Gambino Boss Heading to Jail

NINE YEARS FOR GEEZER GODFATHER

Friend of ours: Gambino Crime Family, Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri, Peter Gotti, John Gotti, Gregory DePalma

Reputed Gambino head Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri copped a plea to racketeering charges stemming from a daring three-year probe by an undercover FBI agent who infiltrated the crime family's ranks and brought down its leadership.

Squitieri, 70, confessed to racketeering and three shakedown schemes in a plea deal with the feds that will likely land him behind bars for nine years - roughly half the time he would have faced had he taken his chances with a jury. But the aging mafioso, who appeared in Manhattan Federal Court clad in tan prison garb that exposed a tattooed arm, made it clear he wasn't pleading guilty to save himself.

After admitting his misdeeds yesterday, Squitieri turned to coldly point at his wife, Marie, in the spectator seats.

"I did it for you. I pleaded guilty because of you," Squitieri said, prompting his wife to well up with tears and rush from the courtroom.

Also looking on were three of Squitieri's daughters, including raven-haired attorney Ginger Squitieri, who sat next to her father as a member of his defense team and greeted him with a kiss.

The feds claim Squitieri took the reins as Gambino acting boss when reputed boss Peter Gotti was arrested in 2002 - the first generation of Gambino bosses in the post-John Gotti era.

Under the deal hammered out with Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Conniff, Squitieri confessed to racketeering and raking in cash through shakedown schemes targeting two construction companies, in Mineola, L.I., and Westchester, and a New Jersey trucking company.

"I know it was wrong," Squitieri said. But the reputed mob leader - identified by the feds as an acting boss - kept his lips zipped when asked to acknowledge his role in the Gambino crime family.

"Mr. Squitieri makes no concession with respect to the name of the enterprise," defense lawyer Gerald Shargel told Magistrate Judge Michael Dolinger.

"With the Gambino name out of it? Guilty," said Squitieri, who must also forfeit $100,000 in cash.

The gravelly-voiced wiseguy joked with the judge when asked to identify the time frame of his crimes. "I can't remember too good, your honor. I'm getting up in age," Squitieri said, estimating that the extortions occurred between 1999 and 2005.

The feds have pegged Squitieri as official underboss and acting boss of the crime family, but some members of his ranks viewed him as holding the ultimate power, according to tapes of secretly recorded conversations.

On Nov. 5, 2004, steely-nerved undercover FBI agent "Jack Falcone" asked reputed capo Gregory DePalma if Squitieri was acting boss, to which the high-ranking mobster replied, "No, he's the boss. The boss is the boss," law-enforcement sources said.

In that same momentous conversation, DePalma told the 6-foot-4, 300-pound-plus Falcone he wanted to propose him as a "made" member of the crime family - not knowing he was an undercover agent.

The probe came to an abrupt end soon after this exchange in order to protect the burly agent, who was later targeted in a $250,000 murder contract foiled by the feds in August 2005 and first reported by The Post.

Squitieri was one of 32 reputed mobsters rounded up in March 2005 as the result of the daring undercover investigation, and all but two have pleaded guilty.

Thanks to Kati Cornell and Murray Weis

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Mafia Cop's Bizarre Nondefense

Friends of ours: John Gotti
Friends of mine: Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa

Finally, Louie Eppolito offers a defense. His defense is that he had no defense.

The Mafia cop, in a jailhouse interview with my colleague Greg B. Smith in yesterday's Daily News, claimed that his defense team in his recent trial at which he was convicted of eight-mob related murders was poor.

Eppolito wasn't the only one surprised by the unfocused defense offered by Bruce Cutler and Eddie Hayes, two high-profile lawyers. In fact, Eppolito's first mistake probably was hiring Cutler. If you're trying to convince a jury that you're not mobbed up, why would you hire John Gotti's mouthpiece, the most high-profile mob lawyer in New York?

Almost everyone who attended the trial on a regular basis was surprised by the defense, which often rambled, got lost in name-calling and histrionics, and looked flatfooted in cross-examinations.

By contrast, Burton Kaplan was the best prosecution witness many court observers ever saw. His spellbinding testimony was like listening to an Elmore Leonard novel on tape. He was the quintessential shady Brooklyn character, an ingenious street kid who seemed to consciously have chosen "Crime" as a life plan on Career Day at Manual Training High.

Here was a complex man who says he loves his wife of 49 years, although he took a lover while on the lam. A man who adores his daughter - who became a Criminal Court judge - but a father who at middle age crossed the line to commit a murder that left two other daughters without a father. A family man who helped cause funerals in seven other families. And yet the defense was never able to paint this grab bag of contradictions as a liar.

The government started with a clear and lucid opening by Assistant U.S. Attorney Mitra Hormozi, who led the jury through a nightmarish narrative of two cops who betrayed their badges for money in a sociopathic spree of kidnapping, bribery and murder. No $50 words, no table thumping, no bellowing. Just a well-prepared lawyer telling a compelling, true-crime story in prose as sparse and direct as James M. Cain's in "The Postman Always Rings Twice."

The great Samuel Goldwyn, who founded MGM studios, once said that he could tell if a movie was working by whether or not his butt squirmed. Not one juror squirmed during Hormozi's opening.

Then, lead U.S. prosecutor Robert Henoch, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves who had served in the Middle East, started calling witnesses to support Hormozi's harrowing tale. Henoch led Kaplan through his direct testimony, which was filled with precise, damning details like knowing where former Eppolito partner Stephen Caracappa's mother lived on Staten Island. Or that Caracappa had a black cat in an apartment in a "thin" building on 22nd St. in Manhattan. Or that he met with Eppolito at a "lady friend's" apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Each detail became another brick in a prison wall.

Neither cop took the stand to counter Kaplan's testimony. Eppolito now claims that his lawyers forbade him from testifying. Excuse me, the client is the boss. But the two Mafia cops did worse than not testifying. Through the entire trial Eppolito and Caracappa sat stoically, showing zero emotion as their freedom was chipped away piece by icy piece by 40 prosecution witnesses. Noted anthropologist and linguist Ray Birdwhistell says the human face is capable of some 250,000 facial expressions. During the three-week trial, Eppolito and Caracappa each chose one expression - blank. Which made them look like the cold-blooded killers the prosecution claimed they were.

Weird.

If I were a wrongly accused man fighting for my life, and my lawyers convinced me taking the stand would be counterproductive, I would at least use my face to emote and register outrage, horror, astonishment, disbelief, incredulity, shock, pity, sadness, rage and disappointment to the 12 very human jurors sitting in the box, who gazed constantly at the defendants for reaction to the terrible things being said about them. Only to see two blocks of ice.

If Burton Kaplan was falsely connecting me to eight Mafia murders, the U.S. Marshals would need to bind and gag me to keep me still and silent. If Eppolito was being framed, as he now claims from a jail cell, why didn't he leap from his seat in the courtroom and scream, "Liar!" Why not plant at least a single seed of doubt in the mind of even one juror by reacting like an innocent man framed?

What was the risk? A few days held in contempt while you're facing life in a cage? Instead, Eppolito waited until the jury said, "Guilty" 70 times, after which he embraced and backslapped Cutler, before claiming he doesn't know what the defense was thinking.

During the trial, many on the jury were probably wondering the same of poker-faced Eppolito.

Thanks to Denis Hamill

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After Conviction 'Mafia cop' Insists: 'It Was a Perfect Frame'

Friends of mine: Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa

In his first interview since being convicted of racketeering conspiracy, so-called "Mafia cop" Louis Eppolito maintained his innocence, insisting that he was the victim of "a perfect frame."

"I was the most perfect scapegoat in history. Nobody was better than I was," Eppolito told the Daily News for Monday editions.

Days after being convicted alongside former NYPD partner Stephen Caracappa for doubling as hit men for the mob, Eppolito claimed he was targeted in part because he had been accused in 1984 of leaking secrets to the Mafia. He was later cleared of those initial charges. "It left a stigma that I was connected to the mob," he told the newspaper by telephone on Friday.

The former detective said he had thought about facing the family members of victims. "I'm going to have to stand there and have people look at me and say, 'You killed my father, you killed my son,"' Eppolito said. "I didn't kill anybody. ... What am I supposed to do? They'll say you don't have remorse."

Both men were convicted April 6 of participating in eight brutal killings while on the monthly payroll of a murderous Mafia underboss. They were also found guilty of kidnapping, witness tampering and bribery _ and of providing inside law enforcement information to the mob.

Neither man took the stand during the trial, though Eppolito told the Daily News that he "begged" his lawyers to let him take the stand.

The 57-year-old said his predicament could be blamed on his 1992 book, "Mafia Cop," which key witness Burton Kaplan said from the stand was "the reason for all our troubles."

"I've thought about it a million times," Eppolito admitted. "I would not have been arrested if I hadn't written the book."

"Still," he said, "there are no regrets. Not a one."

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