Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  At another meeting Eppolito boasted about his mob connections, explaining, “My whole career, every time I’d walk into a club with these guys, cops would be watching…They ask me what I’m doing with John Gotti. I’ve known John since he was a fucking kid…”

  Corso was appropriately impressed. “So you were respected by everybody?”

  “All of them.” He was immensely proud of that fact, that he was respected by all of them. Eppolito was performing a great balancing act, living his life on both sides of the law. One night, he told Corso, he was in a late-night place in Brooklyn when a wiseguy walked in, obviously unaware that Eppolito was a cop, and muttered, “I shoulda shot him. I shoulda shot him. I must have stabbed this cocksucker a thousand times. I’m holding his arm, I’m stabbing him in the fucking back, in the neck, in the head…”

  It was bona fide mob talk, better than any movie, and Corso played the wide-eyed innocent, asking, “If you heard something, even as a cop, that this guy got whacked and it was none of your business, you didn’t hear it?”

  It’s easy to imagine Eppolito’s confident smile as he said, “I didn’t…That’s why I was always so respected by them.”

  As much as Eppolito clearly enjoyed reminiscing about the past, he was struggling to survive in the present. Increasingly desperate to raise money to finance his screenwriting career, Eppolito told Corso he didn’t care where the cash came from. “If this is the biggest drug dealer in the United States,” he said, “I don’t give a fuck. If you said to me, ‘Lou, I want to introduce you to Jack Smith, he wants to invest in this film,’ [if] he says, ‘The seventy-five thousand dollars comes in a fucking shoebox,’ that’s fine with me. I don’t care.”

  Eppolito gradually was being ensnared. He trusted Corso so completely that he even asked him to prepare his tax returns for him and provided all the essential financial data. As a result, the IRS was brought into the investigation.

  For a case that had been in the freezer for almost a decade, Eppolito and Caracappa were attracting a lot of attention. In addition to Brooklyn and the U.S. Attorney, there were now three federal agencies, the DEA, FBI, and IRS, involved in the investigation. But the question still remained: Would the cops reach far enough into the past to enable the Feds to make a RICO stick? Or would Mike Vecchione get to try him and Caracappa for the murder of Jimmy Hydell?

  Eppolito was going to jail, it was just a question of how long and who held the keys. His drug dealing was a criminal act; it was enough to put him away. In addition, Corso had uncovered evidence that Eppolito had evaded taxes by not declaring his screenwriting income. But unless those crimes could be connected to the crimes he’d committed years earlier, Vecchione still didn’t believe there was enough evidence to support a RICO charge. It was also obvious that Eppolito was still associating with known members of organized crime—he was talking to them on the phone, lending them his car—but talking to criminals wasn’t a crime. The basis of a RICO charge wouldn’t come from there either.

  Several investigators from Brooklyn went out to Vegas to see what was going on. Bobby Intartaglia spent some time out there; so did Oldham. Nobody got the whole picture, but they did get some of the big brushstrokes. In 1994, Kaplan was in his bathtub when he received a phone call from his well-respected criminal attorney, Judd Burstein, telling him that Casso had fired his attorney and agreed to cooperate with the FBI. Kaplan knew exactly what that meant to him. He calmly dried himself off and went on the lam. He went directly to Steve Caracappa’s apartment to explain to him what was happening. He was going to disappear and he didn’t want Caracappa to think he’d gone bad, meaning cooperated with the law. Eventually he kissed Caracappa good-bye and took off.

  He’d flown to San Diego, then spent time in Mexico before going to Las Vegas to meet Eppolito. In Vegas Eppolito had asked Kaplan to arrange a $75,000 loan so he could buy a new house. That wasn’t much information, but it meant that both Eppolito and Caracappa had remained in contact with Kaplan. The Feds were positive that Kaplan had earned the money he loaned Eppolito in a marijuana deal, which established at least a tenuous link between the cops and Kaplan’s criminal enterprise. It wasn’t much, but as it had occurred well within the ten-year span mandated by RICO, it moved the clock forward. Vecchione couldn’t believe this was strong enough to support a conspiracy charge, but the Feds were elated. As far as they were concerned this was proof Eppolito and Caracappa were still part of a criminal conspiracy.

  Back in New York a much happier event would also become part of the equation. Unknown to the investigators, Burt Kaplan had a daughter with whom he was very close. Ironically, Deborah Kaplan was a judge; she had been elected to the New York State Civil Court bench in 2002 and was eventually assigned to Manhattan’s Criminal Court. A friend of Judge Kaplan’s once claimed, perhaps facetiously, that Kaplan had become an attorney “to get her father out of jail.” Years earlier, when Vecchione had spent a lot more time in the courtroom, he’d dealt with her often. In those days she was a legal aid lawyer, and he remembered her as quiet and competent. But until he’d read it in the newspapers he did not know that her father was mob associate Burt Kaplan. And he certainly did not know that she and her husband had adopted a baby born in Tula, Russia, in November 2002. And it was this baby who changed everything.

  Burt Kaplan’s criminal life was no secret to his daughter. In 1973, after Judge Jack Weinstein had sentenced Kaplan to four years in prison for selling stolen clothing, camera flash cubes, and hair dryers, twelve-year-old Deborah and her mother appealed to the respected judge to reduce that sentence. They claimed that Deborah had become isolated and depressed because of her father’s absence. While Weinstein did not reduce that sentence, he did recommend that Kaplan be paroled early. Almost twenty-five years later, when Kaplan was on trial in 1998 for selling twenty-four tons of marijuana, Deborah Kaplan, by that time a legal aid attorney, testified in her father’s defense, attacking the key prosecution witness Monica Galpine as an alcoholic and a liar “not capable of telling the truth.” Her testimony apparently had little impact; her father was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. That was a tough sentence for an old man convicted of nonviolent crimes. If he did the whole stretch he would be ninety-two years old the next time he took a breath as a free man. He would never live to kiss his grandchild.

  But prosecutors who thought it was the hammer they needed to get him to cooperate and provide the information they needed to prosecute Eppolito and Caracappa were disappointed. While all around him onetime wiseguys were making deals to reduce their sentences, the real stand-up guy turned out to be the Jew. Because he wasn’t Italian Kaplan could never be “made,” never be inducted into the Mafia, but he was a respected associate, and far more than some of the big-time made men, he was faithful to the old ways, to omertà. Silence. Basically, when approached by federal prosecutors he’d suggested politely that they go fuck themselves.

  Kaplan was a hard case. But he wasn’t only the best shot, as Vecchione told Dades: “I’ll tell you, Tommy, he’s the only shot we got. Without him, we might as well pack up and go home. There’s nothing we can do.” The first thing every good cop does at the beginning of an investigation is learn as much as possible about the people involved. You just never know what information is going to be handy. So all of them, Dades, Vecchione, and Joe Ponzi in particular, started learning everything they could find out about this man in the middle.

  Burt Kaplan was another Depression kid from Brooklyn, from Bed-Stuy, where his family owned an appliance store on Vanderbilt Avenue. He had started gambling as a kid, poker and the horses mostly, and never stopped. “I couldn’t control myself,” he once said. “I was doing every bad thing to get money to gamble.”

  After dropping out of Brooklyn Tech, Kaplan served as a naval radio operator in the early 1950s, stationed in Japan, where he deciphered and analyzed Russian army codes. He often claimed that the National Security Agency had tried to recruit him, but he’d turned down their offer. Instead
he returned to work in the family appliance store. His life changed the day he installed an air conditioner in the Grand Mark, a social club run by, coincidently, Jimmy “the Clam” Eppolito—which happened to be around the block from the apartment in which Mike Vecchione had grown up. He began hanging out there, playing in the card games.

  The only thing worse than being a degenerate gambler is being bad degenerate gambler. And that was Burt Kaplan. To settle his gambling debts Kaplan began borrowing money from loan sharks, including Lucchese consigliere Christy “Tick” Furnari. Eventually he got into the schmatte business, building a legitimate clothing distribution company in Bensonhurst selling designer knock-offs, but his real business was buying and selling anything he could turn over quickly and profitably, from hair dryers that fell off the back of that legendary truck to heroin. He sold counterfeit watches and homemade quaaludes and smuggled tons of marijuana. He got involved with diamond mines; he was wrapped up in some scheme to manufacture clocks that featured Muslim prayers; he even tried to sell a hair lotion in Africa, but when his chemist forgot to put in some chemical the whole shipment turned brown. To square things the chemist offered to make crystal meth for him. So he went into the crystal meth business.

  Photographic Insert

  In March 2009, sixty-seven-year-old Steven Caracappa (seen above in his arrest photo) was sentenced to life plus eighty years in prison and was fined $4.2 million, actually a lighter sentence than sixty-one-year-old Louis Eppolito (below), who received a sentence of life plus one hundred years and a $4.7 million fine.

  Thomas Dades at Intelligence Division.

  Jimmy Harkins, Joseph Ponzi, Thomas Dades, and Mike Galletta, promoted to First Grade.

  The parents of Thomas Dades: his beloved mother, Della, and father, Pete.

  The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.—Theodore Roosevelt

  Bert Kaplan who was the liaison between the mob and the mafia cops. He testified against them in federal court.

  Arrest photo of Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, Caracapa and Eppolito’s mob boss.

  Joe Ponzi, Michael Ryan, Mike Vecchione, Joe Alexis, and John Holmes–members of the Rackets Division in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office.

  District Attorney Charles J. Hynes (right) and Mike.

  Michael Galletta, James Harkins, and Tommy Dades on our promotion day, March 2001.

  The gun that was on Eppolito’s person when he was arrested. On the butt of the gun it says “Mafia Cop Louie Eppolito.”

  Mike Vecchione receives the Distinguished Alumnus Award in Public Service from Hofstra University Law School.

  Anthony Ferrara, unknown male, and Frankie Hydell. Courtesy of Frankie Hydell

  Jimmy Hydell.

  Pulled from the Headlines

  Mike, Tommy, Ponzi, and Arthur Aidalia in front of the World Trade Center.

  Tommy and Terance Meyers (far left).

  While there were a lot of gaps in Kaplan’s story, the big pieces fit together. He was “owned” by Furnari, who took a piece of all the business he did. In 1981, while serving three years in the federal prison camp in Allenwood for manufacturing and distributing quaaludes, Kaplan had apparently met mob associate Frank Santora Jr., who was doing time for a $12 million swindle.

  When Santora found out that Kaplan knew Jimmy “the Clam” Eppolito, he offered to introduce him to the Clam’s nephew, who also happened to be his cousin, a detective named Louis Eppolito. But Louis was a very special detective, Santora told him; he and his partner had access to confidential police information and were willing “to do business on the side if the price was right.” A lot of lives were changed because Kaplan once installed an air conditioner in the Grand Mark.

  According to Casso, after getting out of prison Kaplan had established a relationship with the cops. Wiseguys rarely trust cops, but this was an unusual situation. Eppolito had a pedigree. So Kaplan believed the cops could be trusted to be dishonest. The only rule was that everything had to go through Santora. Santora owned them. He carried all the requests for information, brought back the answers, delivered the money, and kept a little taste for himself. Initially it was mostly small jobs—checking out the license plates of cars seen around a social club, getting an address, looking at a report—and it didn’t involve any heavy hitting.

  The situation changed considerably for Kaplan when Christy Tick went to prison in 1985 and he became the wiseguy version of a valuable free agent. Gaspipe Casso grabbed him for his crew and—always through Santora—Kaplan continued to do business as usual with the two cops he’d never met. It was a big step for Kaplan: Inside the mob Furnari was respected as a serious guy who would do whatever had to be done, while Casso was thought of more as a homicidal maniac. As Lucchese associate Anthony “Tumac” Accetturo once described Casso and underboss Vic Amuso, “They had no training, no honor. All they want to do is kill, kill, get what you can.”

  Kaplan would later admit, perhaps wistfully, “Mr. Furnari would have never let me get involved in the things that Mr. Casso did.”

  In early September 1987 Frankie Santora was walking along Bath Avenue with Lucchese associate Carmine Varriale, who apparently had done something to piss off Casso. Santora was simply with the wrong wiseguy at the worst time. Three shooters caught up with them outside a dry cleaning store and killed both men. Apparently Casso did not know that Santora was Kaplan’s mysterious go-between. He once told Kaplan that if he had known about Frankie Santora’s relationship with the old man he would have been able to save him.

  By then, though, the two cops were comfortable working with Kaplan. Santora’s widow arranged for them to get together. Eppolito supposedly told Kaplan, “We like working with you and Casso. You take care of business. If we tell you somebody’s cooperating you take care of it.” From that night forward Kaplan worked directly with the two cops. Although Eppolito asked many times to meet Casso, Kaplan refused to let that happen. Eppolito told him, “I’ll stand on one side of the door and he can stand on the other side.”

  “That ain’t gonna happen,” Kaplan told him. The killer cops were his life insurance policy. As long as Casso needed the cops, he needed Kaplan. This relationship was a beautiful thing.

  In early May 2004, as the investigation narrowed to Kaplan, Tommy began packing up his career. Once it had been a joke, “twenty and out,” but all too quickly it had become a reality. He was going out angry at the department, like a lover scorned. There were a lot of things a retired cop could do to earn, although admittedly none of them offered the excitement of one day on the job. The PAL was opening a boxing gym on Staten Island and he could run that. That was boxing, and he’d be working with kids, teaching, so that had real appeal. Several really good people he’d worked with, like Mike Galletta and Jimmy Harkins, were doing private investigations and offered him work. It was a little civil, a little criminal, mostly checking records and serving subpoenas—divorce cases, insurance fraud. A little of this, little of that; the bills would get paid.

  But Vecchione and Ponzi were pushing hard to bring Dades into the Brooklyn DA’s office as an investigator. The main difference between that and being an NYPD detective was the job title. There was a hiring freeze in place, so it wasn’t easy to find a slot for him. Vecchione pushed, not just because of their friendship, but because Dades was a damn good cop and they were in the middle of the investigation of a lifetime. Ponzi pushed too, and Hynes was completely supportive. Eventually a way was found to open a slot for him. So going out of the NYPD, he was going into the prosecutor’s office.

  Officially he still had
a couple of months left, but he’d accumulated vacation days and sick days and he wanted to get out as quickly as he could. It was a time for change in his life too. Ro had suggested it would be better for both of them if he moved out of the house, so he’d found a one-bedroom basement apartment. It was a new building, a nice place, and the only thing it lacked was everything that mattered to him. After years of marriage, after coming home every night to Ro and their two smart, noisy, wonderful kids, having to walk into an empty apartment every night, the only sound the electronic hum of the refrigerator, was one of the toughest things he’d ever done.

  It was a bad time for Tommy Dades. His career was ending, his marriage was screwed up, and getting in touch with his father had turned out to be a big-time mistake. The man had made it obvious he didn’t want anything to do with him. The concept of a father rejecting his son was too big for Tommy to understand, so he just accepted it. He was okay with it; he couldn’t miss what he’d never had. Besides, he was still in contact with his aunt and a few other newly discovered relatives. When he would speak with his aunt they would make plans to meet, but somehow that never happened.

  What he did have were the many friends he’d made on the job, and boxing. It had been almost a year since his last bout, but since then he’d been in the gym for two hours after work five days a week, hitting the heavy bag and the speed bag, jumping rope and sparring. The gym had become his real home, where he was as good as his right hand and hitting those bags again and again and again, harder, harder, let him get it out, all of it, the anger, the frustration that he kept bottled up. In the gym, he could explode.