Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  He had the power to do just that, if his candidate won. Norman’s candidate lost. Hynes was set for another term. When Norman walked into the courtroom he barely looked at Vecchione.

  It still wasn’t an easy case. The state intended to bring four different charges against Norman in four trials. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals had agreed to hear a challenge to the strongest charge, so while waiting for a decision from that court Vecchione had to bring a secondary charge against Norman.

  He was also worried about the jury. Juries can be fixed; he knew that to be absolutely true because it had happened to him in a wiseguy murder trial. The vote for conviction had been eleven to one, and years later he learned that one vote had been bought. There was no possible way he could have won the case. In this situation he was well aware that Clarence Norman was among the most powerful black men in New York politics—and nobody knew how far he might go to stay out of prison.

  The charges against him consisted of three felony counts of accepting illegal campaign contributions and a misdemeanor count of concealing contributions from his own campaign treasurer. His defense attorney called it a case of poor bookkeeping—and maybe it really wasn’t a strong enough case to bring down the Democratic party leader.

  But by the time Vecchione finished his summation to the jury it was no longer about a few thousand dollars in illegal campaign contributions, but rather about upholding the American democratic process. It was about ethics and integrity and the misuse of political power. And it took the jury one day to find Norman guilty of all charges. The conviction automatically caused him to be expelled him from the New York State Assembly, where he had been the number two man, and caused him to be disbarred as a lawyer and give up his leadership of the county Democratic Party. Sentencing was delayed until after the second trial, which was scheduled to begin the following January. Vecchione was already at work preparing for that one.

  While Tommy Dades was wrestling his personal demons and Vecchione was prosecuting Clarence Norman, the investigation they had started more than a year ago in a windowless room in the Brooklyn DA’s office had become a major investigation involving literally hundreds of investigators from at least five federal and state law enforcement agencies spread across the nation. Dades’s casual phone conversation with Betty Hydell had grown into a multimillion-dollar effort to put two dirty cops away for the remainder of their lives. Plus. The cold case had become scalding hot.

  As the investigation proceeded late into 2004, so did the legal maneuvering. Joe Ponzi had remained close friends with Mark Feldman and the prosecutor kept him in the loop. A lot of the time, Ponzi believed, Mark was using him to unofficially pass along information he felt Mike Vecchione should know. On a professional basis both Dades and Ponzi often got frustrated by their friend Feldman during this investigation, but their personal relationship remained strong. Both of them had tried hard to work out some sort of accord between him and Mike Vecchione, but that just wasn’t going to happen.

  One winter afternoon Ponzi was sitting in Vecchione’s office, bringing him up to date. Then he mentioned casually that DEA agent Mark Manko had appeared before the grand jury and testified about Kaplan’s statements.

  Vecchione looked up. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you know?” Ponzi seemed surprised.

  “No, I don’t know. Are you telling me they started the grand jury presentation?” Ponzi nodded. Vecchione paused to let that news sink in. “What about our deal to get Hydell? What about us going in with Kaplan, what happened to all that?” He shook his head in disbelief. “Tommy was right. We’re getting fucked over here. This is complete bullshit.”

  Very basically, a legal case begins when a prosecutor presents evidence to a grand jury, then gives that grand jury a charge under the law that fits the evidence. The prosecutor explains exactly what the statute says. If the grand jury believes it has seen sufficient evidence to suggest that a crime may have been committed under that particular statute, it issues a true bill. A true bill means an indictment has been returned and the accused person or persons has been charged with a crime under the specific statute. Then the indictment, the formal accusation charging a defendant or defendants with a crime, is drawn up. The grand jury meets in secret, the proceedings remain private, and there is never any type of public record of what happened in the grand jury room.

  So Vecchione knew absolutely nothing about these proceedings until Ponzi alerted him. He assumed the fact that Feldman or Henoch had gone to a grand jury meant they believed they had sufficient evidence to make their RICO charge stick. But even if that was true, Feldman had agreed to take the Hydell case out of it, to let Vecchione try Jimmy Hydell’s murder. It certainly didn’t look like that was going to happen.

  Vecchione was livid. It wasn’t just ego, it was the extraordinary sense that he had been conned. He picked up the phone and called Feldman. “I can’t believe you’re doing this,” he said. “We had a deal, Mark. We agreed that we would take Hydell, you would take the RICO if you could make it.”

  Feldman started to hedge. “That’s not really the way I remember it,” he said. “I think I said that if there was a RICO we would take it. Well, there’s a RICO.”

  “Yeah, you did say that,” Vecchione agreed. “But you said we would have the murder, you would have the RICO. I went out on a limb and told my boss that we had a deal. You think I’m going to make something like that up?”

  Now Feldman backed off completely. “No, but I think maybe you misheard me,” he said evenly. “I don’t think I ever said that.”

  Vecchione was incredulous. “C’mon, what are you, kidding me? That’s exactly what you said.” He was practically screaming into the phone. “I don’t understand; how can you deny it? We went through it several times. There were other people there who heard every word. I guarantee you that’s not the way Joe Ponzi remembers it.”

  Mark Feldman was adamant. “I’m just telling you, Mike, that’s not the way I remember it. I’d like to speak to Joe and find out how he remembers it. But until—”

  “Well go ahead. He’s sitting right here.” Vecchione put Ponzi on the speaker. “Ask him.”

  Being in the middle between two people he liked and respected was an unpleasant position for Ponzi. “That’s not what you said, Mark. You did say that we were going to go first with Hydell and then you would get the RICO.”

  After a long, thoughtful pause, Feldman said, “Well, maybe there’s something we can do. Maybe there’s a compromise here. Give me a little time to get back to you.”

  Vecchione was burning when he hung up the phone. As he remembers, “For them to tell us that they didn’t say exactly what they said to me was such an act of cowardice and betrayal that I couldn’t find the words to explain it.”

  The fact that he’d been anticipating this confrontation for quite some time didn’t make it any easier to accept. But there wasn’t much he could do about it. That was one thing he knew for sure. Very quietly, in the past several weeks he’d tried to find a different route to Kaplan. He’d asked a couple of young lawyers in the office to find out if it was legally possible to get the old man out of federal custody. Specifically, he wondered if there was some sort of writ he could file in federal court to compel the Bureau of Prisons to hand over Kaplan so he could put him in front of a grand jury. He had spoken to attorneys in the office about that idea and they all pretty much had the same response: Are you nuts?

  “How about this?” he’d suggested. “We’ll tell the judge Kaplan’s a witness in a murder case and that the Feds won’t let us have him. That they’re obstructing governmental administration.”

  “You really want to start a war?”

  “Yeah, I do,” Vecchione had replied. He knew if he ended up in court it probably would get ugly, but if there was even a slight chance the state would prevail it would be worth taking the shot. “We’re getting screwed here.” But there was no pot of gold at the end of this particular legal rainbow. K
aplan was the sole property of the federal government, to do with whatever they pleased. And handing him over to the state of New York apparently wasn’t on their agenda.

  Feldman called a day later. This time his tone was more conciliatory. “We’d like to come over and talk to you about this. I think we can probably satisfy everybody’s concerns.”

  Vecchione wasn’t optimistic. “Yeah, well, we’ll see.” The news that Feldman had gone back on the agreement had spread rapidly throughout the office. A lot of people working there knew Mark Feldman and liked him and respected him. A few of them, like Ponzi, had worked with him when he was in the DA’s office. He’d been a stand-up guy. A relentless prosecutor who didn’t back down. This just wasn’t the kind of thing he did. It didn’t make sense.

  Nobody really knew what was going on in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Some people speculated that Feldman had been so certain the state wouldn’t make the case that he hadn’t bothered to clear his agreement with his boss, Roz Mauskopf, or even the head of the Criminal Division. Now he was stuck having to tell the United States Attorney for the Eastern District that the biggest case that office had prosecuted in several decades was going to the state first because he’d made a commitment to let them try it first. And that couldn’t happen.

  They met in a conference room. In addition to Rob Henoch, Feldman brought his deputy Greg Andres with him. Feldman probably didn’t know the history, but that was not a wise decision. As far as Vecchione was concerned, Andres was a typically arrogant poker-up-his-ass know-it-all Fed. His animosity toward Andres went back to a wiseguy case in which Tommy Dades and Mike Galletta had put away Bonanno boss Joe Messina, only to have Andres credit the FBI for work it hadn’t done.

  Ponzi and Josh Hanshaft were with Vecchione. It wasn’t exactly an old Western showdown at ten paces, more like a new Eastern District confrontation, briefcases across a mahogany table. Feldman laid it out. “Look, Mike,” he said, “we really believe this is what’s best for the case.” When Mike started to respond Feldman said, “Just hear me out first. We’ve got a good RICO case here. If you take the Hydell murder case out of the big picture, take it out of the RICO and put it in the state case, that leaves a big hole in the story. We want to tell the story from beginning to end, so we need to use everything. If you take out Hydell, you remove a big piece of the case. It just doesn’t make sense to do it that way.”

  Andres continued, “If you put Kaplan in the grand jury, you’re gonna expose him to cross-examination—”

  “Who said we have to go first?” Mike interrupted. The Feds were afraid that if Vecchione put Kaplan on the witness stand before they got a chance to try their case, the cops’ defense attorneys would be able to use his testimony to attack his credibility. If he made even a slight error—maybe the wall was painted green, not red—or contradicted himself it could have a damaging effect on the RICO case. The defense could kill him on his cross-examination. So the Feds wanted Kaplan clean when he testified against the cops. Vecchione understood that; that’s why he countered by suggesting the Hydell trial follow the RICO case. “You guys are going to trial faster than I am. Let us put the guy into the grand jury and get an indictment, then you use him to try your guys.”

  “C’mon, Mike,” Andres said in a tone that sounded awfully condescending to Vecchione. “We can’t expose him to the grand jury.”

  Among the many legal advantages the federal government enjoys is that hearsay evidence is permitted in cases brought to a grand jury. For example, rather than Kaplan having to personally appear in front of the grand jury, an agent who took his testimony could repeat it to the jurors. Under New York State law the actual witness—in this case Kaplan—must testify before the grand jury.

  Vecchione shook his head in disbelief. “What do you think, I’m a newcomer? You think I’m going to put this guy in the grand jury and not prepare him thoroughly enough to get what I need without being inconsistent? Let me tell you something; I don’t know Kaplan, I’ve never said one word to the guy, but I can guarantee you that by the time I put him in the grand jury I’ll know every word he’s gonna say. What’s the big deal? I can do this.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Henoch insisted. “If we take out Hydell we ruin the continuity of the story. If you put Kaplan in the grand jury I’ll have to turn those minutes over to the defense.”

  For Vecchione, this was a lot more than legal strategy; it was an attack on his professionalism. “Believe me, I can put Kaplan into the grand jury without screwing up your case.”

  Andres responded, “We would never take a chance on that happening.”

  Vecchione glared at him, trying to maintain control. Part of him, the emotional part, was urging him to reach right across that table and just grab the arrogant son of a bitch. We would never take a chance on that happening? Who the hell did he think he was? “You don’t even know me. I’ve tried more cases than you can count. I’m not the new kid on the block. So don’t give me that bullshit about you guys being better than us because I know I’m better than all of you.”

  Feldman did his best to calm everybody down. “Now look, let’s just look at what’s best for the case…”

  Vecchione listened as Feldman laid it out as dispassionately as he was able. And gradually he had to admit that what he was saying had a lot of merit. Maybe he didn’t like it, it wasn’t part of any deal, but he had to be honest with himself. For the greater good of the case, it made sense. No matter how angry he was he never forgot that the goal was putting two skells away forever.

  As angry as Joe Ponzi was with the Feds, he agreed with Feldman. “Everything flows from Hydell, Mike. That’s where the whole sequence of events starts. If you rip that out you lose the whole continuum. Then you just got a lot of pieces.”

  Vecchione might have kept fighting but he knew that no matter how strongly he believed he could convict the cops for the murder of Jimmy Hydell, he wasn’t holding any cards. He wasn’t even holding the box the cards came in. This was the reality: The Feds could do absolutely anything they wanted to do and there was nothing he could do to stop them. Kaplan was the case and Feldman had Kaplan. Without Kaplan it was desperation time. C’mon, Judge, any good defense attorney would say, they’re coming at my guy with this cheesy old case and an old lady? You gotta be kidding me; twenty years later and that’s all they got?

  Vecchione had made his best argument and Feldman hadn’t bought it. End of story.

  But Mike also was forced to admit that Feldman made sense. Ponzi had strongly felt that way for some time and had been trying to make Vecchione see it. Putting these guys away for Jimmy Hydell might make some people feel better, but it wouldn’t begin to tell the whole story of their corruption. And that was a story that needed to be told in its entirety. Too many people had suffered because of these guys, and their families deserved to have a piece of this prosecution. Maybe even more importantly, the punishment for the one murder—even if it meant that Eppolito and Caracappa would spend the rest of their lives in prison—most definitely did not fit the magnitude of their crimes. As far as Vecchione was concerned, if burning in hell for all eternity was a sentence, Eppolito and Caracappa would deserve it. But as that is not yet part of the penal code, the penalties available under RICO were considerably greater than for a state murder conviction. Mike finally accepted the fact that it made sense for the Feds to take the whole case.

  It was time to begin the salvage operation. So Vecchione began looking for ways to find the compromise Feldman had offered.

  Given the reality of the situation, what he wanted, what he needed, was to make sure that the state got every last bit of the credit that it had earned for making this case. “Okay,” Vecchione said. “I’ll present it to Hynes and get his okay. But if I’m going to go to my boss, here’s what I need in return. I want our people to be in on the arrest. I want to hold the press conference announcing the arrests right here in our office. I want the DA to make the announcement that we broke the case, brought it to
this point, and we’ve arrested, along with the Feds, Eppolito and Caracappa. Then he’ll turn it over to Mauskopf and she can continue the press conference. And then I want to cross-designate Josh to work with you.”

  Feldman nodded. “That sounds good,” he said. “I don’t see a problem.” He said it with real conviction, sounding one step short of absolute sureness. “I know it’s difficult for you, but believe me, it’s best for the case.”

  They shook hands. “I have to go talk to the DA first because he’s still expecting us to do this case,” Vecchione told him. Although he didn’t say it, he still believed there was at least a fair chance he was going to get the case back. No matter how he looked at it, he believed the Feds were going to have a very tough time making a RICO stick. The Feds were confident the continuing drug enterprise would extend the statute of limitations, but Vecchione just didn’t see it that way. The cops had committed most of their crimes for Casso and Kaplan in conjunction with the Lucchese crime family. The statute of limitations on the individual crimes they had committed had run out years earlier. The only thing that left was RICO. And Vecchione just didn’t see how drug deals made by Eppolito in Vegas to pay his bills could be construed as being in the furtherance or the benefit of the Lucchese crime family. Most of the people the cops had worked with were gone. This was going to be a stretch that would make Spider-Man proud. Without the determination that the drug deal benefitted the Luccheses there was no basis for a RICO. And if there was no RICO, well, guess who got the case back to prosecute?