Friends of the Family

by Tommy Dades

  He delayed imposing the sentence until he ruled on the motions for dismissal made by their new lawyers on the basis of the “ticking time bomb.” That seemed like it would be simply another legal formality. In most criminal cases the verdict is never the end, but rather the beginning of the next phase, the sometimes endless series of legal maneuverings and appeals that—as Casso had proved—could continue for years. Time is the one thing that prisoners have in abundance, and they often use it to attack their convictions. In this case though, one of the most respected judges in the business had weighed the factors and made his decision. It was highly unlikely that anyone was going to overturn Judge Jack Weinstein.

  Except Judge Weinstein. On July 1, 2006, an extraordinary case got even more bizarre. As it turned out, according to Judge Weinstein, Mike Vecchione had it right from the very beginning.

  Tommy Dades was working in the kitchen of his Staten Island house when Ponzi called him with the news. “You’re not going to believe this,” Ponzi said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Weinstein just threw out the RICO. You believe that? After the family impact statements were read and they went the whole nine yards that he overthrew the conviction because of the statute of limitations?”

  Weinstein’s ticking time bomb had exploded. Having spent his lifetime learning and respecting the law, Judge Jack Weinstein finally could not convince himself that the federal government’s RICO charge was valid. He couldn’t accept the prosecution’s contention that a continuing connection existed between eight murders and other mayhem, and one ounce of methamphetamine sold in Las Vegas a decade later. It must have been an enormously difficult decision; he had no doubt about the guilt of the accused, and he understood the risks of his decision, but he valued the law far above the consequences of his decision. As far as Judge Weinstein was concerned, “Once Anthony Casso and Burton Kaplan had both been arrested, once the two defendants had both retired from the police force and reestablished themselves on the opposite side of the country, the conspiracy that began in New York in the 1980s had come to a definite close.”

  It wasn’t about letting two deplorable human beings out of a cell, he wrote, it was about that majesty of the law that the good guys spend their lifetimes upholding. He explained, “It will appear peculiar to many people that heinous criminals such as the defendants, having been found guilty on overwhelming evidence of the most despicable crimes of violence and treachery, should go unwhipped of justice. Yet our Constitution, statutes and morality require that we be ruled by law, not by vindictiveness or the advantages of the moment. If we are to be ruled by law, we must be limited by its protections. As Justice [Oliver Wendell] Holmes reminded us, it is ‘A less evil that some criminals should escape than that the government should play an ignoble part.’ Even during the great emergency of the Civil War, the courts rejected the theory that the rule of law could be twisted to meet the exigencies of the moment.’

  “The government’s case against these defendants stretches federal racketeering and conspiracy laws to the breaking point…

  “The decision to enter a judgment of acquittal on the charge of racketeering conspiracy is required by the very essence of the rule of law.” Weinstein did conclude that should he be reversed by the Court of Appeals the sentences he imposed of life-plus on both defendants should stand.

  Steve Caracappa’s first attorney, Ed Hayes, reportedly was “speechless” when reached at his office, but then he emphasized—happily—that the Feds had made a huge error by not permitting the case to be tried in state court, where there is no statute of limitations on murder. And then he added, “But this is a Justice Department that more than any in my lifetime has shown a mad-dog desire to control everything and to ignore the law. And they paid the price in this case.”

  Mike Vecchione read and reread Weinstein’s decision, riding an emotional roller coaster between anger, satisfaction, and concern. “I guess my first thought was anger. I was furious that Feldman had not allowed us to at least go in to the grand jury and get an indictment on the Hydell or the Lino murders just in case something like this happened. We could have been waiting at the bottom of the courthouse steps to lock up Eppolito and Caracappa on state murder charges, where there is no statute of limitations.

  “Admittedly, I felt some satisfaction because I’d been vindicated. My belief that the statute of limitations had expired had been borne out. I respected Judge Weinstein for this decision because I care deeply about justice. No matter how terrible someone is, you can’t change the law to catch them; when you start doing that you no longer have a system of law that matters.

  “On the other hand, I felt terrible because now Eppolito and Caracappa had the potential—although I couldn’t imagine it would happen—of walking away from the worst crimes ever committed by cops.” It also meant that Vecchione and Ponzi had to immediately begin working to put together a murder indictment against the cops. They had to be prepared to indict Eppolito and Caracappa if they were released.

  Dades was also dealing with a great range of emotions. “I was confused,” he remembers. “I’d never heard of anything like that before. I never heard of a judge going so far as to let families speak about how these guys affected their lives and then throwing out the case. If you were guessing he was going to do it, he would have thrown out the indictment or he would have heard some testimony and then thrown it out, but to let it go to a jury and actually allow the jury to deliberate on it and come up with a guilty verdict, then set a sentencing date and have the families come in and give impact statements, I didn’t understand it.”

  Roz Mauskopf’s spokesman issued a terse statement: “The jury in this case unanimously found Eppolito and Caracappa guilty of racketeering and murder based on overwhelming evidence. And based on the law that was given to them by the court, each of the 12 jurors specifically found that the defendants’ heinous crimes were committed within the statute of limitations. We intend to pursue an appeal.”

  The federal prosecutor immediately asked the Court of Appeals to reinstate the verdict, claiming, basically, that the jury had heard the case, had weighed the arguments about the validity of the charge that concerned Weinstein, and had reached a decision. Guilty.

  No one, absolutely no one, doubted the guilt of the two detectives. But the question that was being asked at the end was the same question Vecchione had asked at the beginning: Could the government make a federal case out of it?

  Eppolito and Caracappa were denied bail, but at least they had a lifeline. A chance. For everyone involved, it had become a matter of waiting. And while the court of appeals wrestled with this complex decision, life moved forward. During this time, for Tommy Dades, strained relationships ended. He and Ro tried to save their marriage, but too much had happened and eventually they divorced. He never again spoke with his father, although he continues to speak with his aunt. For a time, he was able to bandage the rift with Mark Feldman. “We would have dinner with Ponzi every few weeks. We’d talk about what happened; the only thing he would ever say was that what he did was best for the case. On a personal level I had always respected him, on a professional level I thought he was tremendous, but eventually that ended badly.”

  As he explains, “Mark was mad at me because he felt I got too much publicity and that hurt the case, but we got through that. Then, though, I started working on another cold case, a 1991 case regarding the murder of an innocent seventeen-year-old kid who was beaten to death. Two cooperators from another case came forward with the names of the people who did it. Feldman had three witnesses I needed to speak to. I asked him four or five times to speak to these people and ask them to talk to me. ‘No problem,’ he kept telling me, but it never got done.

  “I was told by other people that he wasn’t going to do it because I was working with Mike Vecchione. He and Mike just did not get along. So I told him, ‘No matter what your feelings are toward Mike, this is an innocent kid that was killed and you should put your p
ersonal feelings aside and be more professional.’

  “He responded by telling me that I was now a consultant to the DA’s office and I shouldn’t be involved. That a detective or an investigator should be calling him, not me. And that if he ever does put those witnesses on the phone an agent is going to have to be there as a witness. So I went nuts on him.

  “This conversation took place right around the time Mark was leaving the U.S. Attorney’s office to go into private industry. I told him, ‘Mark, the best thing that can happen to you is to get out of this business, because what you’re saying goes against every grain in my body.’ And then I hung up on him.

  “We spoke one more time, maybe a year later. We agreed that we had both lost our tempers. He wanted to forget about what happened, but the truth is I just never could respect him after that and we never spoke again.”

  As so often before in his life, Dades found contentment in the boxing gym. When he was working with teenagers in the Police Athletic League gym on Staten Island, literally showing them the ropes, he felt like he was where he belonged. He got a lot of satisfaction out of teaching those kids all the good lessons about life, about people, he’d learned over his two decades on the job. His reward came when one of those kids, a promising fighter named Terence Myers, showed him the essay he’d written for his college applications: “The people who inspire me are my mother, Patricia Myers, boxing trainer Tommy Dades and Floyd Mayweather Jr.,” he wrote. “All of them went through a lot of ups and downs and a lot of problems in their lives, but they kept working hard and now they are successful…If it wasn’t for my trainer, Tommy Dades, I probably would be in the streets doing nothing with my life.”

  A year passed and still the Court of Appeals failed to reach any kind of decision. There were all kinds of rumors about what was going on; several times it appeared that they had decided what to do, but the sound of their silence was overwhelming. During the waiting all the key members of the government’s prosecution team left Mauskopf’s office. Feldman and Henoch joined large firms, Mitra Hormozi was appointed Special Deputy Chief of Staff to New York State Attorney-General Andrew Cuomo, and President Bush appointed Roz Mauskopf to a federal judgeship.

  Eventually undercover accountant Stephen Corso was sentenced to one year in prison. Corso had faced more than seven years, but Judge Janet Hall said, while pronouncing the reduced sentence, “I can’t find the words to describe the value…of his cooperation.” Corso, who made more than nine hundred tapes with Eppolito, refused an offer to enter the government’s witness protection program when he finishes his sentence.

  For his cooperation Burt Kaplan received a reduction in his twenty-seven-year sentence for marijuana trafficking and was released from prison. He also had to plead guilty to all the crimes to which he confessed as part of his plea agreement but will never have to return to prison for those crimes. He gave the prosecutors everything they needed. More than they imagined. For Burt Kaplan, his last payday is coming. After being released he seemed to have successfully disappeared, although it is doubtful he is in any danger. Almost all of the people against whom he testified are gone, dead or in prison.

  Anthony Casso remains in his cell in Supermax, the maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, his ticket out having expired.

  The waiting went on. Mike Vecchione prosecuted Clarence Norman in four trials on various corruption charges and earned convictions in three of those trials. Norman is in prison, serving his numerous sentences. Vecchione’s office also accepted guilty pleas from ten men involved in the macabre bones case, in which the body parts of more than a thousand corpses were taken and sold. And Vecchione and Tommy Dades worked together on one more high-profile cold case, but this one ended poorly.

  After the Eppolito and Caracappa trials began, Vecchione received several letters from people asking him to pursue other cold cases. Among these letters was a folder full of documents sent by a private investigator who had been working on a case that she believed involved FBI misconduct. Former FBI agent Lin Devecchio was indicted for providing information to mobster Gregory Scarpa Sr.—who died of AIDS in 1994—in the late 1980s that led to four murders. Like Eppolito and Caracappa, rumors had been swirling around Devecchio for a long time, but prosecutors had not been able to make a case against him until Scarpa’s former mistress came forward claiming to have intimate knowledge of Devecchio’s cooperation with Scarpa. When the indictment was announced, many of Devecchio’s former FBI colleagues rallied around him in support. Much of the prosecution’s case centered around this former witness—but after the trial had begun a New York reporter produced audiotapes this woman had made ten years earlier for a book proposal. And in these tapes she had claimed Devecchio was not involved in two of the murders for which he was being prosecuted. As Vecchione explains, “We didn’t find out about those tapes until she was in the middle of her testimony. At the time she made those tapes she was using drugs and was looking to protect herself and her son, but they were devastating to the prosecution. I was convinced we were on the right path and she was telling the truth, but those tapes damaged her credibility as a witness and we had no choice but to ask for a dismissal.”

  A second year passed without the Court of Appeals issuing a decision.

  After leaving Hynes’s office for the second time, Tommy Dades continued teaching boxing at the Police Athletic League gym on Staten Island—and his kids won two NYC Golden Gloves championships in 2008. Joe Ponzi continued supervising more than a hundred investigators, each of them working as many as twenty-five cases. And Mike Vecchione was finally ending the last of the funeral home ghouls prosecution when the Court of Appeals issued its verdict at last.

  In October 2007 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals heard oral arguments from prosecutors and the defense attorneys. Representing the government, Mitra Hormozi contended that the conspiracy never ended because Eppolito and Caracappa continued to look for illicit ways to make money—and shared the secrets of their crimes. The three-judge panel then took almost another full year before finally reaching its seventy-page decision. “We reject the district court’s view that…the enterprise that began in the 1980’s and continued into the early 1990’s could not be considered the same enterprise that engaged in the Las Vegas conduct…”

  It was a long, carefully constructed decision, replete with numerous precedents that weaved a tight rope around the necks of the dirty cops. Guilty. Guilty of the worst crimes ever committed by New York City police officers. Guilty of murder and betrayal. Although defense lawyers promised an appeal to the Supreme Court, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa will spend the rest of their lives in prison. Ironically, there remains the possibility that eventually they will be assigned to Supermax—where, after all these years, they will finally get to meet Gaspipe.

  As always, after the final verdict was announced, Tommy got on the phone with the mother. Betty Hydell had finally gotten justice. “How you feeling?” Tommy asked her.

  There was no celebration in her, just quiet satisfaction. “I’m okay,” she said. And finally they could begin talking about the future.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Mike Vecchione would like to acknowledge the following people:

  To my boss, District Attorney Charles “Joe” Hynes, without whose confidence in me this investigation could never have happened. To George Terra and the Detectives of the Special Investigation Unit of the Brooklyn DA’s office for their great work and dedication to this case and countless others I have worked on with them. To the men and women of the Rackets Division in the Brooklyn DA’s office, simply the best of the best. To my Uncle Louie, my mentor, role model, and the inspiration for me to become a lawyer, and Uncle Fred, the godfather, who always made me laugh and to whom I literally said my first words—keep fighting! I love you. And Aunt Jo, my second mom! I love you. To Jimmy Murphy, a great detective who brought me into the DA’s office and whose stories inspired me. To Jerry Schmetterer, one of my newest and best friends, for his advi
ce and for lending me an ear, and Morty Matz, for sharing with me the wealth of his experience and for all the lunchtime advice and support. To Ronnie, for being a wonderful mother to our sons. I couldn’t have done law school without her. To Joe Petrosino, “grandpa,” my great friend and my partner in the DA’s office. To Anne Gutmann, a great lawyer and the best friend I could ever hope for, and The Cabal, for simply being my friends. To Brian Maher and Steve Bondor, for being there at the beginning in the homicide bureau—great detectives both. To Juliet P., for caring, you are truly “one of the great ones.” And to Frances Mercurio, my great assistant, a true lady who does it all for me and who brightens every day I see her. To Chief Joe Ponzi, for his selfless contributions to this case, this book, and for his greatness as a detective. And to my friend Tommy D., for always being there for me and for his steady supply of “Dades specials.” We kicked some ass!

  Tommy Dades would like to acknowledge the following people:

  To Jim Walden, Jimmy DiPietro, and Randy Mastro, thank you is an understatement. I’ll never forget. God bless all of you and yes, Jimmy D., you are the best defense attorney I’ve ever faced!

  To members of the groups D22 and D44 NY office DEA: Eric, Myron, Hunt, Brizz, Drew, Moran, Al, Cip, and all the rest of the boys. Thank you, a bunch of pros—no better. To Jimmy DeStefano and Gary “J” Pontecorvo, on both a personal and professional level; I’m proud to know you guys and thank you for letting me tag along. Thank you FBI–C38 NY office. Thank you Matt Tormey, C-31 FBI office NY, “What fun!” To Detective Nick Traffacenti and Detective John Votto (Ret.). I learned from the best. To Sergeant Larry Ponzi (Ret.), the epitome of a squad boss. I love you. To Detective Robert Maladonich (Ret.). Thanks for your friendship and guidance both as a detective and as a boxer. To Jr. “Poisons” Jones, you will always be the champ in my eyes. To ADA Chris Blank of the Brooklyn DA’s office—for all your hard work and for understanding me, thank you. To Detective Greg DeBor of the Brooklyn DA’s office, for always being there; you’re a great cop and friend. To “JC,” friends for life. To “LM” the best of luck. To “GS,” thank you for trusting me. To “SG,” my partner on the same hit list—they missed! To Captain William Plackenmeyer (NYPD Ret.), words can’t explain what I owe you, both personally and professionally. To Chief of Detectives William Allee, it was an honor to work for you and learn from you, the “cop’s cop.” All the best. To Supreme Court Judge Laura Ward, thanks for your friendship. To Chief of Rackets Michael Vecchione, the book says it all but we could have written a hundred more. God bless you. To Chief Joe Ponzi, what is it, five calls a day? I’m blessed with your friendship. To Detectives Mike Galletta and Jimmy Harkins, my partners for eleven and seven years. I miss you both—great partners, great detectives, and great friends. “We were surrounded by assassins”; you were right, Jimmy. To Chief Terra, “crazy as a fox.” To Chief Anne Guttman, a sincere thank-you. To Chief Suzanne Corhan, thank you. To Sergeant Joe “Joe the Boss” Piraino, you drove me crazy, but I love you. To Inspector John Lynch (NYPD Ret.) who could have played a police inspector in any movie—a role you were born to be. God bless you. To Sergeant Pat Russo (Ret.), nobody has a bigger heart than you, you’re a man’s man, thank you, Patty! To Terence Meyers, thank you for letting me train you all those years and for bettering yourself. You’re the poster boy for what the PAL is and for what its coaches do for the youth of our city. Keep punching and have a great life. To Detective Jimmy Sanseverino (Ret.), a gentleman, a great detective, and a good friend. To Nwachi Hartley, may you rest in peace. C-ya soon pal, I miss you. To Marty Ricco, I miss our talks; it seems like yesterday. I know you watch over me; I love ya, Rick. To my grandparents “Blackie” and Rosie, thank you for taking care of me. I would not be here if not for both of you. To Detective Joe Simone, Detective Patty Magiorie, and Angela Clemente. Three great friends; may God grant justice—never lose faith in Him. To New York Supreme Court Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder, thank you for showing integrity and that the system can be fair when in the hands of someone like you. To childhood friends Melfi and Pickett, to be your friends for thirty-five years is an accomplishment in itself—we’re the last three standing. And to Jerry Capeci, I enjoy our friendship, you’re a good man. To Sergeants Chris Straum and Jack Cucci, thank you for believing in me. You are two great bosses. To my godson, Frankie, I love you, God bless you. To Detective First Grade Frank Pergola, the epitome of a detective, lots of love and all the best.