Feuer & Rashbaum: Blood Ties

March 12, 2005
Blood Ties: 2 Officers' Long Path to Mob Murder Indictments
By ALAN FEUER and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
The New York Times

It looked at first like a classic gangland hit.

A Mercedes sat abandoned on a Brooklyn highway. A bullet-riddled corpse lay slumped across the seat. The dead man was Edward Lino, a Gambino family captain, who had helped kill Paul Castellano, the boss of bosses, and vault John Gotti into power. It was November 1990 and made men were dying. There was a dead mobster on the Belt Parkway. Business as usual, it seemed. It was the height of the Mafia's brutal civil war.

In the months and years that followed the shooting, the police, the Brooklyn district attorney and the federal prosecutor's office scoured the underworld for sources, tapping their informants for anything they had - a tip, a lead. One of them, a murderous Brooklyn turncoat, gave a scandalous report in 1994 that two corrupt detectives had, in fact, killed Mr. Lino, but the investigation, pursued for months, eventually stalled.

Eleven years of silence slowly followed.

This week, however, the silence was broken with a stunning indictment as investigators accused the two men of acts that their colleagues could have never fathomed 13 years ago when they first appeared at the scene of the blood-soaked car: that the men who held the guns that murdered Mr. Lino were not their rivals but their cousins, not cold-blooded Mafiosi but men, like them, in blue.

When Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were arrested Wednesday night at a dark-wood, white-clothed trattoria in Las Vegas, it brought to light some of the most shocking allegations of police corruption in New York City's history. The two were accused of being paid killers for the mob, charged with having taken part in at least eight murders - most while one or both were still on the New York force.

At their arraignment in Las Vegas, both men appeared yesterday in orange jump suits before their families in the courtroom to enter pleas of not guilty. A federal magistrate ordered them held without bail in Las Vegas pending their return to Brooklyn - where the story begins.

Louis Eppolito put on the patrolman's uniform in 1969. He had a fairly interesting background for a man who was sworn to uphold the law.

His father, Ralph, was a Gambino family soldier known in the underworld as Fat the Gangster. His uncle James was a Gambino captain who went by Jimmy the Clam.

Mr. Eppolito, however, loved his badge.

On the force, he wrote, a man could be a man. "You could swear and you could brawl and it was all in the name of helping other people," he said in "Mafia Cop" - a book he wrote with a co-author, Bob Drury. "I liked that. It was honorable."

His first assignment was the 63rd Precinct in Marine Park, Brooklyn, a quiet post in a well-kept middle-class neighborhood. By 1973, however, he had been sent to the 71st Precinct, which encompassed Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, East New York and East Flatbush, where he was born.

It was a "scum hole," Mr. Eppolito wrote, filled with drugs and pimps, prostitutes and guns. As a body builder (who had once been named Mr. New York City), he moved through the streets, imagining himself as some avenging angel, sometimes twisting arms, sometimes banging skulls.
The newspapers followed his career: "A tough cop's persistence and skill with gun, muscle and handcuffs were credited yesterday..." The Daily News once wrote. "A lone detective chased three hardened criminals..." it wrote another time. On Nov. 30, 1973, Detective Eppolito was splashed across its cover. "EPPOLITO," the headline ran, "DOES IT AGAIN."

Still, he was haunted by his family and his past. One night while Detective Eppolito was out for dinner with his wife, a mobster named Todo Marino picked up the check, he wrote in his book. He kissed the old man on the cheek in thanks, but the F.B.I. was watching. Mr. Eppolito was hauled down to meet with federal agents and answer for the kiss, he wrote. He was hauled down again years later when he was seen attending Mr. Marino's wake.

Even in his first years on the force, he would sometimes have informal meetings with gangland figures in his squad car, he recounted in his book: "I figured who was it going to hurt to stop and commiserate with an old Mustache Pete about his lumbago?"

Mr. Caracappa joined the force the same year as Mr. Eppolito, 1969. It was a time of civil and political unrest when the city rushed to get patrolmen on the streets. Rookies were hurried from the academy. There were shortened training regimens and abbreviated background checks. A number of officers hired in 1969 were later arrested or dismissed from the force.

The pair met working at the Brooklyn Robbery Squad and Mr. Eppolito coyly wrote they sometimes "used their brand of gentle persuasion to glean information from stoolies on minor raps." Mr. Caracappa eventually moved on to the elite Major Case Squad where he helped form the Organized Crime Homicide Unit and where he suddenly had access to a flood of secret information on the mob.

His specific assignment: investigate the Luchese crime family.

A Family Near Upheaval

By 1985, court papers say, the two detectives, had abandoned the idea of policing the mob, and instead had developed what prosecutors have called "a business relationship" with organized crime - chiefly with Anthony (Gaspipe) Casso, the Luchese family underboss.

At that point, the Luchese family was on the verge of upheaval. The family's boss, Anthony (Ducks) Corallo (so named for his knack for ducking subpoenas and convictions), would soon wind up indicted and prosecuted in federal court in Brooklyn as part of what was known as the commission trial, a sort of Waterloo for the New York mob.

In the end, the trial - one of the first to focus on the upper echelons of the Mafia - led to the conviction of the entire leadership of the Luchese family on racketeering charges, along with the conviction of two other Mafia dons.

It also led to a power vacuum in the family, which Mr. Casso and his new boss, Vittorio Amuso, were happy to fill.

Brutal and paranoid about traitorous informants, Mr. Casso - who later became a government witness and admitted his role in 36 murders - ruled with an iron fist,
He promoted vicious mobsters like George (Georgie Neck) Zappola and George (Goggles) Conte to the rank of captain. He was the sort of man who would breezily pick up $1,000 dinner bills or spend double that on an evening's worth of wine. But he also had a vicious bent: He was known for shooting pigeons off the rooftops and once used a forklift to drop 500 pounds of cargo on a dockworker's foot after hearing the man boast about his reinforced boots.

Nonetheless, under his control, the Lucheses prospered. They ran labor unions in the building trades and at the airports. And in a partnership with the Columbo family, they ran what was known as the Bypass Gang - a crew of seasoned burglars who would bypass sophisticated alarm systems, sometimes tunneling into banks from nearby stores.

Then on Sept. 6, 1986, Mr. Casso was the target of an attempted hit - shot and wounded in his car as it sat parked in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn. He escaped into a nearby restaurant, the Golden Ox.

When the investigators showed up at the crime scene, they were rocked by what they found in Mr. Casso's car: a list of license plate numbers.

And not just any license plate numbers. The numbers belonged to the unmarked cars the police themselves used while on surveillance.

The two detectives, is seems, had already begun to provide Mr. Casso with police information, according to prosecutors.

But after the 1986 shooting of Mr. Casso, the two detectives were asked to step up their efforts. Mr. Casso, who has since been imprisoned, wanted the two detectives to work on retainer: "$4,000 per month by Casso for NYPD and governmental information" - the names of informants, the timing of arrests - according to court papers.

"Any additional 'work,' " the papers charge, "was extra."

The extra work, prosecutors assert, came to include murder. In 1986, prosecutors have charged, the two detectives kidnapped an enemy of Mr. Casso, and delivered him up for execution. And then in 1990, according to the federal indictment, they pulled that Mercedes over on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. It was Mr. Caracappa, prosecutors say, who pulled the trigger.
The hit, prosecutors said, netted the pair $65,000, but they paid for it later. The turncoat who first told prosecutors of their crimes in 1994 was Mr. Casso himself.

Suspicions About Murder

About 18 months ago, five veteran investigators - four of them current or retired police detectives - came together to once again focus on what were some of the most sobering accusations they had ever heard about fellow officers.

Each man had special skills: Douglas Le Vien had worked undercover, convincing mobsters that he was a corrupt officer; Robert Intartaglio and Thomas Dades had long investigated mob figures; Joseph J. Ponzi specialized in murders; and William Oldham was an expert in building racketeering cases.

But the group, according to several law enforcement officials, had at least one thing in common: disgust with police detectives committing crimes for the mob. And some of them had long harbored suspicions that two of their retired colleagues - Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa - really had committed some of the worst sorts of crimes: murder.

Mr. Intartaglio, for his part, had a particular passion about the case, according to a colleague. It grew out of frustration he experienced more than a decade earlier, when one of his investigations seemed to keep stalling.

Then a city police detective, he was investigating the Luchese family's Bypass Gang, and it seemed like the mob was often one step ahead of him. "An informant was killed, matters were getting compromised," recalled a colleague, and it was unclear why.

Mr. Dades, for his part, had his suspicions strengthened when he stumbled across evidence in an unrelated mob case that seemed to raise the likelihood that Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa were guilty.

So, armed with frustration, anger and determination, they set about reviewing old files, and interviewing witnesses.

Because the accusations against the men were not new - they had first came to light in 1994 when Mr. Casso himself became a government witness and detailed what he said were their crimes - the men had a wealth of material to review. There were police and F.B.I. reports, the evidence from the earlier homicides, and other records. They set up what they came to call their War Room, in Brooklyn, to store the records and compare progress.

And, most critically, they came to secure the cooperation of a witness, who, according to the government's detention memo, is expected eventually to testify against the detectives.

Offficials in the office of the Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes, which along with federal prosecutors was instrumental in making the case, would not discuss the witness.
But with the witness and that mixed band of investigators, the authorities were able to do what their predecessors in 1994 had not: Convince a grand jury to indict the two men on racketeering, murder and other charges.

An Actor Playing Wiseguys

Las Vegas was the perfect place for a detective to retire. There were golf courses and casinos, pretty women and plenty of sun.
Mr. Caracappa and Mr. Eppolito went there in the early 1990's after leaving the force. The former kept his fingers in the old life, finding work as a private investigator. The latter traded on his heritage, beginning a new career as a bit actor playing wiseguys, and drug dealers in movies like "Goodfellas" and "State of Grace."

They settled across the street from each other on Silver Bear Way, a bland block in a gated community that, in 1996, still lay on the edges of the desert. Eventually, the city's construction boom caught up with them and Silver Bear Way, like the rest of Las Vegas, was surrounded by the sprawl.

Mr. Eppolito lived with his wife and 89-year-old mother-in-law in a nice house adorned with the trappings of his new life. In his office, one official said, there was a wall of photographs that showed him posing with the stars: Robert De Niro, Charles Durning, Ray (Boom Boom) Mancini, the former lightweight champion who produced "Turn of Faith," a film that Mr. Eppolito wrote.
His roles in Hollywood were mostly small and colorful and of the sort that one could easily miss bending down to set one's popcorn on the floor. He was mentioned in the credits as "assassin" or "raid cop No. 1" or "waterfront hood." Still, in his book, Mr. Eppolito recalls being asked by Mr. De Niro himself for authentic pointers on the mob.

When the authorities raided Mr. Eppolito's house, they found more than a hundred guns, including two AK-47 assault rifles and a gold Luger pistol in a pair of safes, a law enforcement official said. His son, Anthony Eppolito, was also arrested in the case and charged with selling methamphetamines, the law enforcement official said.

Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa were themselves arrested Wednesday night at Piero's Restaurant, where Jerry Lewis often celebrates his birthday. Freddie Glusman, Piero's owner, was once married to the actress Diahann Carroll for a couple of weeks.

Their sojourn out west, it seems, had come to an end, Las Vegas style.

Joe Schoenmann, in Las Vegas, contributed reporting for this article.