Friends of the Family by Tommy Dades

wasn’t going to convict the two cops. He offered whatever cooperation he could give them; he had absolutely nothing to lose. In fact, at one point he told Dades that his office was time-barred from bringing a RICO case against the cops. And he also suggested that they add Bill Oldham to their team. Not only did Oldham know the case, he pointed out, but he knew how to maneuver inside the federal system. As an investigator for the U.S. Attorney’s office he had routine access to federal facilities that state investigators did not have. He could save everybody a lot of time.
    It made sense. Bill Oldham became the fourth member of the team.
    The question of jurisdiction continued to bother Vecchione. While he didn’t say anything, he didn’t trust the Feds to stay out of the case, particularly if it looked like Brooklyn might be able to get an indictment. Two cops indicted for committing murders for a Mafia capo? That was going to make big bold headlines. Big bold headlines make careers. Mark Feldman was an ambitious guy.
    But both Dades and Ponzi assured him that Feldman’s word was gold. Better than gold. Besides, they told Mike, Feldman knew and accepted the fact that the U.S. Attorney couldn’t bring murder charges against the cops. “Why don’t you go ahead and speak to Mark yourself?” Ponzi suggested to Vecchione. “You guys are the lawyers; get it all squared away.”
    “So I called Feldman,” Vecchione remembers. “This was business, and we’re both professionals. We started talking about the case and he told me, ‘Look, I think we’re time-barred. The acts look like they’re too far in the past for us to be able to make a case. We don’t have any indication that these guys have been involved in any kind of continuing criminal enterprise, so it’s a single murder. We don’t have a statute for that. So go ahead, knock yourself out.’
    “‘That’s great, Mark,’ I told him.
    “‘Just one thing though,’ he added. It was almost as an afterthought. ‘If it turns out that somehow we can make a RICO out of this, you guys can keep the Hydell murder, but we’ll do the RICO.’ That sounded reasonable to me. I knew that Feldman was protecting his claim, but he didn’t sound optimistic.
    “‘All right,’ I agreed. ‘As long as we can do the murder.’”
    That was the plan. The state would go first, prosecuting the Jimmy Hydell murder, and then, if the Feds could find a RICO charge in there somewhere, the state would then hand over all its evidence and the federal government would proceed. It was an easy deal for Feldman to make. As it might have been described on the streets, it was nothing for nothing.
    When Mike hung up he figured maybe he was wrong, maybe Tommy and Ponzi were right, maybe the Feds weren’t going to get involved. From nailing the two cops to jailing them, this was going to be all Brooklyn. But Vecchione still had this feeling, this little legal itch that just wouldn’t go away, that it wasn’t going to be as easy as it sounded.
    Besides, Feldman had already proved his word was good. The day after his initial conversation with Tommy Dades, he handed over the investigative material the Feds had in storage. Less than an hour after Dades had parked his car in front of the U.S. Attorney’s office at 1 Pierrepont Street he was trying to figure out how to fit five very large boxes in his trunk and backseat. He had no idea what he might find inside those boxes. Apparently the Feds had taken Casso very seriously, at least until he’d threatened the Gotti conviction with his accusations against Sammy Gravano. So it was likely there was a lot of valuable information in those boxes in the back of his car. Right then, right at the beginning, before Tommy carried those boxes up to the eighteenth floor and opened them up, he felt like a little kid on Christmas morning, waiting excitedly to see what surprises he would find.
    A lot of cops aren’t great readers. It’s a job that