Louis Eppolito spent twenty-one years as a New York City police officer and retired as a decorated detective. In 2006 a federal jury in Brooklyn found that during the second half of that career he and his former partner, Stephen Caracappa, had been on the payroll of Anthony Casso, the underboss of the Luchese crime family, selling him confidential law enforcement information and taking part in eight murders between 1986 and 1990. The verdict, returned on April 6, 2006, convicted both men of racketeering conspiracy, with the eight murders, two attempted murders and one murder conspiracy found as racketeering acts, along with obstruction of justice and narcotics offenses. Eppolito was also convicted of money laundering.
The case did not end with the verdict. Less than three months later the trial judge set aside the racketeering conviction on the ground that the statute of limitations had run. In September 2008 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed him and ordered the verdicts reinstated. On March 6, 2009, Eppolito was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, and in July 2010 the same appeals court affirmed the judgment.
Eppolito was born on July 22, 1948, and grew up in Brooklyn, as did Caracappa. His father was a member of the Gambino crime family, a fact that followed him through his career and into the courtroom. He joined the New York City Police Department in 1969, the same year as Caracappa, and served until 1990.
His career was not free of suspicion. In 1984 he came under investigation after a confidential police file was found in the possession of a mob figure in New Jersey. He faced a departmental trial and was cleared.
By the time he left the force, Eppolito and Caracappa had been partners, and between them they had 44 years of service and a long list of decorations. After retiring, Eppolito turned to writing and the film business. He co-wrote an autobiography published in 1992, took small parts in films and worked on screenplays.
The case the government later built rested on a single line of payment. From 1987 until January 1993, the jury found, Casso paid the two detectives $4,000 a month for confidential information. The 2005 indictment placed the start of the arrangement a year earlier, in 1986. For some of the killings the payments were larger. The prosecution's chief witness testified that Casso paid as much as $65,000 for a single murder.
That witness was Burton Kaplan, an admitted drug dealer, who testified that he had been the go-between for Casso and the two detectives. Casso himself was not part of the trial. He had admitted to 36 murders and was serving a life sentence. In a 1998 interview he said, "I had law enforcement on my payroll, certainly."
The first of the murders the jury found took place in Brooklyn in February 1986. The victim was Israel Greenwald. He had not been named as a murder victim in the original 2005 indictment, which charged eight other murder acts; he was added in a superseding indictment, and his murder was among the racketeering acts on which the 2006 verdict rested.
Greenwald left a family. At the 2009 sentencing his daughter addressed the court and spoke to her father directly. "Daddy, when they killed you, part of your baby girl died too," she said.
In September 1986 Casso survived an attempt on his life by associates of the Gambino family. In October 1986 James Hydell was kidnapped and murdered. Both acts are among the racketeering acts the jury found.
Nicholas Guido was 26 years old. He died in Brooklyn on Christmas Day, 1986. He had no ties to organized crime. The information the two detectives supplied led to the wrong man, who shared his name with the intended target. The prosecution described his murder as a case of mistaken identity.
A cousin said in 2005, after the indictment was announced, "They made a mistake and they hit my cousin by mistake." In January 2015 the City of New York agreed to pay $5 million to Guido's family in settlement of their claim. The city's Law Department called his death "tragic."
John Heidel, known as Otto, was murdered on October 8, 1987, on Casso's orders. Casso suspected him of cooperating with law enforcement. The obstruction of justice findings against Eppolito and Caracappa included the passing of information about Heidel in 1987.
The same period produced one of the two attempted murders the jury found. A man targeted on Casso's orders in 1987 survived. The Second Circuit's 2008 opinion lists a second attempted murder in 1991.
The arrangement ran on into 1990, the year Eppolito left the department. Anthony Dilapi was murdered on February 4, 1990. Bruno Facciola was murdered in August 1990. Both murders were racketeering acts in the verdict.
Edward Lino, known as Eddie, was murdered on November 6, 1990. He was murdered under a $75,000 contract. A grand jury examined Lino's death in 1994 and declined to indict either man.
At the 2009 sentencing, Lino's son spoke to the defendants. "May you have a long life in prison," he said.
Both men retired to Las Vegas about a decade before their arrest and lived near each other there.
The investigation that reached them there drew on several agencies at once: the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York, the Kings County District Attorney's Office under Charles J. Hynes, and the New York City Police Department's Internal Affairs Bureau. The government later argued, and the Second Circuit accepted, that Eppolito had continued to pursue the aims of the enterprise in Las Vegas in 2004 and 2005, when the narcotics and money laundering charges arose.
On March 9, 2005, DEA and FBI agents arrested Eppolito and Caracappa in Las Vegas on an indictment returned in Brooklyn. The next day they appeared before a magistrate in Las Vegas, and the case was assigned to Judge Jack B. Weinstein of the Eastern District of New York.
The indictment charged both men with a racketeering conspiracy containing eight predicate murder acts, three predicate acts of attempted murder or murder conspiracy, and numerous acts of obstruction of justice. Both were charged with distributing narcotics and conspiring to do so, and Eppolito was charged with money laundering. The racketeering count carried a maximum sentence of life; the drug and money laundering counts carried up to 20 years each.
The officials who announced the case spoke of it in the plainest terms. "These corrupt former detectives betrayed their shields, their colleagues, and the citizens they were sworn to protect," said Roslynn R. Mauskopf, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District. Pasquale D'Amuro, the FBI's Assistant Director in Charge in New York, said, "Eppolito and Caracappa were not two good cops who went bad." John Peluso of the DEA said, "The only difference between them and the rest of the mob was that they carried badges." Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly called for prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.
At a detention hearing in Las Vegas, defense lawyers told the court that neither man had a criminal record and pointed to their years of decorated service. David Chesnoff, representing Caracappa, said, "The government is relying on the words of rats." Magistrate Judge Jennifer Togliatti was not moved. "I'm not here to count the number of decorations these men have," she said. Both men pleaded not guilty.
The trial opened before Judge Weinstein in Brooklyn in March 2006. The prosecution was led by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Robert W. Henoch, Mitra Hormozi and Daniel Wenner, under the supervision of Mark Feldman. Bruce Cutler represented Eppolito; Edward Hayes represented Caracappa. Both men had been free on bail of $5 million.
Kaplan was the center of the case. He spent four days on the witness stand describing his role as the go-between. Neither Eppolito nor Caracappa testified, and Casso was not called by either side.
Wenner called the case "the bloodiest, most violent betrayal of the badge this city has ever seen." The jury heard about three weeks of evidence and deliberated for two days.
On April 6, 2006, the jury convicted both men. It found that they had directly participated in, or aided and abetted, eight murders, two attempted murders and one murder conspiracy as acts of the racketeering conspiracy, and it convicted them of obstruction of justice, drug distribution, and passing confidential law enforcement information to the leaders of the Luchese family. Eppolito, then 57, was also convicted of money laundering.
"Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa perverted the shield of good, and turned it into a sword of evil," Mauskopf said after the verdict. Judge Weinstein revoked the $5 million bail and set sentencing for May 22, 2006.
Sentencing did not take place in May. Both men had moved for a judgment of acquittal, arguing that the government had brought the racketeering charge too late. On June 30, 2006, in a 77-page ruling, Judge Weinstein agreed. Federal law sets a five-year limit on most prosecutions, and he held that the racketeering conspiracy, as the government had defined it, had ended well before March 9, 2000, five years before the indictment.
The judge left no doubt about his view of the facts. He wrote that the evidence "overwhelmingly established" the defendants' participation in a large number of violent crimes. He ordered that, if his acquittal on the racketeering count stood, the men would receive a new trial on the remaining counts. He refused to release them, calling them "dangerous criminals with no degree of credibility." Hayes called the ruling "a vindication of our trial strategy."
The government appealed. On September 17, 2008, a panel of the Second Circuit, Judges Kearse, Sack and Hall, with Judge Kearse writing, reversed the judgment of acquittal and remanded the case "for reinstatement of the jury's verdicts and the imposition of sentences."
The panel held that Judge Weinstein had defined the enterprise too narrowly. The jury was entitled to find that Eppolito "continued to pursue the principal goal of the enterprise in Las Vegas" in 2004 and 2005, which brought the conspiracy within the limitations period. A conspiracy with continuing purposes is presumed to continue, the court said, until a defendant shows that it ended or that he withdrew from it, and neither man had carried that burden. Having decided the case on that ground, the court did not reach the government's other argument, which concerned concealment.
On March 6, 2009, Judge Weinstein sentenced both men to life imprisonment without parole. Eppolito received life plus 100 years, with consecutive terms on the other counts, and a fine of $4.7 million. Caracappa received life plus 80 years.
Before sentence was passed, Eppolito spoke to the court. "I never hurt anybody," he said, and, "I was a hard-working cop." He told the judge, "The federal government can take my life. But they can't take my soul, they can't take my dignity." Relatives of the dead spoke as well, among them Greenwald's daughter and Lino's son.
Benton J. Campbell, by then the U.S. Attorney, said, "We are gratified that the defendants will spend the rest of their lives behind bars."
Both men appealed their convictions on other grounds. On July 23, 2010, a Second Circuit panel of Judges Kearse, Sack and Wesley affirmed the judgments: the racketeering conspiracy conviction, the narcotics convictions and, for Eppolito, the money laundering conviction. Eppolito argued that his trial counsel had been ineffective. The court rejected that claim under the Strickland standard, and it rejected Caracappa's separate challenges to the evidence, the summation, the limits on cross-examination and the sentence.
Eppolito also faced a separate federal case over his taxes. He was charged with filing false income tax returns for 2000 through 2002, and he pleaded guilty to tax fraud, admitting that he had defrauded the government of $102,800.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO, allows prosecutors to charge a pattern of crimes committed through an enterprise as a single offense. Under its conspiracy provision, 18 U.S.C. § 1962(d), a murder enters the case as a racketeering act. That is why the verdict against Eppolito and Caracappa is expressed as a single racketeering conspiracy conviction with eight murders found within it, rather than as eight separate murder counts. In this case the conspiracy count, as charged, ran from May 1979 to March 2005.
The structure explains why the case was federal at all. New York has no statute of limitations for murder, and state prosecutors could in principle have charged the killings themselves. The federal racketeering case was regarded as more likely to succeed.
The same structure created the risk Judge Weinstein identified. Most federal crimes, including racketeering conspiracy, must be charged within five years under 18 U.S.C. § 3282(a). For a racketeering conspiracy the clock does not start until the conspiracy's objectives are achieved or abandoned. The question was whether the conspiracy had ended in the early 1990s or had continued into Las Vegas. The Second Circuit's answer, that a conspiracy with continuing purposes is presumed to continue until the defendant proves its end or his withdrawal, decided the case.
Judge Weinstein, despite his ruling, called the crimes probably the worst series ever tried in the Brooklyn federal courthouse.
Eppolito denied the murders from his arrest to his sentencing and did not testify. The case against him rested heavily on Kaplan, a cooperating witness with his own criminal past, and the defense attacked the government's reliance on informants from the first hearing. The jury convicted, and in 2010 the Second Circuit rejected the challenge to the sufficiency of the evidence.
The 2005 indictment and the 2006 verdict do not list the same eight murders: Greenwald was added in a superseding indictment, and two murders charged in 2005 were not among the acts on which the verdict rested.
Eppolito's sentence is expressed both as life without parole and as life plus 100 years: the life term was imposed on the racketeering count and the further terms on the other counts.
July 22, 1948: Louis Eppolito is born; he grows up in Brooklyn.
1969: Eppolito joins the New York City Police Department.
1984: Eppolito is investigated over a confidential police file found with a mob figure in New Jersey; he is cleared at a departmental trial.
1986: The indictment later dates the start of the paid arrangement with Anthony Casso to this year.
February 1986: Israel Greenwald is murdered in Brooklyn.
October 1986: James Hydell is kidnapped and murdered.
December 25, 1986: Nicholas Guido, 26, is murdered in Brooklyn.
1987: Monthly payments of $4,000 from Casso begin, as found by the jury.
October 8, 1987: John Heidel is murdered.
February 4, 1990: Anthony Dilapi is murdered.
1990: Eppolito leaves the police department.
August 1990: Bruno Facciola is murdered.
November 6, 1990: Edward Lino is murdered.
1992: Eppolito's co-written autobiography is published.
January 1993: The monthly payments end.
1994: A grand jury declines to indict over Lino's death.
March 9, 2005: Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa are arrested in Las Vegas.
March 10, 2005: Both appear before a magistrate in Las Vegas; they later plead not guilty.
March 2006: Trial opens before Judge Jack B. Weinstein in Brooklyn.
April 6, 2006: The jury convicts both men of racketeering conspiracy, with eight murders as racketeering acts.
June 30, 2006: Judge Weinstein sets aside the racketeering verdict on limitations grounds.
September 17, 2008: The Second Circuit reverses and orders the verdicts reinstated.
March 6, 2009: Both men are sentenced to life imprisonment.
July 23, 2010: The Second Circuit affirms the judgments.
January 30, 2015: The City of New York agrees to pay $5 million to Guido's family.