Friends of the Family by Tommy Dades Page A

promises action; it doesn’t require going into the office, sitting behind a desk, and working through a pile of papers. So much of the time the type of kid who decides to become a cop is looking for action more than intellectual challenge. Even on the job there are numerous assignments that don’t require a lot of reading.
    Anybody looking at Tommy’s background would have figured he wasn’t much of a reader. He came from a broken home and spent as much time on the streets as in school. He was never a great student; he’d droppedout of school after his freshman year in high school to join the marines—although instead of taking the oath he’d ended up working in Vegas. But it turned out that Dades was an avid reader. That was just another one of those little surprises about Tommy Dades.
    That came from his grandfather. His name was Eddie Schwartz—“Blackie” they called him on the loading docks of the New York Daily News, where he worked for most of the forty years he spent with the paper, because of his dark complexion. Blackie Schwartz was a self-educated guy from the Lower East Side who ended up foreman, and every night he’d bring home a fresh-smelling copy of the “night owl,” the first edition, for his grandson. The Daily News wrote about the two things that most interested Tommy, crime and boxing. Tommy read anything to do with organized crime, anything. When the other kids were reading books about sports heroes or the children’s classics, Tommy was reading the biography of Monk Eastman, a tough guy from the nineteenth-century Five Points gang that once owned the city. Rather than collecting baseball cards, Tommy kept stories about mob guys. Learning about organized crime was his hobby long before it became his profession.
    But he didn’t stop when it became his profession. He continued to read everything he could find about organized crime and remembered it, and in his mind he made the connections. Tommy was a great talker; he collected informants like Trump collected rent. Few men who haven’t had a mass card burned in their hand and taken the oath of omertà knew more about organized crime than Tommy Dades.
    But as much as Dades loved being on the streets, it was this ability to mine documents that made him a great detective. He’d read piles of documents to figure out how the pieces fit. He’d find the anomalies that other detectives had overlooked. He remembered the names and the connections and the crimes that went with them. He had the necessary patience to sit and read and the talent to understand every word of it.
    To the five boxes of dusty material he’d carried into the war room he added his own collection of clippings. And then he opened the boxes and went to work learning about the incredible betrayal of Detectives Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa. If there was a nugget in the piles of papers and tapes and transcriptions that would enable him to put those guys away, he was going to find it.
    When Dades sat down at the very beginning of the investigation the investigators already knew quite a bit. They knew that officially Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa had both retired from the NYPD with their full pensions, meaning that any outstanding problems they may have had were resolved: Their records were clean. They knew that Eppolito claimed in his book to have been the eleventh-most-decorated officer in department history. He also wrote about participating in several gunfights. Describing the first one, in which he was one of several officers who killed a bank robber, he claimed, “I learned something about myself during that gunfight. I not only had the capacity to kill, I had the capacity to forget about it, to not let it bother me.”
    That’s strange, Dades thought. According to Eppolito’s records cited in the federal indictment, while on the job he hadn’t been involved in a single shooting.
    They knew that Louis Eppolito had come from a mob family, that three members