Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  Betty had immediately called the FBI. They took a statement from her. But no one from the bureau had ever called back about it.

  “Can I talk to Lizzie about this?”

  “’Course you can.”

  “Let me ask you this, Betty. If I ever got to that point, would you talk to a prosecutor about what you just told me?”

  She replied that she would do whatever he suggested, then asked, “You think something could happen about this? After all this time?”

  Tommy was honest with her. “I can’t promise you anything. All I can tell you is what you’re telling me gives me a foundation to work on. Give me a few days. I’ll either tell you they shut me out or I got the green light to do it.”

  The last case of Detective Tommy Dades’s career had just begun.

  CHAPTER 3

  Mike Vecchione was frying judges that day in late September 2003 when Tommy Dades bounced jauntily into his office. Vecchione was the head of the Rackets Division in Brooklyn DA Joe Hynes’s office, an empire of investigation and prosecution that encompassed everything from organized crime to civil rights violations. Six months earlier Vecchione had arrested New York State Supreme Court Justice Gerald Garson for accepting a bribe. In the hope that he’d receive a reduced sentence, Garson had flipped almost immediately and given up Clarence Norman, head of the Brooklyn Democratic Party. Norman had been caught committing a variety of crimes involving political corruption. Vecchione was going to prosecute the case.

  In Brooklyn, the Clarence Norman case was the big bang of local politics, the past and the future coming together with explosive force. The Brooklyn DA is an elected official; Hynes is a Democrat and Norman ran the local Democratic organization. A lot of promising careers have ended when crime met politics, so this investigation was getting Vecchione’s complete attention. This was going to make Second Coming headlines, and as everyone in law enforcement knows, big headlines often mean big headaches. There was a lot of pressure on him to get it right.

  “The timing couldn’t have been worse,” Vecchione remembers. “I was in the middle of preparing several of the most important prosecutions of my entire career. The other bureaus I supervised were overloaded with work. We had a hiring freeze in place so I was spending a couple of hours every day just juggling lawyers to make sure everything got covered. And then Tommy walks in and tells me he’s got this great case. I almost laughed. There was no way I had the time for it, whatever it was, no way. But with Tommy…I didn’t know what he had, but I knew my life was about to get a lot more complicated.”

  Dades and Vecchione had met in 1992, just after Mike had been named Chief of the Homicide Bureau. Tommy was still assigned to the Sixty-eighth Precinct Detective Squad. The first case Tommy brought to him, the Casatelli case, wasn’t even a homicide. That was typical Tommy. It was a brutal assault that put three college kids in the hospital. And it wasn’t precisely a cold case; at best it was lukewarm. It wasn’t even an important case; maybe it would make page 16. Below the fold. It was the kind of case most detectives would have long since forgotten. But as usual, when Tommy got involved, the mother was in the middle of it.

  Casatelli started one night in 1992. Five college kids were celebrating a birthday in a Brooklyn bar. When they came out of the bar they got into some kind of dispute with three neighborhood tough guys. It was the basic egos-and-alcohol argument. The college kids then got into their car and drove away. Most nights it would have ended there, but not that night. That night lives changed.

  The locals followed in their own car. When the college kids stopped to buy cigarettes the street guys attacked them with baseball bats and knives. Three of the five of them were left lying in their own blood on the sidewalk; each of them had been beaten and stabbed at least ten times.

  After spending more than a year in the hospital two of the victims eventually recovered, but the third one remained in a semicomatose state. So technically it still wasn’t a homicide. Not as long as the machines kept him alive.

  Tommy caught the case. The two kids who had escaped injury had given the police a solid description of their attackers. Within a couple of days Tommy got one name from the streets, a punk he’d arrested twice before named Tommy Kane. Dades got photos of Kane, his brother, and some of the guys they hung out with and glued those pictures to a sheet of paper, creating a rudimentary lineup. The witnesses picked out Kane, his brother Paulie, and a third tough guy named T. J. Hynes. Dades quickly arrested Paulie Kane, who pleaded guilty. But Tommy Kane and Hynes ran. They disappeared.

  The newspapers never bothered with the case. A lot of detectives would have let it go. A file in a drawer. But Tommy got to know the mother of one of the victims, Mrs. Casatelli. They spoke regularly. How you doing, Tommy? I’m fine, is everything okay? Why can’t they find the people who did this to my son? Tommy promised her he wouldn’t forget her son. And he didn’t.

  Tommy was plugged into Brooklyn. If Kane and Hynes were hiding in a Brooklyn sewer, Tommy would have known about it. Believing they’d left the state, he knew eventually he was going to need legal assistance to bring them back. That’s when he went up to see Mike Vecchione.

  Vecchione’s office was on the fourth floor of Brooklyn’s old Municipal Building. It was a dingy corner office, the kind of office that could have come out of a black and white B picture. The windows were covered with so many years of dirt and grime you had to put on the fluorescent lights to find them.

  In the days before terrorism changed the world the DA’s office was run pretty casually. The more productive detectives could pretty much pick the DA they wanted to work with. Tommy Dades knew just about everyone in the office and he knew the Casatelli case was going to be a problem. There were a lot of conservative lawyers in that office, men who needed to see the smoking gun before they would get involved in a case. Tommy barely had smoke, and those people weren’t going to roll the dice on his evidence.

  Tommy needed someone in the DA’s office to issue a subpoena to force a potential witness who had left New York State to return to testify. Initially he took his evidence to a prosecutor he’d worked with several times before. As Dades remembers, “I told him what I had and he laughed in my face. He told me to forget it, he’d never be able to get an indictment with what I had. He told me to come back when I had enough evidence to go to the grand jury. I decided to go over his head.”

  That’s when he approached Mike Vecchione for the first time. The two men liked each other immediately. Both of them spoke Brooklyn and neither one of them had any illusions about the law. Both of them knew how it worked in real life. Tommy was straight with Mike. He told him what he had, what he needed, and how he intended to get it. He admitted it wasn’t much of a case yet. It wasn’t even a homicide. But he promised Vecchione that he would do whatever was necessary.

  What impressed Vecchione most at that first meeting was Dades’s passion for justice. He made this ordinary case seem unique and important. Vecchione had worked with literally thousands of police officers, but he’d never met anyone who spoke as deeply from his heart as Dades. Tommy told him about the mother and how much this case meant to her, saying, “It’s all she’s got, the hope that we’re gonna nail these guys.” He told Mike he had promised her that he would give this case his maximum effort and that he intended to do exactly that. It was a masterful selling job. And when he was done Vecchione agreed to work with him.

  It was two years before they finally got a break. Somehow Vecchione had managed to convince a grand jury to indict both fugitives based on Tommy’s admittedly flimsy evidence. An arrest warrant had been issued. Two years later that warrant paid off. Tommy Kane was picked up in Florida for driving under the influence. When the arresting officer ran his driver’s license the warrant popped. He was extradited to New York and sentenced to nine and a half to twenty-two years. Two down. The Kane brothers were in prison, but Hynes was still a fugitive.

  Tommy’s relationship with Mike continued to grow stronger. During this time
they worked together to solve several other seemingly impossible cases. In one of them, they worked with FBI agents Gary Pontecorvo and Jimmy DeStefano to successfully put a name on a skull that had been fished out of a small river several years earlier and used it to put the killer in jail for murder. But as their friendship grew, even as they wrapped up old cases, the Casatelli case just hung there, a dark cloud that wouldn’t float away.

  More than three years passed. Tommy Dades was still speaking regularly to the mother. Finally, one afternoon he sat down at his desk and he just decided, I’m gonna find that scumbag today.

  He began rereading his notes, searching for the key that would open up the case. He knew it was there; it was always there. He just had to be smart enough to find it. He began by searching for a connection to the system—an application for license plates, a tax return, maybe credit problems. Anything that would leave an identity trail. But if Hynes was in the system, he couldn’t find him.

  Then he remembered a rumor that he’d heard a while back. Supposedly Hynes’s mother had left Brooklyn with him. That was curious. Checking his notes, he discovered that she was a nurse. It was just a detail, one of those bits that easily could have been overlooked. But Tommy figured that wherever she was she had to be working. Bills had to get paid. He knew she couldn’t get a nursing job under an assumed name. Whoever hired her would have checked her license. “I figured what the hell, let me take a shot. If she’s stupid enough to be working as a nurse under her real name, I’m going to get him.”

  Whatever she was doing, he figured she needed a car to do it. He did a massive computer search, looking for a car registered in the mother’s name. And there it was. A woman with that name had leased a car in Florida and after a couple of years had stopped making payments. The car had been repossessed. Tommy called the precinct in Florida covering the area in which the car had been repoed. He spoke with a detective and asked, “You got any hospitals around where you are?” There were two of them. “Do you have any connections to them?” The detective knew people in administration. “Do me a favor, would you? Call your people at those hospitals and see if they got a woman with this name working there.”

  The Florida detective called back fifteen minutes later. A woman with that name was working in one of the hospitals. Unfortunately, that hospital was in a different precinct. It was out of his jurisdiction.

  Two hours after Tommy had sat down determined to solve this case he was speaking with a detective in the correct precinct. This detective contacted the head of security at the hospital and got the mother’s home address. Tommy faxed the arrest warrant to Florida. Less than an hour later, three hours total, the detective called Tommy. “He was sitting on the front stoop when we got there,” he said. “He didn’t give us any trouble.” Hynes pled guilty to the assault and was sentenced to five to fifteen.

  Turned out Hynes was very lucky. Ironically, after Hynes had been sentenced one of the college kids died of his injuries. The case had finally become a homicide. Tommy spoke with the victim’s family, asking them what they wanted the DA to do. Vecchione was willing to go back to court with the more serious charge. But the family had had enough. They didn’t want to dredge up those memories.

  When Dades and Vecchione began working the Casatelli case their relationship had been strictly professional. Cops and lawyers often get along about as well as cats and Chinese chefs. A lot of detectives consider the DA’s office their enemy. They’ve spent too much time working with prosecutors who didn’t believe them, or found a thousand ways to make their job more difficult, or just wouldn’t get with the program. Some prosecutors aren’t exactly passionate about cops either. But Tommy got along very well with most of the people in Joe Hynes’s office. In fact, he got along with them so well that other detectives used to kid Tommy about these friendships, warning him that if he ever got in trouble in Brooklyn the DA would have to appoint a special prosecutor because everybody in the office was his friend. He was up-front with his objectives and always delivered what he promised.

  Occasionally Dades and Vecchione would have dinner. Occasionally eventually became frequently. There were barbecues at their mutual friend Joe Ponzi’s place on Staten Island. Mike was divorced but Tommy got to know his two sons, whatever new woman he was dating, and his father. Mike got to know Tommy’s wife, Ro, and their kids and Tommy’s mother. Mike and Tommy got together about once a week, but they’d speak on the phone at least once a day. If they were working a case they might speak three or four times a day. Their conversations covered all the ground between the gossip about the latest mob hit and Mike’s son’s football game. When Tommy started boxing in NYPD shows and fund-raisers, Mike and Joe Ponzi were usually sitting ringside.

  And they worked together as often as possible. So on that day in September 2003 when Tommy walked in his door with a big, knowing, maybe even a little sheepish smile on his face and flopped down in that wooden chair, Mike knew he was about to go on another interesting legal journey that was guaranteed to be unusual. “Whattya got?” he asked him.

  “You know those two detectives, Eppolito and Caracappa? I think we can finally get them,” he said matter-of-factly. “I can corroborate Gaspipe. You interested?”

  Mike leaned back and clasped his hands behind his neck. “It isn’t too often a guy just drops into your office and changes your life in a couple of sentences,” he recalls. “But as soon as I heard him mention Eppolito and Caracappa I knew I was in. I didn’t know where Tommy was taking me, but I was going with him.

  “Just like everybody else in law enforcement, I had heard all the stories about those two guys. I knew all about Louie my whole life so nothing about him surprised me. Tommy and I had even discussed the case a few times over dinner. I didn’t know any of the details. I hadn’t read Casso’s 302s. I knew Eppolito and Caracappa were supposedly dirty, but I didn’t know how deep the mud went. I also remembered that the case had fallen apart when the U.S. Attorney tore up Casso’s cooperation agreement. The fact that they hadn’t pursued the allegations meant they didn’t have enough evidence to support Casso and they probably didn’t believe him. So when Tommy asked me if I was interested I told him, ‘Are you kidding me? Of course I’m interested. What’ve you got?’”

  By the time Tommy finished relating his conversation with Betty Hydell, Mike was pumping out ideas. “This is great,” he said several times, “this is great.”

  Tommy explained to Mike that he had already made some moves. The first person he’d called after speaking with Betty Hydell was Joe Ponzi. Ponzi was Chief of the District Attorney’s Investigations Unit, and Tommy worked with him all the time. Investigations is a squad of 115 people with powers equal to NYPD officers’ that works directly for the DA’s office. They do mundane things like serving subpoenas and finding witnesses, but they also conduct high-profile and dangerous investigations. They do insurance fraud, tax violations, they work undercover, they even do organized crime cases. Whatever needs to be done to help make a case, that’s what they do.

  Joe Ponzi had spent two decades in the Brooklyn DA’s office, gaining a reputation as one of the best interviewers and polygraph operators in the business. He had the gift for making bad guys want to talk to him. He’d been responsible for an impressive number of confessions. People used to say Ponzi was so smooth he could talk an oyster into giving up its pearl. After meeting more than a decade earlier, Dades and Ponzi had almost immediately become close friends. As Tommy summed up their friendship, “The day we met I would have given him my kidney.”

  Ponzi also had a personal investment in the case. The flamboyant Eppolito had met the immaculately dressed Caracappa in 1979 when both detectives were assigned to the Brooklyn Robbery Squad, which was then commanded by Ponzi’s father. Sergeant Larry Ponzi had been their boss for about two years. In fact, in his introduction to Mafia Cop, Eppolito acknowledged, “Sergeant Larry Ponzi…who taught me how to be a detective, I send my respect.”

  Joe Ponzi knew Eppolito very w
ell. “I would see both of them, Eppolito and Caracappa, in social settings. When the precinct had a 1013, a fundraising party for cops having financial problems or medical problems, or a promotion party, I’d see them there. Louie more than Steve. I didn’t know Steve that well; he was always a mysterious character as far as I was concerned.

  “But Louis…I can remember Louis coming into the Homicide Bureau on the fourth floor of the Municipal Building with his tie draped loosely around his neck and wearing a flashy chain and a snake ring and holding court. He’d tell joke after joke about the broads he’d banged and the crazy things he did. He was out of control.

  “My dad was fairly close with both of them. One time Louis volunteered to fight in an exhibition boxing match. My father was his cornerman that night. Louis talked a good fight, but if he couldn’t knock out his opponent in the first thirty seconds he was finished. The guy he was fighting that night didn’t like him at all. He toyed with him. He just took him apart. In the dressing room they had to give Eppolito oxygen. But he still told people he won.

  “I knew everything about the case before Tommy called me. I saved every newspaper that was ever written about Casso’s allegations. I talked to my father about it: ‘What do you think? You think it’s possible?’

  “My father didn’t know. ‘You know what, I don’t know them like that. I just can’t fathom them in that context. Casso’s crazy as a fucking loon. The government wouldn’t have dropped the case if they had anything.’

  “When Tommy called and told me what he had and asked me to get involved, I hesitated. Before I committed myself to this I needed to get my father’s approval. That was critical for me. I needed him to be comfortable with the idea that I would be investigating cops. My father is my best friend, my mentor, and in my life it’s always been taboo to hunt cops. I’ve steered clear of it for twenty-nine years; this was going to be the first time. But this…this was so far over the line. I told him, ‘If they didn’t do it, that’ll play out, but if they did these things there’s no way they should be able to just walk away from it. I don’t know that anybody’ll be able to put together something a prosecutor will deem court-worthy, but it’s something I want to do.’