Two former New York police detectives convicted of moonlighting as contract killers in eight mob hits were sentenced on Friday to life in prison after telling a judge they were innocent.
“I was a hard-working cop,” Louis Eppolito told US District Judge Jack Weinstein in federal court in Brooklyn. “I never hurt anybody. I never kidnapped anybody. ... I never did any of this.”
Eppolito was sentenced to life in prison for his conspiracy conviction plus 100 years for various other offenses including money laundering, and fined US$4.7 million. Stephen Caracappa received a life term plus 80 years and a US$4.2 million fine.
Eppolito, 61, and Caracappa, 67, had worked as partners on the police force and logged a combined 44 years on the job. They were found guilty of secretly being on the payroll of Luchese underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso starting in the 1980s.
Prosecutors said the pair used their police credentials to make traffic stops that ended with the driver killed. They also said the officers kidnapped a man suspected in an attempted mob hit against Casso and turned him over to a mobster responsible for 36 slayings.
The former detectives also were accused of providing bad information that led to the mistaken-identity murder of an innocent man killed as his mother washed the dishes following a Christmas Day family dinner.
Eppolito and Caracappa were arrested during a 2005 drug sting in Las Vegas, where they had retired.
The case had been marked by legal twists, including the judge’s 2006 decision to throw out a conviction after finding that the statute of limitations had expired on the slayings. An appeals court reversed the decision last year, clearing the way for the sentencing.
US Attorney Benton Campbell said in a statement that he hoped the sentences would bring closure “for the families of the victims of these defendants’ unspeakable crimes and for the citizens of the city whose trust they betrayed.”
DOUBLE-MURDER CASE: The officer told the dispatcher he would check the locations of the callers, but instead headed to a pizzeria, remaining there for about an hour A New Jersey officer has been charged with misconduct after prosecutors said he did not quickly respond to and properly investigate reports of a shooting that turned out to be a double murder, instead allegedly stopping at an ATM and pizzeria. Franklin Township Police Sergeant Kevin Bollaro was the on-duty officer on the evening of Aug. 1, when police received 911 calls reporting gunshots and screaming in Pittstown, about 96km from Manhattan in central New Jersey, Hunterdon County Prosecutor Renee Robeson’s office said. However, rather than responding immediately, prosecutors said GPS data and surveillance video showed Bollaro drove about 3km
Tens of thousands of people on Saturday took to the streets of Spain’s eastern city of Valencia to mark the first anniversary of floods that killed 229 people and to denounce the handling of the disaster. Demonstrators, many carrying photos of the victims, called on regional government head Carlos Mazon to resign over what they said was the slow response to one of Europe’s deadliest natural disasters in decades. “People are still really angry,” said Rosa Cerros, a 42-year-old government worker who took part with her husband and two young daughters. “Why weren’t people evacuated? Its incomprehensible,” she said. Mazon’s
‘MOTHER’ OF THAILAND: In her glamorous heyday in the 1960s, former Thai queen Sirikit mingled with US presidents and superstars such as Elvis Presley The year-long funeral ceremony of former Thai queen Sirikit started yesterday, with grieving royalists set to salute the procession bringing her body to lie in state at Bangkok’s Grand Palace. Members of the royal family are venerated in Thailand, treated by many as semi-divine figures, and lavished with glowing media coverage and gold-adorned portraits hanging in public spaces and private homes nationwide. Sirikit, the mother of Thai King Vajiralongkorn and widow of the nation’s longest-reigning monarch, died late on Friday at the age of 93. Black-and-white tributes to the royal matriarch are being beamed onto towering digital advertizing billboards, on
SECRETIVE SECT: Tetsuya Yamagami was said to have held a grudge against the Unification Church for bankrupting his family after his mother donated about ￥100m The gunman accused of killing former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe yesterday pleaded guilty, three years after the assassination in broad daylight shocked the world. The slaying forced a reckoning in a nation with little experience of gun violence, and ignited scrutiny of alleged ties between prominent conservative lawmakers and a secretive sect, the Unification Church. “Everything is true,” Tetsuya Yamagami said at a court in the western city of Nara, admitting to murdering the nation’s longest-serving leader in July 2022. The 45-year-old was led into the room by four security officials. When the judge asked him to state his name, Yamagami, who
RSS