Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [104]
In March, two retired New York City Police Department detectives, Louis Eppolito, fifty-six, and Stephen Caracappa, sixty-three, were charged with working for the Mob. Even as detailed in the careful sentences of the twenty-seven-page federal indictment, the alleged betrayal, which began in the mid-1980s, was both riveting and complete. On the surface, as many of their astonished fellow cops were quick to point out, the pair had been exemplary police officers. Eppolito, big, beefy, and loud, had been a tough street cop, a head-banger who bragged that he had been in eight shoot-outs and had survived to become the NYPD’s eleventh-most-decorated officer. Caracappa was more cerebral, quiet and ruminative, a cool dandy in the trim black suits he had made in Hong Kong. He, too, had put together an impressive two-decade career, serving on the elite Major Case Squad and winning a promotion to detective first grade.
Yet, according to the indictment, while they had been building their careers and passing themselves off as gung-ho cops, they had been taking orders from the Mob. In dozens of cases, they allegedly gave the Mafia the edge, allowing wiseguys to get away with murder—literally. They revealed the names of individuals who were cooperating with the government, and as a result three informants were killed and one was severely wounded. They shared information about ongoing investigations and pending indictments with the Lucchese crime family, one of New York’s five major Mafia clans. But most shocking of all, and unprecedented in the history of the NYPD, they had acted as paid killers. The two detectives were charged with taking part in at least eight Mob hits—including one where they were the shooters. (The body of a ninth suspected victim was discovered after the indictment.)
Incredibly, allegations about the two detectives were first made more than a decade ago. But officials were never able to get the evidence they needed for an indictment.
“We were only able to make this case,” says one of the key investigators on the task force, “because after years of stonewalling we succeeded in getting the man who paid Eppolito and Caracappa to talk.”
However, unknown to the task force, their star witness had long been an informant for the FBI. And according to dismayed law-enforcement officials, if the FBI had shared this information with the NYPD, the two rogue detectives could have been prosecuted years ago.
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