Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  He knew the politics of the department as well as he knew the rules of the streets. He’d seen good cops get screwed out of the security they’d earned for committing minor transgressions. If the department wanted to get you, you were got. So he was leaving angry at the department—but not with the cops, not with the people he had worked with and knew.

  Those people he loved. And the final thing he wanted to do on the job was clean out the stink. As he explains, “No one who hasn’t done this job can begin to understand it. When you do it day after day you establish friendships and you become part of a family. Every day you put your life in the hands of your partners; you trust them not because you know so much about them, but because they’re wearing the uniform. I never stopped to think about it, I never realized it, until it became time to leave. It’s just…no matter where you go in this city there’s a precinct there, and you know you can walk in there and be welcomed. It’s an extraordinary sense of comfort.

  “I loved the job and I loved the people I worked with. That was my family.

  “Eppolito and Caracappa had betrayed them all. Every single one of them. Everybody knows the movie cliché, some actor with a deep voice warning, ‘This time it’s personal.’ Well, I didn’t care if it was a cliché or not; for me this time it really was personal. I’d been doing the job for almost twenty years. I don’t know how many guys I put in jail. I know I was involved with at least fifty murders, probably more. I never added up the numbers, but I had to be responsible for a few thousand years of sentences. But that had always been part of my job. They were the bad guys and we were the good guys. This was a very different thing. These guys had betrayed my family. I didn’t care what it took, but I was going to get them.”

  Tommy Dades hadn’t set out to be a cop. It just sort of happened to him. After he returned from Vegas with his friend, his grandfather got him a job driving a delivery truck for the Daily News. He started there as a seventeen-year-old and stayed five years. When he was twenty he took all the civil service exams. “I passed them all,” he remembers. “I would have taken any of those jobs. If sanitation had called me first, right now I’d be a retired sanitation worker. But the police department called first. I swore into the police academy on July 16, 1984.

  “Mostly I became a cop because it was a decent-paying job with good security. I didn’t know anything about the history or traditions of the NYPD and none of that really mattered to me. I didn’t take the job to protect society. It was a good job. That was it; that’s what it meant to me.

  “During those first few years on the job there were times I thought maybe I’d made a big mistake not waiting for the fire department or corrections or sanitation. I remember leaving the academy and walking a foot post on Surf Avenue and West Thirty-second Street in the dead of winter. I would stand there in the snow for five hours in January—there wasn’t a soul on the streets—freezing like there was no tomorrow. I was miserable, just waiting for the night to end. I didn’t know enough to go inside and get warm. I was a rookie; I was afraid to hide. On the real cold nights my mother would bring me thermoses. She’d come out there in the cold to find me and stay with me for a little while. I spent a lot of nights wondering, What the hell am I doing? This is not what I envisioned.”

  After spending about two years in uniform Officer Dades got a temporary transfer to narcotics to work as an undercover. It was in narcotics that the job became his passion. “I was out of my mind; I was a wild man. I was commandeering cabs, jumping out of windows—when I heard they were making pot deals in the cemetery behind Trinity Church I’d hide inside until I saw them and then I’d leap out the window and grab them. I pulled my gun a zillion times. I used to use theatrical makeup to make track marks on my arms; I’d put carbon under my eyes, put on some old clothes, and head down to the Lower East Side looking to buy heroin. If I was playing a money guy in a big case I’d wear a nice suit, a flashy tie, expensive jewelry, and I’d drive an Eldorado. In the morning I was a junkie, in the afternoon I was a kilo dealer. One time I was playing the money man, working with a great undercover named John Massoni. We were making a deal for three or four kilos with some Colombians. We met them in a bar—and we had a hundred thousand dollars in a suitcase. You bet you’re aware of everything going on around you. If somebody took an extra-deep breath, I heard it. The Colombians came in carrying gift-wrapped boxes containing kilos of coke. My job was to walk over to them and hand John the suitcase. He’d make the exchange. We’d leave and once we were out of there the arrest team moved in on them. We were having a great time and doing a great job.”

  It was also the most dangerous job he’d ever done. “The only time I was ever scared on the job was when I went into the Coney Island projects to buy a nickel bag. I did that all the time. My field team, my backup, couldn’t come anywhere near the projects. I was wearing a mike but it never worked because it was cheap equipment, so the field team didn’t know where I was. I’d go into an apartment with nine locks on the door. There was nothing anybody could do to help. If I got in trouble, by the time my backup figured it out I was already dead.

  “I never took elevators in those buildings because I didn’t want to be trapped if someone tried to rob me. I’d walk up the steps. All the lights had been busted; all you smelled was piss. On each landing I’d see people sitting with their crack pipes. I carried a .380 automatic; in the winter I’d keep it out of my pocket with my finger on the trigger. This is only a little more than three years after I was driving a newspaper delivery truck.

  “You had to be careful and you had to be lucky. There were guys getting guns put to their heads and forced to snort coke. At that point you have to do what you have to do. That didn’t happen to me. People would see my gun and I’d play off it. ‘So what? What the fuck you looking at?’ As a white guy in those neighborhoods I did real good. I had a great time. We had so many small buys and at least five major cases involved half a key [kilo] or more. Every time I got over I had this big adrenaline rush. If you don’t feel alive at those moments, if you don’t feel your heart pounding, you might as well be dead.

  “I’d never experienced anything quite like it. It wasn’t just the success. It was the camaraderie; every day we were putting our lives up for grabs and you couldn’t do that unless you had complete trust in the people you were working with. From those guys you learn the meaning of trust and loyalty and sacrifice. The badge represents all of that and the pride you take in wearing it is unbelievable.”

  After three years Dades was transferred to the Sixty-eighth Precinct detective squad. The NYPD offers a variety of training courses for young detectives. “Investigating Homicides” was two weeks long. “Sex Crimes” was one week. It all helped—by the conclusion of each course he could fill out all the proper paperwork—but the real training was done on the job, given by the people who had been doing it. “I worked with legends,” Tommy says, “men with thirty years or more on the job. You’d sit around listening to these guys tell their stories and you’d learn more in an afternoon than you could reading three textbooks. They made me understand that I was becoming a part of something that mattered.”

  They spent as much time talking to him about the past, about their experiences, about the legends of the department, as they did teaching him how to pay an informer and keep a secret. They taught him the skills to succeed, but more importantly they imbued in him an understanding of the tradition that he would carry forward. He was one of the elite, a detective in the greatest police department in the world.

  That was an impressive thing to be, and Tommy Dades took tremendous pride in his accomplishment. He knew where he came from; a street kid from a single-parent home, a kid with a ninth-grade education, had made it all the way to detective. And he knew what it had taken to get there. He knew that the only people in the world who had experienced it all, every bit of it, from the incredible joy of breaking a big case to the seemingly endless petty hassles of dealing with the bureaucracy, were the guys who wore th
e same uniform. These were the guys who knew what it felt like to stand alone in the cold on a deserted street at two o’clock in the morning, guys who were willing to trust their partners with their lives on a regular basis. These were the men and women who knew exactly what it felt like to have to tell a parent their kid is dead or to have to stand and take it when somebody is shouting in your face and the nicest thing they’re calling you is a pig; at one time or another most of them had cleaned up vomit in the backseat of the squad car, tried to reason with a belligerent drunk claiming to know powerful people, seen death in too many shapes, and felt absolute fear—yet kept moving forward. These were the only people who knew everything he had experienced in his twenty years—these were his friends, his partners, his comrades, his brothers and sisters in life, a family held together by the badge, and he loved them for it.

  Eppolito and Caracappa had treated all of them like they were garbage. They had crapped on that badge. They had used it to facilitate murders. They had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars to betray the same cops who would have risked their own lives to help save them—and then they probably laughed at the stupid suckers taking home $880 a week and turning down a free cup of coffee.

  So this time, this time it really was personal.

  As Dades read this material he realized there was only one person who could corroborate Casso’s claims, one person who knew the full extent of the cops’ cooperation with the Mafia, and that was Burt Kaplan. Casso had never met them; he’d only seen them once. But Kaplan? Kaplan and the cops were practically partners. The cops used to go to Kaplan’s house for meetings, and when Kaplan got nervous about that he started going to their houses.

  One thing was obvious: If Gaspipe’s 302s were the Bible they would follow throughout the investigation, flipping Burt Kaplan was the Holy Grail. Nobody, not even Casso, knew more about Eppolito and Caracappa than Kaplan. He was their contact; he relayed Casso’s requests to them and reported the information they provided to Casso.

  Tommy knew almost nothing about Kaplan. He’d heard the name for the first time in the mid-1990s when Frank Drew, a DEA agent with whom Tommy had worked on several cases, accidentally picked up Kaplan during the investigation of a drug dealer. Initially, he hadn’t been considered a major player, just another wannabe earning a living by hustling drugs.

  But Dades began learning a lot more about Burt Kaplan in September 1996 when Kaplan was arrested for marijuana trafficking, a crime for which he was eventually sentenced to twenty-seven years. The U.S. Attorney handling Kaplan’s prosecution, Judy Lieb, had called Tommy to ask him some questions about the homicides committed by Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. Apparently Lieb suspected Kaplan had a connection to Gravano.

  Pretty much everybody in the NYPD knew that Tommy Dades was the guy to see if you wanted to know about Sammy the Bull. His interest in Gravano had begun in 1990, when he caught a mob hit on a guy named Eddie Garafola that was credited to Sammy. From that moment on he studied Gravano like Warren Buffett studies annual reports. He memorized the names of his victims and the dates they died and the motives for every one of the nineteen murders Gravano was accused of committing. He knew Sammy’s associates and hangouts, and in at least a few cases, he knew where the bodies were buried. Tommy got to know the two FBI agents who flipped Sammy and they put the detective and the killer together on the phone. Somehow, Dades and Gravano eventually became friendly. The oddest couple.

  But one morning, as Dades sat in Leib’s office describing in detail the many murders of Sammy Gravano, she began talking about Burt Kaplan. Kaplan was with Gaspipe Casso, she explained, and her office was trying to flip him. “You know he’s better than Casso regarding those two detectives,” she said.

  Tommy recalls, “I didn’t know the details of what happened after that, just that Kaplan had refused to cooperate. Instead of flipping on Casso and the cops, he had decided to spend the rest of his life in prison. You couldn’t argue that he wasn’t a stand-up guy, but he was standing up for the wrong people, a homicidal maniac and two dirty cops. I didn’t know how much pressure the Feds actually had put on the old man to testify. Maybe the last thing the government wanted to do right at that time was prove Gaspipe Casso was telling the truth. That could have caused some really embarrassing problems for both the Feds and the NYPD. Maybe they figured that it was better for everybody if Casso stayed buried.”

  Kaplan was the shovel. Tommy wondered what the Feds had really offered him. On some level Tommy had to admire Kaplan’s misguided loyalty; even Casso had flipped faster than a short-order hamburger when his life was on the line. If everything the government said was true, Kaplan had chosen to die in a cage to protect the guy who’d ratted him out. If he’d refused to cooperate way back when to save himself, there was little reason to believe he’d ever change his mind. There certainly was no question that Mark Feldman believed Kaplan was a dead end, otherwise he wouldn’t have been so certain this investigation was going to fail.

  But Tommy Dades has always been an optimist. He wanted to learn the details for himself. Maybe there was something somebody somewhere had missed. It wouldn’t be the first time. He began by calling DEA agent Frankie Drew, who’d arrested “the old man” initially, to begin his education in the world of Burt Kaplan.

  As Drew explained, he had stumbled over Kaplan during the Frankie Puglise investigation. Not only hadn’t Kaplan been a target, his name hadn’t even been in the program. Puglise was a Bonanno/Lucchese associate running a large cocaine and marijuana operation. The DEA agents were listening to wiretaps and eventually they heard several references to a guy who just didn’t fit the wiseguy script. He was referred to only as “the old man,” but it was clear he was a major supplier. He brought in tons of product. What caught the attention of the agents was the fact that Puglise showed “the old man” respect. That was a big thing, an associate showing respect to some nameless supplier; it meant he was somebody important.

  That was Kaplan. Coincidentally, the U.S. Attorney’s office knew all about Burt Kaplan from Casso’s 302s. When they learned he had been arrested on drug charges they tried to nail him, figuring if they put enough pressure on him he would flip. As Judy Leib had told Dades, if Kaplan had agreed to cooperate he would have been a better witness than Casso. They convicted him on cocaine, marijuana, and money laundering charges and the judge hit him with twenty-seven years. After his conviction the DEA, the FBI, and NYPD Internal Affairs all offered him a ticket out, figuring because of his age, because he wasn’t a made guy, he’d accept the offer, but he had turned them down. As Drew told him, the guy was a real hard case.

  But there was one more thing the DEA agent Frankie Drew remembered. The Puglise investigation had been compromised. On one of the phone taps someone had mentioned receiving a warning from the “crystal ball.” The agents had no idea what that meant, but after that conversation everything changed. Phones went dead, meetings were canceled, people basically disappeared. It was obvious somebody had been tipped off.

  One of the men eventually convicted in this case, Bobby Molino, flipped and told investigators that he had seen Puglise speaking with Kaplan, and after they finished, Puglise had come over to Molino and told him, “We’re hot.” Somehow Kaplan had found out all about the investigation; maybe he didn’t know the details, but he had told Puglise that undercover DEA agents were buying drugs, and that their phones were tapped. “We never figured out how Kaplan found out about it,” Drew told Dades. “And he wasn’t interested in talking to us. The guy didn’t flip seven years ago, why’s he gonna go now?”

  Tommy knew that eventually he was going to have to take a shot at flipping Kaplan. He asked Drew for the names of people who were around Kaplan way back when, people he might approach who had some information on the case. Anything that might help him. Drew gave him the names of guys who had already flipped and might have some additional information about Kaplan, as well as some of his own contacts who could help.

  “Look,” Tommy told him
, “I’m doing this case and I’d like to keep it within the DEA because you were the guys who got Kaplan. If he flips it’s only right it goes back to you and not the police department, not the FBI, not anybody. So give me the name of a big boss I can call in New York and in Vegas. Let me see what they want to do.”

  “Call Timmy Moran in Vegas. John Gilbriet’s the guy you want to speak to in New York. They’ll get you whatever you need.”

  Tommy added those names to the long to-do list he was making.

  Like an old engine slowly grinding into life, the cold case was starting to chug along. At that moment it was only Dades, Ponzi, Oldham, and the assistant DA Vecchione. It was just four men, a pile of paper, and a whole lot of hope and determination.

  Meanwhile, in Vegas, Louis Eppolito and Steve Caracappa apparently had absolutely no knowledge of the investigation taking place back in Brooklyn. Both retired detectives had settled into comfortable lives. Eppolito lived with his wife, three children, and mother-in-law in his home on Silver Bear Way. No one was certain where his money was coming from, but he reportedly had been paid a substantial sum by the elderly benefactor of former stripper Sandy Murphy—who had been convicted with her lover of killing her wealthy live-in boyfriend, casino owner Ted Binion—to write a screenplay showing that she was innocent. Sandy Murphy’s sensational trial had been televised by Court TV. Supposedly Eppolito had visited Murphy in prison at least thirty times while researching the story. Eventually both Murphy and her lover’s murder convictions were overturned, but they were convicted of trying to steal $7 million in silver bars and coins Binion had buried in the desert. It was the perfect TV movie story: Vegas, strippers, sex, murder, and money.