Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  Eppolito was also commissioned by at least two older women to write screenplays of their life stories and get them produced. That sounded like a hustle. And one of those women, Jane McCormick, complained to the media that she’d borrowed $45,000 to pay Eppolito to write a screenplay detailing her past as a Vegas casino hostess and stripper who partied with Frank Sinatra and his Rat Pack. The screenplay was called Reflections in the Mirror, but it never got made. “I was a sucker enough to go for it,” she admitted. “He put up a good front, a good game, and took my money.” Apparently she didn’t like the screenplay: “He couldn’t even spell, his English stunk, and he got a lot of the facts wrong.”

  Caracappa was living a much quieter life with his wife, his daughter, and two cats across the street from his former partner on Silver Bear Way. After serving as assistant chief of security for a private company running the prison in which, perhaps coincidentally, Sandy Murphy was incarcerated, he opened his own private investigation business, Argus West. Friendly neighbors reported that he got up early each morning to go to work and usually was in bed so early that “his wife was always complaining.”

  Not surprisingly, Eppolito and Caracappa had remained close friends. As far as their neighbors knew, the two were simply retired detectives from New York who were leading the good life in Vegas. But Eppolito remained cautious that his past might still have reach. At one point he was recorded telling a cooperating government witness that he never spoke on the telephone, because he was fearful that the Feds had tapped his phone. No one knew if that was simply another example of Eppolito trying to impress a potential backer for one of his movie projects or if in fact he actually had learned about the investigation.

  That just didn’t seem possible. There was no identification on the door of the small office where Tommy worked and nobody mentioned the investigation outside of that office. The door was always locked when no one was there, and Tommy held the key. There was a good reason for these precautions: Too many previous investigations involving these two guys had been compromised. The fact was that there still were a lot of cops on the job who had worked with Eppolito and Caracappa. Eppolito in particular was one of those boisterous guys with as many friends as enemies. He was a good-time guy and a lot of people liked him. Caracappa reportedly came back to New York each year for the reunion of the Major Case Squad. There was nothing to be gained by alerting the two cops that the investigation was revving up.

  There was no reason to believe that Eppolito and Caracappa knew what was going on in Brooklyn, but still, these guys had the longest reach into the department Dades had ever seen.

  In the office on the eighteenth floor Dades continued poring over all the materials he and Ponzi had collected. Usually he got to work by five A.M., beating the rush-hour traffic from his home on Staten Island. He’d bring a bagel, a cup of coffee, and a banana and sit there through the morning.

  Joe Ponzi was doing pretty much the same thing in his office. It had been a while since Ponzi had had the opportunity to be actively involved as an investigator in a big case. At night he’d speak with his father, the cops’ former commanding officer, sometimes asking questions but more often dropping a few hints about their progress. During the day Dades and Ponzi spoke on the phone numerous times, comparing notes, asking questions, compiling lists of additional documents that might be useful and people they wanted to interview.

  Tommy spent endless hours listening to the tapes produced by the wiretaps in the Annette DiBiase investigation; the goal then had been to get Bering to talk about his former girlfriend with Hydell, who had killed her. Rather than simply reading the transcripts Tommy wanted to hear Bob Bering, Philly Boy Paradiso (Mickey Boy’s brother), and Jimmy Hydell discuss the crime business. Among those tapes was a recording made the day Hydell disappeared and he wanted to hear the inflections that words on paper could never convey.

  Then he went through the folders of every homicide Casso had mentioned involving the cops. He wanted to know if there had been any witnesses and what they might have seen; he wanted to compare these murders to other mob hits. He read the bios of every perp even peripherally involved in the case.

  He read both Eppolito and Caracappa’s thick NYPD personnel files, hundreds of pages that charted their careers from the day they took the oath until the day they handed in their badges. In an Internal Affairs file he found the reports from the Rosario Gambino case, in which Eppolito’s prints had been found on copies of police documents in Gambino’s house, but he also found references to additional complaints people had made to IAD about Eppolito and Caracappa. He assumed they were the kind of complaints every active cop inevitably receives and made a note to follow up. You never know.

  He reread Eppolito’s book. And when he finished reading all of these documents once, he read many of them again, this time reading them with the additional knowledge he had gained from all the other reports. The first read through he just absorbed the information; the second time he was trying to make connections, to make sense out of seemingly random events. This second time information that hadn’t fit anywhere the first time he read the reports slowly began to make sense. And always, somewhere in his mind, were Casso’s 302s.

  Tommy had always operated on his belief that the more he learned, the more power he had. Knowledge is power, his mother always told him. Remember that. So once he learned something, it stayed filed in his mind.

  He also began making phone calls, speaking to people who had worked with the cops, just trying to gather as much information as possible. At the beginning of an investigation there is no single area of focus; it’s like trying to light a torch with damp matches. You just keep striking and striking until you get that first spark, then you pay close attention until it becomes a fire, and then you use it to light your path.

  Ironically, while forensic science, with all its amazing tools of detection, has enchanted the public, the detectives’ most valuable tool remains the telephone. Tommy Dades practically lived on the phone. His cell phone rang all day and deep into the night. So after going through all the written material once, twice, sometimes three times, he finally picked up the phone.

  One of the first people he called was former Chief Richard Nicastro, who had been running the Detective Bureau when Eppolito had gotten jammed up with Rosario Gambino. What had really happened there, Tommy wanted to know; how did Eppolito beat that one?

  Nicastro had been Eppolito and Caracappa’s ultimate superior. He might remember small things that didn’t make it to paper, the little inconsistencies and oddities that a good detective never forgets. In the department Nicastro had always been well respected; people considered him a straight shooter. Eppolito didn’t share those good thoughts though; in his autobiography he had some pretty nasty things to say about Nicastro. He claimed that after his acquittal he’d had a confrontation with Nicastro, who made remarks about his family and poked him in the chest. Eppolito wrote that he had warned him, “If he poked his finger into my chest one more time I was going to smash his face flat.”

  Mike Vecchione had heard a rumor that in the wake of former Police Commissioner Benjamin Ward in 2002, Nicastro had given a ride to Hugh Mo, the trial commissioner who had acquitted Eppolito. And out of nowhere Nicastro looked at Mo and said, “I told you back then that you made a mistake. You found that guy not guilty on some technicality. I told you he was dirty.” The rumor did not include Mo’s response.

  Tommy wanted to know if Nicastro still felt that way about Eppolito and if there was anything he remembered about that hearing that wasn’t in the reports. When Tommy reached Nicastro the retired Chief politely refused to speak to him, asking, “Who do you know that I can call?”

  “How about Chief Allee?” Dades owed a lot of his success to former Chief of Detectives Bill Allee. Tommy had worked for Allee through a lot of ranks and he had been instrumental in his promotions. Within a day Allee had called Nicastro and vouched for Dades.

  Tommy was pretty blunt the next time he spok
e with Nicastro: “I want to talk to you about Louis Eppolito. I’m starting to look at him and I’d like to know what you know about him.”

  Nicastro didn’t hesitate. “He’s a no-good cocksucker.”

  Well, Dades thought, looks like that rumor is true.

  CHAPTER 5

  The first hint of a problem came from an innocuous request. While going through the two cops’ personnel folders, Tommy Dades had found several references to civilian complaints that had been made against them and investigated by Internal Affairs. According to the brief notations, several of these cases involved the sale of confidential documents. The files didn’t include a lot of details, but one of these charges involved a woman whose husband was in jail. She claimed to have paid Eppolito and Caracappa several hundred dollars to get a look at her husband’s FBI file.

  The thing that intrigued Dades was that most of these complaints had been lodged against Eppolito and Caracappa while they were assigned to different squads. That was unusual. Proving they were working together when they had different assignments potentially was very important. Tommy wanted to read the complete reports. In particular he wanted the names of the complainants so he could find them and interview them. Getting hold of these files might be a little complicated, but it wasn’t impossible.

  It was sort of odd that while Internal Affairs’ entire Rosario Gambino file was included in the documents Dades had picked up from the Feds, none of these other files were there. They had to exist, he knew that; he had log numbers that proved it. And they covered the same sort of crime, selling access to confidential law enforcement documents. For some reason though, nobody had followed up on it. That in itself seemed strange to Dades. If you could prove a pattern of theft, that the guy had committed this crime before, that would constitute reasonable evidence of guilt. So why hadn’t the prosecutors used all the evidence they had? Why didn’t they conduct a thorough investigation? He couldn’t help thinking that if they’d nailed Eppolito the first time they had him, for selling documents to Rosario Gambino, a lot of people who were murdered would still be walking around.

  For Tommy, the bigger problem was dealing with Internal Affairs. The NYPD’s Internal Affairs Unit polices the police department. IA is a quasi-secret unit that conducts investigations into the potentially illegal actions of police officers. This is the unit that brought the charges Vecchione had both prosecuted earlier in his career and later defended cops against in departmental hearings. Dades wouldn’t call anybody there; basically, he despised them.

  It went back to the stupidest thing Tommy had done in his entire career; while his marriage was crumbling, he had an affair. Not just a simple affair—Tommy never did things the easy way—but an affair with the girlfriend of a bank burglar Tommy had arrested after he had been indicted for murder (later he was acquitted). That was the mess that pushed him into retirement. This woman had filed recent assault charges against her boyfriend and would have been a witness against him. So Tommy’s relationship with her could have destroyed the DA’s case. The affair started less than a month after Dades’s mother had died and lasted eight months. When Vecchione and Ponzi found out about it they were furious. Beyond furious. Both men continually berated Dades, but for a long time he just couldn’t break it off. Finally, though, he did.

  And when he did, this woman accused him of rape. She claimed that the first night they were together he had raped her—after which she voluntarily stayed with him for months. It was a lie. A few days after filing the complaint she admitted that the boyfriend had returned and forced her to do it, then she acknowledged it wasn’t true. But the damage was done. Rather than examining Dades’s record throughout his career and the circumstances of the accusation, Internal Affairs launched a full investigation.

  Dades was furious. He knew he was guilty of gross stupidity, but he hadn’t committed any crimes. The fact that his record had been absolutely clean for eighteen years made no difference to IA; they treated him like a felon. He became embittered at the department. At one point while he was being interviewed by an IA officer he lost his temper and practically dived over a table at her. They had to drag him out of the hearing room. Obviously that didn’t help his case.

  “I was humiliated. Throughout my career I was honorable in everything that I did and in return they tortured me and made me feel like a criminal. Look, it was an incredibly dumb thing for me to do. I know that, I admit it. I can’t explain why I did it and I don’t want to make any excuses. It was a mistake and I’m sorry it happened.

  “But even after beating my case, I knew I was wearing a bull’s-eye. If this hadn’t happened I probably would have stayed on the job. But it woke me up. My pension, my medical benefits could go out the window in two seconds for something I didn’t even do. I figured I better secure it while I had the opportunity. So I did.”

  Maybe even worse than dealing with IA, Tommy had to admit his infidelity to his wife. His marriage had been in trouble for a while; things happen between people, but even Ro knew he was not capable of committing a horrendous crime like rape.

  Vecchione did what he could to help. As it happened, he was prosecuting the assault and had interviewed Tommy’s accuser several times. He also knew that Dades’s affair with her would pretty much make it impossible for him to testify in a trial. He was livid about that and he, Ponzi, and Dades argued often, sometimes loudly. Tommy considered the investigation an insult to his entire career. “How can they believe someone like her?” he wondered.

  Vecchione told him. “They don’t, but once the allegation was made they had an obligation to investigate. You know, Tommy, fucking around with her was an incredibly stupid mistake. She’s a witness in this case. You arrested her baby’s father. Having an affair with her was an unbelievably dumb thing to do.”

  But Mike also knew that the rape accusation was bullshit. So when he was contacted by officers at IAB he gave them his assessment of the case. “This is just about revenge,” he explained. “This woman is a liar. She’s just trying to get in good stead with her baby’s father. I’ll bet you anything he told her to make the complaint against Tommy.”

  When IA finally decided that there was no basis for charges to be filed, they referred the case to the department advocate’s office, where Dades could be charged with conduct unbecoming an officer. It took the advocate’s office another three months to drop the whole case. Tommy walked away clean but not unscarred. He’d made some enemies inside Internal Affairs. That was the main reason he had decided to retire after getting his twenty years in.

  The boyfriend eventually accepted a deal and pled guilty. He is serving a state sentence, to be followed by a federal sentence; in all he’ll spend about ten years in prison.

  So there was a pretty good reason Dades couldn’t make the request to Internal Affairs for the missing files. At a meeting of the small team in Vecchione’s office in mid-October Tommy brought up the IA documents he wanted to see. Both Ponzi and Oldham had contacts in IA, but at the investigative level. Because Vecchione’s division is in charge of investigating police corruption, police brutality, and crimes committed by police officers, he had established a good relationship with the Chief of Internal Affairs, Charles Campisi. Unlike Dades, Vecchione had considerable respect for IA, believing there were some excellent investigators working there. In particular he had great confidence in Campisi.

  Vecchione called him. “Listen, Charlie,” he told him, “I have something to discuss with you that I think you got to keep just between the two of us. I wouldn’t ask you to do that if it wasn’t important. I know you have a boss but I got to tell you, for now I’d appreciate you keeping it to yourself.” While IA essentially operates independently of the normal police reporting structure, Campisi was still responsible to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly.

  “Okay,” Campisi agreed. “What’s up?”

  Vecchione laid it out. “We have some new information about a Brooklyn homicide, a wiseguy named Jimmy Hydell, which took place fifteen, si
xteen years ago. Thing is, we think that it may have involved two New York City detectives, Louie Eppolito and Steve Caracappa, who you probably know about. I have to tell you, Charlie, we think we’ve got some pretty strong evidence against these guys and we’ve opened up an investigation.”

  Campisi took a deep breath. He knew the stakes. “What do you need from us?”

  “We know that the IAB did some investigations on both of these guys when Eppolito was in the trial room. We’ve got some log numbers from other complaints and we want to see the complete files. I can’t imagine you don’t have a dossier on both of them because they’ve been under suspicion forever.”

  “I’ve never seen anything on them, Mike,” he replied. Vecchione heard the doubt in Campisi’s voice. “But the files have to be somewhere. Let me put somebody on this.”

  Mike cautioned him that it had to be somebody he trusted.

  “I’ll have somebody personally go through the storehouse and look for the files. If they’re there, you’ll get them.”

  “You need a subpoena?” Mike asked.

  “No, no, that’s okay. You can have whatever we got.”

  Vecchione hung up confident Dades would get the files. At the next meeting he assured everybody that Campisi was taking care of it himself. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll get them.” But Campisi never called back. Vecchione waited almost a week before calling him again.

  Campisi was apologetic. “Mike,” he said, “you’re not going to believe this, but we’ve searched everywhere that those folders could be and we can’t find them.”

  Vecchione was incredulous. That didn’t seem possible. After the Gambino case Eppolito in particular was a known guy. He was high profile; people had to be looking at him every time he took a breath. So when complaints were made about Louie and his partner the alarms must have gone off. Files like that just don’t disappear. “What are you talking about, Charlie? How can they not be there?”