Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [114]
The trial of the two detectives, both of whom face life sentences, is scheduled to begin this September. And perhaps, with a verdict, a mother’s grief will finally be assuaged.
HOWARD BLUM, a former reporter for the New York Times, is the author of eight bestselling books and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His new book, American Lightning, will be published next year.
JOHN CONNOLLY, a former NYPD detective, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. His book, The Sin Eater, the story of Hollywood’s P.I. to the stars, Anthony Pelicano, will be published by Atria early next year.
Coda
Not much more than a year after the indictments, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa went on trial in a Brooklyn courtroom. The trial stretched on for nearly four weeks, and the scene was reminiscent of the big-time New York mob trials of the late eighties and early nineties when John Gotti strutted his way into notoriety: a gaggle of attentive journalists, photographers, and television crews crowding the courthouse steps, and a parade of morally flawed yet pragmatically born-again government witnesses taking the stand.
But it was the “Old Man” who stole the show—and sealed the case for the prosecution. During his four days on the stand, Burton Kaplan was a perfect witness: a model of careful, well-reasoned recollection. In his soft, lulling voice he told his tale with authority and detail. The courtroom was hushed, riveted, as he described, for example, how Eppolito came to visit him when he was in the hospital for eye surgery in 1990 and the detective rather matter-of-factly detailed the Lino murder. Caracappa was the shooter, the Old Man recalled Eppolito’s confessing to him, because “Steve’s a much better shot.”
Eddie Hayes and Bruce Cutler, the tag team of celebrity lawyers who took on the burden of defending the two dirty cops, seemed overwhelmed by the government’s case. They shouted, hurled innuendos against the witnesses, and, raging and furious, pontificated with bombastic indignation in their well-cut suits to the jury. But they never refuted the facts, or seemed really to try. In the end, after only a cursory deliberation, the jury convicted the two former detectives of all the charges.
Caracappa and Eppolito will spend the rest of their lives in jail. And also locked away with them is the big secret that went unmentioned at their trial: Why the New York Police Department allowed the most notorious scandal in its history—two of its own acting as Mafia hit men—to remain ignored for a decade. Until, as fate would have it, this very, very cold case was accidentally resurrected.
Richard Rubin
THE GHOSTS OF EMMETT TILL
FROM THE New York Times Magazine
WE’VE KNOWN HIS STORY FOREVER, it seems. Maybe that’s because it’s a tale so stark and powerful that it has assumed an air of timelessness, something almost mythical: Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black kid born and raised in Chicago, went down in August 1955 to visit some relatives in the hamlet of Money, Mississippi. One day, he walked into a country store there, Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, and, on a dare, said something fresh to the white woman behind the counter—twenty-one-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the owner’s wife—or asked her for a date, or maybe wolf-whistled at her. A few nights later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, yanked young Till out of bed and off into the dark Delta, where they beat, tortured, and, ultimately, shot him in the head and pushed him into the Tallahatchie River. His body, though tied to a heavy cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, surfaced a few days later, whereupon Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged with murder.
Reporters from all over the country—and even from abroad—converged upon the little courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, to witness the trial. The prosecution mounted an excellent case and went after the defendants with surprising