’t like him they might not believe him. But Kaplan had just the right touch of resignation in his testimony. And his knowledge of the smallest details, his ability to describe things that would be impossible to know if you weren’t there, had been phenomenal.

Cutler’s strategy was not to attack the details of Kaplan’s testimony, but rather to try to destroy his whole credibility. It was your basic throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks cross-examination. He rambled from subject to subject, touching just about everything from Brooklyn high school football to whether it was possible to see Bucknell University from the guard towers at Lewisburg federal penitentiary. He accused Kaplan of saying whatever the government felt was necessary in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Kaplan responded by admitting, “Whatever happens, happens. I said at the pretrial hearing, ‘The government’s doing this to get me to talk about two dirty cops.’”