Mafia Cops Sent to Separate Prisons

Mafia cops Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were partners as detectives, partners in crime, neighbors in Las Vegas - and cellmates after being convicted as mob hit men.

Now, their illicit partnership has been broken up forever.

Caracappa, 67, who requested a prison on the East Coast, has been shipped out to Victorville Penitentiary in California to serve his life-plus-80-year sentence.

The high-security prison 86 miles northeast of Los Angeles was once home to notorious inmates John Walker Lindh - the so-called American Taliban - and Ingmar Guandique, suspected of killing Capitol Hill intern Chandra Levy.

Two prisoners have been slain there since it opened in 2004, and a bomb exploded in the prison in February. "It's not a good place to be, but it's better than where he was," said Caracappa's lawyer Daniel Nobel.

Sources said the laconic Caracappa was miserable having to spend every waking moment with a loudmouth like Eppolito in the Brooklyn federal lockup in Sunset Park.

Because they're ex-cops, they were locked down 23 hours a day as a safety precaution and kept away from other inmates.

"If you have two persons together in a small cell that is the size of a closet for some New Yorkers, most marriages would dissolve under those circumstances," Nobel said of their time at the Metropolitan Detention Center.

Eppolito, 60, is still awaiting word from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons as to which cinder-block tomb he will be sent to die.

"It was very peculiar to me that they were housed together," said Eppolito's lawyer Joseph Bondy. "The alternative was solitary confinement."

Eppolito and Caracappa are appealing their convictions, arguing that their trial lawyers were incompetent.

In a letter to Judge Jack Weinstein, Eppolito's daughter Andrea wrote, "The rest of my life will be dedicated to bringing him home where he belongs."

Thanks to John Marzulli

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Reputed Genovese Made Member and Associated Arrested on Sports Betting Charges

A Dover man is among more than 30 people arrested Thursday in connection with a $1 million-a-week, multistate sports betting operation related to prominent organized crime families.

The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office said 36-year-old Dulo Bolijevic of Dover was charged with promoting gambling and conspiracy to promote gambling in connection with this week’s raids, which spanned Bergen, Essex, Somerset and Monmouth counties.

The was no immediate word, however, on what role Bolijevic, who works at Villa Pizza in Rockaway, played in the betting ring.

Authorities from the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, the FBI and other agencies began executing search and arrest warrants beginning Tuesday night. More than 30 arrests were made and more than $1.3 million was seized.

The Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office said the North Jersey investigation began in September 2008 and focused on money-laundering. Undercover detectives infiltrated the bookmaking operation being run by Thomas Conforti of Hawthorne and John “Blue” DeFroscia of Saddle Brook.

DeFroscia is a documented “made” member of the Genovese organized crime family, and Conforti is a high-level associate, authorities said. Each ran separate bookmaking and money-laundering enterprises. and passed a portion of their earnings to Genovese Family.

Conforti and DeFroscia had a large network of agents, who were paid a commission on their profits. Mid-level members were responsible for numerous gambling packages and would meet with the individual agents or package holders and then pass the proceeds to DeFroscia and Conforti.

Investigators found that hundreds of bettors used a system of code names and passwords to place bets on sporting events each week. It was the agents who collected losses from or paid winnings to bettors. The wagers were placed via toll-free telephone numbers or the Internet.

The actual wire room providing betting lines and accepting the wagers is located in Costa Rica — a common practice employed by organized crime families to avoid apprehension of those running the wire room, authorities said.

The investigation revealed that DeFroscia and Conforti used “middle men” as a buffer between themselves and their agents to insulate themselves from law enforcement detection. In the case of Thomas Conforti, an individual identified as Michael Cirelli of Belleville helped run the operation for him. John DeFroscia employed Paul “Shortline” Weber of Aramark, Pa., and Gerald “Jay” Napolitano of Summit, among others, to help run his network of agents.

Napolitano would deliver weekly profits to DeFroscia by dropping envelopes of cash at Racioppi’s Taralles, a store on Bloomfield Avenue, Bloomfield. Nicholas “Pigeon” Restaino of Bloomfield would temporarily hold the cash at the store until DeFroscia picked it up.

Weber, Napolitano and other ranking members would meet with agents in parking lots, bookstores, diners and on the street to exchange cash. Napolitano was seen several times meeting one of his agents, Louis Orangeo of Newark, in various parking lots in Clifton. Orangeo, a mail carrier for the U.S. Postal Service, would meet with Napolitano while on duty in his mail truck. They would exchange an envelope through the mail truck window as if it were ordinary mail.

In addition, Weber, who is employed as a vendor at both CitiField and Yankee Stadium, arranged meetings and drop-offs in each stadium while working. Detectives who conducted surveillance of Weber at the stadiums with the assistance and cooperation of Major League Baseball security, observed him exchange cash proceeds from this enterprise with various co-conspirators.

Thanks to Daily Record

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Victoria Gotti Shouts Out in Court

The mother of John "Junior" Gotti interrupted a hearing on her son's racketeering case Friday by telling a federal judge that the government is trying to kill him before he even gets to trial.

"Why don't you just hang him now!" Victoria Gotti shouted from the spectator section of a room in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

She spoke out after Judge Kevin P. Castel asked lawyers at the end of the pretrial hearing whether there were any other matters to address.

"Excuse me, you honor, may I speak?" she asked as she stood up. "I'm his mother." The judge asked if she was a party to the proceedings. When she said she was not, he told her she could not speak.

Still, she asked him what he thought about perjury - a reference to claims a mob turncoat made that he had slept with her daughter, also named Victoria, the former star of the reality TV series "Growing up Gotti."

Then she made the reference to the hanging of her son and added: "They're trying to kill him before trial!"

Outside court she passed out copies of a lie detector test in which the younger Victoria Gotti said she never slept with the turncoat, John Alite, a Gambino organized crime family associate.

She also told reporters that the government was trying to ruin her daughter's reputation in pursuit of a conviction of Gotti, 44. "This trial is rigged before he sets foot in it," she said.

Before Victoria Gotti's outburst, the judge had rejected Gotti's request to have a public defender added to the case to assist his lawyer, Charles Carnesi. Castel said his review of Gotti's assets left him doubting he would qualify for a lawyer at taxpayer expense.

Carnesi said three trials for Gotti had taken a toll on the family's finances, forcing him to take out a $250,000 loan at 14 percent interest. Carnesi explained the high interest rate, saying: "Mr. Gotti's name, for better or worse, is a well known name which causes lenders pause before they're willing to make a loan to him."

He said Gotti had to spend $75,000 of the loan toward credit cards that have been used to pay the family's living expenses.

Carnesi told the judge he will file papers asking that the latest indictment be thrown out. He said the charges brought in August were "from my view, basically the same indictment" as Gotti's previous three trials. Prosecutors have said Gotti assumed control of the powerful Gambino family after his father's 1992 conviction on racketeering and murder charges. His father died in prison.

The current indictment accuses Gotti of involvement in three slayings in the late 1980s and early 1990s and of possessing and trafficking more than 5 kilograms of cocaine.

Gotti is being held at a federal lockup in Brooklyn. He has been tried three times in Manhattan on racketeering charges for an alleged plot to kidnap Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa. Trials in 2005 and 2006 ended in hung juries and mistrials after Gotti's lawyers argued he had long since retired from organized crime.

Federal prosecutors announced after the third trial that they were giving up.

The hearing Friday was attended by Sliwa, who wore his red Guardian Angels jacket.

Sliwa, who testified at the earlier trials about the kidnapping attempt, which left him with bullet wounds and continuing injuries, said he won't be satisfied until Gotti "follows his father to hell without an asbestos suit."

He noted that Castel is different from the judge who presided over Gotti's earlier trials and suggested it will make a difference in the outcome.

"He's got a tough judge, a no-nonsense judge," Sliwa said. "He's been stripped of his Guardian Angel."

Thanks to TBO

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Unseen Victims from Mob Killings

Deputy U.S. Marshal John Ambrose -- convicted last week of passing information to the Chicago Outfit about a top mob witness -- was only 7 years old when Joe the janitor was found dead.

So he probably didn't read the small 1975 Tribune story about the body of the 33-year-old janitor found in the basement of Chalmers Elementary School on the West Side. Chicago detectives said the janitor suffered a massive heart attack. But a mortician at the Daniel Lynch Funeral Home in Evergreen Park made an amazing discovery along The Chicago Way.

There was a hole in the back of Joe the janitor's head. A heart attack didn't make that hole. A .22-caliber bullet was found lodged in the brain of the janitor.

His name? Joseph Lipuma.

A couple of weeks later, Lipuma's friend and alleged stolen-goods dealer Ronald Magliano, 42, was found shot to death in his South Side home. The home had been set ablaze, an Outfit practice to destroy evidence. Detectives figured the two murders were related, but no arrests were made.

Two years later, a friend of Joe's and Ronnie's was killed in a sensational daytime Outfit hit. Mobster Sam Annerino was chewed up by three men with shotguns outside Mirabelli's Furniture store in Oak Lawn. The Outfit had sway in Oak Lawn. The town's motto? "Be prudent, stay safe."

A few miles to the east in Evergreen Park lived Joe Lipuma's young nephew. A top student at Evergreen Park High School, an excellent athlete, he was so impressive that he was accepted as a cadet at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. But he didn't like the military life, came home after a year, went to law school, and became a federal prosecutor before becoming a criminal defense attorney.

Recently, at John Ambrose's trial, I met that man. He was John Ambrose's attorney, Francis Lipuma, Joe's nephew. I disagree with him about Ambrose, but I couldn't help admiring his skill in the courtroom.

"I was just a kid -- a freshman -- when my uncle was killed," Frank Lipuma told me the other day after the Ambrose guilty verdict. "All I really remember about it was pain. Pain and sadness throughout my house, throughout my family."

Just in case you think I'm drawing some nefarious inference about Frank Lipuma, let me be clear: I'm not.

Lipuma was an assistant U.S. attorney in Chicago. To become a federal prosecutor, applicants must undergo a rigorous FBI background check.

They reach back into your childhood, interview your friends from elementary school and scrub your family. If there were anything there, the FBI would have found it. But what they did find was a young man who felt the pain of his Uncle Joe's death but never learned why he was killed.

"I do remember the funeral home found he'd been shot, and that police thought it was a heart attack, but someone had put a gun behind his ear," Frank Lipuma told me. "It was terrible, all that pain in the family then. He was involved with people. There was just speculation. He knew Annerino, they said. I was just a kid playing baseball, trying to get to college."

Through weeks of testimony in Ambrose's trial, we heard about the Outfit informant he was supposed to protect: the deadly hit man turned star government witness in the historic Family Secrets case, Nicholas Calabrese.

Calabrese was in the federal witness protection program. Ambrose was convicted of leaking information to the mob about what Calabrese told the feds concerning dozens and dozens of unsolved Outfit murders.

One of the murders involved Annerino, the friend of Joe Lipuma and Ronnie Magliano who was known as "Sam the Mule."

The leaked information was contained in the FBI's 2002 threat assessment detailing Nick Calabrese's cooperation, a document prosecutors alleged was read by Ambrose before he leaked details of it to the mob through an Outfit messenger boy:

"Nicholas Calabrese will testify that he, along with Joseph LaMantia, Frank Calabrese Sr. and Frank Saladino, planned and attempted to murder Samuel Annerino. Ronald Jarrett, who is deceased [murdered], also participated in the planning. ... Though the attempt was unsuccessful, Nicholas Calabrese later learned that the murder was later carried out by Joseph Scalise. William Petrocelli and Anthony Borsellino also participated in the murder, but are deceased."

I asked Frank Lipuma if he became a federal prosecutor in part to find out who killed his Uncle Joe, but he wouldn't say: "I couldn't find any hard facts. I deal in facts."

The Chicago Outfit has many victims, and some might consider Ambrose to be one of them. He wanted to ingratiate himself with the bosses. He'll soon be fired from federal service and may even serve prison time. Joe Lipuma was a victim, too, and so was his family.

Murder isn't just between killer and target, especially Outfit murders. The victims are found among living survivors, legitimate folk spaced apart, often unknowing, as if on a vine reaching back through time, remembering.

Thanks to John Kass

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"Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob" Mafia Book Signing

Jeff Coen, the author of Family Secrets: The Case That Crippled the Chicago Mob, will be at Centuries and Sleuths Bookstore in Forest Park on Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 2:00 PM to sign copies of his first rate book on the historic Operation Family Secrets Mafia Trial.

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