The trial of the two detectives, both of whom face life sentences, is scheduled to begin this September. And perhaps, with a verdict, a mother's grief will finally be assuaged.
Howard Blum, a former reporter for the New York Times, is the author of eight bestselling books and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His new book, American Lightning, will be published next year.
John Connolly, a former NYPD detective, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His book, The Sin Eater, the story of Hollywood 's P.I. to the stars, Anthony Pelicano, will be published by Atria early next year.
Not much more than a year after the indictments, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa went on trial in a Brooklyn courtroom.The trial stretched on for nearly four weeks, and the scene was reminiscent of the big-time New York mob trials of the late eighties and early nineties when John Gotti strutted his way into notoriety: a gaggle of attentive journalists, photographers, and television crews crowding the courthouse steps, and a parade of morally flawed yet pragmatically born-again government witnesses taking the stand.
But it was the "Old Man" who stole the show-and sealed the case for the prosecution. During his four days on the stand, Burton Kaplan was a perfect witness: a model of careful, well-reasoned recollection. In his soft, lulling voice he told his tale with authority and detail. The courtroom was hushed, riveted, as he described, for example, how Eppolito came to visit him when he was in the hospital for eye surgery in 1990 and the detective rather matter-of-factly detailed the Lino murder. Caracappa was the shooter, the Old Man recalled Eppolito's confessing to him, because "Steve's a much better shot."
Eddie Hayes and Bruce Cutler, the tag team of celebrity lawyers who took on the burden of defending the two dirty cops, seemed overwhelmed by the government's case. They shouted, hurled innuendos against the witnesses, and, raging and furious, pontificated with bombastic indignation in their well-cut suits to the jury. But they never refuted the facts, or seemed really to try. In the end, after only a cursory deliberation, the jury convicted the two former detectives of all the charges.
Caracappa and Eppolito will spend the rest of their lives in jail. And also locked away with them is the big secret that went unmen-tioned at their triaclass="underline" Why the New York Police Department allowed the most notorious scandal in its history-two of its own acting as Mafia hit men-to remain ignored for a decade. Until, as fate would have it, this very, very cold case was accidentally resurrected.
Richard Rubin : The Ghosts of Emmett Till
from the New York Times Magazine
We've known his story forever, it seems. Maybe that's because it's a tale so stark and powerful that it has assumed an air of timelessness, something almost mythicaclass="underline" Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black kid born and raised in Chicago, went down in August 1955 to visit some relatives in the hamlet of Money, Mississippi. One day, he walked into a country store there, Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market, and, on a dare, said something fresh to the white woman behind the counter-twenty-one-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the owner's wife-or asked her for a date, or maybe wolf-whistled at her. A few nights later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J. W. Milam, yanked young Till out of bed and off into the dark Delta, where they beat, tortured, and, ultimately, shot him in the head and pushed him into the Tallahatchie River. His body, though tied to a heavy cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, surfaced a few days later, whereupon Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged with murder.
Reporters from all over the country-and even from abroad- converged upon the little courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, to witness the trial. The prosecution mounted an excellent case and went after the defendants with surprising vigor; the judge was eminently fair, refusing to allow race to become an issue in the proceedings, at least overtly. Nevertheless, the jury, twelve white men, acquitted the defendants after deliberating for just sixty-seven minutes-and only that long, one of them said afterward, because they stopped to have a soda pop in order to stretch things out and "make it look good." Shortly thereafter, the killers, immune from further prosecution, met with and proudly confessed everything to William Bradford Huie, a journalist who published their story in Look magazine.
Yes, we know this story very well-perhaps even too well. It has been like a burr in our national consciousness for fifty years now. From time to time it has flared up, inspiring commemorative outbursts of sorrow, anger, and outrage, all of which ran their course quickly and then died down. But the latest flare-up, sparked by a pair of recent documentaries, The Murder of Emmett Till and The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, has spread to the federal government: last year, the Department of Justice announced that it was opening a new investigation into the case. This spring, Till's body was exhumed and autopsied for the first time. It has been reported that officials may be ready to submit a summary of their findings- an "exhaustive report," as one described it-to the local district attorney in Mississippi by the end of this year. The only person in the Department of Justice who would comment on any aspect of the investigation was Jim Greenlee, U.S.Attorney for the Northern District of Mississippi, who would say only that its objective was "to get the facts about what exactly happened that day and who might be culpable."
I have spent a good bit of time trying to do the same thing, even though it's hard to see how I might have any kind of connection with the story of Emmett Till. I am a white man from the Northeast who is not a lawyer or an investigator or an activist; what's more, the whole thing happened a dozen years before I was born. But as is the case with so many other people, the story took fierce hold of me the first time I heard it, as a junior in college in 1987, and it has never let go. It drove me, after graduation, to take a job at the Greenwood Commonwealth, a daily newspaper in Greenwood, Mississippi, just nine miles from Money. There, I found myself surrounded by people who really were connected, in one way or another, with the case: jurors, defense lawyers, witnesses, the man who owned the gin fan. My boss, a decent man who was relatively progressive when it came to matters of race, nevertheless forbade me to interview any of them-even to ask any of them about it casually-during the year I worked for him.
In 1995, when I found myself back in the Delta to conduct interviews and cover a trial for what would eventually become a book about Mississippi, I took the opportunity to try to talk with the people I couldn't back when I lived there. Unfortunately, many of them had died in the interim, including Roy Bryant. (J. W. Milam died in 1980.) After a good bit of detective work, I managed to track down Carolyn Bryant, only to be told by a man who identified himself as her son that he would kill me if I ever tried to contact his mother. I laughed loudly into the phone, more out of surprise than amusement. "I'm not joking," he said, sounding a bit surprised himself."Really, I'm not!"
There were others, though, who were willing to talk, were even quite obliging about it, which surprised me, because these were men who had rarely, if ever, been interviewed on the subject.You see, I wasn't interested in talking to Till's cousins and other members of the local black community, the people who had been there with him at the store, who had witnessed or heard tell of his abduction and had worried that they might be next. Those people had been interviewed many times already; I knew what they had to say, empathized with them, understood them.The people I wanted to interview were those with whom I couldn't empathize, those I didn't understand. I wanted to sit down with the men who were complicit in what I considered to be a second crime committed against Emmett Till-the lawyers who defended his killers in court and the jurors who set them free. I wanted to ask: How could they do it? How did they feel about it now? And how had they lived with it for forty years?