Featured Excerpt: Blood and the Badge by Michael Cannell

Prologue

On 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 Soprano generation—he had left the old neighborhood for the suburbs. He, his wife, and 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 plainclothes 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 onto 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.

1: A Homecoming

On an early October day in 1979, a thirty-one-year-old detective named Louie Eppolito and his wife, Fran, drove their blue Chrysler New Yorker from their home in the Long Island town of Holbrook to a Brooklyn funeral parlor to pay last respects to Louie’s uncle, Jimmy Eppolito, who was known to his associates in the Gambino crime family as Jimmy the Clam.

Until his shooting death on the night of October 1, Jimmy the Clam had served as a capo, a man of status and authority who for two decades commanded a crew plying the dark trades of loan-sharking, bookmaking, and burglary.

Dignitaries from all five New York crime families, allies and adversaries alike, gathered at the wake to honor a well-liked Mafia veteran marked for death through no fault of his own. While the families variously collaborated and feuded, often with mortal consequence, they by custom convened at wakes and weddings for a few peaceable hours of small talk and ice-cold geniality. In the underworld, wakes were work events.

A parade of middle-aged men entered wearing wide-lapel suits and broad ties. They had arranged their hair in Brylcreem pompadours, combovers, and shameless toupees. Let us assume the room smelled of Parliament cigarettes and Aqua Velva aftershave, the odor of underworld gatherings. Bodyguards, cronies, and hangers-on stood at a discreet remove while bosses shook hands, squeezed arms, crossed themselves, and bowed heads in doleful expressions of mourning. They spoke in low, gravel-throated tones in English and Italian. Jimmy the Clam was a good man, they said, a man of honor. Che tragedia. What a tragedy.

Louie Eppolito was hard to miss among his uncle’s mourners. He was a big man with a weightlifter’s physique gone to paunch. If he resembled anyone, it was Jackie Gleason. With a mustache and gut, he looked like a greaser dressed in a size-fifty suit for a casino night. One by one the mafiosi shook his hand. They kissed both cheeks in the Mafia manner, and asked after his daughters, Andrea and Deanna, and his son, Tony.

For Eppolito, the funeral was an uncomfortable homecoming of sorts. He was born into an established Mafia family, but he worked as a New York City detective. Police regulations prohibited him from fraternizing with criminals.

In a strict professional sense, Eppolito stood for these few hours behind enemy lines, though the surroundings were familiar. He had grown up among these men. A handful had visited his childhood home in East Flatbush, a Brooklyn neighborhood then known as Pigtown, where they conferred with Eppolito’s father, Ralph, known as Fat the Gangster, who had teamed up with Jimmy the Clam and a third brother, Freddy, in the Gambino operations. Their associates knocked on their door at odd hours. They huddled in the living room and spoke in low tones.

Louie, meet some friends of mine, Fat the Gangster would say. Louie stood and shook hands. They nodded in approval. Kid has a lot of respect, they said. His father often left with the men. The family might not see him for days.

Young Louie learned respect the hard way. His father was a short, stout man with an abusive temperament. In Louie’s recollection, his father hit for the mildest infraction. “I’d get smacked for looking the wrong way at my mother,” Eppolito later wrote in a memoir. “I’d get smacked for using the wrong tone of voice with my sister. I’d get smacked for being more than thirty seconds late for dinner.” Ralph hit his son with fists or whatever was handy—a two-by-four, a ketchup bottle, and, on one occasion, an Italian baguette. It was tough love, but without much love.

Ralph delivered his smacks with lectures on the Neapolitan code of conduct: always shake hands, show respect to family and strangers alike. No matter what, avoid dishonoring the family with una brutta figura, a bad showing.

When Louie turned twelve, he joined his father on afternoon trips to a private room above the Grand Mark Tavern, in Bensonhurst, where his Gambino associates talked business over rounds of craps and a Sicilian card game called Ziganet. Louie carried drinks and swept up. He also played errand boy. Every day he delivered an envelope of cash to patrolmen who, by longstanding arrangement, parked across the street, in front of Za-Za’s pool hall. Louie was careful not to hand the envelope directly to a cop, only to drop it on an empty car seat.

Fat the Gangster hated the Irish-heavy police with an inordinate fury. “I guess my father despised them because they could be bought so cheap,” Eppolito said.

One afternoon, in March 1968, Louis, by then nineteen, returned home from his job as a telephone installer to find his maternal grandfather standing outside their apartment building. “You better head inside fast, Louie,” the old man said. “Everybody’s crying, and I think your father’s dead.”

Fat the Gangster had died of a heart attack. Days later a cortege of eighteen black limousines carried gamblers and hit men, capos and consiglieri to a funeral mass at the Church of St. Blaise. FBI agents watched from a distance.

Within weeks of the funeral Eppolito did what his father would have most hated: he enrolled in the police academy.

Eppolito passed his defection off as caprice. He applied without much thought, he said, after coaching his brother-in-law, Al Guarneri, as he jogged and jumped rope in preparation for the police academy fitness test. Eppolito lied about his family’s ties to organized crime in the NYPD screening, though it may not have mattered. The academy had relaxed its background checks to replenish its ranks after the Vietnam-era draft drastically reduced the applicant pool. With race riots and anti-war protests flaring, the NYPD would hire practically any young man capable of lacing up shoes and walking the streets.

Eppolito claimed to have signed on impulsively, though it is hard to see his enrollment as anything but an act of rebellion against his abusive father, a defiant slap back that he dared not deliver until his father had passed. His friends and family could scarcely believe his change of allegiance. “They all told me I’m crazy,” he said. “What do you want to do that for?”

Even in the academy, Eppolito could not escape his father. During a lecture, a police instructor showed recruits a hierarchical chart of organized crime figures—soldiers, capos, consiglieri, and bosses—illustrated with mug shots and grainy surveillance photos. “Hey, Louie,” a classmate said, “there’s a guy with your last name.” The jowly man in the mug shot was his father.

As a rookie patrolman assigned to South Brooklyn, Harlem, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Eppolito found that the bully tactics he had learned from his father worked just as effectively in a blue uniform. He ignored police procedures, instead imposing what he called street justice. “We broke their hands. We broke their arms. We broke their legs,” he said of an off-duty raid that sent thirty-seven homeless drug addicts to the hospital. “And I didn’t give a fuck, and I still don’t. . . . When you live on the street, you abide by the law of the street.”

Eppolito’s aggressive methods led to notable arrest numbers in the city’s roughest neighborhoods—enough arrests to earn commendations and a smattering of headlines. Though he may have benefited from tips passed to him by underworld acquaintances.

Eppolito advanced his reputation by portraying himself to crime reporters as a protector of women and children. His brag worked. The New York Daily News recounted how he dressed up as an elderly matron—complete with rouged cheeks and an old dress—to catch muggers in the act; how he ran down five robbers on foot after their getaway car rammed his police cruiser; how he intercepted a burglar fleeing the Kings Lafayette Bank with $1,500 in cash; how he caught a pickpocket while working undercover as a coffee shop waiter. Eppolito had, the newspaper wrote, “a reputation for quick thinking and possessing ‘street smarts’ vital to his team.”

Eppolito told reporters that he had broken the rookie arrest record. He later asserted, without evidence, that he was the eleventh most decorated police officer in the city’s history. Exaggerated or not, his claims made their way into type. I’m the son of a Gambino crime soldier, he liked to say, but look what I’ve made of myself

After a brief marriage that produced a son, Lou, Jr., Eppolito met Frances Todisco, the daughter of a Bronx elevator operator. Coincidentally, he spotted her stepping from an elevator at a resort hotel in Puerto Rico. At their wedding, in 1973, Eppolito asked the band to play the theme from The Godfather. Together they had two daughters and a son.

Meanwhile, Eppolito waited impatiently for promotion to detective. He avoided working in narcotics, a prestigious post in the drug-heavy 1970s, for fear he would cross paths with his relations. The decision no doubt hurt his prospects. For three straight years he planned a party, only to cancel it when his name did not appear on the promotion list. “I wasn’t ignorant of the fact that there were people in the department who remembered my roots, where I came from,” he later wrote in a memoir. “Still, I was naïve enough to figure I could overcome my father, my uncles, my family.”

Finally, in 1977, Eppolito advanced. He was promoted to detective and assigned to the Brooklyn Armed Robbery Squad. “In my mind I was being promoted three years too late,” he said. “And I never forgot the snub.”

Detective Eppolito was the loudest, crudest voice in the squad room. “He was always telling crazy stories,” said Detective Phil Grimaldi who worked in a neighboring precinct. “He had a bunch of chains and rings, and he looked like an organized crime character from central casting.”

By Eppolito’s own admission, his partner once had to stop him from flogging a suspect to death. “The public will never understand the mentality of a cop—a good cop, anyway,” Eppolito said. “In a way, it’s very similar to the mentality of organized crime. You do what you have to do and don’t think twice about consequences. . . .” Like any vigilante, he believed the righteous cause justified the brutality.

He earned both accolades—and distrust. It did not go unnoticed that Eppolito dressed like a cartoon mobster, with his pompadour, heavy gold necklaces, and a snake-head ring shining on his pinkie finger. “He was a tall guy, muscular, but he got overweight, [was] a sloppy dresser, never tightened his tie, wore a big .44 caliber revolver under his arm and strong-armed people,” said Detective Frank Pergola. “He put words in witnesses’ mouths and put innocent people in jail.”

Eppolito bragged that he routinely returned to the homes of domestic violence cases, after arresting the husband, to have sex with the abused wives, who were, by his description, eager for revenge. “He was sort of bragging about it,” said Grimaldi. “Nobody knew if it was true or not.”

On at least one occasion he interceded on behalf of a car thief, or tried to. When a young street thug brought six cars to a South Brooklyn used car dealership for resale, he mentioned, in passing, that a couple were “tag jobs,” stolen cars with bogus VINs. The dealer recoiled; he would not touch them. The thief told him to relax. The dealer asked him to move the cars off the lot immediately.

When the dealer arrived at the lot the next morning, he found an unmarked police car parked out front. Eppolito got out and asked if they could speak. Listen, Eppolito said, the kid that brought the tag jobs is a good kid. Don’t worry about him. I’ll take care of the auto squad. You’ve got nothing to worry about.

Absolutely not, the dealer said, I won’t do business with him. The dealer suffered no repercussions for his rebuff, but the lesson was clear. “It was known in the neighborhood that Eppolito was for sale,” said Grimaldi. “If you had a problem, he could fix it.”

While investigating a murder in the Sixty-Second Precinct, Detective Frank Pergola mentioned to Eppolito that one of the Romanian gypsies committing petty crime on Bath Avenue was harassing his daughter.

“Oh?” Eppolito asked. “What does he look like?”

“So I told him,” Pergola said. “I figured he was going to rough the guy up. The next time I go to the Sixty-Second Precinct he said, ‘Don’t worry about that kid anymore.’ I say why? He says, ‘He’s not around.’ I said, ‘What the hell did you do? He says, ‘I threw him in the trunk of a car and I took him to Greenwood Cemetery and I threw him down a hill and told him to walk home. So he ain’t never going to bother you again.’ That’s a true story. That’s the way Louie was.”

Eppolito later admitted that if a victim of his vigilante measures filed a grievance with the police department’s Civilian Complaint Review Board for excessive force or abuse of authority, he simply lied his way clear.

* * *

By joining the police department Eppolito had, in theory, broken faith with the family business: he had switched teams. The rules of police conduct required that he distance himself from his family and its deep-seated ties with La Cosa Nostra.

Eppolito had made a nominal effort to resist the gravitational pull of acquaintances and family. In reality, he never truly separated himself. He later admitted to inviting mob pals into his squad car to talk. “I figured who was it going to hurt to stop and commiserate with an old Mustache Pete about his lumbago?” he said.

One night, after Eppolito dined with Fran in Brooklyn, an influential old Genovese capo named Toddo Marino, one of his father’s closest friends, unexpectedly paid the couple’s bill, then crossed the dining room to say hello. Eppolito kissed Marino on both cheeks. He did so unaware that the FBI was watching Marino. Eppolito was, by his account, summoned to the FBI office, on Third Avenue, to explain how he came to be on kissing terms with a Mafia capo.

Eppolito was named for his grandfather, Luigi, a skilled watchmaker and a friend of the 1930s mob boss Lucky Luciano. After his grandfather died at age ninety-one, in 1978, Eppolito saw his uncle Jimmy the Clam for the first time in six years. He was, as Eppolito remembered him, a gentlemanly capo who, unlike Eppolito’s father, rarely raised his voice or spoke coarsely.

“Suddenly this warm feeling kind of washed over me,” Eppolito later wrote. “He looked more like my father than I remembered. They could have been twins. I walked straight over to him, hugged him, kissed him. I almost cried.”

In return, Jimmy teased his nephew, the big-shot detective, for ignoring his relations. In violation of police regulations, Eppolito agreed to drive Fran and the children to visit Jimmy the Clam and his wife, Aunt Dolly, at their large white home tucked behind a black wrought-iron gate a block from the waterfront in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. After their visit, when Eppolito and Fran said goodbye, Jimmy the Clam handed his nephew an envelope. Fran opened it on the drive home: it contained $3,000 in cash and a note: “Take the kids on vacation.”

“I almost drove off the highway,” Eppolito said.

Accepting cash from a capo was a code-red police infraction, but Eppolito could not return the envelope without causing insult, or so he said. He kept the money, and began paying regular visits to talk with his uncle over cups of strong Italian coffee. He did so knowing that Jimmy the Clam, like Toddo Marino, might be under police surveillance. If so, Eppolito would be photographed or recorded in his company. Jimmy the Clam never asked about Eppolito’s investigative work, Eppolito said, and Eppolito never asked about his uncle’s rackets.

Eppolito was unaware that Jimmy the Clam’s considerable influence was waning. As long as seventy-six-year-old Carlo Gambino presided over family operations, Jimmy the Clam had nothing to fear. Gambino was a courtly gray-haired patriarch and for many years the most powerful mobster in America. He was said to be the prototype for Don Corleone of The Godfather. Like the fictional don, Gambino suffered heart failure. He spent the night of October 14, 1976, at his yellow-brick waterfront home in Massapequa, New York, watching the New York Yankees beat the Kansas City Royals with a ninth-inning home run to claim the American League Pennant. Hours later he died of a heart attack, one of the few Mafia family bosses to die of natural causes. His throne passed to his cousin, Paul “Big Paulie” Castellano, whose business card identified him as a meat salesman. His profile was so low that law enforcement agencies knew little about him. He lived in a gaudy Federalist-style home, known as the White House, with his wife, Nina, a pack of guard dogs, and their live-in Colombian maid, Gloria, with whom he conducted an explicit long-term affair. His home stood on the highest elevation in New York City: 410 feet above sea level. The Dutch settlers called it Todt Heuvel, or Death Hill.

With his patron and protector gone, Jimmy the Clam had cause to worry. Castellano, the new boss, was related by marriage to Nino Gaggi, a capo with designs on Jimmy the Clam’s territory. Jimmy the Clam had anticipated the coming conflict. In desperation, he asked for a meeting, or “sit-down,” with the newly enthroned Castellano to complain that one of Gaggi’s men had cheated his son out of $7,000 in a cocaine deal. He also claimed Gaggi was a government informant. He asked for Castellano’s blessing to kill Gaggi.

Castellano prevaricated. Afterward, he privately warned Gaggi to beware of Jimmy the Clam. By doing so, Castellano tacitly gave Gaggi permission to strike back. Word inevitably got back to Jimmy the Clam through the Mafia’s whispered channels: his execution was now inevitable. The only question was when and where.

Gaggi’s opportunity came after Jimmy the Clam’s son, a Gambino soldier known by his childhood nickname, “Jim-Jim,” teamed up with a three-hundred-pound con man named John Ellsworth. With heavy girth and mutton chops, Ellsworth looked like a late-stage Elvis Presley. His twenty-one-year criminal career included more than a dozen charges of passing bad checks, forgery, and grand larceny.

Ellsworth could fast-talk his way into almost anything. In 1969, he stowed away on the Rolling Stones tour of America by posing as a Chrysler agent providing transportation. He then contacted Chrysler, claiming to work for the band. By this trickery Ellsworth came up with free tour buses. He stayed on, city after city. Nobody in the band’s entourage balked when he signed arena leases and arranged security. Nor did he arouse suspicion by speaking for the Rolling Stones after Hells Angels killed four audience members at an Altamont Speedway concert. even though managers and musicians could not recall where he came from or who hired him.

In the mid-1970s, Ellsworth and Jim-Jim formed a bogus charity to purportedly raise money for the International Year of the Child, a United Nations initiative to address starvation and other deprivations. They won endorsements from Senator Edward Kennedy and Hollywood actress Jane Russell, among others.

In reality, the charity was a scam. They solicited donations from labor leaders who would not deny a charity linked to the underworld, and then skimmed the proceeds. They also used the charity to launder income from loan-sharking and drug sales. Meanwhile, Ellsworth and Jim-Jim cruised New York in a chauffeured light blue limousine, stopping at Studio 54 and other night spots.

In December 1977, the two con men cadged invitations to the annual White House Christmas party for the children of Washington’s diplomatic corps. While the kids drank pink punch and ate cookies in the state dining room, Ellsworth and Jim-Jim posed for photos with First Lady Rosalynn Carter by a holly-draped mantelpiece. They told her about their Santa-like plan to distribute gifts to underprivileged kids around the globe.

Seven months later the ABC news program 20/20 reported that Jimmy the Clam’s son had conned the first lady, and that he stole as much as $5 million earmarked for malnourished children. The Associated Press followed with an article published in dozens of newspapers.

The high swindle, and its attendant notoriety, sat poorly with Paul Castellano, the new Gambino boss. Mob rules required that crimes be efficient and discreet to avoid unwanted scrutiny. Now that Jim-Jim had embarrassed the first lady—and earned national headlines—the Gambinos braced for heightened scrutiny. The foolhardy young Jim-Jim had become a liability.

The grievance against Jim-Jim, and by extension his father, sealed their fate. “Just what the hell is happening with Jim-Jim?” Eppolito asked during one of his periodic visits. Jimmy the Clam shook his head. “It’s going to be very bad for us.” He knew that when they came for Jim-Jim, they would come for him, as well. It was only a matter of time.

With Castellano’s blessing, Nino Gaggi assigned the job to his associate, Roy DeMeo, a short, pot-bellied Gambino soldier fifteen years his junior. DeMeo grew up in the working-class Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he started as a teenage loan shark. He had long since moved his family to Massapequa, a Long Island suburb populated by brokers and construction executives, where he led a conventional life of poolside barbecues and afternoon fishing trips on South Oyster Bay. 

By outward appearance, DeMeo could be any suburban dad working the backyard grill. His gut hung over his belt like a sack of potatoes.

In reality, DeMeo headed a crew of young thugs who specialized in stealing luxury cars. With machine-like efficiency, they changed the VINs on hundreds of cars and exported them to wealthy buyers in Kuwait and other Middle Eastern countries.

DeMeo also owned a dilapidated corner bar, the Gemini Lounge, on Flatlands Avenue in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, that doubled as a clubhouse where his young crew drank and played cards. It was also the location of at least seventy-five murders committed with fetishistic precision and planning. Every crime family contains at least one soldier who takes genuine pleasure in killing. For the Gambinos, that man was DeMeo. The murders were so savage, and so numerous, that Castellano urged Gaggi to restrain DeMeo. But Gaggi was reluctant to intercede. DeMeo’s operations were too profitable to suppress.

DeMeo’s killing technique came to be called the Gemini Method. After accepting a murder assignment, he invited his target to the Gemini Lounge for a friendly meeting on some trumped-up subject. With Pabst Blue Ribbon or Four Roses bourbon in hand, the prey unwittingly found himself lured into a back apartment rented to Joey Guglielmo, a tall, gray-complexioned Gambino hit man and DeMeo cousin nicknamed “Dracula.” Guglielmo furnished the apartment with little more than a single mattress, but DeMeo equipped it like a slaughterhouse, complete with knives, ice picks, and saws.

The murders followed the same well-rehearsed course of action: the unsuspecting target walked the length of a hall where a crew member ambushed him and shot him in the head. DeMeo preferred a tidy murder, so the Gemini men immediately wrapped the victim’s head in a turban of towels to stanch the blood while another stabbed him in the heart to stop blood from pulsing from the wound. To avoid staining their clothes, the crew stripped to their underwear.

The half-naked men then disrobed the body and dragged it to a shower where they disemboweled it and hung it upside down to bleed dry, as a hunter would bleed a deer carcass. They often ate dinner with bloodstained hands while the naked body drained in the next room. The New York Daily News later called their procedure “a21 collective derangement.”

After dinner the Gemini crew laid their victims out on a thick plastic swimming pool liner unfurled across Dracula’s living room floor. DeMeo had once worked as a butcher’s assistant. He and his men used butchering techniques to sever sinew, joint, and muscle as they neatly dismembered the body into six parts. They methodically sheared off arms, legs, and heads, as a taxidermist would, and wrapped them in cardboard boxes lined with plastic bags that they discarded among the refuse heaps in the Fountain Avenue dump, a wasteland between the Belt Parkway and Jamaica Bay. DeMeo repeated a saying with impish pleasure: “No body, no crime.”

Jim-Jim’s imprudent breach of Mafia etiquette had earned him, and his father, a trip to the Gemini Lounge. The evening began, as mob assassinations often do, with the arrival of a trusted friend. On the night of October 2, 1979, a fifty-eight-year-old Gambino associate named Peter Piacenti came by the house to pick up Jimmy the Clam and Jim-Jim. Friends called Piacenti “Petey 17” because he once owned a Brooklyn nightclub with a 1717 street address. Jimmy the Clam had sponsored him as a Gambino associate. The two men had a long, warm relationship.

This evening Piacenti posed as an intermediary. He convinced Jimmy the Clam and Jim-Jim to meet with Nino Gaggi to resolve their dispute. Piacenti presented the meeting as no more than a sit-down to clear the air between feuding branches of the family tree. Jimmy the Clam must have suspected the worst, but he had no choice. So the three men—father, son, and friend—drove to a deserted playground behind a white-brick school, Grady High, in Brighton Beach, near Coney Island, where they met Gaggi and DeMeo.

By 9:40 P.M. all five were squeezed into a 1978 Thunderbird driving on a service road beside the Shore Parkway, probably headed to the Gemini Lounge. Jim-Jim drove with Gaggi beside him. Piacenti sat in back between Jimmy the Clam and DeMeo.

Jimmy the Clam knew how trips like this ended. He abruptly told his son to pull over, saying he had to urinate. When the car stopped, Gaggi and DeMeo both pulled guns before Jimmy the Clam could get out. Within seconds Gaggi shot Jim-Jim four times. DeMeo leaned forward, reached across Piacenti, and fired three times into Jimmy the Clam’s head. Father and son died instantly.

Shooting two men in a car parked on a Brighton Beach street was exactly the kind of haphazard killing the Mafia avoided. The three killers could only disperse and hope for the best. DeMeo dropped his gun in a sewer and walked west alone toward Sheepshead Bay. Gaggi and Piacenti walked south, toward the beach.

Bad luck: a blond, baby-faced twenty-year-old from Bensonhurst named Patrick Penny and a girlfriend drove by at the exact moment that a stray bullet fired from within the Thunderbird shattered its windshield. The couple followed Piacenti and Gaggi from a distance. They hailed a cab dropping a passenger a quarter mile from the crime scene. They asked the driver, a man named Paul Roder, to radio the police.

As it happened, Roder had no need to call. He was an off-duty Housing Authority police sergeant. Penny told him that two shooters were walking toward Coney Island Avenue. Roder intercepted them a block away. He pulled his cab up to block their way, opened the driver-side door, and ducked behind it as a shield with his service revolver in hand. He identified himself and called for them to stop. Gaggi pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and fired. Roder fired back, striking Gaggi’s chest. A second shot hit Piacenti in the leg, severing an artery. An ambulance took both men to Coney Island Hospital, where they refused to answer police questions.

Five months later Penny testified against Gaggi and Piacenti, though he lost a measure of credibility by admitting to more than a hundred burglaries and car thefts—a prodigious record for a twenty-year-old. The jury acquitted both men of murder charges after the mob bribed a juror. They were, however, found guilty of lesser charges.

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office sent Penny into protective custody in Florida, but he refused to stay longer than two months. By May 13, 1980, he was drinking with friends at Ryan’s, a dive bar in Sheepshead Bay while Roy DeMeo and an accomplice waited outside. At 2 A.M. Penny put ten dollars on the bar to pay for drinks. He told his friends that he was going to fetch something from his Jeep. He was shot to death moments later.

* * *

In the early morning hours of October 2, 1979, Eppolito was at his precinct house preparing for the most prestigious assignment of his ten-year police career. At 9:15 A.M. Pope John Paul II would land at LaGuardia Airport. Eppolito’s exemplary arrest record had earned him a place among the NYPD honor guard escorting the pope as he traveled to the United Nations, an Upper East Side lunch, St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, St. Charles Borromeo Church in Harlem, a Bronx high school, and, finally, a mass at Yankee Stadium. Eppolito grew up among criminals, but he was still a Catholic. “I22 was somewhat overwhelmed knowing that I would be able to see [the pope],” he said, “even if it just meant trotting alongside his armored car.”

Eppolito’s wife, Fran, phoned the precinct house at 5 A.M. Minutes earlier she had received a frantic call from his aunt Dolly. Detectives had woken her with shattering news: patrolmen had found her husband, Jimmy the Clam, and son, Jim-Jim, shot to death in a Thunderbird parked out by the Shore Parkway. Father and son had not returned home, but Aunt Dolly distrusted the detectives. She wanted Eppolito to find out what happened.

“I23 knew in Louie’s mind he had finally found a father figure again,” Fran said, referring to his uncle Jimmy. “And when that call came in from Aunt Dolly, I was heartbroken for him. . . . After all those years of hating his father, hating what this family stood for, for this to happen just as they had gotten close . . .”

man was DeMeo. The murders were so savage, and so numerous, that Castellano urged Gaggi to restrain DeMeo. But Gaggi was reluctant to intercede. DeMeo’s operations were too profitable to suppress.

DeMeo’s killing technique came to be called the Gemini Method. After accepting a murder assignment, he invited his target to the Gemini Lounge for a friendly meeting on some trumped-up subject. With Pabst Blue Ribbon or Four Roses bourbon in hand, the prey unwittingly found himself lured into a back apartment rented to Joey Guglielmo, a tall, gray-complexioned Gambino hit man and DeMeo cousin nicknamed “Dracula.” Guglielmo furnished the apartment with little more than a single mattress, but DeMeo equipped it like a slaughterhouse, complete with knives, ice picks, and saws.

The murders followed the same well-rehearsed course of action: the unsuspecting target walked the length of a hall where a crew member ambushed him and shot him in the head. DeMeo preferred a tidy murder, so the Gemini men immediately wrapped the victim’s head in a turban of towels to stanch the blood while another stabbed him in the heart to stop blood from pulsing from the wound. To avoid staining their clothes, the crew stripped to their underwear.

The half-naked men then disrobed the body and dragged it to a shower where they disemboweled it and hung it upside down to bleed dry, as a hunter would bleed a deer carcass. They often ate dinner with bloodstained hands while the naked body drained in the next room. The New York Daily News later called their procedure “a collective derangement.”

After dinner the Gemini crew laid their victims out on a thick plastic swimming pool liner unfurled across Dracula’s living room floor. DeMeo had once worked as a butcher’s assistant. He and his men used butchering techniques to sever sinew, joint, and muscle as they neatly dismembered the body into six parts. They methodically sheared off arms, legs, and heads, as a taxidermist would, and wrapped them in cardboard boxes lined with plastic bags that they discarded among the refuse heaps in the Fountain Avenue dump, a wasteland between the Belt Parkway and Jamaica Bay. DeMeo repeated a saying with impish pleasure: “No body, no crime.”

Jim-Jim’s imprudent breach of Mafia etiquette had earned him, and his father, a trip to the Gemini Lounge. The evening began, as mob assassinations often do, with the arrival of a trusted friend. On the night of October 2, 1979, a fifty-eight-year-old Gambino associate named Peter Piacenti came by the house to pick up Jimmy the Clam and Jim-Jim. Friends called Piacenti “Petey 17” because he once owned a Brooklyn nightclub with a 1717 street address. Jimmy the Clam had sponsored him as a Gambino associate. The two men had a long, warm relationship.

This evening Piacenti posed as an intermediary. He convinced Jimmy the Clam and Jim-Jim to meet with Nino Gaggi to resolve their dispute. Piacenti presented the meeting as no more than a sit-down to clear the air between feuding branches of the family tree. Jimmy the Clam must have suspected the worst, but he had no choice. So the three men—father, son, and friend—drove to a deserted playground behind a white-brick school, Grady High, in Brighton Beach, near Coney Island, where they met Gaggi and DeMeo.

By 9:40 P.M. all five were squeezed into a 1978 Thunderbird driving on a service road beside the Shore Parkway, probably headed to the Gemini Lounge. Jim-Jim drove with Gaggi beside him. Piacenti sat in back between Jimmy the Clam and DeMeo.

Jimmy the Clam knew how trips like this ended. He abruptly told his son to pull over, saying he had to urinate. When the car stopped, Gaggi and DeMeo both pulled guns before Jimmy the Clam could get out. Within seconds Gaggi shot Jim-Jim four times. DeMeo leaned forward, reached across Piacenti, and fired three times into Jimmy the Clam’s head. Father and son died instantly.

Shooting two men in a car parked on a Brighton Beach street was exactly the kind of haphazard killing the Mafia avoided. The three killers could only disperse and hope for the best. DeMeo dropped his gun in a sewer and walked west alone toward Sheepshead Bay. Gaggi and Piacenti walked south, toward the beach.

Bad luck: a blond, baby-faced twenty-year-old from Bensonhurst named Patrick Penny and a girlfriend drove by at the exact moment that a stray bullet fired from within the Thunderbird shattered its windshield. The couple followed Piacenti and Gaggi from a distance. They hailed a cab dropping a passenger a quarter mile from the crime scene. They asked the driver, a man named Paul Roder, to radio the police.

As it happened, Roder had no need to call. He was an off-duty Housing Authority police sergeant. Penny told him that two shooters were walking toward Coney Island Avenue. Roder intercepted them a block away. He pulled his cab up to block their way, opened the driver-side door, and ducked behind it as a shield with his service revolver in hand. He identified himself and called for them to stop. Gaggi pulled out a .38-caliber revolver and fired. Roder fired back, striking Gaggi’s chest. A second shot hit Piacenti in the leg, severing an artery. An ambulance took both men to Coney Island Hospital, where they refused to answer police questions.

Five months later Penny testified against Gaggi and Piacenti, though he lost a measure of credibility by admitting to more than a hundred burglaries and car thefts—a prodigious record for a twenty-year-old. The jury acquitted both men of murder charges after the mob bribed a juror. They were, however, found guilty of lesser charges.

The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office sent Penny into protective custody in Florida, but he refused to stay longer than two months. By May 13, 1980, he was drinking with friends at Ryan’s, a dive bar in Sheepshead Bay while Roy DeMeo and an accomplice waited outside. At 2 A.M. Penny put ten dollars on the bar to pay for drinks. He told his friends that he was going to fetch something from his Jeep. He was shot to death moments later.

* * *

In the early morning hours of October 2, 1979, Eppolito was at his precinct house preparing for the most prestigious assignment of his ten-year police career. At 9:15 A.M. Pope John Paul II would land at LaGuardia Airport. Eppolito’s exemplary arrest record had earned him a place among the NYPD honor guard escorting the pope as he traveled to the United Nations, an Upper East Side lunch, St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, St. Charles Borromeo Church in Harlem, a Bronx high school, and, finally, a mass at Yankee Stadium. Eppolito grew up among criminals, but he was still a Catholic. “I was somewhat overwhelmed knowing that I would be able to see [the pope],” he said, “even if it just meant trotting alongside his armored car.”

Eppolito’s wife, Fran, phoned the precinct house at 5 A.M. Minutes earlier she had received a frantic call from his aunt Dolly. Detectives had woken her with shattering news: patrolmen had found her husband, Jimmy the Clam, and son, Jim-Jim, shot to death in a Thunderbird parked out by the Shore Parkway. Father and son had not returned home, but Aunt Dolly distrusted the detectives. She wanted Eppolito to find out what happened.

“I knew in Louie’s mind he had finally found a father figure again,” Fran said, referring to his uncle Jimmy. “And when that call came in from Aunt Dolly, I was heartbroken for him. . . . After all those years of hating his father, hating what this family stood for, for this to happen just as they had gotten close . . .”

Detective Joe Piraino was typing up a report on the shooting when Eppolito walked into the Sixty-Second Precinct. “Eppolito was wailing,” Piraino said. “‘They took everybody from me, they took everybody from me.’ I was stunned because the victim was a relative of Eppolito’s and it would be considered a conflict of interest. He didn’t belong there.”

On a normal news day, a Mafia double murder would earn front-page headlines, but Gaggi and DeMeo, by accident or design, chose to kill Jimmy the Clam and Jim-Jim when the pope’s visit dominated the news. The New York Post published a short item on page fifteen. The New York Daily News ignored the murders entirely.

Eppolito had time to identify the bodies before joining the pope at LaGuardia Airport. In the cold of the examination room, he stood beside the two dead men covered in sheets. Tags affixed to their toes identified them as “James Eppolito, Jr.” and “James Eppolito.” He pulled back Jim-Jim’s sheet first. “It was nothing I hadn’t seen before in twelve years on the job,” he said. “But all that blood, and Jim-Jim’s brain blasted away.”

His uncle was next. “Uncle Jimmy’s face was just absolutely destroyed. His jaw and bottom lip were totally gone, torn off, giving him this long, buck-toothed look. . . . I cleaned him as best I could, combing his hair and washing the blood off his face. But water kept pouring out of his eyes, like he was crying.”

That night, after the pope stood on the Yankee Stadium infield with his right hand raised in blessing to eighty thousand worshippers, Eppolito returned to his Brooklyn station house and sat on a bench. It had been a long day weighted with tragedy and transcendence. According to Eppolito, two agents from the FBI’s Organized Crime Division visited him at home that night. He took it as an insult, as if he might have been involved in his uncle’s death.

“From that moment, I knew I could never truly be trusted by the Police Department,” Eppolito later said. “I had family members who were also Family members. Yet, at least the mob guys I knew treated me with respect.” He felt as if he no longer belonged among the police, as if “the badge I wore was somehow a mistake.”

Eppolito had repudiated his family after his father died. Now, twelve years later, his uncle’s death returned him to the fold. At the wake, among cigar smoke and aftershave, he felt the pull of old allegiances. When Eppolito had shaken all the hands and exchanged the obligatory greetings, he and Fran made their way to the door. Eppolito stopped for a parting word with his cousin, Frank Santora, a big-shouldered mob subordinate with thick hands, a perpetual tan, and an abundance of satiny black hair swept back in a well-oiled wave. He was smooth, but tough. At the time, Eppolito had no way of knowing that his cousin would enable his darkest impulses and set his life on a new course.

Over the following weeks Fran noticed her husband’s mannerisms change.

Eppolito underwent a conversion of sorts the night of the wake, as if Jimmy the Clam had posthumously beckoned him back to the world he had left behind—the world of his father, Fat the Gangster, and his grandfather Luigi. He had never seemed particularly Italian, but began to drink double espressos and say salud or grazie as he raised a glass of chianti. He gestured with his hands in the animated manner of a paisan bickering over politics. His musical taste had always favored doo-wop. Now he took Fran to hear nightclub singers perform the Italian classics “Mala Femmena” and “Scapricciatiello.” For the first time, he appeared to take pride in the world of his ancestry.

* * *

As Eppolito’s family life changed, so too did his work life. In the mid-1970s New York’s fiscal crisis decimated the NYPD budget. The downturn shrank the force by more than five thousand. For four years the department hired no recruits. The police academy sat empty. Meanwhile, the streets deteriorated. Crime reached historic levels. Women carried Mace in their purses. Garish swaths of graffiti-covered subway cars. Dog walkers heard gunshots in parks. Prostitutes and junkies expired on the street.

In May 1980, eight months after Jimmy the Clam died, the fiscal shortfall forced the department to consolidate. Amid the shakeup, Eppolito was asked to submit the names of three precincts he would welcome for reassignment. He had worked twelve years on the crime-heavy streets and housing projects of Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant. He now went to the Sixty-Second Precinct, located on Bath Avenue in Bensonhurst, where the streets smelled of Old World delicacies. On Eighteenth Avenue, specialty pasta stores peddled homemade cavatelli. Wheels of Parmigiano cheese as big as tractor tires hung in salumeria windows beside strings of dried sausage. Bakers carried trays of biscotti and pignoli cookies while greeting customers in bursts of Italian. Pizzerias baked square pies in wood-burning ovens in the Sicilian manner. Sinatra sang from car radios. Stone-faced Mafia associates cruised in Cutlass Supremes with St. Christopher medals on dashboards and baseball bats stowed in their trunks.

In food shops and sidewalks, men greeted Eppolito by name and shook his hand. Hey, hayadooin? To the goombahs he was more than a detective: he was Fat the Gangster’s son. They waved him in for a free espresso or beer and addressed him in the South Brooklyn manner, full of sarcasm and slang punctuated by slicing hand gestures.

More often than not Eppolito accepted their offers. He knew they might be under police surveillance, but no longer cared. For better or worse, these were his people. “I felt like I was home,” he said.

Copyright © 2025 by Michael Cannell. All rights reserved.