Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [110]
Suddenly, the microphone the techies had planted in a flowerpot on top of the store’s safe started broadcasting: tap, tap, tap! It was the sound of the gang coming through the roof—and the signal the police had been waiting to hear. A police helicopter swooped toward the roof. Squad cars rushed from their hiding places.
But no one had counted on the fog. It had sheathed the island in a dense black veil. In the darkness, the Bypass Gang escaped.
That same month, John “Otto” Heidel, a safecracker who was cooperating with the police on the Bypass case, was gunned down. He bent down to examine the flat tire on his car and a fusillade of bullets riddled his back. A year later, another informant, Dominick Costa, got shot five times as he pulled into his driveway. Somehow, he survived.
After those two shootings, Intartaglio knew “without a doubt” that there was a leak. Something was rotten in the department. Now, fifteen years later, he felt able to confirm his suspicions: Stephen Caracappa had been a detective in the Major Case Squad.
FOR DOUG LEVIEN, the hit on Eddie Lino back in November 1990 gave a definitive shape to his wary thoughts about the department. He had gone over the crime-scene reports at the time and seen right away how it must have gone down. The black Mercedes pulling obediently to the side of the road on the Belt Parkway. Lino lowering his window. And the shooter squeezing off nine bullets at close range. Mortally wounded, with his foot on the accelerator, Lino had crashed into a schoolyard fence. At the scene was a wristwatch the shooter presumably had lost as he fled. Lino, it seemed, would have never stopped his car and rolled down his window to speak to another wiseguy. But he would have for someone flashing a badge.
At the time, LeVien had called up a buddy who was advising the NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau. LeVien listened carefully as his friend shared a similar fear. Then the friend spoke the unspeakable: “You’re right. I think a cop whacked Eddie Lino.”
TO THIS DAY, Joe Ponzi wears a gold ring with his eighty-year-old father’s shield number. In fact, he had first met Lou Eppolito when the detective worked under his father in a Brooklyn precinct. Now his thoughts focused on the two accused cops. Why did they do it? he kept asking.
Back in 1984, when Internal Affairs had suspended Eppolito for several months for passing intelligence files to Rosario Gambino, a major Mob heroin trafficker, Ponzi felt the detective was getting a bad deal. Sure, Lou was full of himself, a slow-witted, self-aggrandizing onetime muscleman going quickly to seed, a “parade cop” who seemed more intent on collecting headlines and medals than collars.
Still, the way Ponzi looked at it, the department was coming down on him not because of anything Lou had done but because of who he was: the son of Ralph “Fat the Gangster” Eppolito, a Gambino-family killer, and the nephew of James “Jimmy the Clam” Eppolito, a genuine power in the family. When Lou threw himself a fund-raiser—a “racket,” as cops call their shindigs—to help him make ends meet during the suspension, Ponzi was one of the several hundred people who bought a ticket. And when a departmental trial cleared Lou and he went on to be promoted to detective second grade, Ponzi thought justice had been done.
Now he had other thoughts. Perhaps Eppolito had been rotten all along. Perhaps he had been leading a double life since the day he joined the department, in 1969. He was his father’s son. Or maybe the Internal Affairs investigation and the suspension had pushed him over the edge. Made him a killer for the Mob. Ponzi was not sure he would ever know.
Steve Caracappa was even more perplexing. He seemed in every way an unlikely friend to the ebullient Eppolito.