Ames fired.'I started backing away,' Ames said. 'He took a swing at me with the stick…I ducked, and as I ducked, I cocked the 9mm [pistol], and I fired and kept firing-there were no conscious thoughts.'
Ames testified that Brooks dropped his stick after being struck by the second or third bullet, but continued to lurch forward in a tackling position. 'I wanted to be left in peace,' Ames told the prosecutor on the stand. 'I wanted this to stop…I think I saved my own life. He left me with no options.' Ames 's wife, Jeanne, testified that she had been so frightened by Perry Brooks's occasional verbal threats against her family during the fifteen-year feud that she kept a pistol on her nightstand, and the window blinds drawn. Other farm employees told of being threatened by Brooks as well. The jury evidently was less moved by the prosecutor's argument that Perry Brooks had not threatened the Ames family directly in many years.
Ames defense attorney, Craig Cooley, argued that Ames 's reaction, when confronted with a three-foot stick about the thickness of a shovel handle, had not been excessive.'People have been killed with billy clubs,' he said.The first sheriff's deputy to reach Holly Hill Farm on the morning of the shooting testified that Ames declined to make a statement, then pointed to Brooks's body and said:'He's over there if you want to try to help him.'
Three months after the verdict, in December 2005, Perry Brooks's widow, Evelyn, accepted a settlement in her $10 million wrongful death suit against John Ames. The settlement was sealed by the court and the amount was not disclosed. Kim Brooks said afterward that her mother had struggled with the decision of whether to settle or let the case go to trial, where the family had hoped additional facts, more favorable to their father, might emerge.
At the time of the settlement, the $45,001.12 lien that Ames had placed on Brooks's farm back in 1989, in an attempt to force
Brooks to pay for his fence, remained unpaid.With interest, it was estimated to have grown to about $150,000.
I have not been back to Caroline County since the story. But one memory of the reporting has stuck with me. It is from my second visit to Holly Hill Farm, in the fall of 2004. I turned up on the day when a visiting vet was on hand to suction multiple embryos from four cows that had been super-fertilized with hormone treatments and then artificially inseminated. The removal of embryos is an exacting task in the best of circumstances. But this day, nothing seemed to go right-one cow was difficult to suction, another seemed to have no embryos, and a third became restless in the holding chute, jumped, and knocked loose the hypodermic needle that had been planted in her back.'John, it's been a long time since I've had a morning like this,' the vet said.
As they worked, I scanned the fields outside the barn. In the distance, just beyond a row of trees, lay Brooks's farm, and the dirt track that Perry Brooks had traveled on the morning of his death. Then I turned back to Ames, the vet, and the cows.That's when I noticed a pure white cat sitting like a sentry on top of a stall post. It was watching us coolly, in the way cats do. And for just a moment, it looked to me like the ghost of Perry Brooks, prowling among us, and watching the difficulties in the barn that day with a certain bleak satisfaction.
Howard Blum and John Connolly : Hit Men in Blue?
from Vanity Fair
If Betty Hydell had not turned on the television that afternoon in 1992, she might never have learned the stranger's name. But there on the Sally Jessy Raphael show was the bruiser who had knocked on her door six years earlier looking for her son. He had come asking for twenty-eight-year-old Jimmy on the day he disappeared-and, she had no doubt, was murdered. Only, now that she knew the man's name, justice, she was convinced, was impossible. He was beyond the law.
Six years later, she lost another son. Frank, thirty-one, the younger brother, was found lying between two parked cars in front of a Staten Island strip club with three bullets pumped into his head and chest. Now she needed to talk; and slowly, despite her anxieties, she was growing ready.
Finally, in the fall of 2003, say those who participated in the case, Betty Hydell, then sixty-five, shared her long-held secret. It was a secret that would have momentous consequences.This single name resurrected old suspicions and set in motion a covert eighteen-month investigation that led a team of retired New York cops and Drug Enforcement Administration agents back to the bloody gangland wars of previous decades, and had them hunting through seemingly ice-cold cases and unsolved murders. And at the end of their long investigative journey they uncovered what law- enforcement officials are calling 'the worst case of police corruption in the history of New York.'
In March, two retired New York City Police Department detectives, Louis Eppolito, fifty-six, and Stephen Caracappa, sixty-three, were charged with working for the Mob. Even as detailed in the careful sentences of the twenty-seven-page federal indictment, the alleged betrayal, which began in the mid-1980s, was both riveting and complete. On the surface, as many of their astonished fellow cops were quick to point out, the pair had been exemplary police officers. Eppolito, big, beefy, and loud, had been a tough street cop, a head-banger who bragged that he had been in eight shoot-outs and had survived to become the NYPD's eleventh-most-decorated officer. Caracappa was more cerebral, quiet and ruminative, a cool dandy in the trim black suits he had made in Hong Kong. He, too, had put together an impressive two-decade career, serving on the elite Major Case Squad and winning a promotion to detective first grade.
Yet, according to the indictment, while they had been building their careers and passing themselves off as gung-ho cops, they had been taking orders from the Mob. In dozens of cases, they allegedly gave the Mafia the edge, allowing wiseguys to get away with murder-literally. They revealed the names of individuals who were cooperating with the government, and as a result three informants were killed and one was severely wounded. They shared information about ongoing investigations and pending indictments with the Lucchese crime family, one of New York 's five major Mafia clans. But most shocking of all, and unprecedented in the history of the NYPD, they had acted as paid killers. The two detectives were charged with taking part in at least eight Mob hits-including one where they were the shooters. (The body of a ninth suspected victim was discovered after the indictment.)
Incredibly, allegations about the two detectives were first made more than a decade ago. But officials were never able to get the evidence they needed for an indictment.
'We were only able to make this case,' says one of the key investigators on the task force, 'because after years of stonewalling we succeeded in getting the man who paid Eppolito and Caracappa to talk.'
However, unknown to the task force, their star witness had long been an informant for the FBI. And according to dismayed law-enforcement officials, if the FBI had shared this information with the NYPD, the two rogue detectives could have been prosecuted years ago.
Instead, the case of the two 'Mafia cops' remained little more than a swirl of suspicions until a mournful and angry Betty Hydell decided to speak.
After twenty hectic years on the job, Detective Tommy Dades was counting the days until his retirement. He had worked narcotics and then gone up against the Colombo crime family as a hard- charging detective in Brooklyn 's Sixty-eighth Precinct. Now, in September 2003, the detective was finishing his career in a Brooklyn organized-crime intelligence unit. His plan was to draw his pension at age forty-two and move on to what he'd been contemplating for years-running a boxing gym on Staten Island while he was still able to go a couple of rounds himself. He'd nurture some tough kid from the projects who had the heart and skill to be a contender. But before he could begin his new life, Dades, always the dutiful cop, hoped to wrap up some of the unresolved cases in his files.
The April 1998 murder of Frank Hydell, a Mob hanger-on, was a case that, despite several arrests, still gnawed at him. With only small justification, Dades felt responsible: Frankie had been working for him-and the FBI-as an informant.The burst of bullets that knocked Frankie down and left him stretched out flat on the street was, Dades believed, the Mob's retribution.
Over the years, Dades had made a point of keeping in touch with Frankie's family. He would visit Frankie's mother, Betty, at her Staten Island home. Flashing his wide smile, Tommy would chat her up in his easy, affable way, hoping their meandering conversations might unearth some buried clue.
But when Dades stopped by that day at the tail end of September 2003, Betty Hydell didn't want to talk about Frankie. Instead, she focused on his older brother. As people close to the case describe the moment, she began slowly, tentatively; and then, as if suddenly liberated from years of indecision and misgivings, she let the whole story tumble out.
Two men had come looking for Jimmy the day he disappeared. One was fat, the other thin. And, she gravely announced to the detective, she knew the fat one's name. She even had his picture.
She had seen him on television, talking about his book. Watching him banter with Sally Jessy, believing he had played a part in the murder of her son, had left her, she said,'with a sinking feeling in my stomach.'That same day, Betty bought the book. She couldn't bear to read it, but she wanted to study the photographs just to be sure. One look and she was certain: He was the man.
Later, Dades got a paperback copy of Mafia Cop, written by Lou Eppolito (along with journalist Bob Drury). He felt mounting rage as he scanned the cover, with its photograph of retired second- grade detective Eppolito's gold shield and its subtitle, The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob.
Dades, like most officers in the city who worked organized crime, knew a bit about the accusations surrounding Eppolito and Caracappa, which had surfaced with great fanfare a decade earlier. Lucchese-crime-family underboss Anthony 'Gaspipe' Casso, a stone-cold killer turned government witness, had boasted to his FBI debriefers that he had placed the two detectives on his payroll and, even more disconcerting, had used them for hits. In 1994 the Daily News trumpeted the allegations against Eppolito and Caracappa on its front page with the headline hero cops or hitmen? When nothing further happened, Dades, who knew firsthand about the unreliability of wiseguys, figured it was all smoke and no fire. But now, staring at Eppolito's smug photograph in the paperback, he thought, as he later confided to investigators in the Brooklyn district attorney's office, Gotcha!
Very quickly, a plan took shape in his mind. He'd go to his friends Mark Feldman, the organized-crime chief in the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office, and Michael Vecchione, who had a similar job in the Brooklyn D.A.'s office, and argue that Betty Hydell's eyewitness testimony was enough to get the case reopened. Since he was retiring from his NYPD job, he could even come on board as an investigator. It shouldn't take much to build a case against the two retired detectives for their roles in Jimmy Hydell's murder.
But Dades was mistaken. Betty Hydell's tip was just the beginning. By the time the investigation concluded, one and a half years later, seven other murder cases would be documented. By then, Dades would be long gone, finally retired to his gym.
The year was 1986, and on the sidewalks of New York the Mafia was busy settling grudges. Every day, or so it seemed, bold yellow police tape stretched across another crime scene where a wiseguy had been brought down.
Gaspipe Casso, forty-six at the time, was one of the lucky victims. On September 6, 1986, he was at the wheel of his black Cadillac, pulling into the parking lot of the Golden Ox Chinese restaurant, in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, when a hit team opened fire.Two slugs smashed into his left shoulder, but Casso, bleeding and seething with anger, raced out of the car and into the restaurant. He was leaning against a refrigerator in the kitchen, crouched like a wounded, dangerous animal, when the cops found him.
The police on the scene also found something else. In the car was a confidential printout listing the license-plate numbers of the department's unmarked surveillance cars. Casso, they realized with sudden alarm, had a hook deep inside the NYPD.
Further evidence that Casso had an infuriatingly reliable inside source surfaced four years later. Just before the unsealing of an indictment charging Casso along with fourteen other Mafia heavies in a federal bid-rigging case that could have brought him, if convicted, a sentence of up to one hundred years, he disappeared.
It took authorities more than thirty months to zero in on his hideout. Shacked up in suburban New Jersey with an old girlfriend, Casso readily surrendered when an FBI SWAT team crashed through his bedroom door.
After sulking through a long year in federal prison, Casso, with a wiseguy's easy relativism, agreed to a deal. He would tell all he knew, and in return the feds, no less pragmatic, would forget about his complicity in thirty-six murders, enroll him in the witness-protection program, and then set the volatile sociopath loose in some unsuspecting corner of America.
With their first questions, the earnest debriefers focused on Casso's sources in the New York City Police Department. 'My crystal ball,' he acknowledged. Then Casso quickly gave up Eppolito and Caracappa. He detailed how, starting around 1986, he had placed the two cops, as the government put it, on 'retainer.' Employing one of his associates, Burton Kaplan, as the middleman, he claimed he paid his moles four thousand dollars a month. In exchange, the two detectives, wired into the world of organized-crime investigations, let him know whatever the police and federal organized-crime units were secretly up to.
But there was more. Casso matter-of-factly went on that, after the attempt on his life, he was determined to get even. (Or, as one of the alleged hit men was heard wailing on an intercepted
