Stephen Caracappa spent more than two decades as a New York City police detective, and for part of that time he was also, a federal jury found, a paid associate of the Luchese crime family. With his partner Louis Eppolito he passed confidential law-enforcement information to the family's leadership, exposing people who were cooperating with investigators, and the two men took part in murders on its behalf. Prosecutors said the arrangement brought them a monthly retainer of $4,000 and larger sums for particular contracts.
The case was tried in Brooklyn federal court in the spring of 2006. On April 6 the jury convicted both men of racketeering conspiracy and found proven, as acts of that conspiracy, eight murders, two attempted murders and a conspiracy to murder, along with obstruction of justice and narcotics offenses. The verdict was set aside within three months on a point of law, reinstated by a federal appeals court in 2008, and followed in March 2009 by a sentence of life imprisonment plus 80 years. Caracappa denied the crimes from his arrest to his death in federal custody in April 2017, at the age of 75.
Caracappa was born on November 12, 1941. He was a Brooklyn native, and he served in the Army in Vietnam, where he was a sergeant. He joined the New York City Police Department in 1969.
Over the next two decades he became a detective of some standing. He and Eppolito were partners and friends, and between them they served about 44 years on the force. Both were decorated. Caracappa helped to establish the department's unit for investigating Mafia murders. He retired in 1992.
After leaving the force both men moved west, and by 2005 they had lived in Las Vegas for about a decade.
The prosecution's case was that the two detectives, while still serving, had secretly become associates of the Luchese crime family. Their value to the family lay in what they could see. As detectives they had access to the department's confidential records and to information about investigations under way, and they passed that information to the family's leaders. Prosecutors said it allowed the family to identify cooperating witnesses and to stay ahead of investigations directed at it.
The man who paid them was Anthony Casso, the Luchese underboss. Federal prosecutors put the retainer at $4,000 a month, paid from 1987 until January 1993. For individual murder contracts the payments were larger.
The information ran both ways. The Second Circuit later described how the detectives gave Casso and the family's boss, Vittorio Amuso, advance notice in May 1990 of their impending arrests, and passed on tips in the late 1980s about electronic surveillance. These acts of obstruction were charged alongside the murders as part of the same racketeering conspiracy.
The racketeering acts that the jury found proven began in 1986. The first was the murder of Israel Greenwald in February 1986 in Brooklyn.
James Hydell, known as Jimmy, was the second. Prosecutors listed him among the murder victims of the conspiracy, with a date in October 1986. The Second Circuit described the act as a kidnaping, after which Casso had Hydell killed.
On December 25, 1986, Nicholas Guido was killed. Prosecutors said his death was a case of mistaken identity: he was not the man the family had meant to kill. The jury found his murder proven as one of the acts of the conspiracy.
In October 1987 John Heidel, known as Otto, was murdered. His murder is among the acts the jury found proven.
In the same period a man survived an attempt on his life. That attempted murder, which prosecutors dated to 1987, was one of the two attempted murders the jury found proven. The other, in 1991, was also an attempt on a man who survived.
The killings resumed in 1990. Anthony Dilapi was murdered on February 4, 1990. Bruno Facciola was murdered in August 1990. Edward Lino, known as Eddie, was murdered on November 6, 1990.
For the Lino contract the family paid a separate sum, which prosecutors put at $75,000 in their statement on the verdict.
The verdict covered eight murders, and the conduct the jury found proven ran from 1986 to 1990.
Their relatives came to court in 2006 and 2009, a widow, a daughter and a son among them, to speak of husbands and fathers.
Caracappa left the department in 1992, and the payments from the family ended in January 1993. The two men were by then outside the police department, and within a few years they had settled in Las Vegas.
The allegations against them first appeared in newspapers in 1994. More than ten years passed before either man was charged.
The case was built by federal and local agencies together. On March 9, 2005, both men were arrested in Las Vegas. The next day the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Roslynn R. Mauskopf, announced that a federal grand jury in Brooklyn had returned an indictment against them. She was joined by the Kings County District Attorney and by the New York offices of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The case was assigned to Judge Jack B. Weinstein.
The indictment charged the two men with participating in eight murders and in three attempted murders or murder conspiracies, with obstruction of justice, and with distribution of methamphetamine and conspiracy to distribute it. Eppolito alone was charged with money laundering. The narcotics and money-laundering counts concerned conduct in Las Vegas in 2004 and 2005.
"These corrupt former detectives betrayed their shields, their colleagues and the citizens they were sworn to protect," Mauskopf said. Pasquale D'Amuro, the FBI assistant director in charge in New York, said: "Eppolito and Caracappa were not two good cops who went bad."
The superseding indictment on which the case went to trial was framed in four counts. Count One charged both men with racketeering conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. 1962(d), running from May 1979 to March 9, 2005. Count Two charged Eppolito with money laundering. Two further counts charged both men with distribution, possession with intent to distribute and conspiracy to distribute five grams or more of methamphetamine.
The trial took place in the federal courthouse in Brooklyn before Judge Weinstein and lasted three weeks. The prosecutors were Robert W. Henoch, Mitra Hormozi and Daniel Wenner, under the supervision of Mark Feldman. Edward Hayes represented Caracappa, and Bruce Cutler represented Eppolito.
The central witness was the middleman who had stood between Casso and the detectives, an admitted drug dealer. He testified for four days. He was at the time serving a 27-year sentence on a separate narcotics conviction. Casso himself did not testify.
Neither defendant took the stand. Caracappa's position was the one he gave in a television interview in 2006, when he called the accusations "ludicrous" and said: "I couldn't kill anybody."
The jury deliberated for two days and returned its verdict on April 6, 2006. The forewoman read the findings aloud for about ten minutes, saying "proven" some 70 times as she went through the racketeering acts one by one. Both men were found guilty on every count. On the racketeering conspiracy count, the jury found that each defendant had agreed to participate in each racketeering act charged against him. Asked whether the conspiracy had ended before March 9, 2000, the jury answered no. As the Second Circuit later summarized the charges, the acts alleged against the two men ran from murders, attempted murders, kidnapings and obstructions of justice between 1986 and 1991 to the narcotics offenses in Las Vegas in 2005.
The convicted conduct, as the prosecutors summarized it, included eight murders, two attempted murders, one murder conspiracy, obstruction of justice, drug distribution, money laundering by Eppolito, and the leaking of confidential law-enforcement information to the leaders of the Luchese family. Judge Weinstein revoked the $5 million bail on which each man had been held, and they were taken into custody. Sentencing was set for May 22, 2006. The racketeering charge carried a maximum of life imprisonment, and each drug count a maximum of 20 years.
"Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa perverted the shield of good, and turned it into a sword of evil," Mauskopf said.
Cutler called the verdict "an appearance of justice, but it's not justice." Hayes, in tears, said of his client: "I like Steve."
At a hearing in early June, Weinstein told the court that these were probably the worst crimes ever tried in that courthouse, and he told the two men that they would receive life sentences. The widow of Israel Greenwald addressed them: "You must pay severely for what you have done, for you did not just kill one person, you killed a family." Weinstein postponed the sentencing while he considered the defense motions.
On June 30, 2006, Weinstein issued a 77-page ruling. He granted the defense motion for a judgment of acquittal on the racketeering conspiracy count, the count that carried the murders.
The ruling turned on time. Federal law sets a five-year limitations period for non-capital offenses, and the indictment had been returned in March 2005. For the racketeering count to stand, the conspiracy had to have continued into the five years before that date. Weinstein concluded that it had not. In his view the conspiracy had come to a definite close in the mid-1990s, after the two men had retired from the police department and moved to Las Vegas. He also ordered a new trial on the remaining counts, on the ground that the evidence of the murders had spilled over into the jury's consideration of the other charges.
He did not doubt the evidence. He wrote that it had "overwhelmingly established the defendants' participation" in a large number of violent crimes, and he said that he agreed with the jury that the men were guilty of murder and the other crimes. But the statute, he wrote, "mandates granting the defendants a judgment of acquittal on the key charge against them." He had earlier described the two men as "dangerous criminals with no degree of credibility."
"It's exactly what we argued during the trial," Hayes said. Neither man went free. Bail was denied after the ruling, and both remained in custody while the government appealed.
The government took the case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. On September 17, 2008, a panel of Judges Kearse, Sack and Hall reversed Weinstein's ruling in United States v. Eppolito and sent the case back with instructions to reinstate the verdicts and impose sentence.
The panel held that the district court had taken too narrow a view of the enterprise. Caracappa and Eppolito, it said, could themselves constitute an enterprise, a partnership whose life did not end with their retirements. Whether that partnership had ended before March 9, 2000, was a question for the jury, and the jury had answered it. The court added that a racketeering conspiracy is presumed to continue until the defendant shows that it ended or that he withdrew from it, and the jury had been "easily entitled" to find that the conspiracy ran past March 2000, given the two men's conduct in Las Vegas.
The decision restored the verdicts on every count and returned the case to Weinstein for sentence.
On March 6, 2009, Senior Judge Weinstein sentenced both men in the Brooklyn federal court. Each received life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Caracappa's sentence was life plus 80 years, with a fine of $4.2 million; Eppolito received life plus 100 years and a fine of $4.7 million. Caracappa's narcotics counts carried consecutive terms of 40 years each, the statutory maximum.
Relatives of the dead spoke before sentence was passed. A daughter read a letter to her late father: "Daddy, when they killed you, part of your baby girl died too." A son told the two men: "May youse have a long life in prison."
Caracappa addressed the judge and maintained his innocence. "You will never take away my will to continue to prove how innocent I am," he said. Eppolito told the court: "I was a hard-working cop."
The United States Attorney by then was Benton J. Campbell. "We are gratified that the defendants will spend the rest of their lives behind bars," he said. "The sentences imposed bring some measure of closure for the families of the victims of these defendants' unspeakable crimes."
Both men appealed again, in two appeals that were heard together. The Second Circuit heard argument on May 18, 2010, before Judges Kearse, Sack and Wesley, and on July 23, 2010, in United States v. Caracappa, it affirmed the judgments of conviction.
The court rejected each ground raised. It found no abuse of discretion in the admission of a witness's testimony about a prior statement, and no plain error in an isolated remark made by a prosecutor in rebuttal summation. It found no abuse of discretion in the limits placed on the cross-examination of a witness. It held the evidence sufficient to support Caracappa's narcotics convictions and rejected his argument that his narcotics sentence was grossly disproportionate. It also rejected Eppolito's claims that his trial lawyer had been ineffective.
The convictions that stood were for racketeering conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. 1962(d) and for distribution of narcotics and conspiracy to distribute them under 21 U.S.C. 841(a)(1) and 846. Eppolito also stood convicted of money laundering under 18 U.S.C. 1956(a)(3)(B).
In 2016 Caracappa petitioned Judge Weinstein for compassionate release on the ground of illness. Weinstein refused. "There is nothing I can do in your case," he said.
Caracappa died in April 2017 at a federal prison medical facility in North Carolina, aged 75. He was serving his life sentences at the time, and his death ended the case against him.
The murders in this case were never charged as stand-alone counts. They were charged as racketeering acts within a single count of racketeering conspiracy under the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 18 U.S.C. 1962(d). Under that structure the jury does not convict of each murder separately; it finds each act proven or not proven, and the conviction is for the conspiracy. That is why the forewoman read the word "proven" act by act.
The structure also brought the case within the reach of federal time limits. New York State has no limitation period for murder, but the two men were prosecuted federally, where the racketeering charge was seen as the more promising route to a conviction. Federal law, 18 U.S.C. 3282(a), requires that non-capital offenses be charged within five years. For a conspiracy, the question is when the agreement ended, and the Second Circuit held that a racketeering conspiracy is presumed to continue until the defendant proves that it ended or that he withdrew. The defendant carries that burden.
Weinstein's ruling of 2006 rested on two federal rules of criminal procedure: Rule 29, which allows a judge to enter a judgment of acquittal when the evidence cannot support a conviction, and Rule 33, which allows a judge to order a new trial. The appeals court reversed the orders made under both rules, and the verdicts were restored.
Caracappa never admitted the crimes. He called the accusations "ludicrous" before trial, said he could not kill anybody, did not testify, and told the court at sentencing that he would keep trying to prove his innocence. The verdict and the two appellate decisions stand as the final record against him.
The 2005 indictment and the verdict do not list the same eight murders: Israel Greenwald was added in a superseding indictment, and two murders charged in 2005 were not among the acts on which the verdict rested.
November 12, 1941: Stephen Caracappa is born.
1969: He joins the New York City Police Department.
February 1986: Israel Greenwald is murdered in Brooklyn.
October 1986: James Hydell is killed.
December 25, 1986: Nicholas Guido is killed.
1987: The monthly payments from the Luchese family begin, by the prosecutors' account.
1987: A man survives an attempted murder later found proven as a racketeering act.
October 1987: John Heidel is murdered.
February 4, 1990: Anthony Dilapi is murdered.
May 1990: Advance notice of the arrests of Casso and Amuso is passed to the family.
August 1990: Bruno Facciola is murdered.
November 6, 1990: Edward Lino is murdered.
1992: Caracappa retires from the police department.
January 1993: The payments end.
1994: Allegations against the two detectives first appear in newspapers.
March 9, 2005: Caracappa and Eppolito are arrested in Las Vegas.
March 10, 2005: The indictment is announced in Brooklyn.
April 6, 2006: The jury convicts both men on every count; bail is revoked.
June 30, 2006: Judge Weinstein enters a judgment of acquittal on the racketeering conspiracy count and orders a new trial on the other counts.
September 17, 2008: The Second Circuit reverses and orders the verdicts reinstated.
March 6, 2009: Caracappa is sentenced to life imprisonment plus 80 years and a $4.2 million fine.
July 23, 2010: The Second Circuit affirms the convictions.
2016: Judge Weinstein refuses compassionate release.
April 2017: Caracappa dies in federal custody in North Carolina, aged 75.