The Brotherhoods: The True Story of Two Cops Who Murdered for the Mafia

At twilight on the evening of March 9, 2005, William Oldham sat in a rental car in a parking lot off the Las Vegas Strip. Oldham, a twenty-year veteran New York Police Department detective now working as an investigator with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn, had traveled across the country to arrest Stephen Caracappa and Louis Eppolito, two former NYPD detectives who had worked as hit men for the mafia in the eighties and early nineties. Across the street was Piero's, an upscale Italian restaurant decorated in a style known as Mob Vegas and frequented by local wiseguys as well as by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci during the filming of Casino. Oldham watched the exterior of the single-story restaurant patiently -- the red neon sign, the two attendants standing at the valet parking stand, the sun setting in the cloudless desert sky. Oldham could wait. He had been investigating Caracappa and Eppolito for seven years, the longest case of his career. Oldham was fifty-one years old, drank too much, depleted, done. For years no one else had worked the case against Detectives Caracappa and Eppolito. Oldham had refused to drop it. No investigation had demanded as much from him -- time, tenacity, every trick of the trade he'd acquired during a lifetime spent chasing criminals. If this was Oldham's longest and best case, it was also likely to be his last.
As Oldham watched, Caracappa and Eppolito pulled up to the valet parking area in an SUV with tinted windows, palmed the valet a few bucks, and walked toward the restaurant. Caracappa was dressed in a black pinstripe suit with wide lapels and a gold handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket. He walked with the self-conscious stride of a sixty-three-year-old mobbed-up dandy. Eppolito, a bodybuilder and a Mr. New York in his youth, was now nearly sixty and hugely overweight. He wore a tight-fitting double-breasted olive suit. He moved slowly but with a vestige of the strut he'd affected as a street cop. Oldham caught a glimpse of Eppolito's large gold-and-diamond pinkie ring with the NYPD detective shield embossed on it. Oldham hadn't seen either man in more than a decade, since he had worked with Detective Caracappa in the elite Major Case Squad. But Caracappa and Eppolito looked the same to him, just older and paler, dressed like aging gangsters. The two retired detectives had no idea they were about to be arrested. As far as they knew, they were going to a meeting with a Vegas accountant with underworld connections to talk about drug money to be used for financing a feature film about the mafia that Eppolito had written.
Before Caracappa and Eppolito reached the restaurant's door, Oldham put his rental car into gear and lurched across the avenue, pulling up behind the SUV, blocking its escape. Three chase cars from the Drug Enforcement Administration screeched to a halt and blocked the driveway. Four DEA agents planted in the vestibule of Piero's rushed the two from the entrance. At the briefing that morning, when the protocol for the takedown was planned, Oldham had urged the agents to be careful. The targets were in poor health, Oldham said. Eppolito had undergone open-heart surgery weeks earlier. Caracappa had only one lung remaining. Oldham wanted to be sure the agents didn't scare Caracappa and Eppolito to death before they had a chance to go to jail. At Piero's, Eppolito and Caracappa were sprawled against a wall within seconds. Two DEA agents took Eppolito and spread his hands against the wall. Patting him down, they found a stainless-steel .45 semiautomatic tucked into his waistband. Eppolito was plainly dazed and disoriented. Caracappa, the tougher of the two, was impassive as he raised his arms above his head and turned in a circle. Oldham went for Caracappa's ankle, where Oldham knew from their time together in the NYPD he kept a pistol.
"It's been a long time coming," one of the DEA agents said to Eppolito.
"Yes, it has," Eppolito replied.
The supervising DEA agent began to recite the charges against Caracappa and Eppolito, a formality Oldham had never heard before. He had made hundreds of arrests over the years, a number of them involving some of the most dangerous criminals in the country, but he had never experienced anything like this takedown. There was a theatrical aspect to it, the submachine guns, the dozen agents now swarming Piero's, the elaborate radio communications. The federal agents were triumphant, thrilled to be part of the arrest of the two dirtiest cops in the history of the NYPD. But Oldham had worked on the case far too long to feel elation. As a detective, he loved the chase. Capture brought out more complex feelings. Caracappa and Eppolito were "Steve" and "Louie" to Oldham -- fellow NYPD detectives, no matter the crimes they had committed. Now he watched the two being led away by federal agents.