Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [106]
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