Houston Cronicle

March 11, 2005, 10:44PM

 

Arrests could end 11 years of silence

Two New York police officers are accused of being killers for the mob

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, 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 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 announced what 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 Lino were not their rivals but their cousins, not cold-blooded Mafiosi, but men, like them, members of the New York Police Department.

When Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were arrested on 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 on Friday, both men appeared in orange jumpsuits in the courtroom to enter a plea of not guilty. A federal magistrate ordered them held in Nevada pending extradition back to Brooklyn.

Eppolito's 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.

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."