Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [105]
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 HIT MEN? 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