The 25th of December, 1986, 17th Street, Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, Christmas evening. A 26-year-old telephone company worker named Nicholas Guido has just finished his mother Pauline’s homemade manicotti. His uncle Tony is visiting. Guido steps outside to show his uncle something, a brand new red Nissan Maxima, his Christmas gift to himself, parked at the curb outside the family home.

His mother is inside washing dishes. The plates are still warm. Hitmen hired by a Lucesy under boss pull up to the curb. They shoot Nicholas Guido to death in front of his uncle and his car. His mother runs outside. She runs to the car. Her son is sitting up at the wheel. She reaches for his hand. His fingertips are cold.

He died in the seconds it took her to get from the kitchen to the street. Nicholas Guido had no mob ties whatsoever. He was a telephone installer whose name appeared on the fire department hiring list. He had never been arrested. He had never been in a room with any member of any crime family.

He died on Christmas evening on a Brooklyn sidewalk because two NYPD detectives ran his name through a law enforcement database, got his address wrong, and handed it to a mob under boss as a kill order. His father, Gabe, stopped eating after that Christmas, stopped caring. His brother Michael said later he died the same day as Nikki.

It just took him 3 years to stop breathing. Both are buried in Greenwood Cemetery, three blocks from where Nicholas Guido was shot. Nicholas Guido’s murder was the work of detectives Louis Epalito and Steven Carakappa of the New York City Police Department. two decorated, sworn active duty law enforcement officers who from 1985 to 1990 simultaneously collected their NYPD paychecks and a $4,000 per month mob retainer ran a parallel career as contract killers, used their badges to pull victims into fake traffic stops, used their NYPD database access to locate targets for execution, and participated in or facilitated eight confirmed confirmed murders while their supervisor approved their expense reports. They retired. They moved to Las Vegas. They lived in houses on the same street. They were not arrested until

March 2005. Epileto was 56. Caracappa was 62. Nicholas Guido had been dead for 19 years. This is their complete documented story and it is the most thoroughly documented case of police corruption in the history of the New York City Police Department. Louisie Epalito was born the 22nd of July 1948 in East Flatbush, Brooklyn into a world that made everything that followed feel to him completely inevitable.

His father, Ralph Epalito, was a Gambino crime family bookie known on the street as Fats the Gangster. His paternal uncle James Epileto and his cousin James Epileto Jr. were both made members of the Gambino family, assigned to the crew of Capo Nino Gagi. Growing up in East Flatbush, Epito became personally acquainted with multiple mobsters as a matter of daily neighborhood life.

His uncle and cousin were eventually murdered by Gambino soldier Roy Deo and Capo Nino Gagi with the permission of boss Paul Castellano killed by the same family they served. The specific mob logic of men who knew too much or took too much. Louie Epito joins the NYPD in 1969 at age 20.

On his application, he is asked to disclose any relatives in organized crime. He writes,”None. This lie is not discovered for years. He rises through the department accumulating commendations. Medal of valor, merit medal, cop of the month, exceptional merit citation, departmental recognition. By the time he publishes his 1992 memoir, he claims to be the 11th most decorated officer in NYPD history.

He is a large man, heavy set, dark-haired, physically imposing. He plays a small role in Good Fellas in 1990 as a Gambino Cappo named Fat Andy. His real name, Epilito, is in the credits of a Martin Scorsesei mob film while he is simultaneously on the payroll of the Lucesi crime family. Steven Carakappa was born the 12th of November 1942 in Brooklyn.

He joins the NYPD in 1969. the same year as Epilito. He is Epilito’s physical opposite, lean, small, precise. Described by Anthony Caso in a 1998 interview with 60 Minutes as the little small skinny guy, he rises methodically through the department, making detective in 1979, eventually becoming a founding member of the organized crime homicide unit within the NYPD major case squad.

The specific unit whose mission is to build cases against the New York mob. The unit that Carakappa helped create and design is the unit he uses to feed intelligence directly to a Lucesi underboss for 5 years. By 1985, federal authorities already recognize both men as associates of the New York mafia.

In 1983, Epilito had been investigated after a report that he passed NYPD intelligence files to Rosario Gambino, a distant relative of the Gambino boss. He was cleared. The investigation produced nothing. The red flag disappears into the department’s filing system. In 1985, Anthony Gaspipep Caso makes a decision that will define the next decade of New York organized crime history.

Anthony Casso was born the 21st of May 1942 in Brooklyn, the son of a long shoreman, the product of the South Brooklyn boy street gang, the protetéé of Lucesi captain Christopher Christy Tick Fenari. By the early 1980s, he is the Lucesi family’s underboss, operating alongside boss Victoriao Vikamuso with a documented capacity for violence that makes him genuinely feared, even within an organization that is not squeamish about violence.

The FBI’s case files attribute involvement in 36 murders to Casso personally across his career. He is not a man who uses fear as a management tool. He uses actual murder as a management tool and fear is simply the byproduct. In 1985, Caso learns something that changes his operational thinking permanently.

There are two active duty detectives in the NYPD who can be bought, not merely persuaded to look the other way. report, monthly salary, murder contracts, access to the NYPD’s confidential files, its witness lists, its ongoing investigations, its informant identities. He calls them his crystal ball. for $4,000 per month.

Divided between Epolito and Caracappa through a go-between named Burton Kaplan, a career criminal and Lucesi associate who functions as the payment courier and the operational middleman for the entire arrangement. Casso has a permanent window into the law enforcement apparatus pursuing him.

Kaplan’s role is deliberately structured to keep Caso’s name off the direct transactions. Kaplan collects the $4,000 monthly payment from Casso and delivers it to Epalito and Caracappa in cash. When Casso needs a name run through the NYPD database, the request travels through Kaplan. When Casso wants a murder contract fulfilled, the offer travels through Kaplan.

Neither Casso nor the detectives are ever in the same documented room at the same time, except once in a Toys R Us parking lot in October 1986. When Epileto and Carakappa stand at the entrance, providing security, while a man they have just kidnapped is delivered in a trunk to the man they are paid to serve.

The man in the trunk is James Jimmy Hyel. September 6, 1986. A hit team of Gambino Associates ambushes Anthony Casso in the Flatlands neighborhood of Brooklyn. Casso is shot multiple times. He survives. He does not call a doctor or a hospital. He goes to ground and begins the process of identifying and eliminating everyone involved in the attempt on his life.

He instructs Kaplan to instruct Epilito and Caracappa. Find them. The two detectives run the names through the NYPD intelligence system and return with a list of names and addresses. One name is James Hyell, a low-level Gambino associate who was part of the hit crew. Casso does not want Hyell killed.

He wants him delivered alive, capable of being questioned. He wants the names of everyone who ordered and approved the attempt on his life before he puts a bullet in H Highell’s head. Epilito and Carakappa take the job for $35,000 plus a $5,000 bonus. Casso adds voluntarily. They knock on the door of Hyidell’s mother’s Staten Island home with their NYPD badges.

They ask her where her son is. They find him in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. They approach him as active duty law enforcement officers on official business. Hyel, a Gambino associate, has no particular reason to suspect that two NYPD detectives are about to deliver him to the man he tried to kill. He is handcuffed, locked in the trunk of a car provided by Casso and driven to a Toys R Us parking lot in Brooklyn where Kaplan takes the keys.

Epilito and Carakappa pull their car to the entrance and wait. While Caso, standing in the parking lot, receives the car keys. Caso tells Kaplan he recognizes the two men at the entrance. Kaplan refuses to confirm their identities. On October 18, 1986, in a basement in Brooklyn, Anthony Casso has James Hyell strapped to a chair.

He tortures him. He shoots him repeatedly, using him as documented accounts describe it as target practice, pumping bullet after bullet into non-fatal areas of his body. Hyel tells Caso what he wants to know. He names Nicholas Guido. He names Edward Leno. He names Bartholomew Boreello. When Caso has extracted every name available to him, he shoots Hyidell in the head.

Jimmy Hyell is shot 14 times. He begs Caso to kill him before the final bullet. His body has never been found. The crystal ball is operational and it has just produced its first list of targets. The first name is Nicholas Guido, not the two sixyear old telephone installer in Windsor Terrace with the new Red Maxima.

The Gambino associate Nikki Guido who was part of the Caso hit crew. a different man with the same first name, the same last name, and a residence in the same general area of Brooklyn. Casso asks Kaplan to get the address and a photograph from the police database. The detectives charge him $4,000 for the information.

Casso, who has just paid a $40,000 kidnapping fee, decides $4,000 for an address is greedy and refuses to pay. He finds his own way to the target. His hit team tracks a small red sports car. They record the license plate. Casso asks the crystal ball to run the plate. The plate comes back registered to a Nicholas Guido.

The address is a few neighborhoods away from the court street area where they have been looking. Casso gives the address to his hit team. They set up on the house. They see a young man getting into a red car that matches the description. They move. On December 25, 1986, they killed the telephone installer instead of the mob associate. The address was wrong.

The man was wrong. Nicholas Guido, the Gambino associate, is alive. Nicholas Guido, the telephone installer with the new car and his mother’s homemade manicotti in his stomach, is dead on a Brooklyn sidewalk on Christmas night. Pauline Pippetone runs outside to find her son sitting up at the wheel of his car. She reaches for his hand.

His fingertips are cold. The detectives who provided the address that produced this death are still on duty. The following Monday morning, they report to the 62nd precinct. They sign the attendance log. Epalito and Carakappa continue working both sides of the law with a documented operational fluency that investigators will spend the next two decades trying to fully map.

Each name they provide to Kaplan carries a potential death sentence. Each name they hand over is a human being whose location, habits, and associations are now known to the most violent underboss in New York organized crime. John Otto Hyel, an informant in the government’s investigation of the bypass gang, a safe cracking crew.

The detectives identify him as a suspected cooperator and hand his name to Casso. Hyel is murdered on October 8th, 1987. Jimmy Bishop, an official in the Painters Union Local, 37, cooperating with the Manhattan DA’s office on a corruption investigation. The detectives identify him as a suspected cooperator.

Bishop is murdered on May 17, 1990. Bruno Fatiola, a Lucesi member Casso, suspects of being an FBI informant. Epilito delivers a message to Fatiola before his murder to create a false impression of safety and prevent flight. On August 30, 1990, Fatiola is murdered. Federal agents who examine the crime scene find a stuffed canary jammed in his mouth.

A mob message directed at every other informant who might be considering cooperation. The message is signed by the same two detectives who helped locate him. The bypass gang grand jury indictment. Casso and another senior Lucesi soldier are named as defendants. The detectives warned Casso the indictment is coming.

Both men evade capture for an extended period. Israel Greenwald, not a mob target at all, a diamond dealer being used by Kaplan in a Treasury bill theft scheme. A man Kaplan fears might talk to prosecutors. Epilito and Carakappa pull Greenwald over in a fake traffic stop, kidnap him, drive him to a garage, tie him up, and put a bullet in the back of his head.

They received $25,000. His body is buried under a concrete floor in a Brooklyn garage. It remains there for nearly two decades until a garage worker interviewed after the 2005 arrest tells investigators exactly where to dig. Then November 6th, 1992, the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. Gambino Captain Edward Eddie Lino has been on Caso’s list since his name came out of Hyell’s mouth in that Brooklyn basement in October 1986.

Casso has been patient. He has other names to work through first. By 1992, he is ready for Leno. He offers the detective $65,000, a contract fee that dwarfs the $4,000 monthly retainer, and signals the specific importance of the target. They accept. They follow Lo’s Mercedes from his social club.

They are driving an unmarked police car. Caracappa activates the lights. Lo pulls over on the belt parkway because the car behind him with the flashing lights is an NYPD vehicle. And there is no reason in a world where police are not mobb hitmen to do anything other than pull over. Caracappa walks to the driver’s window.

He shoots Lo at close range. They leave. Lo dies in his car on the belt parkway. The unmarked police vehicle returns to the precinct parking lot. The total paid to Epalito and Caracappa across the entire documented operation $375,000. For that money, Casso received eight murders, an attempted murder, the identities of multiple FBI informants whose names became death sentences, advanced warning of two federal indictments, and the NYPD’s full intelligence database made available on request. The entire operation begins to collapse, not through investigative brilliance, but through the specific combination of ego, arrogance, and a televised confession that only Anthony Casso could manage. In 1992, Louis Epalito retires from the NYPD. He publishes his memoir titled Mafia Cop,

the story of an honest cop whose family was the mob. The book contains photographs of Epolito and Caracappa. Caso sees the book. He tells Kaplan, “These are the two men from the Toys R Us Us parking lot the night Hyel was delivered.” Kaplan refuses to confirm their identities. The book sits on shelves in bookshops and airport news stands in a world where nobody who reads it knows that its author is actively employed by a Lucesi underboss.

In 1994, Caso facing charges related to the 36 murders he has admitted to attempts to enter the federal witness protection program. He offers the FBI the story of his two NYPD detectives. He gives them every detail. The FBI cannot prosecute on Caso’s word alone. He is, in the documented assessment of the federal prosecutors who evaluate his offer, a man with too much baggage to put before a jury.

He is eventually kicked out of witness protection in 1997 when his testimony begins contradicting documented facts. The case file goes cold. By the mid 1990s, both Epilito and Kakappa have retired and moved to Las Vegas. They buy homes on the same street. Epilito sells cars at an Infinity dealership where he entertains fellow salesman by showing them crime scene photographs from his NYPD career.

Carakappa gets a job as a correctional officer at the Las Vegas Women’s Correctional Facility. In 2003, an NYPD detective named Tommy Dades, who has been looking at unsolved cases, pulls the H Highell file. He finds something that should have ended this story 17 years earlier. Betty Hyell, James Hyidell’s mother, the woman who answered the door when two detectives came looking for her son in October 1986, is still alive.

She has never been asked a simple question. Dads asks it. She identifies Epilito and Caracappa as the two men who came to her Staten Island door asking for her son on the morning he was kidnapped and murdered. In 2004, Kaplan, who has been in federal prison for nearly eight years keeping his mouth shut about everything, decides he is done keeping his mouth shut.

He agrees to testify. He sits on the stand for 4 days at trial in 2006 and describes every payment, every message, every murder contract in documented chronological detail. Also in 2004, the electronic record of Caracappa’s November 11, the specific NYPD database query that produced an address and photograph of a Nicholas Guido surfaces in the internal records investigation.

Carakappa left a digital trail in 1986 that nobody looked at for 18 years. On the 9th of March 2005, DEA and FBI agents converge on Pieros, an Italian restaurant in Las Vegas. Epilito and Carakappa are arrested as they walk through the door for dinner. They are charged with racketeering, conspiracy covering murders, kidnappings, witness tampering, obstruction of justice, money laundering, and narcotics dealing spanning from the mid 1980s to the mid 2000s.

A federal jury convicts them on the 6th of April, 2006. Judge Jack Weinstein, presiding over the sentencing hearing, addresses the two men. He calls it the most heinous series of crimes ever tried in this courthouse. On the 6th of March, 2009, Epoito is sentenced to life in prison plus 100 years. Caracappa receives life plus 80 years.

The second circuit upholds both convictions on the 23rd of July 2010. Caracappa dies of cancer in federal prison on the 8th of April 2017. He is 74 years old. Epilito dies in federal custody at a Tucson hospital on the 3rd of November 2019. He is 71 years old. He dies in custody on the same day of the year he joined the NYPD 50 years earlier.