As a former Mafia killer, Eddie Lino must have known his death might always be around the corner. But he wasn’t expecting it to find him in retirement, on a Brooklyn freeway in 1992, when two police officers reportedly pulled him over in his Mercedes. Maybe he thought he was about to get a ticket for speeding. Instead, prosecutors allege, one of the officers pulled out a gun and killed him on the spot.
Tales of police officers corrupted by the mob are hardly unheard of in New York. But the case of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, whose long-awaited trial opened in Brooklyn on Monday, has stunned even seasoned investigators. The two former senior detectives stand accused not just of turning a blind eye to Mafia activity — the usual charge — but of using their positions within the NYPD to commit crimes, for more than 10 years, on behalf of the Luchese family.
Eddie Lino’s murder — in which Caracappa, now 64, is alleged to have pulled the trigger, earning the duo $75 000 from their Mafia boss — is only one of eight in which they are implicated; apart from murder the list includes racketeering, kidnapping, obstruction of justice and money-laundering. After retiring in the early 1990s, they moved to Nevada and allegedly started dealing in methamphetamine. That activity came to a sudden halt when they were arrested at an Italian restaurant in Las Vegas in March last year.
”It’s just stunning,” Roslynn Mauskopf, of the US Attorney’s office in Brooklyn, said at the time of their indictment. ”These corrupt former detectives betrayed their shields, their colleagues and the citizens they were sworn to protect.” Gerald Shargel, a veteran New York defence lawyer, who has represented many Mafia figures, told The Guardian on Monday that if the allegations were true, ”it has to be the rawest breach of a police officer’s duty perhaps in history.”
Prosecutor Mitra Hormozi told the court on Monday they had not been ”traditional mobsters. They were better. They could get away with murder because these two men were New York City police detectives”.
The crucial missing witness is Anthony ”Gaspipe” Casso, the Luchese family ”underboss” who first made the claims about the detectives. He said he regularly paid them $4 000 per month, sometimes for the names of mobsters who had turned into police informants, and were subsequently found dead. But Casso will not be testifying: after entering the witness protection programme, he was convicted of new drugs offences, and is serving a prison sentence of more than 300 years.
”He was the paymaster, he was the one who says he knew the two cops, met them, shook their hands, and they brought one of his victims to him in the trunk of a car,” said Selwyn Raab, a writer on the mafia who interviewed Casso twice in jail. ”He could be a tremendous corroborative witness, but the government doesn’t want him. They think he’s discredited.”
Instead, prosecutors are relying on Burton Kaplan, a 72-year-old career criminal — and father of a serving New York judge, Deborah Kaplan — who says he acted as go-between for Casso and the detectives.
Caracappa and Eppolito have loudly protested their innocence. Eppolito (57) got his defence in early with an autobiography entitled Mafia Cop, acknowledging that his father, grandfather and uncle were members of the Gambino crime family, but maintaining that he had never been tempted — except for a bit-part in the Martin Scorsese film GoodFellas.
”Totally ridiculous,” Caracappa said of the charges in an appearance on the primetime TV show 60 Minutes in January. ”It’s ludicrous. Anybody that knows me knows I love the police department.”
Mob tales
At least four book deals and a possible film are understood to be in the works as the case begins. In a pre-trial motion, one of Caracappa’s lawyers tried unsuccessfully to force the lead investigator in the case to disclose details of his book proposal, arguing he was motivated less by the quest for justice than the quest for good material. The commercial appeal of mob tales derives from the fact that ”most people don’t feel endangered by the mafia, so they vicariously idealise them,” said Selwyn Raab, whose book, Five Families, will be published in the UK this year. ”People don’t understand how they’re picking your pockets indirectly through higher costs, labour corruption and undermining law enforcement,” he added. – Guardian Unlimited Â