Dirtnap for a Corrupt Mafia Cop

This week saw the demise of a man who, in my opinion, is worse than any other mobster I have written about on this blog.  John Gotti, Nicky Scarfo and Gaspipe Casso were all bad guys, no question.  Those men were mafioso and lived their lives accordingly: criminals who would lie, steal, cheat and murder according to the code they lived their lives by.  

Stephen Caracappa, on the other hand, was an NYPD detective who sold his badge to the Lucchese crime family. Why Stephan and his partner in crime fellow detective Louis Eppolito did not receive the death penalty is beyond me.  These two rogue detectives were sworn to uphold the law and they were responsible for good of the public.  Instead, they betrayed everyone in uniform as well as every citizen of this country.  They cost the taxpayers 18.4 million dollars in lawsuit settlements alone, and that is not where the damage they dealt ended. They murdered, or had a hand in the murders of, at least seven people, including one completely innocent man.

On April 8, 2017 Stephen Caracappa died of cancer.  He died in Butner, FCI where they house sick criminals like Carmine Persico and others.  

Caracappa not only sold information to Gaspipe Casso and the Luchese family, he committed murder for him. In 1990 he and his partner pulled over Gambino Edward Lino on the Belt Parkway and they shot him.  They dropped off another man they kidnapped so that he could be tortured.

They also sold bad information to Gaspipe that resulted in the Christmas day murder of Nicholas Guido, an innocent man who was just showing off his new car.

Guido happened to have the same name as one of the men who shot at Gaspipe Casso when they tried to murder him.  The Guido they were seeking had fled the state in fear of being found.  

Diamond dealer Israel Greenwald got into trouble with the mafia in 1985 when he traveled to Great Britain to help a friend purchase some treasury bills.  He thought the deal was an honest one.  When he returned, the FBI questioned him about his business.  Burton Kaplan, a drug dealer connected with Gaspipe Casso, hired Caracappa and Eppolito to find him and murder him so he could not talk to the FBI.

The two law enforcement officers used police databases to find out Greenwald's address and the kind of car he drove.  They pulled over his car, flashed their badges and told them they were taking him in for a hit and run.  They took him to a Brooklyn warehouse where they murdered and buried him.  Greenwald was not found for twenty years and his family had been left to wonder what became of him.

Greenwald's family lost everything because they could not prove he died.  The last they saw him when he left for work.  Caracappa had appealed his case and just recently asked a judge to grant him release because he was dying of cancer.   The judge rightly told him there was nothing he could do for him.