The police on the scene also found something else. In the car was a confidential printout listing the license-plate numbers of the department's unmarked surveillance cars. Casso, they realized with sudden alarm, had a hook deep inside the NYPD.
Further evidence that Casso had an infuriatingly reliable inside source surfaced four years later. Just before the unsealing of an indictment charging Casso along with fourteen other Mafia heavies in a federal bid-rigging case that could have brought him, if convicted, a sentence of up to one hundred years, he disappeared.
It took authorities more than thirty months to zero in on his hideout. Shacked up in suburban New Jersey with an old girlfriend, Casso readily surrendered when an FBI SWAT team crashed through his bedroom door.
After sulking through a long year in federal prison, Casso, with a wiseguy's easy relativism, agreed to a deal. He would tell all he knew, and in return the feds, no less pragmatic, would forget about his complicity in thirty-six murders, enroll him in the witness-protection program, and then set the volatile sociopath loose in some unsuspecting corner of America.
With their first questions, the earnest debriefers focused on Casso's sources in the New York City Police Department. "My crystal ball," he acknowledged. Then Casso quickly gave up Eppolito and Caracappa. He detailed how, starting around 1986, he had placed the two cops, as the government put it, on "retainer." Employing one of his associates, Burton Kaplan, as the middleman, he claimed he paid his moles four thousand dollars a month. In exchange, the two detectives, wired into the world of organized-crime investigations, let him know whatever the police and federal organized-crime units were secretly up to.
But there was more. Casso matter-of-factly went on that, after the attempt on his life, he was determined to get even. (Or, as one of the alleged hit men was heard wailing on an intercepted phone call that was leaked to the Daily News, Casso wanted to "put me on a table, cut my heart out, and show it to me.") So, using Kaplan once again as negotiator and paymaster, he said he gave the two detectives "additional work."
Jimmy Hydell had been one of the hapless shooters in the botched assassination, and, as Casso told the story, the two detectives were sent out to bring him in. They tracked him down in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and, with a flash of their gold badges, arrested him. Only, Hydell wasn't taken to the precinct.They drove him to a nearby body shop, where they shoved him, kicking and screaming, into the trunk of a car.As Casso told the FBI, the detectives drove the car to a Toys "R" Us parking lot in Flatbush. Gleeful and triumphant by his own account, Casso was waiting. He got behind the wheel and, with Hydell curled up in the trunk, headed to an associate's home in Brooklyn.
Hydell was carried into the basement. It became a torture chamber. After Hydell shared the names of his two accomplices, Casso was satisfied but not finished. "I shot him fifteen times," he boasted.
In subsequent sessions, Casso told his interrogators that he had employed the two detectives in connection with seven other murders. In one, according to Casso's unapologetic account, they somehow made a mistake and gave him the address for the wrong Nicholas Guido. As a result, a twenty-six-year-old who had the same name as one of the men who had allegedly ambushed Casso was gunned down on a Brooklyn street on Christmas Day 1986. On another occasion, in November 1990, according to Casso, the two detectives pulled Eddie Lino, a captain in the Gambino crime family, over to the side of the road.When Lino lowered the window of his Mercedes, Caracappa allegedly pulled out his revolver and fired into his head and chest.The detectives, Casso said, were paid $65,000 for the hit.
To the FBI, Casso seemed like the perfect witness. His stories flowed easily and without apparent embellishment. The details were convincing. There was only one problem-Casso had never actually talked to the two cops or handed them any money. He claimed he had left it to Kaplan to handle those chores. In fact, he conceded to his suddenly disconcerted debriefers, Kaplan never even shared their names.
But, he explained, he had seen them once: when he retrieved Hydell in the parking lot. And the way things worked out, it was enough.
On the lam, looking for ways to fill the long days in his suburban hideout, Casso had picked up a book.The author's photo came as a shock. He later said it was the same stolid tough guy who had stood guard while Jimmy Hydell lay in the trunk. He'd never have trouble identifying Lou Eppolito or his grim, wraithlike partner, Stephen Caracappa, to any jury.
Only, despite Casso's willingness to get on the stand and point a condemning finger at the two detectives, he would never get his chance. He screwed up. Repeatedly. Housed in a prison section with other cooperating prisoners, he hatched a bug-eyed plot to kill a federal judge. He persuaded a prison employee to provide him with food, drugs, and fellatio.To avenge a jailhouse fight he had lost, Casso attacked Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta in the shower room after discovering that the three-hundred-pound wiseguy had been left handcuffed. And he offered the feds a loopy story about Sammy "the Bull" Gravano's role in the 1991 stabbing of the Reverend Al Sharpton, a tale quickly proved false, since Gravano had been in prison at the time of the attack. In the end, the feds had to concede that Casso was pathologically savage, reckless, and ultimately unreliable. And, more significant, any defense attorney worth his six-figure retainer would shoot their star witness's credibility full of holes.
In the summer of 1998, after determining that Casso had breached the terms of his agreement, the government sentenced him to life without parole. Without his testimony, police and federal authorities quickly decided, there was no hope of ever making a case against the two Mafia cops.
That, in brief strokes, was the story that was told in the mountain of FBI criminal-investigation summaries, police reports, and crime-scene accounts that the U.S. Attorney's Office delivered on four overloaded handcarts to the "war room" on the fourteenth floor of the Brooklyn district attorney's building, on Jay Street. It was the fall of 2003, and in the weeks after Tommy Dades shared his new discovery, there was a flurry of activity.
Mark Feldman of the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office, a man whom Eppolito had admiringly described in his fateful book as "a tough Jew," issued the marching orders. The D.A.'s investigative unit, a team of retired detectives whose long careers had been measured out in Mob cases, would lead the charge. They were assisted by William Oldham, an ex-cop and federal investigator in Feldman's office.Their mandate was to dig up the past and scrutinize the present.To go back, and to go forward.To do whatever was necessary to make the cases against two cops who had allegedly betrayed the city's trust. The men whose crimes they were investigating were of their generation, detectives who had been their colleagues. It was their own legacy they would be working to redeem.
To a man, they looked forward to the task with a special zeal. "I know what happened back then. I know all the names, all the players. This isn't history to me," says Robert Intartaglio. A fabled detective known throughout the department as Bobby I., he had retired after twenty-eight years on the job and had spent the last nine working in the D.A.'s office.
"All the years on the job," he explains with a forlorn shake of his head, "you couldn't help feeling that the wiseguys were onto us.
You don't talk on the phone.You don't call some people. Leaks are the worst thing that can happen. And yet they kept happening. Now it was payback time."
Retired detective Doug LeVien embraced the case as his unexpected summons to the front lines. Back in the seventies he had posed as a corrupt cop to infiltrate the Lucchese crime family. Now, after twenty-five years on the streets, he was strapped to a desk as a detective investigator in the D.A.'s office.This was, he realized, a chance to head back into battle. Maybe his last one.And if it were, it would be a fitting last hurrah. "We would clean our own house," he says. "Cops would get other cops."