Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  At one of Louie Eppolito’s early meetings with Corso he proudly boasted about his mob connections. He claimed that he had been told by John Gotti’s attorney, Bruce Cutler, that on his deathbed Gotti professed to have trusted only three people. “He says, ‘My family, as a whole; my father; and Louie Eppolito because he went through so much as a cop.’ He says, ‘I knew Louie. We hung together…The cops always said the cocksucker’s a wiseguy with a badge. Always. But this guy never broke. Never wavered.’”

  Corso was professionally impressed—and recording every single word Eppolito said.

  Dades and Vecchione didn’t know the details of the FBI’s Vegas operation. But what they knew was enough: Louie Eppolito was dealing with a member of the Cali cartel. Maybe it was completely innocent, maybe these guys were just tennis buddies—and maybe Tommy could still get a good price on the Brooklyn Bridge. They did some figuring: The last killing that Casso credited to Eppolito and Caracappa took place in 1992. For their crimes to qualify under the RICO Act as a continuing conspiracy the Feds would have to prove that at least one criminal act had occurred within the past five years. If the Vegas part of the investigation produced evidence of a crime connected to Casso or the Luccheses, the Feds theoretically could bring RICO charges against the cops.

  Eventually Joe Ponzi learned about Corso’s progress from the DEA. He informed Vecchione that the DEA had a confidential informer “who may be into these guys on some stuff. He’s wired and apparently he’s getting some very good information.”

  As a prosecutor with a passion for justice who had spent most of his life trying to make sure bad things happened to bad people, Vecchione was happy to learn the Vegas operation was going well, but as the guy who wanted to personally put two scumbags in a small cage for the rest of their lives he was pretty pissed off. He could almost hear the Feds smiling as they greased the gangplank for the state.

  Dades didn’t need to say I told you so. He’d been telling everybody that it was going to go that way since the investigation started. But even Tommy had to laugh at the irony. It was his own insistence that the DEA get involved that had made the possible probable.

  The tree that had grown in Brooklyn had planted roots in Vegas. That created a lot of interesting possibilities: The Feds could make a drug case against the cops in Vegas but not be able to connect it to Casso, meaning there would have to be two completely independent indictments. Or they might be able to link the cases—but even that wouldn’t do any good if they couldn’t make both cases. And whatever was happening in Vegas, in Brooklyn the investigation was a lot of evidence away from a sure thing.

  It had taken Dades several months to put together most of the pieces of the Jimmy Hydell murder. Starting at the end, Hydell was killed because of his participation in the hit on Gaspipe Casso; there was no question about that. But why the attempt was made on Casso was tough for everyone to figure out. Dades still believed it was in retaliation for Casso going after John Gotti and blowing up his guy Frank DeCicco, but on the DiBiase tapes Philly Boy Paradiso had claimed it was because of a bad debt, something about some missing bonds. There was another rumor floating around that Gambino captain Angelo Ruggiero owed Casso a lot of money from gambling losses and decided to whack him rather than pay his debt. And another informer claimed that Casso was hit because he had made some “denigrating remarks” about Ruggiero and threatened to kill Gambino soldier Bobby Boriello.

  The actual reason Mickey Boy Paradiso ordered the hit could have been any one or even several of those reasons. It didn’t matter, whatever it was; it was Paradiso who put together the team of shooters including Jimmy Hydell, Nicky Guido, and Bob Bering. Their driver was a guy named Dominick Lattori. None of these people were made guys. And obviously they hadn’t spent a lot of time planning the job. It was amateur hour. Not much more than a shoot-and-pray. The hit team pulled their car alongside Casso’s car and opened up on him. They hit him twice, but police reports from that night state that he escaped by running through a parking lot into a Chinese restaurant, then ran through the kitchen and out the back.

  The police reports also included the information that the car Casso was driving was registered to a convicted drug dealer named Burt Kaplan. And in the glove compartment the police found an NYPD computer printout identifying the license plate number of a car that had been tailing Casso as an unmarked police car. That was the first physical evidence that Casso—or Kaplan—had a source inside the NYPD.

  Casso claimed in one of his 302s that Kaplan had handed him a manila envelope containing the police report of the attempt, which included the names and some photographs of members of the hit team. Supposedly the information was a gift to Casso from the cops, a way of proving to him that they were the answer to his prayers.

  Maybe, but there was another possibility too. Jimmy Hydell’s sister, Lizzie, told Dades that her brother had come home all upset and she’d overheard him talking excitedly about the attack on Casso. Also in the house at that time was the guy she was dating, a kid named Frankie Sapanaro. Frankie Sapanaro’s father and uncle were both soldiers in the Colombo family. Through an informer inside the Colombos, Dades was able to confirm his hunch that Frankie Sapanaro had gone home that night and told his father what he’d heard. Nobody was saying that Frankie did anything wrong, or even considered the consequences of this information. His father had done the so-called right thing; he’d given up Jimmy Hydell to Casso. Loyalty was more important than love.

  However Casso learned about it, the information about what happened next had come from numerous different sources. Detective George Terra flipped Bob Bering, who informed him that Jimmy Hydell knew he had been fingered as one of the shooters. Hydell told Bering he had to meet some wiseguys in Dyker Park, Brooklyn. Apparently Jimmy had been told the whole problem could be “squashed,” but Bering described him as “real nervous about it.”

  After Frankie Hydell became an informant for Dades, he told him that just after Jimmy had left his house on Staten Island to go to the meeting, Eppolito and Caracappa had mistakenly picked Frankie up. Betty Hydell told Tommy that when Frankie told her about that, she got in her own car and had her confrontation with the two cops. She identified Eppolito after seeing him appear on The Sally Jesse Raphael Show to promote his book.

  Dades later confirmed through NYPD records that Eppolito and Caracappa were no longer partners at that time, making the fact that Betty saw them together much more significant. They certainly had no police business bringing them together.

  Frankie said that as he drove toward the Verrazano Bridge less than an hour later he saw the two cops again. He didn’t know if they had seen him, but they definitely were not following him. They were on their way to Brooklyn.

  Later that day, Betty eventually told Dades, she got a phone call from Jimmy. Nothing special, he told her, he was just checking in. Betty didn’t remember anything unusual about the call, nothing to make her anxious, and absolutely nothing to indicate he was worried about the next few hours. Tommy figured that was probably the last phone call Jimmy Hydell ever made. What Betty had never told anyone—until she told Tommy—was that a couple of days later, after Jimmy had disappeared, she made an effort to find him. She had no way of knowing he was dead; no body was found, and it was possible he knew that detectives were close to solving the Annette DiBiase murder and had gone on the lam. Betty Hydell successfully traced Jimmy’s phone call. Through telephone company records, she learned that he’d made that call from a pay phone on Bay Eighth Street, near Dyker Park. Dades hoped she’d saved the phone company printout, but it was lost.

  Dades then learned from FBI reports how Hydell had been lured to the meeting. An FBI agent specializing in organized crime had testified in a bail revocation hearing for Mickey Boy Paradiso in 1987 that informers had told him, “There was a meeting to take place on October 18, 1986, where Mr. Paradiso was scheduled to represent an individual known to us [the FBI] as James Hydell, who is the alleged shooter of Anthony ‘Gaspipe’ C
asso. The meeting was to take place in the vicinity of a frankfurter stand located on Bay Eighth Street in the Dyker Park section of Brooklyn. Mr. Paradiso was supposed to meet with two other members of the Gambino family in addition to a representative of the Lucchese family, where they would resolve the issue regarding Mr. Hydell shooting Mr. Casso.”

  From the tapes of Bob Bering’s debriefing by George Terra, Dades learned that Hydell had tried to get himself some protection at that meeting. Hydell knew that Detective Al Guarneri was in charge of the Annette DiBiase murder investigation. He knew Guarneri from the neighborhood. Guarneri had become completely obsessed with the DiBiase case. During that time period he generated something like 350 DD5s, reports of actions taken during an investigation. He had worked on it day and night for ten months, both on and off duty. “I lived and breathed this case,” he told Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Mike McAlary. It’s clear that Guarneri believed Hydell and Bering were involved in her disappearance—and that both of them knew that Guarneri was tracking them.

  Dades took what he knew and tried to figure out what was going on in Jimmy Hydell’s mind that day. He had to be aware this meeting might be a trap. Apparently he arrived there early enough to give his mother a call. Maybe that was his way of saying good-bye. Just in case. But chances are he was also looking for protection—so like any Joe Citizen, he turned to the police. He would use Al Guarneri to shield him from the wiseguys. If he was being set up, the presence of cops would prevent the wiseguys from killing him.

  Bering admitted that Jimmy Hydell had told him to call Al Guarneri at the 6-2 and tell him that Hydell was going to be at a meeting in Dyker Park and he was probably going to get hit. Hydell obviously figured Guarneri would come running. Bering called the Sixty-second Precinct. Guarneri later told reporters that he wasn’t working that day, but someone from the Sixty-second called him and told him Bering was looking for him. Guarneri returned the call and presumably Bering passed along the message.

  There are information gaps in every investigation. Usually they can be filled in by putting together causes and events, what had to happen to enable the next action to take place. It’s a leap of information, sort of the way a nerve impulse will leap across a synapse from one neuron to another. The question that Dades couldn’t answer was how Eppolito and Caracappa found out that Hydell was going to a meeting in Dyker Park. So again he had to speculate based on the facts he did know.

  The wild card in the murderous deck—that Jimmy Hydell could not possibly have known—was that Al Guarneri’s brother-in-law was Detective Louis Eppolito. And he also could not possibly have known that Eppolito was working for Gaspipe Casso. So what might have happened—this is one of those jumps cops make to fill in some blanks—was that Bering called Guarneri, and Guarneri called Eppolito. Dades believed that Guarneri knew that Eppolito was looking for Hydell—they were relatives, they talked—and that it was also highly probable that Guarneri didn’t know and didn’t care why Louie was looking for Hydell. Eppolito was an active cop, Hydell was an active bad guy; they were a legitimate match. Tommy’s supposition was that Guarneri got Bering’s phone call and completely innocently reached out to Eppolito by beeper, and when they got connected he told him Hydell was going to be in Dyker Park.

  Maybe it happened that way, maybe not, but however it happened, Eppolito and Caracappa found out about Hydell’s meeting and raced across the Verrazano to get there before the wiseguys. Frankie Hydell saw them on their way.

  Jimmy Hydell was already at the park when the two cops got there. As Casso later admitted, while he was incarcerated in New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Institute he had spent a lot of time with a Colombo family shooter named Chickie DeMartino. Dades knew DeMartino well—working with FBI agents James DeStefano and Gary Pontecorvo, he had arrested him for an attempted murder. Wiseguys in the joint together spend a lot of time talking business. According to Casso, during one of their conversations, DeMartino suddenly started talking about Jimmy Hydell. He told Casso he had been sitting on Jimmy and was going to kill him, although he didn’t give a reason. Casso may have been amused when he heard that.

  Talk about your coincidences—here were two wiseguys looking to whack the same guy! Sometimes it’s amazing what two men will have in common. But clearly, whatever happened at the park, it wasn’t going to be Jimmy Hydell’s day.

  DeMartino told Casso he was sitting in his car watching Hydell, getting ready to make his move, when two men approached Hydell and put him in their car. DeMartino told Casso that he figured the two men were either cops or FBI agents, because their car looked like an unmarked police car.

  Obviously that made great sense to Dades. Hydell had alerted the cops, so he certainly wouldn’t have been surprised when two detectives showed up and flashed their badges. In fact, he was probably thrilled. But not as happy as Eppolito and Caracappa. This was precisely how their badges made their crimes so simple. That badge made it easy to get a real suspicious guy in a car—“Hey, Jimmy, you’re under arrest for whatever,” or “Hey, Hydell, get in the car; we want to ask you a few questions.”

  Jimmy Hydell probably believed he was saving his own life by getting into the car. Dades also believed the cops must have handcuffed Hydell; it was standard procedure when you were putting somebody in the backseat of a car, and Hydell would have understood that and accepted it.

  Casso said that once the cops had Hydell in their car, they drove him to an auto repair garage on Nostrand Avenue owned by someone they trusted. Gaspipe did not know the exact location of the garage.

  Casso had been told by Kaplan that when the cops got to the garage Eppolito physically picked up Hydell and hog-tied him, then threw him in the trunk of another car, a car that had been provided by Kaplan.

  Dades had learned from several sources—informers as well as Casso’s 302s—that Eppolito and Caracappa then brought Hydell to the parking lot of a Toys “R” Us on Flatbush Avenue in the trunk of the car. The cops had sent a prearranged code to Kaplan’s beeper informing him that they had Hydell and were bringing him to the planned meeting place. It was there, Casso told the FBI, that he saw the cops for the first and only time. From the parking lot Casso and his friend, Lucchese underboss Vic Amuso, drove the car to an unidentified house nearby belonging to a wiseguy and took Hydell into the finished basement.

  60 Minutes had done a story about Casso in 1998 after his plea agreement fell apart. Although during that interview Casso told correspondent Ed Bradley that he “had cops on his payroll,” for legal reasons that show’s producers had edited out that information. But Casso did describe the Hydell killing on camera, telling Bradley, “I took him to a place that I had prearranged, somebody’s house that I could use. I brought him there, sat him down. I wanted to know why I was shot and who else was involved, who gave the orders to shoot.”

  Bradley asked him, about killing Hydell, “Was it just one shot to the head?”

  “I didn’t shoot him in the head. I didn’t shoot him in somebody else’s house. You make a mess. I shot him a couple of times. I didn’t torture him or anything like that. I shot him a couple of times, the kid died.”

  “What’s a couple?” asked Bradley.

  “I don’t know, more than a couple. I don’t know the exact amount. Maybe I shot him ten times, twelve times…It could’ve been fifteen.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the hatred I had for him. I wanted to beat him with the gun after it was empty. He just tried to kill me. He doesn’t deserve anything. That’s the law anyway…That’s the law of the Mafia.”

  Tommy watched this clip over and over, and every time he did he found himself thinking about Betty Hydell. Long ago Betty had accepted the fact that her son was dead, but she wanted to know why and how and who. She wanted to find his body. In the twelve years between Jimmy’s disappearance and broadcast of this show in 1998 she had spoken with the FBI numerous times. The bureau’s response was always the same: We have no new information about the dis
appearance of Jimmy Hydell.

  As she discovered watching 60 Minutes, it turned out they knew everything. It was while watching this program that Betty learned for the first time how her son had died. It was brutal for her, and for her daughter, Lizzie, but it also confirmed Betty’s suspicion that just about everybody in law enforcement was lying to her. That had left her feeling there was no one she could trust, no one who cared.

  So Dades—and the task force—knew the whole story of Jimmy Hydell’s murder. They knew exactly what Eppolito and Caracappa had done. And now their job was to prove it beyond a reasonable a doubt.

  CHAPTER 7

  The task force met each Tuesday morning. While some of the meetings continued to be held in the Brooklyn DA’s office, perhaps symbolically the other meetings were held two blocks away at the Eastern District. These meetings generally lasted about two hours, during which everyone reported what they’d learned the previous week and got their assignments for the following week. The meetings were conducted very professionally—and equally dispassionately.

  Every joint task force eventually takes on its own identity. Sometimes it becomes a cohesive unit, working smoothly and efficiently as the loyalty of its members shifts gradually from their assigning agencies to this makeshift team. The common goal, putting bad guys in a cage, becomes a powerful engine for unity. Dades knew the exhilarating feeling, the excitement, that resulted when everybody finally got it together to experience the legendary Three Musketeers bravado, all for one, one for all.