Saturday, March 12, 2005

2 ex-NYC officers charged in Mafia killings
Suspicions first arose years ago while they were still in uniform

By ALAN FEUER AND WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
THE NEW YORK TIMES

NEW YORK -- 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 Eddie Lino, a Gambino family captain, who had helped kill Paul Castellano, the boss of bosses, and thereby vault John Gotti into power.

It was November 1990 and made men were dying. 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. One informant, a murderous Brooklyn turncoat, gave a scandalous report in 1994 that two corrupt detectives had in fact killed Lino, but the investigation eventually stalled.

Eleven years of silence followed.

This week, however, investigators announced that the men who held the guns that murdered Lino were not cold-blooded Mafiosi, but men, like them, in blue.

Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were arrested Wednesday night at a trattoria in Las Vegas. The two are 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 yesterday, both men entered pleas of not guilty. A federal magistrate ordered them held in Nevada pending extradition back to Brooklyn.

 

Family had Gambino ties

 

 

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 as Fat the Gangster. His uncle, James, was a Gambino captain, who went by Jimmy the Clam.

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."

By 1973, 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," 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, Eppolito was splashed across its cover. "EPPOLITO," the headline ran, "DOES IT AGAIN."

 

Moving up

 

Caracappa joined the force the same year as Eppolito: 1969. The pair met working at the Brooklyn Robbery Squad and Eppolito coyly wrote that they sometimes used their "brand of gentle persuasion to glean information from stoolies on minor raps."

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.

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, would soon wind up indicted and prosecuted in federal court.

The trial -- 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 convictions of two other Mafia dons.

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

Brutal and paranoid of traitorous informants, Casso promoted vicious mobsters like George "Georgie Neck" Zappola and George "Goggles" Conte. He would breezily pick up $1,000 dinner bills. But he also 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.

The Lucheses prospered. Then on Sept. 6, 1986, Casso was shot and wounded in his car in Brooklyn. He escaped into a nearby restaurant.

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

The two detectives had made good on their early business of providing Casso and others with sensitive police information, according to prosecutors.

But after the 1986 shooting of Casso, the two detectives were asked by Casso to step up their efforts. Casso, who has since been imprisoned, wanted them to work on retainer: "$4,000 per month by Casso for NYPD and governmental information," according to court papers. "Any additional 'work,' " the papers charge, "was extra."

In 1986, prosecutors have charged, the two detectives kidnapped an enemy of 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. Caracappa, prosecutors say, pulled the trigger.

 

Cooperative informant

 

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

Each man had special skills: Douglas Le Vien had worked undercover; Robert Intartaglia and Thomas Dades had investigated mob figures; Joseph J. Ponzi specialized in murders; and William Oldham was an expert in building racketeering cases.

Because the accusations against the men were not new, the investigators had a wealth of files to review. And, most critically, they came to secure the cooperation of an informant, who, according to court papers, is expected to testify against the two men.

Caracappa and Eppolito had retired in Las Vegas in the early 1990s. The former kept his fingers in the old life, finding work as a private investigator. The latter traded on his heritage, launching a new career as a bit actor playing wiseguys and drug dealers in movies such as "Goodfellas."

Eppolito and Caracappa were arrested Wednesday night at Piero's Restaurant, where Jerry Lewis often celebrates his birthday.