My Online On Crime Column: My Q&A With Michael Cannell, The Author Of 'Blood And The Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, And A Scandal That Shocked The Nation

Michael Cannell is the author of five non-fiction books, most recently Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation. He has worked as an editor for The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Time, Sports Illustrated and many other publications. He lives in New York City. 

You can read my Q&A with him below:

Davis: I read and enjoyed Jimmy Breslin’s book The Good Rat some years ago. Why have you now written about the same subject so many years later in Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked a Nation?

Cannell: I enjoyed The Good Rat, as well. The great Jimmy Breslin was nearing the end of his storied career as a tabloid columnist when he wrote it. He was scouting for a book subject. He sat in the back of the courtroom, alongside other reporters, when two disgraced detectives, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, went on trial after secretly working for the mob. Breslin didn’t write anything like a conventional account of their depravities. Instead, he published a pastiche, with long transcripts and excerpts from his notebooks. I aspired to write something entirely different: a thorough and detailed narrative of the detectives’ corruptions. I’ve come to think of their history as a perverse, dark side of the American story. I felt, and my publisher agreed, that it warranted a full telling rendered in vivid detail.

Davis: How would you describe one of the corrupt cops, Louis Eppolito?

Cannell: Oddly enough, Detective Eppolito was born into a Mafia family. His father was a Gambino capo known as Fat the Gangster. No surprise, the father was abusive and violent. Weeks after Fat the Gangster died of a heart attack Eppolito joined the police academy. He enlisted, he said, on a whim, but it was more likely a form of rebellion against his father. Eppolito earned a reputation as an effective cop, but his family eventually drew him back into their illicit schemes. Who among us can escape our families?  

Davis: How would you describe the other corrupt cop, Stephen Caracappa?

Cannell: Successful partnerships are often a pairing of opposites. Eppolito was a loud, sloppy, boorish man. Caracappa was the reverse: immaculately dressed in dark suits. He was quiet and shrewdly calculating. Eppolito postured as the tough, but it was Caracappa who pulled the trigger.

Davis: How and why did the two detectives become informants and killers for the mob? What crimes did they commit? 

Cannell: It was known in certain circles that Eppolito and Caracappa would do favors for pay. Their criminal careers escalated after the Lucchese crime family put them on their payroll. In return, the detectives shared sensitive law enforcement information — who was under surveillance, whose phones were bugged, who faced arrest. And most crucially, who in the mafia ranks was secretly informing on their brethren. In other words, who was a rat. In more than a dozen cases, the detectives helped facilitate the murder of the Mafia informants. 

Davis: How were they able to commit these crimes over such a lengthy period of crime? 

Cannell: In 1984, the FBI raided the New Jersey home of a Sicilian heroin dealer named Rosario Gambino. To their astonishment, they found that Gambino had his own police file in his possession. Agents discovered Eppolito’s fingerprints on the pages. He had presumably passed the file to Gambino in exchange for cash. As a result, NYPD internal affairs had Eppolito dead to rights. Amazingly, they dismissed the case. It appears that the police brass could not stomach another corruption scandal. Eppolito not only got off, but the NYPD brass promoted him to detective second grade.

Ten years later Lucchese underboss Gaspipe Casso made a deal to cooperate with the FBI. He implicated the detectives. Shockingly, prosecutors abandoned the case for political reasons. Casso went to supermax prison and the detectives retired to Las Vegas. They had gotten away with it all, at least for now. 

Davis: Burt Kaplan was the career criminal who served as a link between the Lucchese Cosa Nostra crime family and the two killer cops. Who was he and how did he end up becoming a cooperating witness?

Cannell: Kaplan was a lifelong degenerate gambler who paid off his debts with proceeds from a long series of illegal schemes, many conducted in partnership with the Lucchese family. It was Kaplan who, as you said, mediated between the detectives and their mob patrons. And it was Kaplan who eventually proved their undoing.

Davis: How would you describe Lucchese underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso? Why was he called Gaspipe?  

Cannell: Gaspipe Casso likely inherited his nickname from his father, a longshoreman who enforced union rules along the waterfront with the swing of a pipe. Even by Mafia standards, Casso inspired fear. The majority of mafiosi simply followed the established underworld protocols, as they would have in, say, the military or a conventional workplace. Casso, on the other hand, was a true sadist, a man who derived satisfaction from killing. (He would later confess to participating in more than thirty murders.) When the FBI finally caught up to him, he flipped. The man who had spent his entire adult life killing informants became an informant himself. Until he proved too vicious and erratic for his government handlers.

Davis: The hero of your story appears to be a good NYPD cop named Tommy Dades. Who was he and how did he help break the case?

Cannell: Dades was raised by a single mother in Sunset Park, among the toughest Brooklyn neighborhoods of the 1970s. As a detective, he often made a special connection with the mothers of both perpetrators and victims. He helped them understand the confusing judicial procedures. He ran errands. He sent Christmas cards. He did so out of a sincere sense of concern, but he knew, on some level, that mothers hold secrets. One such mother phoned Dades years after Eppolito and Caracappa had safely retired to Las Vegas. She shared with with him fresh evidence that she uncovered by chance. Her phone call led Dades to revive a dormant investigation. Without Dades, the detectives would almost surely have gotten away with it all.

Davis: What takeaways do you hope your readers glean from your book?

Cannell: I think Eppolito and Caracappa fascinate us because they were effective cops with lauded records — good family men, as well — and yet they committed atrocities. While I wrote, I found myself thinking about the anti-heroes of black-and-white gangster movies and, before them, the frontiersmen who operated outside the law in Westerns. The interplay of light and dark runs throughout these American stories. As much as anything, I think that is the takeaway.