The Mafia Cops doing mob hits part # 2 #LouisEppolito #StephenCaracappa #TommyDades
In part # 2 Detective first grade Tommy Dades talks about the big break that led to information that became the catalyst for the investigation of Lou Eppolitto, and Steve Caracappa. A former New York garment dealer, Burton Kaplan, sat down with DEA agents in 2004 to tell them an incredible story about two retired New York Police Department detectives. There was plenty of time. Kaplan, a 71-year-old longtime Mob associate and former mastermind of a $10 million marijuana sales ring, had completed only eight years of his 27-year prison sentence. He wanted it shortened to see his granddaughter. Kaplan said that from 1986 to 1993 he met many times with two NYPD detectives, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, to perform services for them and deliver $4,000 in monthly payoff money from Lucchese crime family underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso in exchange for confidential information on police informants and investigations. Casso also paid Eppolito and Caracappa much more to assist in eight murders, including $70,000 for one whack. They received about $375,000 in all. It was a story law enforcement had heard a decade before – from Casso himself – but now they had what they considered a solid witness. In March 2005, DEA and FBI agents converged on and arrested Eppolito and Caracappa as the pair walked into Piero’s, an Italian restaurant in Las Vegas. The two, following a 2006 trial in federal court in Brooklyn, were convicted of eight contract murders, two of which they did themselves, and counts of racketeering, bribery, kidnapping and other felonies, from 1979 to 2005. On March 6, 2009, a federal judge sentenced Eppolito to life in prison plus 100 years, Caracappa to life with 80 extra years, and fined each more than $4 million. Both men, unwaveringly, professed their innocence. A decade after their sentencing, the so-called “Mob Cops” case remains both disturbing and extraordinary. Eppolito and Caracappa not only betrayed their police colleagues, but accepted large bribes to deliver police records to a top organized criminal for years, and, worse, acted willingly as his hit men while working as police officers. “I have never dealt with anything this egregious,” John Peluso, assistant special agent for the DEA’s New York field office, told the Associated Press. “They are toxic.” U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein, who presided over the “Mob Cops” trial, once remarked that the “two defendants have committed what amounts to treason against the people of the City of New York and their fellow police officers.”
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