by Tommy Dades
Vecchione didn’t want to give up. He discussed the situation with his own boss, Brooklyn DA Joe Hynes, who confirmed that Feldman had him in a box. “What is, is,” Hynes said. “We can’t make them do something they don’t want to do.”
That left Casso’s lawyer, D. B. Lewis. Vecchione spoke with him several more times, trying to convince him that this was his client’s only shot at changing the equation. “I don’t understand the problem,” he said. “Your guy’s already confessed to Hydell’s murder on national television. If the Feds were going to prosecute him for it, they would have done it a long time ago. His own words would have hung him. It doesn’t make any sense not to talk to me.
“We’re giving him a chance to get back into court. Once he gets there who knows what a judge’ll do? Right now Casso’s got nothing. You know as well as I do that the Feds wouldn’t dare prosecute him for testifying against two dirty cops. They already got him for fifteen murders. And this’ll give him what he needs, a law enforcement agency verifying what he said was true. Once he gives us what we need, we’re gonna go out and corroborate a lot of it, something nobody else has done. We’ve already corroborated some of it.” Vecchione gave him no details about the investigation beyond what was absolutely necessary and perhaps even hinted they had more than they actually did.
Lewis replied that he would talk to Casso “and make every attempt to get him in.”
It didn’t work. Lewis reported to Vecchione that without a written guarantee of immunity on the Hydell killing from both the Feds and the state Casso wouldn’t speak to him.
Vecchione’s own feeling was that Lewis was being too much of a lawyer, that he was hurting his client. The entire situation seemed crazy to him—Feldman refusing to grant immunity for a crime he had no intention of prosecuting; Casso—or Lewis—turning down the only shot he had at a reduced sentence. Vecchione made one final plea to Lewis: “Do me a favor. Let me come into the jail and speak to him. You be right there, but just give me one shot. One shot, that’s all, to see if I can convince him.”
Vecchione was confident that he, Dades, and Ponzi could persuade Casso to talk to them. Each of them had spent much of their career convincing reluctant witnesses to do just that. But they never got the chance. According to Lewis, until his client had immunity he wasn’t interested in meeting with anyone working the two cops case. Years later, though, Vecchione was told by someone in prison with Casso that Gaspipe had wanted to speak to him. In fact, long after it would have done any good, Casso wrote to Vecchione and had a second lawyer call him to confirm that he wanted to take his last shot. But it all came too late, much too late.
Just like Dades, Mike Vecchione was incredibly frustrated—and really pissed off. Casso was done; he was out of the equation. That left only one path to the cops. Vecchione turned the page and took a good, long look at the One-Eyed Jew.
CHAPTER 8
As the investigation expanded into new and promising directions, trying to maintain secrecy was like trying to catch the wind in a strainer. While there was no direct evidence that anyone outside the task force had learned about it, all of a sudden inexplicable things began happening.
On a beautiful afternoon in late fall 2003, Mike Vecchione was in his office making last-minute preparations for the surrender of Brooklyn’s Democratic political boss Clarence Norman. For Vecchione, this was the culmination of a long undercover operation. Another crooked politician was going to take a fall. The media was going to love this one. This was a front-page indictment.
So when Vecchione’s phone rang he just assumed it concerned the last-minute details of Norman’s arraignment. To his surprise, it was his sister. “Mike,” she said anxiously. “You’d better get right home.”
His first thought was his eighty-three-year-old father, with whom he lived in the house in Queens. “What’s the matter? Is Dad okay?”
“No no no, he’s fine. But somebody broke into the house. They wrecked it.”
“I raced out to Queens,” says Vecchione. “After my divorce I’d moved into my parents’ small home until I could get resettled. It was just a temporary stop; I didn’t expect to be there more than a few months. Then my mother died unexpectedly and my father had a quadruple bypass and was diagnosed with prostate cancer. There was no way I could leave my father there alone. Ten years later I was still living there.
“My father lived on the main floor, while I had a small bedroom and office upstairs. It wasn’t terrible; the house was close enough to my ex-wife and my two sons to enable me to get over there easily and often. It wasn’t perfect, but it had worked out well for all of us—until I got that phone call.
“I didn’t know what to expect. By the time I got home the cops were already there. Somebody had really wanted to get in—they’d taken a big chance by kicking in the side door in daylight. I began walking through the house, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Whoever it was had ransacked my bedroom and my office. They’d pried open locked desk drawers and dumped them on the floor, pulled out every bureau drawer and thrown the clothes around the room, they’d ripped apart the closet and stripped the bed, they’d knocked over the bookcases and cabinets. My whole life had been dumped on the floor. I couldn’t believe it—and then the situation got worse. A day earlier I’d cashed a large check to cover my son’s high school tuition and my Christmas gifts. That money was gone, I figured.
“And then I went down into the finished basement. What they’d done down there was even worse. They’d stuffed up the toilet with paper, then defecated in it and flushed it over and over and over and then left it running. The basement floor was flooded with fecal-polluted water.
“But truthfully, it was what I discovered on the first floor, my father’s floor, that really shook me up. There was almost no damage at all and nothing had been taken. My father’s coin collection, his jewelry, none of that had been touched. The thieves had barely touched anything in his bedroom. So it was pretty obvious that this wasn’t an ordinary robbery—somebody was sending me a message.
“My father had been at work—he does fine-jewelry enameling—so he was okay. The whole thing was just overwhelming. I sat down on the living room couch, and I cried.”
And then he returned to his office to accept the surrender of Clarence Norman, who arrived trailed by a large entourage of supporters, reporters, and cameramen. Norman treated it like a political rally, stopping outside the building to make a brief speech, then cavalierly marching inside.
As the shock dissipated over the next few days, Vecchione began considering the facts. And they were chilling. This did not have the hallmarks of a random break-in. Whoever had done this presumably had been watching the house. They appeared to know that Mike lived on the upper floor. Obviously they knew when no one was at home. The fact that they had gone through all his papers might mean they were looking for something specific, but he doubted that. No one could possibly believe he kept important papers at home. His first reaction was that this break-in was somehow connected to the Norman indictment. A basic fuck-you-very-much gesture. That was the logical conclusion. It had taken place the day Norman was to be arrested.
It didn’t occur to him that this might have something to do with the Eppolito and Caracappa investigation until he had a conversation with his close friend Assistant District Attorney Joe Petrosino. Petrosino, who lived only a couple of miles away from Vecchione in Queens, is in charge of prosecuting all vehicular crimes for Hynes’s office. That includes everything from drunk driving to hit-and-runs. When Petrosino heard about the robbery he told Vecchione about some similar problems he’d had.
Petrosino recently had prosecuted two egregious drunk-driving cases involving cops. He hadn’t given either officer any kind of break. And as a result strange things began happening around his house. All four tires on his car were flattened. Garbage was thrown on the front lawn. Beer bottles filled with urine were left out in front. Someone wrote in the dust on the back of his car “We know you.” The telephon
e rang at odd hours and threatening messages were left for him. Eventually Internal Affairs got involved. Security cameras were installed around his house; his phones were wired. On several occasions the cameras got pictures of a dark car stopping in front of the house, but no one was ever identified.
Vecchione still tended to believe that the break-in had something to do with Clarence Norman—Norman had been indicted, and a month later additional charges were lodged against him—rather than the cops. Others around him didn’t share that belief. If Eppolito and Caracappa had found out they were being investigated, who knew how they would respond? These were well-connected men, mob guys, and if Casso was telling the truth, they were murderers with nothing to lose.
Normally, the mob doesn’t go after cops and prosecutors. It’s one of those unspoken rules of organized crime warfare. Besides, the promise of payback is too tough. Hit a cop or a prosecutor and all the rules are off. Anything goes. But as Vecchione knew, Casso and the cops played by their own rules. As Casso admitted in his 302, he had already plotted against a prosecutor, against Eastern District ADA Charlie Rose. So Vecchione didn’t kid himself; his title offered him little protection from the mob.
There wasn’t too much he could do about it except clean up the house. It took industrial cleaners several weeks to return the basement to a livable condition. But overall, he figured, he was lucky. His father hadn’t been home and so was never in danger; the thieves had failed to find most of the cash he had at home and hadn’t touched his father’s belongings. And whatever warning they were trying to send to him, it didn’t work. Threats didn’t make him back down. Ever.
Within a couple of weeks all that remained of the break-in were some anxious memories and the stains on the basement walls. And then he got the second threat. He knew where this one came from; it was from a murderer he’d put in prison. This one was pretty straightforward: “I’m gonna kill Vecchione,” he’d told an informer. Even that threat didn’t really worry him. Just about everybody on the right side of the law has received death threats at some time during their career. Vecchione had gotten his share. One of Vecchione’s first major trials was the prosecution of two mob guys who were being tried for killing another lowlife. Unfortunately, his key witness was slightly insane. At various times this guy had told people he was a doctor and that he’d driven in the Indianapolis 500, which were both completely untrue. But he had seen the murder and he claimed he could identify the two defendants. Vecchione knew his witness would have some trouble surviving a cross-examination, but he also believed he could support the key elements of his testimony with other evidence.
One night, as Vecchione and this witness left the office and walked out onto the sweeping steps of the municipal building, the witness told him, “Uh, you know, Mike, maybe you’d better not stand too close to me.”
Vecchione looked at him quizzically. “What? Are you kidding me?”
He shook his head. “Don’t stand too close. There’s a lot of people that don’t like me.” He pointed to his right. “You go that way, I’ll go the other way.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
He wasn’t kidding at all. As Vecchione was to learn, he was in a business in which sudden and sometimes unexpected death was part of the job description. So he just never worried about it.
Vecchione took this threat from prison less seriously than some of his colleagues. Imprisoned tough guys are always boasting about what they are going to do to the cop or prosecutor who put them away, but very rarely do those threats become reality. Every once in a while, though, you do get a skell like John Pappa, who sat in his car in front of Dades’s home waiting to kill him. But just in case this threat to Vecchione was real, security in the DA’s office was immediately increased—and the DA assigned detectives to guard him around the clock.
Dades tried to determine the seriousness of this threat. It had been made by a wiseguy he and Vecchione had convicted of homicide in the skull case. He went out to the detention center on Rikers Island and wired up the informant who had told authorities about the threat, then put him with the killer who’d supposedly made it. But the informer couldn’t get him to repeat it.
It was a third seemingly unrelated event that changed Vecchione’s life. This one was simple and direct: Very early one morning a few weeks later someone smashed in the rear window of his car. No other cars on the street were touched. And when technicians were replacing the window they discovered a stash of marijuana that someone had hidden in the ceiling of the car. It seemed probable that “someone” had smashed the window so the drugs would be discovered—and maybe destroy Vecchione’s career. But Vecchione had spent too many years building his reputation for anyone to believe the pot belonged to him. Either these incidents were simply an unpleasant coincidence or somebody out there was sending a real strong message. After the burglary, the threat, and the broken rear window, Joe Hynes decided Vecchione needed real protection once again.
For the first time in his career Mike Vecchione admitted he was scared, but for his father rather than for himself. He was confident he could handle pretty much any situation, but his father was eighty-three years old and frail. Vecchione still didn’t know for certain that these events were even connected to a specific case, but he could no longer ignore that possibility. Hynes reassigned bodyguards to both Vecchione and his father. The DA office’s technical unit installed security cameras inside and around the house. The NYPD equipped the house with a state-of-the-art panic alarm. This is a fail-safe system hardwired into the telephone lines. If someone cut the phone lines a signal would instantly be sent to the nearest police precinct. The techies also put a panic button next to his bed and gave him a button device on a neck chain to wear when he was in the house. “If anything out of the ordinary happens,” one of the men installing the system explained, “you just hit this button.”
Mike asked, “What happens then?”
The cop told him, “The whole world will respond. You’ll get everybody, the precinct, the borough, emergency service, special operations, they’ll all respond immediately. So do us a favor, be real careful with it.”
Vecchione smiled at the thought. “Oh, I don’t think you need to worry about that.” Knowing the panic button was there when his father was at home alone made him feel more secure. The worst aspect of the protection, for him, was the bodyguards. It was ironic; he’d spent much of his career dealing with scum and had never felt like he was in danger. Now he was prosecuting politicans and cops and something very strange was going on. He didn’t want bodyguards, but Hynes insisted. They began protecting him at a most inopportune time—just as a new relationship was beginning to get serious.
He had started dating an assistant ADA from Manhattan about six months earlier—and to his surprise had fallen in love with her. At the beginning of this investigation he had been very circumspect about it. He hadn’t said a word about it to her. It had nothing to do with trust; he just believed he should keep it inside the task force. But as it began occupying more time in his life, he couldn’t keep it a secret. The fact that she was an excellent lawyer as well as an experienced prosecutor made him feel comfortable discussing it with her. It wasn’t light dinner conversation, but he did keep her informed about the investigation’s progress. She actually proved very helpful. The only people in his own office who knew about it—he believed—were the members of the task force and Joe Hynes. At times while directing the investigation he had to make legal decisions and wanted someone to provide a little counsel. She proved to be the perfect person for that job.
It was only when Mike showed up for a date accompanied by bodyguards that she became very concerned about his safety. Mike tried to treat the whole thing as little more than a misunderstanding. He didn’t want to alarm her. But the constant presence of two burly detectives made that almost impossible. “Why are you taking this so lightly?” she demanded. “This isn’t a joke.”
He didn’t have a good answer to that question. And the mo
re he considered it, the more he began to understand that maybe he should be taking this situation a lot more seriously. It seemed like somebody had a real gripe against him. There was no telling how far it might go.
The bodyguards interfered with their relationship. One beautiful New York night, for example, Mike and his date went to a quiet restaurant on Columbus Avenue. They sat across from each other at a small table, speaking in low voices, low enough so the two big, armed DA investigators sitting nearby couldn’t hear them. Vecchione’s date lived nearby, so as he began to walk her home he told the cops, “We’re okay, you know. You don’t need to come with us. We’re just gonna walk a couple of blocks.”
To which one of them responded, “Nothing’s going to happen to you on our watch. We were ordered to guard you, so we’re going to guard you.” They walked slowly back to her apartment, just the four of them, chatting pleasantly. And then Vecchione and his bodyguards drove back to his home in Queens.
Fortunately, Dades and Vecchione balanced each other. Their personal battles came at different times, enabling each to provide support for the other one when it was needed. Both of them had the ability to focus completely on a problem, eliminating the surrounding static. So no matter what was going on in their personal lives, they didn’t bring their home life to the office. Meanwhile, Joe Ponzi remained steadfast, an anchor for his friends, his own life stable. But there still were the frequent conversations with his father, who had commanded Eppolito and Caracappa, who knew them both, and who still found it so hard to believe that two cops he had trusted could be so completely corrupt.
Joe had to be extremely careful not to reveal to his father any information about the progress of the investigation. Confidential means confidential. It was hard for him, but his father was a cop, so he knew how it worked and didn’t ask questions. But on those occasions when the conversation would end up focused on Eppolito and Caracappa, it was Larry Ponzi who shared his memories. “When Steve was working undercover for me,” Larry told Joe, “he had a ponytail, he had a beard, so I called him into my office one day and I asked, ‘What are you trying to do, look like Serpico?’”
