Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia.

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Transcript

[0:48] Nobody knows exactly how he went out, but one thing’s for sure, it wasn’t voluntary. The canary could sing, but he couldn’t fly, right? Exactly. So, guys, I know you all know me, but I’m retired intelligence unit detective Gary Jenkins, Kansas City Police Department. Got this show, Gangland Wire, and we deal with the mafia almost every week. So this story is blood and the bads, the mafia, two killer cops, and a scandal that shocked the nation. I know you know some of y’all will know this story about Steve Caraappa and Lou Eppilito I want to tell you what Joe Pistone who everybody knows is Donnie Brasco, said about this book “Cannell pulls back the veil to refill law enforcement’s most lurid chapter an entwined tale of decorated detectives on the mafia payroll a true account of police depravity unearthed with intensive reporting. And it really was. I mean, these two guys, Michael, they were unbelievable. They were depraved, depravity. I think that’s a really good word to say. They were like mafia people that went undercover on the cops, I would say, wouldn’t you?

[2:04] Yeah, I mean, the story essentially is that these two decorated detectives in the NYPD were on the mafia payroll and on the Lucchese crime family payroll in the late 80s and mostly the early 90s. And Louis Eppolito, who was really kind of the main guy, was born into a mafia family. His father was a Gambino Capo known as Fat the Gangster. And his uncle was a Gambino Capo known as Jimmy the Clam. And so Louis Eppolito was born into a prominent mafia family, but he rebelled against his family and joined the NYPD. And he became a detective, mostly working in South Brooklyn. Slowly but gradually, his family drew him back into the family business. And his patron in the mafia was an underboss known as Gas Pipe Casso. And so Louis Eppolito and his friend and partner, a man named Stephen Caracapa, were feeding Gas Pipe Casso sensitive police information. Who was under surveillance? Whose phones were tapped?

[3:30] Most importantly, who was an informant? Who was a rat? And so…

[3:40] What did Gas Pipe Casso do when he found out who the rats in his ranks were? Well, he hired Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa to facilitate the murder or assassination of the rats. And in at least one case, Eppolito and Caracappa pulled the trigger themselves. So they were bad guys. You know, among the detectives that I interviewed and that I got to know and got to be friends with in the course of interviewing this book, many of them said that they considered this to be the worst case of police corruption in the history of New York. And, I mean, I don’t know if I would make that claim myself. I’m not sure that I’m qualified to make that claim. But certainly this is among the worst cases of corruption in the country’s history.

[4:34] There’s no doubt about it. I saw that documentary about the 7-5 about all the corruption of more street policemen against people who were dealing narcotics on the street level. And that was pretty widespread corruption among a whole precinct. But these guys, they were targeted and against the higher echelon informants. How were they able to find out names of informants and things like that? Now, where did they work? You have to be, you have to work certain places in the police department to be aware of a lot of this information. You’re just Joe Blow street cop out there doesn’t know a lot of what’s going on. Where did they work that gave them access to this kind of information?

[5:16] Well, for the most part, the way they found out was that Stephen Caracappa, Louis Eppolito’s partner, worked in what was called the Major Case Squad. So the Major Case Squad, of course, was working on the most prominent cases and made a real effort to work on organized crime cases. And Caracappa, he had worked it out so that in the Major Case Squad, he was a kind of point man for all of the paperwork. People would report to him. They would call him every morning. They would file their updates and information to him. He would compile them, and then he would send them along to the higher-ups. So Caracapa was uniquely positioned to know exactly what was going on, to know what everybody was working on. And not only that, but he had access to FBI and DEA information. So whenever this information crossed his desk, he would send it along to the Lucchese crime family. And for the most part, this information was accurate. In one tragic case, he passed information along to Gas Pipe Casa, the underboss.

[6:32] And Casa ordered the shooting of a young man named Nicky Guido. The shooting occurred in Brooklyn on Christmas morning. Nicky, who was 26 years old, came outside with his uncle to show his uncle his new car, and he was shot to death there. The problem was that it was the wrong Nicky Guido. It was a case of mistaken identity. The Nicky Guido that Gas Pipe Casa was seeking, same name, also lived in Brooklyn, but lived in an adjacent neighborhood. So that was a rare case of the information being faulty. Years later, when Casso was interviewed about this on 60 Minutes, he said, these things happen. He brushed it off. He dismissed it.

[7:22] Wow. That’s, you know, those, that’s Karakapa being, getting himself in a position where all the paperwork went through him so he could see everything was going on. A few years later, Gotti’s people will develop an informant in the intelligence unit. He was actually an injured detective, a guy named Bill Peist. And that’s all he did was handle the paperwork and he had all this information. So he was really valuable to them for a period of time. So that’s really interesting because you’ve got to be in the right place to get any kind of decent information. Right.

[7:54] Go ahead. Go ahead. You know, I’m just going to say it’s worth remembering that all of this is taking place at a time when Rudy Giuliani and other prosecutors were using the RICO laws to bust the mob. The mob bosses were desperate. They were desperate for information. They were desperate to find out who was under investigation. The days when they could more or less do what they wanted in New York were coming to a close, and Giuliani was rounding people up. These two cops working for the Lucchese-Quine family were kind of a lifeline for the mob. Gas Pipe Caso referred to them as his crystal ball, and that’s really what they were. They were like a crystal ball. I wonder, did it become known among other mob guys that they had this source of, or Caso had this source of information? Did they like, I was coming bug gas pipe about, hey, find out about this, find out about that?

[8:53] Yeah, I mean, people knew that gas pipe had a crystal ball, but they only knew this people as the crystal ball. What happened was that Casso never, strange as it may sound, Casso only knew the identity of these two cops late in the game. And the reason for that is that these cops were brought to him by a drug dealer, a kind of exalted high-level drug dealer named Burt Kaplan. And Burt Kaplan had arranged many financial schemes with the mob. And Burt Kaplan acted as an intermediary between the mob and the two cops. And he kept everybody’s identity secret. He was the only one who really knew who everybody was in this kind of chain of information. And the reason that he did that, of course, was he wanted everything to be secret in case somebody, somebody became an informant. He didn’t want anybody to be able to inform on anybody else. He wanted to keep things safely compartmentalized.

[10:06] Interesting i think there’s a couple cases where i know there’s one case where they delivered a guy to casso to kill and by picking him up on the street and put him in their trunk can you tell us about that case and i think in the end that’s the one that that brings him down.

[10:24] Yeah i mean what happened was that and it relates to the story about nicky guido that i just told you. The real Nicky Guido, not the one that was shot, the real Nicky Guido and a young man named Jimmy Heidel pulled up in front of a strip mall in Brooklyn, and they had been assigned the job of assassinating Gas Pipe Caso. Well, they shot at Caso, who was eating an ice cream cone in his car. They hit him. They injured him. Caso runs into a restaurant and runs downstairs and hides in basically like a meat locker or refrigerator. And he eventually gets away. So he devotes the next couple of years to trying to track down the people who assassinated. Jimmy Heidel, of course, was at the top of the list. He sent the two cops, Epolito and Caracapa, to look for Jimmy Heidel. They went to his family home in Staten Island and they went to his family home.

[11:45] Jimmy Heidel’s mother comes out of the house and confronts them. They flash their police badges. They say it’s police business. Of course it isn’t. And they drive to Brooklyn, and they pick up Jimmy Heidel in Brooklyn. Now, they were very happy to kill Jimmy Heidel, but that’s not what Casso wanted. Casso said, I want you to just abduct him. I want you to bring him to me. And so they drove to a Toys R Us parking lot right by the Bell Parkway along the edge of southern Brooklyn. And they delivered Jimmy Heidel to Casso. Casso took Jimmy Heidel to the basement of a friend’s house. And I mean, I think the only word you can use is tortured him. He tortured him and shot him, shot his, you know, his four limbs and demanded to know who else was involved in the attempted assassination at that strip mall. Casso gave it all up. I’m sorry, Jimmy Heidel gave it all up. He begged for one thing. He said, when I die, throw my body in the street. And that’s because he wanted his mother to be able to get the life insurance money. He didn’t think his mother could get the life insurance money without the body.

[13:09] Casso never dumped the body in the street. In fact, that body has never been found. There are some theories about it lying underneath a mall development, but the body has never been found.

[13:25] Crazy, crazy, crazy.

[13:30] Now, trying to remember, these guys went about their day-to-day business all the time. And Eppolito, he had these close family members in the Gambino family, but yet they end up working, getting introduced to Caso Lucchese by a drug dealer. I wonder, how did that work? Did his Gambino relatives not know about his double life or?

[13:55] Well, what happened was that Burt Kaplan was a degenerate gambler. His criminal life on the outskirts of the mafia involved crimes, originally started as crimes that could be used to pay off his gambling debts. He could never be a part of the mafia, inducted as a made man because he was Jewish, but he made deals with the mafia and he acted a little bit the way Arnold Rothstein acted in the 1930s. He was sort of a money man and a facilitator and a schemer. And he went to jail in the 80s and his best friend in jail and his companion was a man named Frankie Santora. And Frankie Santora happened to be Louis Eppolito’s cousin. And so when Burt Kaplan and Frank Santora got out of jail, Santora said, my cousin is a policeman.

[15:02] He’s an NYPD detective, but he’ll help you out. If you need help, he’ll do what you need. At the time, Kaplan didn’t like the idea. He didn’t like the idea of being in some kind of arrangement with a cop. But not long after Kaplan got out of jail, he had hired a diamond dealer to sell a stolen treasury bond in London. And when that diamond dealer, whose name was Israel Greenwald, flew back into JFK Airport in New York, Customs grabbed him, the FBI questioned him.

[15:50] And so now Burt Kaplan was worried that Israel Greenwald would become an informant. What was he going to do about Israel Greenwald? Well, Bert Kaplan, of course, thought about his jailhouse friend Frankie Santora and Santora’s cousin. And so he contacted Santora and said, is your cousin, the policeman, still willing to do some work for me? And so Israel Greenwald was driving home from the Diamond District here in New York one day. He was pulled over by a police car. There was Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa.

[16:34] And they said, you are implicated in a hit and run. You’re going to come with us. He did go with them. And he ended up buried underneath a parking garage in Brooklyn. Now, this part of the story had nothing to do with, gaspite Casso. But now Bert Kaplan had a relationship with these two dirty cops. And so Bert Kaplan eventually brought them to gaspite Casso and said, these detectives can be very helpful to us. He must have been in bed with Casso on a lot of different things that he would give up that kind of a valuable source to him.

[17:19] Right. Casso originally went to the Lucchese crime family for loans because of his gambling problem. And he got into real trouble with the Lucchese loan sharks. It just so happened that Bert Kaplan’s father-in-law was a retired cop and he knew the Lucchese members. You know, it was all very cozy in those days in Brooklyn, and incestuous. So the father-in-law takes Bert Kaplan to the 19th Hole Bar, which was a Lucchese hangout. And they go in and they make an arrangement for a favorable arrangement for Kaplan to pay off his debts. Kaplan eventually went from being a customer to being a co-conspirator. And he helped the mob and Gas Pipe Caso in particular with all sorts of illegal schemes. Well, it’s funny how it works sometimes. Those guys are so intertwined with each other. And there’s always another scheme where you can use people and use people for this, use people for that. They’re always looking for that guy they can use and somebody that’s hurting in some manner or they can manipulate them and get control over them.

[18:44] Right. I mean, absolutely the case. I mean, in this case, Bert Kaplan was desperate to pay off his debts, but really over the long run, he was sort of running the mafia rather than the way around because he was such a master manipulator and such a schemer that they really relied on him for his abilities. Who else? Was there anybody else that they gave up or anything that you Do you remember particularly that these guys gave up? That was a store. I mean, they gave up a lot of people. I will, you know, before we started here, we mentioned, very briefly mentioned Otto Heidel.

[19:23] There’s just a fascinating story about a bank robbing crew in New York at the time.

[19:33] It seems like they were straight out of Ocean’s Eleven, straight out of that George Clooney movie. Oh, yeah, the bypass crew. I read that in your book, The Bypass Gang. That looked really interesting. Yeah, I remember that. Yeah, The Bypass Gang. They would wait for a holiday weekend so that they have plenty of time.

[19:51] Yeah. They would drill into a bank or a jewelry store or a luxury goods store, and they would make a weekend out of it. They would bring in food, and it was almost sort of like a holiday weekend for them, and they would take their time. And they were very sophisticated about disarming the alarm systems. And they were segmented into different types of crews. One was responsible for disarming the alarms. One was responsible for the physical job of breaking into the bank or luxury goods store. And then one was responsible for monitoring the police scanners. And they employed a man named Otto Heidel, not really a gangster. I mean, not a hardcore criminal, but he was part of this crew. And he was arrested one day for the FBI caught him stealing some material. And he had a beautiful wife who looked like Marilyn Monroe. And he was terrified that if he went to jail that she would not be faithful. And so for years, Otto Heidel remained a member of the bypass gang, but he worked as an informant for the FBI.

[21:10] And when Stephen Caracappa caught on to this, he passed Otto Heidel’s name along to Gas Pipe Caso. Now, Otto Heidel one day was.

[21:28] Coming back from playing racquetball or something in a, in Marine Park in South Brooklyn. And he came back to his car and there was a flat tire, which I’ve come to understand was a, was a common mafia ploy when they were going to assassinate somebody. They couldn’t get away if their tire was flat. And Otto Heidel, I think must’ve known that because he’d lay down on the street to replace the flat tire. He placed his pistol by his side, but it didn’t help. He was shot there. He managed to get up and run up a street. The shooters, the assassins followed him up this one-way street, driving against the traffic and finished him off. But Otto Heidel was really just one of many.

[22:21] Boy, boy, boy. So Tommy Dage, you got to know Tommy Dage pretty well, and I’ve heard of him before. He was a pretty active investigator and well-known detective in New York City. Now, if I remember right, he’s the one that maybe uncovered this whole situation, the first guy that got onto this. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, I mean, it’s just what I’ll say about this is that Gas Pipe Caso, who we’ve been talking about, spent a lot of years using Eppolito and Caracappa to kill informants. And then Gas Pipe Caso himself became an informant. He had been hiding out in a girlfriend’s house in New Jersey.

[23:13] The FBI tracked him down there largely because he was using one of the early model cell phones, and they tracked him down that way. And he became an informant. And the prosecutors thought, okay, now we have the insider. Now we have an insider. Well, first of all, I should say he told them all about Eppolito and Caracappa.

[23:39] So the prosecutors thought, now we have the insider who can testify against Eppolito and Caracappa. The problem was that Casa was kind of a loose cannon, and he started to badmouth some of the other informants, including Sammy the Bull Gravano.

[24:01] Who had testified in other cases. At that point, he became kind of radioactive. Yeah. Because the prosecutors thought, we can’t put this guy in the stand. Because if he starts shooting his mouth off, it’s going to cause a problem for these other cases. Yeah. And so they just sent him to Supermax. They ended his cooperation agreement, and they send him off to Supermax. And that was the last that anybody heard of gas pipe cast out. So what does that mean for Eppolito and Caracappa? The feds just really let them walk because they figured better not to endanger the other prosecutions, including the prosecution of John Gotti, than to pursue Eppolito and Caracappa. Eppolito and Caracappa. Let me explain something here to my guys out there now. And this happened in Chicago, particularly with Frank Culotta. When you get an informity and a good storyteller, and he’s going to be testifying against these other mob guys and the higher echelon mob guys, you have to be able to take him in his word. So then what they do is they start trying to denigrate that guy and try to make him out a liar. And so when the Lucchese guy, you know, when Gaspar Casso.

[25:20] Starts telling some lies here and there, and the defense attorneys find out about it, then they’ll be, they’ll like start bringing all that up. And is bad-mouthing Sammy the Bull? Well, they don’t want Sammy the Bull to be bad-mouthed any more than he is because that’ll destroy his testimony. And they’ll, you know, they’ll bring Caso in and say, hey, what about, you know, this time Gervano lied or that time Gervano lied or this time this guy lied. And so the feds are one more murderer, set of murders, let go to protect Sammy the Bull Gravano, really, because his testimony was so valuable to him. So it’s kind of interesting. Exactly. The minute Gas Pipe Caso was going to call Sammy the Bull Gravano a liar on the stand, you can be sure that Sammy the Bull Gravano’s lawyers would ask for a retrial. So Gas Pipe Caso, I know this is complicated, but Gas Pipe Caso goes to Supermax. And the case looks like Eppolito and Caracappa are going to get away with all this. I tell you what, that’s Kafkaesque, isn’t it? Just stick him down at Superbac. He can’t tell anybody anything in order to protect this other case. That’s amazing because the prosecutors knew what Eppolito and Caracappa had done. Yeah. But they made a kind of deal with themselves, which is that they weren’t going to pursue them. Now, what happened next? Deal with the devil. Deal with the devil. Exactly.

[26:43] So what happened next was that Tommy Dades, a New York City detective, had decided to retire after 9-11. He worked in the intelligence division in the NYPD, and he had been working on mob cases for a long time. And after 9-11, the emphasis shifted to anti-terrorism. He had worked for more than 20 years, and he figured it was time to retire. And he was winding things down.

[27:14] And then one day, he gets a call from a woman named Betty Heidel. So Betty is the mother of Jimmy Heidel, the man that we discussed earlier, who Eppolito and Kara Kappa uptrended. Abducted and delivered to Gas Pipe Caso. Betty Heidel had seen the cops at Bledon Caracappa when she came out of her house that day, when they were looking for her son. Louie Eppolito had published a memoir. And that was a bad idea. And so Betty Heidel happened to see Eppolito promoting the book on the Sally Jesse Raphael show, the daytime talk show. And she recognized Louie Eppolito and she went out and bought the book. And there in the book is a photo of Eppolito and Cara Capa with their names in the caption. So now Betty Heidel knows the names of the man who abducted her son. So what is she going to do with that information? She called Tommy Dades. Tommy Dades.

[28:32] Had come to her house when her other son was killed, was murdered. Now, Tommy Dades is a special guy. Tommy Dades was raised by a single mother in Brooklyn. And throughout his career, he had a very special relationship with the mothers in the cases, the mothers of the victims and the mothers of the perpetrators. And I think he developed this relationship or friendship with them out of a really sincere desire to help them. He explained to them how the judicial system worked, and he sometimes sent them Christmas cards and sometimes helped them out with various things, drove them places.

[29:19] Betty Heidel trusted him, and so she called him and told him that she now knew who had abducted her son, Jimmy Heidel. Now, Tommy took this case to Michael Vecchione, a prosecutor in the Brooklyn DA’s office, and they developed this case. Tommy locked himself up in a room in the Brooklyn DA’s office and did an enormous amount of research. He went through all the phone logs and all the search logs from the major case squad where Stephen Caracappa had operated. And they began to work with the FBI and with the federal prosecutors.

[30:09] And eventually, this became a federal case. The expectation was that the Brooklyn DA’s office would prosecute the homicide part of the Eppolito and Karakapa case, and the feds would prosecute a RICO case. But it didn’t work out that way. The whole case ended up going to the feds. It’s a point of some bitterness. Eppolito and Karakapa were tried and convicted. And, Without giving too much away here, I will say that that conviction was thrown out by the judge on a technicality. And so it looked as if they were going to get away with it again. The conviction was eventually reinstated and they did go to prison. Wow. There’s a lot more stories in this book, guys. There’s a lot more stories in this book. It’s just a trip through the seamy underbelly of New York City in the 1970s. And these guys are famous. Eppolito was in two or three movies, most notably, I guess, The Goodfellas. And they retired and thought they had it made when Tommy Dates dropped the hammer on them. They thought that they’d gotten away with it all for reasons that we discussed. They went to Las Vegas. Eppolito went to Las Vegas first.

[31:35] Caracappa moved into a house directly across the street from him in a subdivision. So why did Caracappa live directly across the street? I think the answer is that he wanted to keep an eye on Caracappa. Caracappa was kind of a loudmouth, a bully, a guy who boasted a lot. I think Caracappa was nervous that Eppolito was going to get them into trouble. And of course, he did by publishing that book. So, Tommy Dades was working on this case. He made contact with a DEA agent in Las Vegas who put Eppolito and Caracappa under surveillance. Mm-hmm.

[32:22] They sent an accountant who had been indicted. They turned him into an informant, and the accountant had many meals with Eppolito and Caracappa wearing a recording device. Oh, really. As you mentioned, at this point, Eppolito thought of himself as an actor and a movie maker. He had had bit parts in movies, including Goodfellas, as you mentioned, but he wanted to produce, he wanted to direct, he wanted to write screenplays.

[33:00] The accountant acted as if he were going to help Eppolito find backers, find funding for these movies.

[33:13] At one point, the accountant asked them about buying drugs. And Eppolito helped the accountant track down some drugs. And that was the precipitating event that led to their arrest. Get that one thing, you could make an arrest for it and like drugs and go in and serve a search warrant on the house. And hopefully you can dig up some more corroborating information, evidence in those search warrants. So interesting, I tell you what. And this has got to go down in history, as Tommy Dates said, you know, the most corrupt two policemen in the entire history of the New York City Police Department. And that is saying something, isn’t it? Well, before all of this came to light, and when Gas Pipe Casso was telling the feds about these two corrupt cops, that they had fed sensitive police information to the mob, that they were implicated in a dozen murders, and they were implicated in a dozen murders.

[34:21] That information leaked to the press. It was on the cover of the Daily News.

[34:28] Tommy Dades went to a Dunkin’ Donuts one morning before work to get some coffee. And there was the newspaper.

[34:40] And Tommy tells me that he just couldn’t believe it. I mean, there were a lot of corrupt cops. There was a lot of corruption. People knew that Eppolito and Caracappa might be kind of dirty. But to work for the mob and to actually kill for the mob, it didn’t even seem believable. I can imagine. That’s just, it is, it’s still unbelievable today, even with all the evidence that’s been unearthed about these guys and everybody that’s talked to them. I think, I think Kaplan even ended up turning on everybody too, didn’t he? Well one of the real ironies of the story is yes caplan who was so obsessed with keeping things secret caplan who’s told the authorities over and over again that he would never be an informant he would he threatened to kill himself to over medicate himself to commit suicide in jail he was not going to become an informant, but he eventually did. And he was the one who really put Eppolito and Caracappa in jail. Without his testimony, the feds really would not have had a case. They lost Gaspipe Caso as the insider, so they used Bert Kaplan as the insider instead.

[35:59] Interesting. Well, Michael Connell, this has been great having you on and having you on again and telling the inside story on this particular show. I’m going to tell you guys a little bit about Michael Connell. He’s got the book that he was on my show before, A Brotherhood Betrayed, The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder Incorporated, which is a story of Abe Rellis, Incendiary, The Psychiatrist, The Mad Bomber, and The Invention of Criminal Profiling, the limit life and death on the 1961 grand prix circuit and i am pay mandarin of modernism now you kind of you go from modern art to the bob bob in the 30s even yeah i’m all over the place you’re all over the place what that means is you’re a great researcher too and you develop relationships with people that know these inside facts and that can write it down that’s the key to being a good writer, isn’t it? Yeah.

[37:00] So anything else you want to share with us? No, I just, it’s a great, it’s a great pleasure to be on here with you. And thank you, Gary, for your, for your interest. It’s a, it’s always a pleasure, a great pleasure to talk to you. You’re so knowledgeable about all of this and I appreciate it. All right. Thanks for coming on, Michael. So guys, don’t forget. I like to ride motorcycles. So watch out for motorcycles when you’re out there on the street. If you have a problem with PTSD and you’ve been in the service, go to the VA website and hand in hand with PTSD, you know, our friend Angelo Ruggiano, former Gambino prospect, I think a proposed member is, he’s a drug and alcohol counselor down in Florida, believe it or not. And he has a website, a YouTube page, and he has a hotline on that. So if you got a problem with that, go see Angelo Ruggiano. And if you have a problem with gambling, there’s one 800 bets off, I know. And don’t forget, I’ve got some books of my own out there on my website or just go to Google or run Amazon Gary Jenkins. You’ll find everything I’ve got, a couple of documentaries, a couple of three documentaries actually to rent for only $1.99, cheap at twice the price. So thanks a lot, Michael. I really appreciate you coming on the show.

[38:16] Thanks, Gary. Fun to be here.