by Tommy Dades
But it was his associate Rae Koshetz who made the only argument that could actually save the cops: The statute of limitations had expired. The last murder for which they were being prosecuted had occurred in 1990, meaning to make a conspiracy charge stick the U.S. Attorney had to prove at least one criminal act took place after March 2000. “Casso’s allegations against Eppolito and Caracappa were dead as a doornail by the dawn of the new millennium,” she said. But to solve that problem the government had set up the drug bust and the money-laundering counts. “It’s like wearing a straw hat with a winter coat,” she told the jury. “It doesn’t fit.”
In his summation for Louis Eppolito, Cutler did little more than attack, attack, and then attack some more. According to Cutler, the government’s witnesses were “cretins, subhumans, and gnomes.” The diminutive Franzone was the gnome: “One of a race of dwarflike figures. He is a gnome, a cretin, a lowlife, a thief, a bum, a grave-digging killer who got away with it.” Steven Corso was “a sophisticated, unctuous, polished lowlife thief.” Burt Kaplan “lived a double life, a triple life, or even a quadruple life.” Cutler even managed to attack the United States government, somehow linking the prosecution of two hero cops to the war in the Middle East.
The jury deliberated for only ten hours over two days. They asked for only three things: Early in the process they wanted to review the portion of Kaplan’s testimony in which he explained why Casso had asked for his help in tracking down the men who had shot him. Later they asked about the audiotapes Otto Heidel had secretly recorded that Eppolito had stolen from the dead man’s apartment. And finally they wanted cream for their coffee.
Almost everyone assumed the deliberations would last several days. There were seventy different counts to be debated and a tremendous amount of evidence to be examined. Beyond guilt or innocence on each count was the question of whether so many different crimes committed over nineteen years could really be considered parts of a single conspiracy. And after all that, the jurors had to decide if the statute of limitations had expired.
So when the rumor started spreading after lunch on the second day that the jury had reached a verdict, almost no one believed it. It was too quick; there was too much testimony to consider. But if it was true, Vecchione figured, doing the equations of the courtroom, it had to be guilty all the way. There was no possible way the jury could have debated each of the seventy counts and found for the defendants.
Joe Ponzi called Henoch when he heard the rumor. “I’m hearing there might be a verdict,” he said.
Henoch didn’t think so. “I’m not getting any vibe one way or the other. The judge isn’t even going to be back from lunch until two forty-five. I don’t think so.” Ponzi returned to work.
When Judge Weinstein returned, about a half hour early, the marshals informed him that the jury had reached a verdict. Weinstein didn’t wait for the media; he brought the jury back into the courtroom.
CHAPTER 14
June Lowe, Weinstein’s courtroom deputy, faced the jury, read the first count, and asked, “Proved or not proved?”
The courtroom was absolutely silent. “Proved,” the foreman replied.
She read the second count. “Proved or not proved?”
“Proved.”
The third count, the fourth. Proved. Proved. They had murdered Israel Greenwald. Murdered Eddie Lino. Kidnapped Jimmy Hydell. They had provided confidential information to the Lucchese family. Every single count, seventy counts, proved.
It took eighteen minutes to complete the process and poll the jury. As the verdict was being read Eppolito and Caracappa sat stoically, silently, Caracappa shaking his head slightly in denial. In the front row Eppolito’s daughter, clutching a rosary, began crying. A row behind her Elizabeth Hydell was smiling, nodding. A spectator in the rear of the courtroom was laughing with joy.
As the verdict was being read someone shouted into Ponzi’s office, “Joe! Turn on the TV! It’s on New York One. They’re convicted.” Ponzi watched for a few seconds. Yes! he thought. Yes! He immediately called Tommy Dades, who was in his apartment. “They were convicted on all counts,” he said, “turn on New York One.”
Dades turned on the TV—and called Betty Hydell. They watched it together. Betty was ecstatic. “Thank God,” she said. “Thank God.” She thanked Dades over and over, “If it wasn’t for you…”
“Look at that,” Dades said as the news spread from channel to channel, “just look at that.” For the first time in so many months, he just sat back and relaxed. Something in his life was going right. Finally.
Mike Vecchione was in Chicago, having lunch with several of his students from Brooklyn Law School. They were there for a moot court competition. A New York radio reporter was with them. Her office called to give her the news. Vecchione took one minute to enjoy the feeling, then went back to work with his students.
In the courtroom Weinstein thanked the jury and released them. After they’d left the courtroom he revoked Eppolito and Caracappa’s $5 million bail. Federal marshals stripped the two former New York City detectives of their belts, ties, and jewelry, emptied all their pockets, and began to lead them away. Caracappa hugged Ed Hayes and gave him a Mafia-like kiss on the cheek. Hayes got emotional, his eyes watering, and Caracappa comforted him, whispering, “Everything’ll be all right.”
As Eppolito was escorted out of the courtroom his daughter shouted, “It’s not over, Dad!”
Outside the courtroom the defense lawyers announced they intended to appeal the verdict. Cutler said, “It’s an appearance of justice, but it’s not justice.”
Eppolito’s daughter angrily told reporters, “People have called this the worst case of corruption New York has ever seen. But it was not on my father’s part and not on Stephen Caracappa’s part. It was on the part of the United States government.”
Roz Mauskopf made her first appearance of the trial a few minutes later, reading a prepared statement: “They didn’t deliver us from evil. They themselves were evil personified. They did it as cops, and they did it as Mafia cops.” They turned the “shield of good” into a “sword of evil,” she concluded.
Later that afternoon Ponzi and Bobby I went over to the U.S. Attorney’s office to join the celebration. Later they joined a large group of people who had a stake in the case at a restaurant on Court Street. Inside the restaurant Mauskopf made a point of acknowledging the effort made by the state. Only later did Ponzi realize that they’d forgotten to invite Patty Lanigan to join them.
That night several of the jurors spoke with reporters. “All the prosecution did was give us details, details, details,” explained one of them, “and the defense didn’t address it.” Apparently there had been very little doubt about their guilt, and much of their time in the jury room had been spent debating the validity of the conspiracy charge, the RICO—or, as Judge Weinstein continued to refer to it, the “ticking time bomb.” Eventually they decided the prosecution had given them all the dots, and they simply connected them. The juror added that both men had many opportunities to walk away from the mob life but made the wrong decision. “I’m sorry,” the juror said, “but they have no morals.”
Tommy Dades wondered if the jurors had really considered the defense claim that the statute of limitations had expired. “You never really know what happens once people get inside that jury room, why people reach the decisions they do. But I think in this case the evidence was just so overwhelming that these guys had committed so many terrible crimes and had absolutely no remorse about it that the jury figured, ‘Screw ’em. These guys are dirty. These guys betrayed the city. Whatever happened in Vegas happened. And I’m not going to let these two murderers walk out of the courtroom on a technicality.’”
Eppolito and Caracappa were held temporarily in the Metropolitan Detention Center, the place where Ponzi had first met Burt Kaplan. Eppolito remained defiant, telling the media, “It was a perfect frame. It was a very well-thought-out plan. There’s no more perfect frame than this. I didn�
�t kill anybody.” He claimed that Casso and Kaplan had ensnared him because of his well-known family ties to the mob—as well as his own problems with Internal Affairs during his career. “I was the most perfect scapegoat in history.”
Caracappa seemed much more reflective. Near the end of the trial he’d had a long conversation with Felipe Luciano, who many years earlier had been a founder of the militant Puerto Rican group the Young Lords but later had become a respected reporter. Their paths had crossed for the first time just as Caracappa was beginning his career. “It was a different time,” Caracappa told Luciano. “I remember my first collar. Second night on the job. One of those Tactical Police Force guys was ahead of me and he walked me through the processing in court. Showed me how to do it. I was a rookie cop. And I remember just looking at him, even the way he stood. They had those long coats then. He’d put his hands back, so the coat was pulled back, and you could see the cuffs hanging a certain way, not like the rest of us, and his gun. They had a style. It was my introduction, my beginning. First collar. Second night on the job. And starting out, it all held so much promise.”
They all had their memories, the good guys and the bad guys. Watching the cops go down, Mike Vecchione couldn’t help but think back to his first major trial, to the moment when he had to make that decision about who he wanted to be. “It was a murder case; a wiseguy was the defendant. My first major case. So winning it meant as much to me as anything in my whole life. Late one night I was sitting in my office going through all the documentation. I had piles of reports, hundreds of pages. My door was closed. And then I found an interview that my main witness had done with Nassau County detectives. And in this interview he said something that was completely contradictory to what he’d said in the grand jury. Oh my God, I thought.
“As soon as I saw it I knew it was going to cause me a lot of trouble. Without this piece of paper my life is a lot easier. With this piece of paper I’ve got to work a lot harder and I still might lose the case.
“It would have been absolutely nothing for me to take that report and tear it up or just throw it away. No one would have known the difference. Not one person. I would be lying if I said the prospect of getting caught didn’t enter my mind. It did. But I also knew it was the wrong thing to do. I could hear my father’s voice in my head, and my mother, telling me that sometimes doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily help you at that moment, but as long as you do it you know you never have to lie, you never have to cover up. One lie leads to another and another and another and then the whole house of cards falls down. Call it whatever you want, but for me that is my ethical substance.
“That case was tried three times. This was the case I found out later was fixed the first time. But cases never get better with age. And eventually the defendant was acquitted.”
Vecchione knew, Dades knew, Ponzi, Lanigan, all of them; they all had been there, they all remembered that first time when they had to decide what kind of cop they wanted to be. Vecchione had walked away from temptation. But at some point while this trial was in progress, every cop, every man and woman in law enforcement, must have stopped and wondered what had happened to Eppolito and Caracappa. When was the first time they didn’t walk away?
Dades had another suggestion. “These guys weren’t cops who became criminals. They were criminals with badges. From the very beginning they were criminals who slipped through the system.”
Joe Ponzi asked himself that question over and over, without ever coming up with a satisfying answer. “I knew Louie. I thought he was a good detective, maybe a little wild, but this? I just couldn’t believe that he had gone into the police department with the intent to do this. There were times when I found myself starting to rationalize his actions. I don’t know what could have possessed him to do this. Did he really have such contempt for other cops that he felt like, ‘Fuck them, they deserve it’? I thought maybe he’d gotten screwed in the Rosario Gambino investigation. Maybe he didn’t do anything and in his mind they did this to him based on his family and his upbringing. I was trying to rationalize an excuse. Later on people told me, ‘Take it to the bank. He gave that document to Rosario Gambino and he didn’t get framed or set up.’
“There is a side of me that thinks maybe they were both drowning in some level of financial debt and that’s what motivated them. Obviously I don’t excuse them for one day of it, but it’s just so hard for me to believe that someone could go into the police department with the mind-set that he’s going to become a cop and use the badge the way Louie did. It’s just so hard for me to accept that.”
The cops had been convicted, but there was still a lot of legal bookkeeping to be done. Eppolito and Caracappa were held in separate cells at MDC while Judge Weinstein was considering their appeal. At the end of the trial Eppolito had hugged Bruce Cutler, and Caracappa had hugged Ed Hayes, but the love didn’t last.
Almost as soon as the cell door slammed behind the now infamous Mafia cops, they claimed they had not been adequately represented and fired Cutler and Hayes. Maybe they did believe that, but it is also accepted strategy. Blaming the lawyers at least guarantees a hearing. And on rare occasions it even results in the verdict being overturned.
But these guys seemed serious about it. In a hearing in early May, Eppolito’s new lawyer, Joe Bondy, claimed in his motion for an acquittal or new trial that “Defense counsel spent the majority of Mr. Eppolito’s closing argument speaking about himself, including he lost fourteen pounds during the trial, loved Brooklyn as a borough of bridges and tunnels and was an admirer of the great Indian Chief Crazy Horse…After uttering these broad-ranging irregularities, counsel then neglected to argue…the lack of evidence of the [RICO] offense.”
In his own affidavit Eppolito claimed that Cutler had basically ignored him throughout the trial. He wanted to testify, he wrote, but Cutler refused to put him on the stand. “The last refusal represented the culmination of a relationship that was increasingly hostile and adverse.”
Caracappa’s new lawyer, Daniel Nobel, was less harsh, saying he was surprised by “the glaring lack of legal sufficiency” demonstrated by Hayes.
Judge Weinstein rejected the motion, but his comments while doing it left Eppolito and Caracappa with hope—and may well have caused some shivers in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Focusing on the conspiracy charge that held the entire case together, Weinstein said, “It was not a strong case…The government was warned about this from day one and there is a sound basis for appeal. There was enough evidence, barely enough, to put it to the jury…But I concede a more learned jurist may disagree, and it wouldn’t upset me at all to be reversed.”
Sentencing was scheduled for the fifth of June. A week before that Daniel Nobel filed additional papers, and this time he didn’t hold back on Ed Hayes. Nobel wrote that the two private investigators hired by Hayes would testify that he “made no serious effort to prepare for the trial and remained unfocused…The only effort by Mr. Hayes to present a theory of defense…was a totally confusing and completely disjointed effort to blame the prosecution on an undefined conspiracy emanating from Washington, DC.”
Eppolito’s new lawyer criticized Cutler for “repeated failures to investigate relevant areas, inability to communicate with his client and a complete lack of trial preparation.”
Whatever affection or even civility had existed between the cops and their lawyers was gone. “I was so personally offended,” Cutler responded. “One day you’re begged to come in and the next day you’re knocked by the client, who to me is delusional in a certain respect. He’s certainly ungrateful and shameless…They started off blaming the government and the prosecutors. Who’s left? Us. I am rankled and angry.”
“He’s desperate,” Hayes said of Caracappa. “Who else can he attack? I am surprised, however, since I didn’t think he was like that.”
On June 5 Judge Weinstein permitted the relatives of several of the victims to speak. Jeweler #1’s now-grown daughter, Michal Greenwald, was especially
poignant, glaring at the disgraced cops and telling them, “We loved our daddy, and having him disappear into thin air with no explanation was something I would not wish upon my worst enemy. Do you know what it feels like to visit a friend who recently lost a loved one and to be envious of them because they have a grave?”
And finally, finally, Betty Hydell had her chance to speak. “I was closer to you that day than I am right now and you deny it. I just wish you’d stay in jail the rest of your life, without family or friend, and you die in jail alone.”
Eventually Louie Eppolito stood up in the courtroom and faced the families of his victims who had come to see justice done. With typical arrogance Eppolito smugly insisted he was innocent, that he had been framed, and invited these people to visit him in his cell so he could prove that to them. Then he began talking about his pride in his accomplishments as a New York City police officer.
And as he did, a man sitting in the spectator section interrupted, yelling, “Mr. Eppolito! Do you remember me?”
Eppolito looked, maybe he shook his head slightly. “No,” he said.
Barry Gibbs, whom Eppolito had arrested for the prostitute murder, was getting what little satisfaction was available to him. “I’m the guy you put away for nineteen years. I’m Barry Gibbs. You don’t remember me? You don’t remember what you did to me? To my family?” Guards quickly hustled Gibbs out of the courtroom.
Judge Weinstein told Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa that he intended to sentence them to life in prison without the possibility of parole, a one-million-dollar fine, and a seizure of assets, for what was, he said, “probably the most heinous series of crimes ever tried in this courthouse. There has been no doubt, and there is no doubt, that the murders and other crimes were proven without a reasonable doubt.”
