by Tommy Dades
Campisi explained. At the time Eppolito and later Caracappa were being investigated the NYPD was divided into seven divisions for management purposes. Each of those seven divisions ran its own satellite Internal Affairs unit, all of which were supervised by a headquarters division. “Brooklyn South did these investigations back then. When the system was centralized all the smaller units were supposed to have transported all their files to bureau. Do I know for sure that every file made it from the units? Mike, the truth is I don’t know where these files are.” He added without too much hope that there was one storage facility still to be checked—but a couple of days later he reported that the files weren’t there either.
Internal Affairs had absolutely no files on Eppolito or Caracappa, two of the most controversial cops in recent memory.
Dades wasn’t the slightest bit surprised at the news. “That’s just bullshit,” he angrily told Vecchione. “How can there be nothing? You tell me. I told you that these guys were gonna fuck us.”
Vecchione didn’t agree. “C’mon, Tommy, nobody’s fucking anybody. Just relax. Believe me, I know Campisi. I’m telling you, the guy’s a fair guy. If he had this stuff he’d give it to us. He doesn’t have it; what do you want him to do?”
“I’ve been telling you right from the beginning,” Dades said, “these guys are gonna fuck us every way they can. Listen to me, Mike, if the Feds can take this case away from us, they’re going to.”
“They can’t, Tommy,” Mike reassured him. “There’s no way.”
None of these files was ever located. No one knows precisely what was in them. It’s probable they were simply misplaced—they might still be sitting in a file cabinet somewhere collecting dust—but it’s also possible that somebody friendly with the two cops found them and destroyed them.
To Tommy though, this was a reminder that they were taking on the system and they shouldn’t expect to receive a lot of help. As anyone who has ever worked inside the system knows, the first objective of the system is always to protect the system. This was an old case, long forgotten; it wouldn’t do anybody any good to dredge it up again. And as it turned out, this was only the first of the many dead ends the investigators would explore. There was nothing for Dades to do but go back to work, chasing another lead.
And it was only a few days later that he caught a real big one. The majority of cold cases are solved through existing paperwork. Somebody picks up on a detail that previously had been overlooked. At that point the small task force was focusing almost exclusively on the Jimmy Hydell murder. Vecchione’s plan was to nail Eppolito and Caracappa for one killing, then investigate their other crimes. The Hydell case offered the greatest opportunity to put them away. Betty Hydell could connect the cops to her son, which would corroborate Casso.
Following Hydell, there was a loose agreement that they’d go after the Eddie Lino killing. Lino was a lot more difficult in many respects. But Gaspipe was on record saying that the cops had actually killed Lino and there was an eyewitness who had seen someone fitting Caracappa’s description walking away from Lino’s car. They would try to find that witness again; who even knew if he was still alive or around or even remembered what he’d seen, but it was a link that might lead to others.
Among the piles of documents Tommy examined were numerous computer runs done by Eppolito and Caracappa. “It was just the regular work you gotta do,” he explains. “Back in the 1980s if a cop wanted to access the police department’s computers they had to type in their name and tax ID number. The actual reports were printed on the old kind of computer paper, attached sheets of pinfed computer paper that folded onto itself. I went through all the printouts in Eppolito’s file first and I didn’t find anything that connected him to these crimes, so then I started going through Caracappa’s file.
“Caracappa was a member of the Major Case Squad, so he was in the perfect position to look at all the confidential information on wiseguys. It was legitimately part of his job. And that’s exactly what he’d done. As I went through his file I began to see the names of wiseguys who had been killed that Caracappa had run under his ID number. I was trying to find some kind of connection between the dates he ran the files and the dates these guys got killed. But the timing was off. I was positive there was a tie-in, I knew there was an explanation, I just couldn’t figure it out. I kept telling myself, ‘You had to make a mistake somewhere. I know you did and I’m gonna find it.’”
Tommy had set up a timeline. A crime line, actually. Casso had been shot on September 14, 1986. Everything sprang from that day. Within a few days Gaspipe had learned from Kaplan’s sources inside the department that Hydell had been one of his assailants. A couple of weeks after that Jimmy Hydell had been kidnapped, tortured until he admitted who sponsored the attempt and identified the other people who had been with him, and then killed by Casso.
One of the shooters was a wiseguy named Nicky Guido. In the pile of computer printouts run by Detective Stephen Caracappa, Dades discovered that on November 11, 1986, he had run the name Nicholas Guido through the NYPD database. On the surface that made sense; the police had learned the mob associate Guido had been part of the hit team that attacked Casso, and they would want to know everything possible about him, so Caracappa might simply have been doing his job. But unlike the other homicides, in this case the timeline was perfect: Guido was ID’d, Caracappa ran his name and got his information, Guido was murdered. The only problem with this scenario was that the wrong Nicky Guido had been killed.
Right around the time Dades found this file he had a conversation with George Terra, a top investigator in Ponzi’s office. George Terra was another one of those old-timers, the experienced guys who didn’t need a scorecard to know all the players. Joe Ponzi liked to tell people that Terra was so cunning that the fox who bit him had died. Terra had been working aspects of this case almost from the very beginning, first as an NYPD detective who broke the Annette DiBiase murder and was a key member of the task force that finally located and arrested Gaspipe Casso in his New Jersey hideout, and after his retirement as an investigator in Joe Hynes’s office. In fact, many of the tapes that Dades had spent hours listening to had come from an investigation run by Terra.
Those tapes had allowed Dades to get to know a dead man. They practically were Jimmy Hydell’s autobiography. Terra told Tommy the history of the tapes: One afternoon the DA’s office unexpectedly had gotten a call from Philly Boy Paradiso, who was sitting in jail. This was less than a year before the attack on Casso. Philly Boy had taken a good long look at his future and decided to cooperate. He told Terra that he could give him the Annette DiBiase kidnapping/murder.
It was Jimmy Hydell, he said. Hydell had insinuated to him that he had killed her. He didn’t straight-out admit it, Paradiso told Terra, he just sort of suggested it. The DA agreed to a deal: Philly would wear a wire and try to get Hydell’s confession on tape. Terra and the two FBI agents in their small task force would work with him. During the next few months Philly Boy and Hydell were together every day. But instead of talking about DiBiase, Hydell began discussing his personal hit parade. Hydell told him about the murder of Joseph Trinetto, who made the fatal mistake of living with Bob Bering’s ex-wife. Trinetto came out of the house one morning and found his tire was flat. While he was changing it in his driveway someone put a couple of bullets in his head. And Hydell told Paradiso about the murder of bar owner Giacomo DeAngelo, who was machine-gunned to death in front of his house. But then he began talking about Casso—and disappeared.
As Terra told Dades, “We put Philly with Hydell every single day. Jimmy doesn’t talk too much but as time goes by we’re putting together little bits and pieces of who got killed and why. Then comes the day, October eighteen, 1986. Jimmy disappears. All we know is that he went to meet somebody over by the VA hospital at Dyker Park. There are U-shaped concrete bleachers and that’s where he was supposed to meet somebody. We don’t know who. His car was there. His change of clothes was there, but he’s
gone.
“According to Philly,” Terra continued, “nobody knew what happened to him. So now we put Philly with Jimmy’s younger brother, Frankie. We’re trying to find out what happened to Jimmy and we’re trying to find out what happened with the Casso shooting. Frankie kept saying that Casso had something to do with a bond deal, $40,000 worth of bonds…”
Terra had come all the way back to Tommy’s starting point, Frankie Hydell. The murder of Frankie Hydell had led to Dades forming a relationship with Betty Hydell, and Betty’s information had started this entire investigation. Bigger pieces were beginning to fit together. Tommy had a long list of questions he wanted to ask Terra. He never had to ask them; Terra handed him the key to the lockbox.
Like Dades, George Terra was an organized crime expert. He told Tommy that after each of the Casso killings he’d done computer searches about the victims. When Nicky Guido was killed, he said, he’d done a group search. He had gotten a computer printout of all the Nicholas Guidos living in Brooklyn. There were eight or nine of them, he remembered, but only one of them lived in downtown Brooklyn. That Nicky Guido, the one who lived near the mobsters, had been the victim—but he was not the Gambino associate.
But then Terra had gone further. He discovered that several Gambinos supposedly lived in upstate New York, in Sullivan County. It turned out there was a reason for that. More than a century earlier—long before the establishment of the child protective services—the New York State legislature had permitted the establishment of societies dedicated to the prevention of child abuse. Members of these societies were given all the powers of peace officers; they could make arrests, file charges, even take custody of children. But most important for the Gambinos, they were legally permitted to carry concealed weapons without having to obtain a permit. This was one of those archaic laws that had survived mostly because few people knew about it. Somehow, the Gambinos found out about it and took full advantage. The Sullivan Society had been incorporated in 1982, and most of its twelve members had ties to organized crime. Gambino associate Nicky Guido was a member of the Sullivan Society. And while he apparently was living in New Jersey, his legal address was in upstate New York.
Any doubt Terra might have had that this Nicky Guido was one of the shooters was resolved when he found out that he had been arrested at the Vista Hotel in Manhattan on a gun possession charge—along with Jimmy Hydell. The case was dismissed—it wasn’t even part of Guido’s record—but it was all the proof George Terra needed to know he’d identified the right Nicky Guido. And then he realized what must have happened—the shooters had killed the wrong Nicky Guido.
Terra was so certain of his information that he’d gone to the Seventy-sixth Precinct on Union Street and told detectives there that Nicky Guido had been murdered by mistake, that he was the wrong Nicky Guido. They looked at him like he was crazy, he told Tommy, and paid no attention to him.
But Dades knew it all squared. Armed with this knowledge, Dades went back to look a little more closely at Caracappa’s computer search for Nicholas Guido. Maybe, just maybe, Caracappa had made the same mistake. As he remembers, “I looked at the date of birth of the Nicky Guido that had been killed, the innocent kid. He was born on February 2, 1960. I thought, Please let that be the birth date of the Nicky Guido that Caracappa ran. I got out the Nicky Guido homicide folder and checked the computer run. It took me a little while to find the birth date. And there it was, February 2, 1960. Caracappa had assumed because this Nicky Guido lived in the right area that he had to be the target. Caracappa had identified the wrong Nicky Guido. The Nicky Guido who had been part of the team that shot Casso had been born on January 29, 1957. He was about three years older than the victim and lived somewhere in Jersey.
“I just held that piece of paper in my hand, looking at it. I gotcha, you fuck. I gotcha. Gaspipe wanted to know where to find Nicky Guido. You gave him this kid’s address by mistake and a couple of weeks later he got killed. That’s no coincidence.”
Tommy just sat there, staring at the sheet of paper. This was the first piece of physical evidence that connected either of the cops to the murders. It proved that Caracappa had been actively looking for Nicky Guido—just as Casso had told the FBI. It had been sitting in that file for sixteen years. Who knows how many other people had searched through that file without grasping its significance? Dades knew it wasn’t proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Caracappa could claim he was simply running names because that was the job of his unit; he could say he was sloppy; he could try to explain it a dozen ways, but Dades knew it was going to be very difficult for anyone to believe that the connection between Caracappa’s mistake and the murder of Nicky Guido was just an innocent coincidence.
Dades was absolutely elated. “In that instant,” he recalls, “the investigation changed fundamentally. It wasn’t just speculation anymore. I went out into the hallway waving the paper and started yelling down the hall to George Terra, ‘We got him, George. We fucking got him! It’s the wrong birth date. We got him!’ Nobody else knew what I was screaming about, but they knew that I’d found something important.”
Terra immediately came running into the office. Tommy showed him the computer run and the birth dates. Terra was smiling and nodding. “That totally fits with what I looked at on the computer back then,” he said.
He called Ponzi; he didn’t wait for him to say hello. “We got him. Caracappa gave Casso the wrong Nicky Guido. That’s why they killed the kid.”
Ponzi got it. “Are you sure?”
“I’m holding the paper in my hand.”
Dades walked into Vecchione’s office, a big smile on his face. Mike was in the middle of his breakfast. “You’re not gonna believe this,” Tommy said, waving the printout. “Look at this, look at this. We got him. We got him in black and white.”
He walked around Vecchione’s desk and laid down the paper in front of him. Mike looked at it, not quite understanding what he was looking at. “What do you got?”
“Look at this,” Tommy said, pointing to the birth date on the printout. “Nicky Guido, the kid who got killed, remember we could never figure out why he was killed ’cause he wasn’t a wiseguy? This is it, this is why. Caracappa got the wrong guy. He ran the name on the computer, but he came up with the wrong guy. It’s the wrong address.”
“Geez,” Vecchione said. He stared at the sheet of paper through the eyes of an experienced prosecutor, trying to find the holes that a good defense lawyer would exploit. “This is unbelievable, Tommy,” he said. He was ecstatic. His mind started racing; within seconds he was already in the middle of the trial, already dealing with the first legal hurdle. His plan was to indict Eppolito and Caracappa for the Hydell murder. Getting this paper admitted as evidence in that trial would be complicated because it had nothing to do with Hydell’s killing. If either cop dared take the stand he could bring it in during his cross-examination—but at that point Vecchione believed there was little chance that would happen. More likely he would have to make a Molineux motion to get it in. Basically, this allows a prosecutor to introduce evidence of crimes that are similar to the crime for which the defendant is being tried or goes to prove his identity. It allows a prosecutor to show a pattern; this is the same way this guy committed this crime, this crime, and that crime. Somehow, Vecchione knew, he’d manage to get it in.
Joe Ponzi was equally excited. He looked at this evidence from the detective’s point of view; what does this give us and where do we go from here? This was a promising beginning; it was the first solid proof that these guys were dirty. It was enough to get everybody excited, maybe even to get additional resources if that became necessary. They knew now they were following the right path.
Finally Dades called federal prosecutor Mark Feldman. “Mark,” he said, “you’re not gonna believe what we found…” Feldman was intrigued by the discovery. More than anyone else, Feldman knew about the real Nicky Guido—in 1989 he had put Nicky Guido in prison for the attempted murder of Anthony Casso.
So Feldman went all the way back with the Nicky Guido story. At this point in the Mafia cops investigation though, he was simply an interested observer. The Feds had been unable to make the case against the detectives seven years earlier; it was a state case now. But as a good friend of both Dades and Ponzi, as well as one of the best wiseguy prosecutors in the business, at that moment Feldman was probably pleased for Tommy, for Ponzi, and for justice. But it’s also possible he might have been just a little envious. This was a no-lose situation for the Brooklyn DA’s office: If Dades’s small team could accomplish what the FBI couldn’t, nailing Eppolito and Caracappa, careers were going to be made. It was a big-time get. And if they couldn’t make it stick? Well, only a few people would know they even tried and certainly no one would blame them for failing. That was the beauty of a cold case.
One thing did change abruptly following the discovery of this evidence: Dades’s somewhat fanciful quest evolved quickly into a serious investigation. Over the next couple of months several people joined the team. Bill Oldham had long been lobbying to add Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Henoch from the Eastern District, explaining that Henoch would serve as Mark Feldman’s representative. When Dades wondered exactly why he was needed, Oldham explained, “This is going to be a state trial and Henoch used to be a Manhattan DA.”
