Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  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.

  So Tommy Dades never knew Jimmy Hydell. But he got to know the brother, Frankie Hydell, real well. In fact, he felt responsible for Frankie’s murder. This was one of those cop things that ate him up. Frankie wasn’t as tough as his older brother; Jimmy had earned a mob reputation, while Frankie probably was more of a wannabe. Frankie’s real expertise was in bank burglaries, with a minor in drugs and extortion. But in March 1988, Frankie Hydell was convicted of manslaughter. The key piece of evidence against him was a confession he made to a junkie who was wired, a confession that turned out to be more bragging than reality. His real crime was stealing the car that his brother used in the hit. Frankie served eight years, and when he got out he went right back to work.

  Not too long after being paroled Frankie was in a social club on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn when a mason tenders union official named Frankie Parasol was murdered. He wasn’t supposed to be killed. This was supposed to be a simple beating, ordered by a heavy hitter as a warning, but it went bad. Parasol was shot in the ass; it should have been an embarrassing flesh wound, but the bullet opened an artery and he bled to death. Frankie Hydell actually tried to save him; after everybody else ran away he called 911. His voice can be heard on the tape pleading for an ambulance. While nobody could have known it at the time, this was one of those moments where a butterfly flapping its wings in the Southern Hemisphere leads to a hurricane in the Northern Hemisphere: It started a long chain of events that ended two decades later in a Brooklyn courtroom.

  Tommy Dades’s partner Mike Galletta caught the murder case. Within days Tommy and Mike learned from a confidential informant that Frankie Hydell and several other men were involved. A confidential informant, or CI, will provide information but will never testify in court, while a cooperating witness, a CW, will take the stand. Dades and Galletta had forged an unusual and productive relationship with an FBI agent named Matt Tormey. The three men often worked as a team, ignoring completely the legendary NYPD-FBI rivalry. Galletta and Tormey believed that if Frankie got jammed up, rather than go back to jail he would flip, meaning he would agree to become a confidential informant. And Frankie could be very helpful; not only did he know where bodies were buried, he knew who had buried a lot of them. They decided to take a shot at turning him.

  Galletta knew that Frankie Hydell was shaking down stores on Thirteenth Avenue in Brooklyn. He was in the business of money for nothing. Mike and FBI Special Agent Bill Hickel installed video cameras and a tape recorder in one of those places, a twenty-four-hour convenience store. Steven Spielberg couldn’t have directed a better scene. Hydell was arrested and locked up. Another two years in the joint for parole violation was the best outcome he was looking at. The worst thing was doing major time. Hydell’s parole officer laid it out, then threw him a lifeline. The FBI wanted to talk to him, he explained. If Frankie was looking for a deal they could help him.

  Tommy had turned a lot of guys. He was pretty much an expert at it. He was a good talker; he had a feel for telling people what they needed to hear. But even for an expert it sometimes is very tough to convince a street guy to change his future. A couple of years earlier, for example, Tommy and Matt Tormey had spent three days, eight hours a day, trying to flip a guy named Joey Gross. They bought him breakfast, lunch; they let him make phone calls and laid out his options. They explained to him over and over how it would benefit him to work with them and warned him what would happen if he didn’t. For two days Gross didn’t say too much, but at the end of the third day he agreed to think about it. For a long time that was as far as he would go: thinking about it. It took months, but eventually he ended up testifying for the government in several cases. Instead of spending a decade in prison he did a year and a half and went into the Witness Protection Program.

  Frankie Hydell was easy. He was feeling real bad about his participation in Parasol’s murder. M
att flipped him in a single meeting. It went exactly as it had been planned. Tormey registered Frankie Hydell as an FBI confidential informant, although the NYPD had complete access to him. From that first meeting, Frankie was adamant he would never testify in the Parasol murder; instead, he supplied information about bank robberies, car thefts, big marijuana deals, and an array of other crimes.

  Initially Frankie Hydell told Tormey he didn’t want anything to do with Detective Tommy Dades. He distrusted cops in general, claiming that two cops had been involved in his brother’s disappearance—but he had a special hatred for Tommy Dades because, Hydell told Tormey, “This guy, he’s always looking to break everybody’s chops.”

  Little by little Tormey convinced Hydell that Tommy Dades was an okay guy. “I’ve been working with him a long time,” he said. “I’m telling you he can be trusted a hundred percent. He’s a good guy.”

  Tommy met Frankie Hydell for the first time in an FBI safehouse, a sparsely furnished apartment in a high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Hydell had a gruff voice and he spoke street: “You know that everybody hates your fucking guts. Both you and your motherfucking partner. You guys’re destroying the whole neighborhood, locking everybody up, breaking chops for no reason.”

  Instead of arguing with him or defending himself, Tommy treated Frankie with respect. He focused the conversation on subjects where they might find some level of agreement. By the end of that first meeting, maybe they weren’t best friends, but there was the foundation of a good rapport. That made a lot of sense. They both came from the streets; they knew a lot of the same people, talked the same talk. And Frankie Hydell pretty much sealed their relationship during that first meeting when he told Tommy that a psycho kid named John Pappa was looking to kill Tommy. “He even sat on your house for two days. He saw your wife and kids go in your house. He was waiting for you to come home and then he was going to kill you in front of them.”

  This story winds around a lot of corners before it gets to Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa, but it all leads directly to the murderous detectives. John Pappa was loosely affiliated with the Colombos. He definitely was a heavy hitter, credited with ten murders before celebrating his twenty-first birthday. As Frankie explained it to Dades, when Pappa found out that Tommy was looking at him for a couple of those hits he figured he could end the investigation by killing him. Nobody ever claimed he had brains. Somehow Pappa managed to get Tommy’s address. And according to Hydell, Pappa then spent several days sitting in his red car in front of Tommy’s house on Staten Island, waiting for Tommy to come home. Waiting to kill him.

  A few weeks later a second CI confirmed Hydell’s information.

  Dades’s wife, Roseann, took the news that some lowlife had been waiting patiently in front of her house to kill her husband pretty matter-of-factly. This wasn’t the first death threat Tommy had received. A year earlier there’d been a series of letters warning him that he and Galletta were going to be machine-gunned to death. But this threat was as real as the red car parked in front of the house. No one doubted Pappa was serious. And no one knew if he had been working alone. Tommy told Ro what to look for, how to be careful, how to get help fast. The department stationed a squad car in front of the house twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the next six months.

  Ironically, about a month before getting this information, Tommy had arrested Pappa. The investigation that Pappa had tried to stop had resulted in his indictment for multiple murders. “We got word that Pappa was going to be a member of the bridal party at a friend’s wedding on Staten Island,” Tommy recalls. “There was only one thing the groom didn’t know: Pappa had been one of the guys who’d killed his brother. So we were going to arrest Pappa when he showed up at church for the wedding rehearsal.

  “I was sitting in the car across the street when he showed up. We waited until he started climbing the steps to the church and then I jumped out of the car and started screaming. ‘Police, John! Hold it right there.’ I had my gun in my hand. I was maybe ten feet away from him when he pulled a nine-millimeter out of his waistband; at that distance that gun looked about as big as a basketball.

  “I screamed at him, ‘Dump the gun, John! Dump it now!’

  “Instead he took off running. Just as he opened the door to the church he turned around and aimed right at me.

  “In those situations you don’t think, you react. ‘Don’t do it!’ I screamed at him. I aimed my gun at him and started to squeeze the trigger—and just as I did the church door opened and I saw a whole bunch of people inside the church. I didn’t fire.

  “Pappa ran inside. I grabbed the door before it closed and raced inside right after him. I wasn’t more than ten steps behind him, but I didn’t see him throw away his nine-millimeter. Instead I heard it hit the floor over to my right. I never saw the gun, but I heard it. In situations like that every one of your instincts is pumping. You see things, you hear things, you feel things that otherwise it’s impossible. But I heard that gun hit the floor and slide.

  “The whole wedding party was screaming, trying to scramble out of the way. They didn’t have any idea what was going on. There were people diving into the pews. About halfway down the aisle I took a flying leap at Pappa and tackled him. As we hit the floor I slammed my knee into the side of his head to keep him down, then I pointed my gun at him and I started screaming loud as I could, ‘Don’t anybody fucking move! Don’t move! I’ll kill anyone that moves!’ I didn’t know who any of these people were. All I knew is that they weren’t friends of mine. ‘Everybody get down,’ I yelled. I ended up putting the priest on the floor.

  “John Pappa wasn’t done. He started getting wild on me. I grabbed him around the throat with one hand and warned him, ‘Try me and I’ll break your fucking neck.’ As the backup raced into the church I was shouting to them, ‘Get the gun! Get the gun! It’s under the pews over there on the right.’ Pappa’s nine-millimeter had fourteen bullets in the clip—and one in the chamber.”

  After learning from Frankie Hydell that Pappa had intended to kill him, Tommy figured he’d better set that one right forever. As a result during Pappa’s trial the judge had Tommy thrown out of the courtroom. Pappa’s defense attorney had caught him mouthing silently, “I know what you did and if you beat the case I’m gonna kill you.” Eventually Pappa was convicted of five murders and received two life sentences plus sixty-five years. He was twenty-one years old and he was never going home again.

  So at their very first meeting Frankie Hydell may have saved Tommy Dades’s life. That made a pretty strong foundation on which to build a relationship. As the months passed Frankie turned out to be a very productive informant. He was involved with a mob crew that was in the marijuana business, bringing in four-hundred-pound crates from Mexico through Arizona. They would put sheets of the laundry freshener Bounce in each crate to blunt the scent so the drug dogs couldn’t detect it. Frankie told them about each shipment. The information Frankie provided resulted in the arrest and conviction of five major players.

  The whole key to working successfully with a confidential informant is maintaining secrecy. Paid informants literally sign contracts under fictitious names; their real names are known only to their law enforcement contact. Tommy and Frankie had a good thing going and both of them knew it. While they only met face-to-face three times, they spoke several times a week. Then one night the situation changed. Frankie was told by the head of his mob crew to go up to the Bronx, supposedly to meet with people who were shipping stolen cars out of the country. It turned out that the real reason for the meeting was to confront him. One of the other members of the gang had gotten word from somewhere that Frankie was cooperating with the Feds. They assumed he was talking about the union guy’s killing, which put them all in jeopardy. Frankie managed to laugh his way out of the situation, but as soon as possible he met with Tommy and Matt. “They think I’m working with you guys,” he said.

  This information, it turned out, had come from someone i
n the Brooklyn DA’s office. In order to flip Frankie Hydell, to make the convenience store shakedown disappear if he agreed to cooperate, Tommy and Matt needed the DA’s cooperation. Notes were scribbled on sheets of paper; folders had been flying all over the office. Anybody could have known about it. Later, Joe Ponzi, chief of the DA’s investigative force, had conducted an extensive internal operation to try to identify the leak. He’d dumped phones, set up a sting; he tried everything possible. Joe Ponzi was a friend of both Tommy Dades and Mike Vecchione. This leak was an itch he was desperate to scratch, but he was never able to discover its source.

  In fact, where it came from didn’t matter; the damage was done. Hydell was compromised. Tommy and Matt decided to shut down the operation, telling him, “You got no choice. You’re gonna have to go full boat now. Witness protection, the whole thing.”

  If Hydell realized he was in a real bad jam, he didn’t show it. “Ah, don’t worry about it,” Frankie told them, “I blew ’em off. The whole thing’s bullshit. Everything’s cool.”

  Tommy did worry about it. Several years earlier the mob had found out about another CI he was working with and they had killed him. Just as in this case, there’d been a leak in the system that had never been found. So Dades knew the consequences if Hydell was wrong. He tried again to talk him in, but Frankie continued to refuse, insisting he had the whole problem covered.