Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  At one point Kaplan talked about his disdain for all the other wiseguys who had “gone bad,” who had become informers. Now he was one of them, at different times describing himself as “a rat,” “an informant,” and “a stool pigeon.” But the closest he came to admitting he had any regrets about his past was telling Henoch, “As I look at my life in retrospect, I did a lot of unsettling things.”

  There was only one slight hiccup in his testimony. When responding to questions about the Nicky Guido murder, Kaplan claimed that the cops had demanded $4,000 for providing Casso with information about Guido. Casso refused. “Gee,” he said, according to Kaplan, “I just gave them a $5,000 bonus for that thing with Jimmy. Tell them they’re getting pretty greedy.” According to Kaplan, Casso eventually got the address of Nicky Guido—the wrong Nicky Guido—from someone at the local power company.

  Dades laughed when Ponzi told him about Kaplan’s testimony. “If you look at the timeline it hits you right in the face. Casso gets the names of the shooters from Hydell. At that time there were only eight Nicky Guidos in New York State. We know that because George Terra had run a group search. But only one of them lives in downtown Brooklyn. Right after Jimmy disappears Caracappa punches up this Nicky Guido on the computer. Six weeks from the day Caracappa runs Nicky Guido, the kid is killed. What’s the coincidence of that happening?

  “A couple of years later, in 1989, the day it was announced that Feldman had indicted the real Nicky Guido for shooting Casso, Caracappa runs another computer scan for the name. That’s the day he found out they’d killed the wrong person.

  “But the best way to introduce this in the trial was through my testimony, and there was no way that Feldman or Henoch wanted me to testify. Joe Ponzi and I were barely mentioned in the trial. They shut us out totally. So I don’t believe they got Nicky Guido’s name from the power company, the phone company, or anywhere else except Steve Caracappa.”

  At various stages in Mike Vecchione’s career he had defended clients he believed to be guilty. Once, he’d saved the job of a cop who had been caught shaking down drug dealers, then selling the drugs he’d confiscated out of his squad car. On another occasion he’d successfully defended a hold-up man whose partner had killed a cabbie. That was the job of the defense attorney; give your client the best defense possible within the law. So he knew all the back alleys familiar to defense lawyers. But he didn’t have the slightest idea how Cutler or Hayes could attack Kaplan’s testimony. Burt Kaplan had been superb on the stand. A witness’s demeanor is as important as his testimony; if a jury doesn’t like him they might not believe him. But Kaplan had just the right touch of resignation in his testimony. And his knowledge of the smallest details, his ability to describe things that would be impossible to know if you weren’t there, had been phenomenal.

  Cutler’s strategy was not to attack the details of Kaplan’s testimony, but rather to try to destroy his whole credibility. It was your basic throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks cross-examination. He rambled from subject to subject, touching just about everything from Brooklyn high school football to whether it was possible to see Bucknell University from the guard towers at Lewisburg federal penitentiary. He accused Kaplan of saying whatever the government felt was necessary in exchange for a get-out-of-jail-free card. Kaplan responded by admitting, “Whatever happens, happens. I said at the pretrial hearing, ‘The government’s doing this to get me to talk about two dirty cops.’”

  Cutler read a long list of wiseguys whom Kaplan had implicated in crimes to buttress the claim that he would say anything about anybody for his freedom. To that Kaplan pointed out, “These weren’t doctors or lawyers—these were gangsters.”

  Finally, in his testimony Kaplan had claimed he had met with the two cops face-to-face, often three or more times a month, for more than three years. He also admitted that for several periods during that time he had been under both audio and video law enforcement surveillance—at least some of that time by Bobby I. Cutler wondered aloud why there wasn’t a single surveillance photograph or a single audiotape of Kaplan with Eppolito or Caracappa. Not one.

  Kaplan responded that he’d been very careful when arranging those meetings. He used public telephones to call them; when they spoke they used the code name Marco; and they met only at night and in isolated places like a Staten Island cemetery or Kaplan’s home.

  No photographs. No tapes. It wasn’t much of a defense, but after two days of cross-examination it was just about the only dent that Cutler was able to make in Kaplan’s testimony.

  Henoch proceeded to lay out his case with all the excitement and glamour of a mason constructing a brick wall. Day after day, witness after witness, he stood at a podium reading questions out of his notebook, rarely raising his voice. But slowly and carefully that wall grew higher and more solid.

  Henoch wanted to introduce the physical evidence—the computer printout—that connected Caracappa to the murder of Nicky Guido while the gruesome crime scene photographs were still very much in the minds of the jurors. But rather than Detective Tommy Dades, he called a veteran detective from the NYPD Criminal Records Division. Detective Steven Rodriguez testified that Caracappa had used the NYPD computers for personal reasons. In 1985, for example, he’d run a criminal history check on his fiancée. It was a year later that he pulled the record of Nicky Guido—who was shot and killed six weeks later.

  In his cross-examination, Ed Hayes asked Rodriguez, “If a middle-aged man was about to get married and he wants to do a check on his future wife, would that shock you?”

  “Yes,” Rodriguez replied, “yes, it would.”

  Hayes then argued that his client was too smart to run a computer scan that would have connected him to a homicide, noting, “You would have to be a falling-down moron not to know that these checks were kept in perpetuity by the police department.”

  Henoch objected to that comment, and Weinstein had it stricken from the court record.

  The crooked accountant, Steve Corso, was the next witness. Corso was crucial; it was his testimony about the Vegas drug deal that would enable Henoch to make the RICO. Corso admitted that he had started wearing a wire for the FBI only after he had been arrested for stealing more than $5 million from his New York tax clients to support his gambling habit. And then Henoch began playing tapes on which Eppolito was heard telling Corso that his son, Tony, would provide designer drugs to Hollywood producers coming to town.

  In addition to involving his son, Eppolito also used his attractive daughter. During his cross-examination Corso was asked if he had been interested in dating Eppolito’s daughter. Yes, the accountant admitted, he was. “Eppolito told me if the deal went through and I got the movie money for him, he would suggest to her that she date me.”

  There was more. Supposedly Eppolito had been taped telling Corso that his daughter was “a classy woman” because she would never have oral sex on a first date. Fortunately Judge Weinstein refused to allow that tape to be played in his courtroom, explaining, “We’re keeping the daughter out.”

  Outside the courtroom, Eppolito’s daughter was his most vocal defender, calling him “[a] perfect scapegoat.” Also outside the courtroom, Eppolito’s gay son, Louis Eppolito Jr., openly discussed his dysfunctional relationship with his father. In a very strange way, their relationship almost paralleled Dades’s experience with his own father. Eppolito’s first son told reporters that the two men hadn’t spoken in almost a decade; Louis Eppolito Jr. said, describing what his father had told him the last time they spoke, “If I was in front of him he would have punched me so hard in the face, I would have been picking my teeth up off the floor.” Supposedly he was angry because his son refused to pick up an autographed copy of Mafia Cop.

  The son and his life partner had attended almost every court proceeding and finally his father broke the silence between them, telling him, “The papers are wrong…It’s all lies, everything’s a lie.”

  Finally it was Betty Hydell’s chan
ce to testify. Literally two decades after her son was murdered she was getting the chance to face his kidnappers in a courtroom. Tommy spoke with her before she testified, telling her what to expect, trying to get her to relax. But she’d waited too long for this day. She was trembling as she answered the prosecutor’s questions, probably as much from anger as nervousness. In almost the same words she had used to tell Tommy Dades about the day her son disappeared, she told jurors how the two detectives—“One was the big one, one was the little one”—had mistakenly tailed her younger son, Frankie, who was using his brother’s car. Betty had followed them in her own car, she said, and confronted them. The driver pulled out a badge and showed it to her. But Betty did her own detective work. “I checked with motor vehicles and the plates didn’t belong to that car. I just assumed they were undercover cops.”

  Everyone in the courtroom was anticipating the dramatic moment when the victim’s mother pointed at Eppolito and Caracappa and said, “That’s them. They are the people I saw that day.” But it never happened.

  “She made the point,” Ponzi said. “The jurors got it. They didn’t want to give the defense a chance to point out that twenty years had passed since she’d seen them, and after that day she’d seen Louis Eppolito on TV, she’d read his book and seen the pictures, maybe she was a little confused. The jurors knew who she was talking about when she said the fat one and the skinny one. They knew.”

  A string of other witnesses followed. As Louis Eppolito’s wife sat impassively, his goumada, his Mafia mistress of six years, testified that Eppolito had met with Burt Kaplan in her Brooklyn apartment. Frank Santora’s daughter testified that she had seen Kaplan, Eppolito, and Caracappa at her father’s house. Burt Kaplan waived his attorney-client privilege to allow his former lawyer, Judd Burstein, to testify that Kaplan had called him one day in 1994 and told him that the New York Post was reporting Anthony Casso used two New York City cops to order killings. “This is a big problem for me,” Burstein quoted Kaplan as saying. “I was the go-between.”

  In reinforcing Burt Kaplan’s testimony, Tommy Galpine described the many tasks he did for him. In addition to moving furniture for Kaplan’s daughter and taking her car for servicing, he put drops in Kaplan’s eyes after his eye surgery, supplied the car to Eppolito and Caracappa that was used to kidnap Jimmy Hydell, copied NYPD files that Eppolito had given to Kaplan, and delivered money to Eppolito in the Caribbean. During his cross-examination Cutler pointed out that Kaplan had put Galpine “on the road to perdition.” To which Galpine responded, “I had a choice and I made a bad one. I never thought I’d be sitting here, but here I am.”

  Peter Franzone admitted he was an illiterate sixth-grade dropout and then testified, just as he had told Lanigan, “I saw [Greenwald’s body] leaning against the wall and Frankie told me that I got to help bury the body because I’m an accessory and if I didn’t help him he would kill me and my effin’ family.” Franzone identified both Eppolito and Caracappa as participants in the two murders Santora committed in the garage.

  By the time the prosecution got ready to rest its case—after twelve days, thirty-four witnesses, and an array of evidence ranging from the rusted watch found at the Lino murder scene to photographs from Burt Kaplan’s daughter’s wedding. It was an impressive prosecution, and when it was done it seemed like only a miracle could save the Mafia cops. And then the letter from Anthony Casso arrived.

  He wasn’t trying to throw a monkey wrench into the proceedings—he was tossing the whole tool cabinet. “This really was his last shot,” Vecchione explains. “I think he finally understood what he’d lost when he refused to talk to us. He had been holding out for nothing, for nothing; the immunity he wanted in the Hydell killing wouldn’t have made the slightest difference. His problem was that he had nothing left to sell.

  “But the fact that he had nothing of value to offer didn’t stop him from trying. If the prosecution didn’t want his testimony, I guess he figured he would try the defense. So in early March he’d written to Feldman, swearing, ‘I, Anthony Casso, hereby confess to have personally participated, as part of a three man team that shot and killed Eddie Lino in Brooklyn’s Gravesend section. Detectives Eppolito and Caracappa are falsely being accused of this crime.

  “‘Furthermore: As the former underboss and official acting boss of the Lucchese crime family, I can honestly prove to the honorable Jack Weinstein that Detectives Eppolito and Caracappa have never supplied confidential information to the Luccheses and in no way participated in the abduction of James Hydell.’ He just kept going, writing, ‘It was Kaplan and his partners…who robbed and killed Israel Greenwald, not the detectives.’ Casso also claimed that he could prove Betty Hydell was lying when she testified she had seen Eppolito and Caracappa at her house. It was all crap.”

  The defense immediately asked Judge Weinstein to declare a mistrial, claiming Feldman had withheld exculpatory evidence. They also announced they were considering calling Casso as a defense witness. That made sense. They had nothing else.

  During an hourlong telephone conversation with the defense attorneys, Casso said, “Let me tell you something, Kaplan is saying on the stand what I want him to say on the stand. I was supposed to be part of this…I told Kaplan if we bring this case to the government, we’ll both get our freedom.” According to Casso, his wife and Kaplan’s wife had carried messages between the two of them, setting up the plan to frame the two cops, forcing the government to offer them a reduction of their sentence in exchange for their testimony.

  Ed Hayes called the conversation “a completely exculpatory account of what happened.”

  It was actually a reasonably clever plan. Clever, but not true. And easily disproved. Judge Weinstein ruled that the defense was entitled to call Casso as a witness, but reminded them, “He may have other things to say that he won’t tell you on the phone…[He may try to] curry favor with the government—the only people who can help him.”

  The defense decided that Gaspipe should stay right where he was, and with that, Casso’s last hope to influence this trial ended. And then the judge denied the motion for a mistrial.

  Eppolito’s entire defense lasted just over twelve minutes. Rather than calling any witnesses, Bruce Cutler simply read eleven citations Eppolito had received during his career, including the citation honoring Eppolito as the November 1974 cop of the month and a certificate honoring him for preventing an attack on students from a Coney Island Yeshiva and for “The Maintenance of the Jewish holiday of Purim.” In addition, he read a portion of the dust jacket of Mafia Cop. That was it; Cutler didn’t attack the evidence, he didn’t call any witnesses, he just stood up and read for twelve minutes. Tommy Dades says, “This was one of the most unusual defense strategies I’d ever seen. I’ve been involved in trials where the defense didn’t even try to do much, figuring the jury would understand that the prosecution hadn’t proved anything. But this—I didn’t get it, to be honest. It was like saying to the jury, ‘My guy is so guilty we’re not even going to bother.’”

  Caracappa’s defense wasn’t much better. Hayes wasn’t even in the courtroom. Instead he had flown to Los Angeles to meet with federal prosecutors about an entirely different case. Judge Weinstein was furious when he discovered Hayes’s absence. He found him at the ritzy Hotel Bel-Air and they spoke on a speakerphone. Hayes explained he was going to be busy for the next several hours. Judge Weinstein had a different idea. “Mr. Hayes, you just tell the United States Attorney that your meeting is at an end. You’re supposed to be here in court.”

  Although there was some speculation that Caracappa might testify in his own defense, he decided not to risk it. As Vecchione had learned many trials ago, that is something jurors notice and consider. “They want the defendant to look right at them and tell them that he isn’t guilty. Jurors put themselves in the handcuffs of the defendant sitting there listening to this evidence and they think, Boy, if I was accused of a crime that I didn’t commit, there’s no way you could keep me
off the stand. So when a defendant doesn’t testify there’s a belief that they were afraid, that they couldn’t answer the prosecutor’s question, so they’re probably guilty. In this case they had two defendants who were afraid to testify.”

  Hayes’s associate Rae Koshetz called two witnesses. One of them, Caracappa’s ex-partner, testified that Caracappa had spent sixteen hours guarding the man who killed Rabbi Meir Kahane the night before Eddie Lino was killed and therefore he must have been too tired to chase and kill anyone. The second witness testified that the Caribbean island of Antigua was not known as a place to launder money.

  Neither witness was able to refute a single charge. So the defense rested its case without actually putting up a defense. All that was left for them was the name-calling.

  Prosecutor Dan Wenner began the three-hour closing argument for the government, describing the case as “one of the bloodiest, most violent betrayals of the badge this city has ever seen…These corrupt men…did nothing less than arm the homicidal maniac Anthony Casso with the ammo and means to leave an avalanche of death in his wake.”

  Wenner went through the details of each murder, artfully weaving together all of the threads the prosecution had presented into a thick noose. As he reminded the jurors, “Think how dangerous it is to frame a cop…Cops have time cards. Burt Kaplan testified about things that happened on certain days. How would he know that the cops weren’t somewhere else on those days?”

  Eddie Hayes began the defense summation. He did raise several legitimate questions, the most striking being the fact that Franzone hadn’t mentioned that Greenwald was buried with a plastic bag covering his head, a black scarf knotted around his neck, and his hands bound—details Franzone certainly would have noticed if he actually had participated in the burial.