by Ann Rule
IN early September 1997, Eric Alpert filed another affidavit. Included in the information set forth was the story of Tom’s obsessive revenge against Linda Marandola, which had been reported to the FBI by an informant in 1980. Now the public knew that Anne Marie Fahey was not the first woman Tom had stalked. Members of the Delaware Supreme Court’s Censure Committee hastened to say that they had never been informed of the Marandola matter. But one member had been, and he happened to have been one of Tom’s bosses at Morris, James, Hitchens & Williams at the time of the complaint. Seventeen years later, he had no comment about the matter.
The FBI seized Tom’s E-mail. In doing so the investigators talked to the woman in charge of the computers at Saul, Ewing and learned that Tom had asked her a few days after Anne Marie vanished if his E-mail had been destroyed. He had been somewhat dismayed, according to the witness, to learn that it had not.
The balance of public opinion in Wilmington was tipping. Tom resigned from Saul, Ewing without giving a reason.
WHATEVER Tom had done during the day after Anne Marie vanished, he apparently spent much of it with Gerry. In their strategy sessions, Connolly, Donovan, and Alpert had come to believe that the missing components of the case probably rested deep in the bosom of the Capano family. They had learned the Capano credo: Family was family. Louie, Joey, and Gerry had good reason to revere their older brother—none more than Gerry; Tom had bailed them all out of trouble, and now, perhaps, it had been their turn.
Gerry Capano’s name had stood out in the time line Tom wrote for Friday, June 28, 1996. His name appeared opposite five items: 6:30, 10:30–11:00, 12:30+, 12:30–1:30, and 3:00. And for 9:15–10:30, Tom had written, “drive to SH.” “SH” had to be Stone Harbor. Gerry had a house and a boat there. Of all the Capano family, he was the one who spent the most time at Stone Harbor.
Gerry still had the cherubic features that had once made him such a cute little kid, but his avocations were all so macho that one wondered if he was still trying to prove himself to his older brothers. When he wasn’t hunting grizzly bears and moose in the great Northwest in the winter, he competed in shark-fishing derbies in the Atlantic Ocean off Stone Harbor. He had neither his brothers’ business acumen nor their cleverness.
Joey wasn’t mentioned in Tom’s notes. But the trio of investigators suspected that Gerry and Louie might well have fallen on their swords to protect Tom—as long as their swords weren’t too sharp. Both of them had a great deal to lose and they were vulnerable, Gerry perhaps more than Louie.
With the first-year anniversary of Anne Marie’s disappearance near at hand, it was obvious that some pressure had to be exerted on Gerry and Louie. They were clearly not willing to talk without some incentive. Of course, there wouldn’t be any way to lean on either of them unless they had Achilles’ heels when it came to the law.
Louie had had trouble in the past with illegal campaign contributions and bribery of public officials, and his financial dealings were very intricate when it came to the IRS. A multimillionaire, he was a brilliant real estate and construction entrepreneur but he had been known to grease wheels when it came to zoning and building permits. Tom’s diplomacy and connections had allowed Louie to walk away with few repercussions, but he probably had been left with some anxiety about the government’s interest in his business dealings.
Louie was called back before the grand jury and asked countless questions. Both his business and his personal life were suffering. All unwittingly, his wife and his son, his only child, had become involved in the aftermath of Anne Marie’s disappearance. If Louie was stonewalling the government to protect Tom, he was also putting his immediate family at risk.
Gerry Capano’s activities were even more suspect. His drug use was common knowledge, some of his close friends had prison records, and Gerry collected weapons the way some men accumulate baseball cards. Any one of these preferences could put him and those around him in jeopardy with the law. Intelligence said that Gerry was still the spoiled kid in the Capano family, the bad little boy. In his cups, he had ruined many a holiday and reduced his mother to tears. When he wasn’t drinking or drugging, Gerry was likable, but he wasn’t smooth and he wasn’t brilliant. His judgment had never been very good, and he had the Capano instinct to look after his own.
Gerry looked like the weakest link in the chain the family had erected to protect Tom. Maybe Tom had drawn Gerry into his own dark plan because he knew that more than anyone else his little brother was malleable.
Given Gerry’s proclivities, Connolly and Alpert contacted the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) agency. Diane Iardella, an ATF agent and her husband, Doug, a Wilmington police detective, joined the investigation. Both of the agencies they worked for had had reason to look suspiciously at Gerry’s activities. Now, because Tom Capano was under suspicion, the rest of his family were drawn into the probe. The “feds” would watch Gerry’s activities and apply pressure if he broke any laws. The Iardellas added much to the team.
When they weren’t at their half-million-dollar beach house in Stone Harbor, Gerry and his wife, Michelle, lived in a beautiful home on Emma Court in Brandywine Hundred. On the night of Wednesday, October 8, 1997, there was a loud knocking at their door. A federal search warrant was about to be executed; the warrant specified that authorities had reason to suspect they would find evidence of three crimes: possession of cocaine, distribution of cocaine or possession with intent to distribute, and possession of a firearm by a drug user. The ATF agents did not come away empty handed. In an unlocked gun safe in one of the children’s bedrooms, they found ten shotguns, four rifles, four revolvers, and eight “illegal explosive devices.”
They located two more revolvers and another shotgun in the dining room. They also verified Gerry’s possession of drugs. Field testing established that there was cocaine in his truck and a Baggie with cocaine in the laundry room cupboard (along with a rolled-up dollar bill and a credit card with powder residue on the washing machine). There was marijuana in the laundry room and in a tool chest in the garage. A guest—Gerry’s business partner—had both cocaine and marijuana on his person.
Carrying out the search warrant verified that Gerry had broken the law that forbids a drug user to possess guns. He couldn’t have looked more guilty of the crimes they suspected unless he had had white powder clinging to his nose and a bandolier around his chest. Even so, Gerry could find legal arguments that would tend to cut down the sentence he would receive. He could claim, at least half truthfully, that he used the weapons for lawful hunting and sporting, and that he collected them as a hobby. A conviction on such a gun charge could bring him about six months in jail. And in point of fact, the raid had not unearthed much weight in the illegal drugs found.
A week later, however, the federal agents raided Ed Del Collo’s house and found another gun. Del Collo was Gerry’s best friend, but he was also a convicted felon. And convicted felons are not permitted to own guns. A check of the serial numbers showed that Gerry had purchased the gun for Ed. He had broken another federal law; he had not only transferred guns, he had purchased them for a convicted felon. Furthermore, he could not argue that all the guns he’d ever possessed were for lawful hunting and sporting purposes.
Now Gerry was looking at three years or more in prison.
A week later, the Division of Family Services began an investigation of Gerry and Michelle’s suitability as parents. Authorities were concerned that their children, both toddlers, were living surrounded by guns and drugs.
Some time earlier, Tom had stepped in to help Gerry and said he should consult an attorney, even telling his little brother whom to call. Gerry did, and his lawyers suggested that the federal agents were raiding his home solely to force him to implicate his brother in a murder investigation.
Interestingly, Joe Hurley, Tom’s attorney, distanced his client from the raid. He didn’t want Tom’s image soiled by the mention of drugs and an arsenal of weapons. Hurley told reporters that he wasn’t surprised
that Colm Connolly had been involved in the gun and drug investigation. “That is a small office over there,” Hurley said, thus dismissing the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s office as pretty small potatoes.
Connolly had no comment.
Gerry’s attorney called Connolly often now, asking if Gerry should come in for questioning. “We kept saying, ‘We’re not ready for him yet.’ We acted as if we weren’t that anxious to talk to him,” Connolly said. “We said, we’re not going to bring him in—to borrow a line from The Godfather—until we had an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
They would let Gerry sweat until he would have no choice but to tell them the truth. If their hunch was right, Gerry was the most vulnerable in the Capano dynasty and quite possibly the one who had the information they needed to move in on Tom.
Chapter Thirty
THANKSGIVING WAS APPROACHING and the Faheys faced another holiday season without knowing what had become of their sister. The flyers with Anne Marie’s picture on them were still out there, but they were weathered now, faded by the summer sun and winter storms. It didn’t seem possible that a person who was loved so much could simply disappear off the face of the earth and never be found. But Anne Marie had.
And then, like the first pebbles of a massive rock slide, it began. All of the digging at the underpinnings of the Capanos had weakened the family loyalty that heretofore had overridden everything. Loyalty, usually an admirable trait, is not always a good thing—not when it is blind and when the object of that loyalty is undeserving.
On Saturday, November 8, 1997, and by agreement, a perspiring and nervous Gerry Capano appeared at the IRS office building with his attorney Dan Lyons. Because reporters were watching Connolly’s office and the Wilmington Police Department, Ron Poplos had offered the use of his office. The IRS building was off the beaten path, north of Wilmington. The government probers hoped they could interview Gerry without having it turned into a media event.
Colm Connolly, Eric Alpert, and Bob Donovan had waited a long time to hear what Gerry had to say. Along with Poplos and the Iardellas, they were basically the entire investigative team and they had worked on a shoestring budget for seventeen months to solve a case that many said was unsolvable. This interview could turn out to be what they had been waiting for.
As they questioned Gerry, they had some idea of what they were about to hear. They had come to believe that Tom had been with Gerry on the day after Anne Marie Fahey vanished. One neighbor they talked to in Stone Harbor thought he had recognized Tom and seen Kay’s Suburban parked around the corner for several hours in the middle of the day.
They believed that Gerry might know where Anne Marie’s body was—and if they were lucky, he might even be able to shed some light on what had driven Tom to commit murder. But they were unprepared for the whole story, a story that revealed the modus operandi of a man as cold as death itself.
It was four in the afternoon. Shadows fell across the barren boughs of the trees in Rodney Square, where people huddled together waiting for buses to take them home. It was hard to believe that two years before, Anne Marie’s November calendar had been full of happy times with Mike. So much had changed.
Gerry had not come forward with an open heart; before he agreed to have his formal statement taped, he had signed a plea bargain with the government that would save him from prison. But he also asked for protection from prosecution for his sister, Marian, and her husband, Lee Ramunno, and his mother. He wasn’t sure how many people in his family might be holding back information from the government.
For the record, Connolly began by discussing the terms of the plea bargain. “You understand,” he said, “you are agreeing to plead guilty to misprision of a felony—the felony being kidnapping—and in return, the government is entering a plea agreement with you, which has a stipulated sentence of three years’ probation? And you understand that any statement you make has got to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, correct?”
Gerry said yes to all the stipulations. He gave Tom’s address—which was Marguerite’s Weldin Road home—and his own on Emma Court. He was ready now to tell them of how Tom had come to him in trouble long before Anne Marie Fahey disappeared, about how he was worried for Tom and his family.
“Now,” Connolly said, “isn’t it true that sometime around February of 1996, your brother, Thomas Capano, asked you to borrow some money?”
“Yes, he did . . . $8,000.”
“Did he tell you why he needed to borrow that money?”
“Yes, he said that two people were extorting him . . . a girl and a guy.”
“OK. And the girl—did he say that he had had a relationship with her?”
“No.”
“Did he describe her as crazy or anything?”
“Yes.”
“Did he have any subsequent conversation with you in which he told you what this woman and her boyfriend were attempting to do to him?”
“To ruin his career.”
Gerry explained that he had lent Tom the $8,000, and that sometime between February and June, Tom had asked to borrow a gun. Gerry had first offered him a shotgun. “He told me he was afraid for his life,” Gerry said; “that he was afraid he was gonna get beaten up by this girl’s boyfriend if he didn’t pay them the money.”
“Did he take a gun from you?”
“Yes . . .”
“What kind of gun?”
“It was a ten-millimeter.”
Gerry said he had shown Tom how to use the handgun, which he had given to him unloaded. But when Tom gave it back to him sometime later, it hadn’t been fired. It was in the same condition it had been when he’d taken it.
“Now,” Connolly asked, “during this conversation when he asked you to borrow a gun, isn’t it true that he also asked you if you knew a person that could ‘help him out’? Didn’t he ask you if you knew anybody who could break somebody’s legs?”
“Yes . . . I told him yes, that I might. I talked to a friend of mine and nothing ever came out of it.”
“Now, isn’t it also true that sometime between February 1996 and June 28, 1996, your brother Thomas told you that if this woman—this woman he had spoken about—hurt his kids, he was going to kill her?”
“Yes, because she had threatened him several times about hurting the kids at the bus stop or doing something else to them.”
“Isn’t it also true that during this time frame he made a request to you about using your boat?”
“He said that if this girl or this guy hurt his kids, and he killed them, could he use the boat? And I didn’t—I just blew it off ’cause I didn’t think he was serious. I just thought he was blowing off steam.”
“And that’s why you never went to law enforcement authorities?”
“That’s right.”
Asked to recall the circumstances at 6 A.M. on June 28, Gerry said he had walked out of his house on Emma Court that morning to find his brother’s black Jeep parked in his driveway. Surprised, he had walked up to the passenger-side window and peered in. Tom was sitting there, reading the morning paper.
“What did your brother say to you?”
“He said, ‘Can you get hold of the boat?’ ”
“And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Did you do it?’ ”
“And by that, what did you mean?”
“He’d either killed the girl or the guy who was threatening to hurt his kids.”
“And what did your brother Thomas say in response?”
“He nodded.”
“Did he ask if you could help him?”
“Yes he did . . . I told him I didn’t want to get involved, that I had a beautiful wife and kids and a great life and I didn’t want to ruin my life.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Don’t leave me cold—don’t leave me flat. I need you, bro.’ Stuff like that.”
Tom had suggested that he could use Gerry’s boat by himself, but Gerry said he’d refused. T
om didn’t know anything about boats. “No way” did he have the experience to do that. So Gerry had agreed to help Tom get rid of the body of the “extortionist” he had killed. They agreed to meet at Tom’s house on North Grant Avenue.
“When you went into the garage at Grant Avenue, what did you see?”
“I saw a cooler and a rolled-up rug.”
The rug had been long, Gerry recalled, about three-quarters the size of the garage, and the cooler was big. “It looked to be about four feet long by two feet wide,” Gerry said.
“Was there anything unusual about the cooler?”
“There was a chain wrapped around the cooler.” Gerry added that the chain looked new and had a lock on it.
Gerry said that he and Tom had taken the cooler to his house in Stone Harbor, and from there onto his fishing boat, Summer Wind. He remembered that it was very heavy and he heard ice rattling inside it. A Styrofoam cooler wouldn’t have attracted much attention at the shore; many fishermen used such coolers to keep fish on ice.
And then Gerry said he had steered the boat out into the Atlantic Ocean.
“About how far out?” Connolly asked.
“I would say about seventy miles. Somewhere between sixty and seventy-five miles. I would have to look at the chart.”
“How deep was the water there?”
“Hundred and ninety-eight feet.”
“What did your brother do?”
“Lifted the cooler up and put it in the water.”
“Did the cooler sink?”
“No.”
“What did you do with it—because it wouldn’t sink?”
“Took my shark gun out and shot it once with a deer slug, and it still wouldn’t sink.”
“What did your brother do then?”
“I maneuvered the boat back to where the cooler was floating.”
