Books: "Blood and the Badge," By Michael Cannell

 

Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation

By Michael Cannell

Minotaur Books; hardcover, 368 pages; $30.00

Michael Cannell is a former editor at the New York Times, has contributed to The New Yorker and other publications, and is the author of the critically acclaimed A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder Inc., and three other works of nonfiction.

Blood and the Badge is Cannell's definitive account of one of the darkest chapters in the history of the New York City Police Department, when two detectives were discovered to be also working for the Mafia, and left a trail of terror across South Brooklyn and Manhattan's Little Italy that included the deaths and wrongful imprisonment of innocent people.

Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa rose through the ranks of the NYPD in the 1970s and .80s, both rising to become detectives. They also were paid informants for the Lucchese organized crime family, leading them to commit multiple crimes and were involved in at least 12 murders.

These names should be familiar to followers of the news, as their arrests and subsequent trial were widely covered, and while they were the subjects of many books, Cannell uncovers plenty of new information from his interviews with numerous federal agents, detectives, and prosecutors. Cannell also interviewed their mob counterparts who had previously not been willing to speak, and says they are now because "these sources are, in most cases, deep into retirement and inclined at last to let go of old secrets."

Cannell depicts a mafia culture of violence and murder without remorse, with two cops who acted as the mob's early warning alert system, leaking names of mobsters secretly cooperating with the government and derailing investigations by divulging details of surveillance, phone taps, and impending arrests, while also willing to commit violence. This was also a time when the federal government was increasingly using the power of RICO statutes to begin dismantling a criminal industry that was perceived to be "untouchable." This led to growing paranoia in the mafia, as mobsters started to rat each other out. 

Eppolito and Caracappa continued to work as the "crystal ball" of the Lucchese family until they retired from the NYPD in the early '90s, when they retired to Las Vegas, and collected their pensions. Eppolito wrote a memoir, Mafia Cop, in 1992, in which he implicates himself and his former partner. There also was additional evidence revealed two years later, but FBI officials could not muster an indictment.

The allegations went nowhere for a decade until Tommy Dades, who revisited the case when he becamed determined to crack the cold case before his retirement from the force. The two former detectives were tried in 2006, and were sentenced to life in prison a few years later, close to thirty years after their crimes were committed.

In this excerpt, Cannell writes about how they carried one of their grisly crimes: "In the early evening of November 6, 1990, forty-eight-year-old Eddie Lino drove his black Mercedes east through a clog of rush-hour traffic on the Belt Parkway, along the rounded southern belly of Brooklyn. Lino was a short, hard-bitten capo, or captain, in the Gambino crime family. He led a crew that trafficked heroin and cocaine, skimmed money from unions, and fattened up on a full portfolio of other rackets. Five years earlier he aided his close friend John Gotti's rise to power by helping to ambush the Gambino boss, Paul Castellano, and his bodyguard, Tommy Bilotti, outside Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan.

Lino had spent the afternoon conducting business at the Mother Cabrini Social Club, in the Gravesend neighborhood, where capos received petitioners seeking favors and pocketed unlawful profits delivered by foot soldiers. Lino, acting for the Gambinos, spoke to his Colombo family contacts that day above the din of card games and the clink of espresso cups. Then he headed home wearing a tan trench coat against the autumn chill.

By 6:50 P.M., an hour after sunset, Lino was driving the first dark miles of his hour-and-a-half trip home to Fort Salonga, a town on the north shore of Long Island. Like many mafiosi of his generation - the Sopranos generation - he had left the old neighborhood for the suburbs. He, his wife, and their three children lived in a house set back from the road in a hilly, wooded section two miles from Long Island Sound.

As Lino neared Brighton Beach, a dark, unmarked sedan, a Crown Victoria, flashed police lights behind him. Lino endured wiretaps and surveillance as an occupational hazard, but the pull-over on the Belt Parkway had likely struck him as the result of a routine traffic infraction, an inconvenience and nothing more. Still, he kept the car in gear, just in case, after stopping on the grassy shoulder of a service road beside Abraham Lincoln High School. Lino lowered his window as two plain-clothes detectives wearing badges walked up for a word - one with a portly, walrus-like profile, the other as skinny as a crane.

What's that on the floor? one of the detectives asked. As Lino leaned over in his seat to see, the thin detective raised a revolver and shot him nine times in the head and back. Lino's lifeless foot slipped off the brake and the car rolled to the right, stopping hard against a fence enclosing a high school sports field. Lino lay slumped on the passenger seat, bleeding onto the leather upholstery. The detectives returned to their Crown Victoria and drove into darkened Brooklyn streets lined with bodegas and stoop sitters, corner delis, and split-level homes with tiny lawns watched over by statues of the blessed mother."