Instead, the case of the two "Mafia cops" remained little more than a swirl of suspicions until a mournful and angry Betty Hydell decided to speak.
After twenty hectic years on the job, Detective Tommy Dades was counting the days until his retirement. He had worked narcotics and then gone up against the Colombo crime family as a hard-charging detective in Brooklyn 's Sixty-eighth Precinct. Now, in September 2003, the detective was finishing his career in a Brooklyn organized-crime intelligence unit. His plan was to draw his pension at age forty-two and move on to what he'd been contemplating for years-running a boxing gym on Staten Island while he was still able to go a couple of rounds himself. He'd nurture some tough kid from the projects who had the heart and skill to be a contender. But before he could begin his new life, Dades, always the dutiful cop, hoped to wrap up some of the unresolved cases in his files.
The April 1998 murder of Frank Hydell, a Mob hanger-on, was a case that, despite several arrests, still gnawed at him. With only small justification, Dades felt responsible: Frankie had been working for him-and the FBI-as an informant.The burst of bullets that knocked Frankie down and left him stretched out flat on the street was, Dades believed, the Mob's retribution.
Over the years, Dades had made a point of keeping in touch with Frankie's family. He would visit Frankie's mother, Betty, at her Staten Island home. Flashing his wide smile, Tommy would chat her up in his easy, affable way, hoping their meandering conversations might unearth some buried clue.
But when Dades stopped by that day at the tail end of September 2003, Betty Hydell didn't want to talk about Frankie. Instead, she focused on his older brother. As people close to the case describe the moment, she began slowly, tentatively; and then, as if suddenly liberated from years of indecision and misgivings, she let the whole story tumble out.
Two men had come looking for Jimmy the day he disappeared. One was fat, the other thin. And, she gravely announced to the detective, she knew the fat one's name. She even had his picture.
She had seen him on television, talking about his book. Watching him banter with Sally Jessy, believing he had played a part in the murder of her son, had left her, she said,"with a sinking feeling in my stomach."That same day, Betty bought the book. She couldn't bear to read it, but she wanted to study the photographs just to be sure. One look and she was certain: He was the man.
Later, Dades got a paperback copy of Mafia Cop, written by Lou Eppolito (along with journalist Bob Drury). He felt mounting rage as he scanned the cover, with its photograph of retired second-grade detective Eppolito's gold shield and its subtitle, The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob.
Dades, like most officers in the city who worked organized crime, knew a bit about the accusations surrounding Eppolito and Caracappa, which had surfaced with great fanfare a decade earlier. Lucchese-crime-family underboss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, a stone-cold killer turned government witness, had boasted to his FBI debriefers that he had placed the two detectives on his payroll and, even more disconcerting, had used them for hits. In 1994 the Daily News trumpeted the allegations against Eppolito and Caracappa on its front page with the headline hero cops or hitmen? When nothing further happened, Dades, who knew firsthand about the unreliability of wiseguys, figured it was all smoke and no fire. But now, staring at Eppolito's smug photograph in the paperback, he thought, as he later confided to investigators in the Brooklyn district attorney's office, Gotcha!
Very quickly, a plan took shape in his mind. He'd go to his friends Mark Feldman, the organized-crime chief in the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office, and Michael Vecchione, who had a similar job in the Brooklyn D.A.'s office, and argue that Betty Hydell's eyewitness testimony was enough to get the case reopened. Since he was retiring from his NYPD job, he could even come on board as an investigator. It shouldn't take much to build a case against the two retired detectives for their roles in Jimmy Hydell's murder.
But Dades was mistaken. Betty Hydell's tip was just the beginning. By the time the investigation concluded, one and a half years later, seven other murder cases would be documented. By then, Dades would be long gone, finally retired to his gym.
The year was 1986, and on the sidewalks of New York the Mafia was busy settling grudges. Every day, or so it seemed, bold yellow police tape stretched across another crime scene where a wiseguy had been brought down.
Gaspipe Casso, forty-six at the time, was one of the lucky victims. On September 6, 1986, he was at the wheel of his black Cadillac, pulling into the parking lot of the Golden Ox Chinese restaurant, in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, when a hit team opened fire.Two slugs smashed into his left shoulder, but Casso, bleeding and seething with anger, raced out of the car and into the restaurant. He was leaning against a refrigerator in the kitchen, crouched like a wounded, dangerous animal, when the cops found him.
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.