COPS AS DUMB AS WISEGUYS

Razzle Dazzle

Cops As Dumb As Wiseguys

By RICHARD STEIER

Nicholas Guido was a telephone installer who aspired to be a civil servant. He was on the hiring lists for Firefighter and Sanitation Worker when he was murdered on Christmas Day 1986 because he was mistaken for a mobster who was about his age and had the same name. He was 26 years old.

Two men who became civil servants and are now on trial for their connection to crimes including that murder, "Mafia cops" Lou Eppolito and Steven Caracappa, took some solace from testimony against them that they were not the ones whose wrong identification sent the actual killers to Mr. Guido's Windsor Terrace block.

It wasn't that they were squeamish about murder, the prime witness against them, Burton Kaplan, told the jury in U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein's Brooklyn courtroom. They didn't run the check that would have produced the address for the "right" Nicholas Guido for financial reasons, Mr. Kaplan testified: they wanted $4,000 above their regular $4,000-a-month retainer from Luchese crime family boss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, and Mr. Casso didn't want to pay extra for the information.

The Chief-Leader/ Adrienne Haywood James BADGEFELLA: Former NYPD Det. Lou Eppolito walks from the Federal courthouse in Brooklyn Heights March 22 after another day of damning testimony against him and his ex-partner, Steven Caracappa. In addition to charges against them that include a role in eight organized-crime murders, Mr. Eppolito last year was cited by a judge who overturned a murder conviction based on evidence that the then-cop had intimidated the key witness in the case into a false accusation, leading to a man wrongly spending 19 years in prison.

A Gangster's Mentality

Mr. Eppolito viewed the account of his non-involvement in the mistaken identification as a sort of vindication, seeking out a Newsday reporter two weeks ago to express outrage that the Guido murder had been used by other papers to whip up public sentiment against him. It was as if he were saying that he prided himself on only being involved in murders where the victims truly deserved it.

It's the rationale of the wiseguy who needs to justify the pathology that comes with the life. Stupidity also figures prominently, or at least a dulling of the senses: Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa started on this merry-go-round of capture, disgrace and likely conviction because they could not distinguish the scent of those who later betrayed them from their own smell.

Evidence continued to mount last week that the ex-Detectives were two of the biggest mutts to ever dishonor the badges they once wore. They have given new life to the old cliche of cops on the mob payroll that has been immortalized in movies like "The Godfather," "Serpico," and "Prizzi's Honor."

But where old photos of the two men suggested a vibrancy that could have led to their being cast as either Hollywood cops or wiseguys, the glamor has been sucked out of them over the years. Mr. Caracappa at 64 resembles Don Ameche when he was 20 years older, shortly before his death. Mr. Eppolito, a former bodybuilder, now summons memories of Sydney Greenstreet as the corpulent Kasper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon. If there is anything beyond the normal aging process to be read into their physical transformations, it would be that among the wages of sin is decay.

In contrast with the corruption case involving the leaders of the old Transit Patrolmen's Benevolent Association eight years ago, there are no retired cops visible in the courtroom, bearing witness as the betrayal by the defendants of their oaths and obligations is set forth by the U.S. Attorney's Office. It is as if their transgressions are so singular and unrelated to the lives of honest cops that there is no need to confront them.

Minor Drug Bust Ties Up Past Acts

The racketeering case against Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa is connected by a decidedly slender thread. The standard for bringing such cases is that at least one of the acts in what is alleged to be a pattern must have occurred within five years of when they were actually charged. In this instance, that criterion is satisfied by a minor drug transaction in which the two former Detectives merely offered referrals to an accountant who was secretly cooperating with the Federal Government after embezzling more than $5.3 million from his clients.

Early last year, during a dinner with the two men, the accountant, Steven Corso, told Mr. Eppolito that he had four clients - ''young Hollywood punks'' - who were ready to invest $75,000 apiece in scripts Mr. Eppolito wanted to write, but when they came to visit they would want to obtain crystal methamphetamine and Ecstasy for partying purposes.

"Tony could get that for you," Mr. Eppolito said in the tape-recorded conversation, referring to his 24-year-old son.

When Mr. Corso inquired about getting it from another acquaintance of the ex-detectives', Guido Bravatti, Mr. Caracappa replied, "Guido can handle it."

Small Sale, Big Trouble

At a subsequent meeting with the younger Eppolito and Mr. Bravatti, Mr. Corso paid $900 and received an ounce of crystal meth and the promise of 10 to 15 Ecstasy tablets. It seemed like small potatoes on which to make a major case, but it would have been hard to find anyone in the courtroom who had much sympathy for the plight of the defendants other than Mr. Eppolito's lawyer, Bruce Cutler. (Mr. Caracappa's primary attorney, Ed Hayes, was not even present for the testimony during the afternoon of March 22 by Mr. Corso, which focused almost entirely on Mr. Eppolito except for his partner's fateful "Guido can handle it" line.)

Mr. Cutler's primary defense against Mr. Corso, aside from attacking him for his past thefts to support a major gambling habit and pay for girlfriends and jewelry - ''The kind of thing that made this country great ... theft, profligacy and debauchery," the attorney sneered - was to suggest that Mr. Eppolito's incriminating remarks amounted to nothing more than the boasting of a man trying to coax money from a potential backer.

Describing his client as "garrulous, loquacious," Mr. Cutler said, "He makes things up, creates. Lou had the police background, he had the mob lineage [referring to relatives including his father who were made members of the Mafia], and that's what he's selling."

Tough to Impeach Tapes

Whether the jury was buying these arguments was another story. Mr. Corso didn't need an unblemished character to buttress the case against Mr. Eppolito, since the incriminating remarks had been tape-recorded. The actual drug sale was even videotaped.

That made it a bit harder for Mr. Cutler to explain away as mere bluster Mr. Eppolito's responses when Mr. Corso suggested he could line up backers for his scripts whose characters were a few degrees south of pristine.

"Do you care what someone does for a living?" Mr. Corso said regarding one of the phantom backers.

Mr. Eppolito replied, "If this is the biggest drug dealer in the United States, I don't give a f---."

He then added, "But don't ask me to transport drugs for it ... If you said to me, 'Lou, I wanna introduce you to Jack Smith, he wants to invest in this film' [and] he says, '$75,000 comes in a f----- shoe box,' that's fine with me; I don't care. I've had people give me money before."

From the standpoint of the defense, that last remark echoed the earlier testimony of Mr. Kaplan about the arrangement he had with Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa beginning more than 20 years earlier. His specificity about details and the inability of the defense lawyers to break him down on cross-examination left some reporters who have been covering the trial since it began convinced that the case has been decided virtually from the compellingly crafted opening statement of Assistant U.S. Attorney Mitra Hormozi, with no chance for the defense to sway the jury after the prosecution rests its case.

Ex-Lawyer Backs Witness

The defense attorneys have sought to persuade jurors that they should not believe the 72-year-old Mr. Kaplan because, in addition to his own long criminal history, he has a motive to lie in the hope of reducing his long sentence on a marijuana-trafficking conviction. Their task became harder when his former lawyer recounted conversations they had a dozen years ago that are consistent with his testimony.

By that point in 1994, Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa had both retired from the NYPD, skating past the suspicion of some superiors that they were crooked. Mr. Eppolito had left the force in 1990, got a bit part in "Goodfellas," and with the help of a ghostwriter spun an imaginative biography called "Mafia Cop." Mr. Caracappa obtained a disability pension two years later, and the two former partners moved to Las Vegas, where they lived across the street from each other.

In early March of that year, Judd Burstein, then a top criminal lawyer known for his appeals work who had long represented Mr. Kaplan, learned that Mr. Casso had forsaken his organized-crime vows and was cooperating with Federal prosecutors. He called Mr. Kaplan to apprise him of this development, and described his client's reaction this way: "He wasn't happy."

Mr. Burstein testified that he knew Mr. Kaplan owned the house where Mr. Casso was living prior to his incarceration. "I knew that Casso was a big guy in the Luchese family and I knew Burt had a close relationship with him."

Nickname Told a Story

He did not know, he continued, that Mr. Kaplan was an associate of the Luchese family. Under cross-examination by Mr. Hayes, Mr. Burstein said he didn't remember whether he knew at that point that Mr. Casso was a killer, although he was aware that "his nickname was Gaspipe and he was known to be crazy."

His own client, Mr. Kaplan, had never bothered to inform him that he had been a middleman in a bunch of murders that were carried out on Mr. Casso's orders. "The Burt Kaplan I knew," Mr. Burstein said, "was a person who was involved in marijuana-trafficking and counterfeit clothing. It never even crossed my mind that this guy had a propensity for violence."

That changed three weeks later, Mr. Burstein testified, when Mr. Kaplan called him about an article in the New York Post that stated that Mr. Casso had used two NYPD Detectives - who were not identified - to handle the murder of mobster Edward Lino.

As he recalled it, Mr. Kaplan said of the article, "This is a big problem for me. I was the go-between between Casso and these two cops on this killing."

Mr. Kaplan said a few more things, Mr. Burstein testified: "The sum and substance of what he was saying was, it wasn't just this one murder."

'Big' Turns to 'Huge'

The following morning, Mr. Eppolito's picture appeared on the front page of the Daily News and an article named him and Mr. Caracappa as the two cops involved in hits carried out for Mr. Casso. Once again, Mr. Kaplan called, Mr. Burstein testified. What he had characterized a day earlier as "a big problem" had now grown "huge," and "he told me he was going to be on the lam."

During his cross-examination, Mr. Hayes was able to establish that Mr. Kaplan didn't always apprise his lawyer of his various illegal activities or the persons with whom he engaged in them, and so at one point Mr. Burstein had written a letter to the Federal Government attesting to the integrity of someone he had met through Mr. Kaplan who was in fact a partner in crime.

Nor, Mr. Hayes elicited, had Mr. Kaplan told Mr. Burstein about his enlisting Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa to kill Israel Greenwald, a jeweler who he suspected might decide to become an informant against him.

An Unreliable Source

Mr. Kaplan's having withheld such details was not enough to chip away at the most damning corroboration Mr. Burstein offered of his former client's relationship with the two ex-Detectives: his description of the panic Mr. Kaplan felt at their being implicated by name in a newspaper article.

The potential case against them back then fizzled out when Mr. Casso proved so unreliable in his statements to prosecutors that they decided later in 1994 not to use him as a witness. When Mr. Burstein got wind of that decision, he notified Mr. Kaplan, who returned to New York soon after and was based there until his drug conviction in 1997.

Recent Crime Needed

New evidence was unearthed against the two ex-Detectives by retired Detectives working for the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office. When Mr. Kaplan decided, after years of resisting, to cooperate with the Federal probe because he feared that Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa would anoint him the fall guy if he didn't make the first deal, the racketeering case needed just a more-recent criminal act to throw the net of their past over the two rogue cops.

Enter Mr. Corso, who had already ingratiated himself with a few Vegas wiseguys at the government's request. One of them, Mike Frate, discussed their going into business with Mr. Eppolito, forming a company to develop scripts and sell stock through an initial public offering.

Mr. Corso testified that he expressed reluctance to do business with Mr. Eppolito because of his police background, and said that Mr. Frate assured him, "He's one of us."

Mr. Eppolito quickly warmed to the idea of the IPO, and a promised upfront payment to him from its proceeds of $250,000, Mr. Cutler said, because it would have meant "Lou achieving what he had never achieved: financial security."

Addictive Lifestyle

Unlike Mr. Corso and Mr. Kaplan, who became bad guys in no small measure because they were bad gamblers, Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa suffered from none of the usual addictions. They both bought into the wiseguy lifestyle, however, with the big cars and the expensive clothes and the rest of the surface flash that is coin of the realm in that world.

They also bought into Mr. Corso's act, sweetened with flattery and the promise of big money from unnamed sources. This seemed particularly remarkable because, on the first day that the ex-CPA took the witness stand, it was also revealed that Mr. Caracappa 21 years ago used the NYPD computer system to do a criminal background check on the woman he eventually married.

That check proved his fears were groundless. In contrast, the failure to exercise any such suspicions about Mr. Corso has put Mr. Caracappa and Mr. Eppolito where they are. Perhaps that shouldn't be surprising: they seem like two men for whom a financial score would always be more seductive than a romance of the heart.

Their predicament also suggested, however, just how hollow the souls of two cops who apparently opted for the mob life really were.

No Pangs of Conscience

Twenty years earlier, the gangster whose errands they had begun running had sent a team of killers to shoot the wrong Nicholas Guido, whose final act when the assassins struck was to throw his body across his uncle to protect him from their bullets.

Cops with any conscience would have been chastened enough by his nobility or revulsed enough by Mr. Casso's ability to write that murder off as a clerical error to rethink what they were doing. They would have either ended their association with Mr. Casso or reclaimed their sense of honor by quitting the NYPD.

Instead, if the testimony that their attorneys haven't been able to impeach so far is to be believed, Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa went right on using their badges for safe passage while diving after the dirtiest kind of money. Along the way, the cop instincts that once allowed them to become Detectives got trapped in the sewer from which they finally have been flushed.