Freedom Will Be Brief for Mafia Cops

Friends of mine: Louis Eppolito, Steven Caracappa

My guess is that one way or the other the Mafia cops are going to the can.

For life.

Although the federal prosecutors put on a masterful RICO case against Louis Eppolito and Steven Caracappa, convicting them on 70 counts in a racketeering case involving eight mob murders, kidnappings, money laundering, bribery, betraying the badge, drug dealing and general felonious low-lifery, Judge Jack Weinstein warned from pretrial hearings on that the racketeering case was "thin." That the statute of limitations aspect of the prosecution, trying to tie together Mafia contract murders in Brooklyn in the late 1980s and early 1990s to a drug-dealing conspiracy in Las Vegas in 2004 as a single ongoing criminal enterprise, was a "ticking time bomb."

Bang!

On June 30, Weinstein's warning blew up in the faces of the prosecutors like a pre-Fourth of July cherry bomb. But it hardly signaled Independence Day for Louis Eppolito and Steven Caracappa.

In the end, all the prosecutors managed to accomplish by having a jury return a 70-0 rout of a scattered and lame defense was to remove the word "alleged" from any future mention of the Mafia cops. Eppolito and Caracappa can now until the end of time be legally called murderers, kidnappers, thieves, traitors, mutts, skels without the need of legal qualifiers. Just as we can now refer to Kerik the Krook, we can call them Killer Caracappa and Evil Eppolito, Mafia hit men. But what lies ahead?

Federal prosecutors filed an immediate appeal to have the verdict reinstated. But if you read Weinstein's beautifully written decision on the letter of the law, it's hard to see where any appeals court will find wiggle room. If the appeals court upholds Weinstein, all the feds can retry the Mafia cops for are the Vegas drug charges, which are no joke since Weinstein sentenced each of them to 40 years on those counts.

Still, retried without the spillover prejudicial evidence of eight murders, kidnappings and badge selling, those charges might bring considerably less time for first offenders. If they're convicted at all.

Which brings us full circle to the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, where this Mafia-cops investigation was originally made as a murder case, before it was wrested from them in a superseding federal RICO indictment.

It's no secret that there has been a long-standing competition between the Brooklyn DA's office and the Brooklyn federal prosecutors who often snatch state cases and make headline federal cases out them. One insider tells of the day Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes pointed out of his window in the Metro Tech Center and saw the new headquarters of the Brooklyn prosecutor's tower being erected and remarked, "Look, they're even stealing my [expletive deleted] view."

The reason this case should have stayed with the Brooklyn DA's office all along is that there is no such thing as a federal murder charge. Murder is always a state charge. Murders can be used as tent poles to prop up federal racketeering cases. But racketeering cases have statutes of limitation. A New York state murder charge has no statute of limitations.

If Judge Weinstein's case is upheld on appeal, the Brooklyn DA will be waiting on the courthouse steps to indict Louis Eppolito and Steven Caracappa on state murder charges. One suspects that there might even be more than the eight murders charged in the federal case. Plus there is the case of Barry Gibbs, who served 19 wrongful years in prison after, he says, he was framed by Eppolito for the 1986 murder of a prostitute on the Belt Parkway.

New defense attorneys will try to make double-jeopardy arguments against retrying Eppolito and Caracappa for the same murders presented in Brooklyn federal court. But just as they were acquitted on a legal technicality in federal court, the Mafia cops can technically be retried for the same murders on a state level because in federal court they were not charged with murder but with racketeering, which is a separate crime.

So, judgment day will come for the Mafia cops because the technical letter of the law will cut both ways.

There is simply no way that Hynes will ever rest knowing that these two monsters with gold shields, who ran around his county kidnapping, murdering, burying bodies in cement, talking bribes, framing people, selling out fellow undercover cops, facilitating murders with NYPD computers, might walk around free.

As Eppolito and Caracappa sit in the Brooklyn federal lockup awaiting a bail hearing until after Weinstein returns from vacation on July 21, they should know that just as there was a ticking time bomb of statute of limitations ticking in their federal case, another time bomb tick-tocks in the Brooklyn DA's office where the Mafia-cops case was first triggered.

One way or the other, the Mafia cops are going to the can.

For life.

Thanks to Denis Hamil

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"Little Man" Working for the Chicago Mob

Sounds like this is one to skip.

Size does matter: "Little Man" is big on gross-out humor and slapsticky sight gags that appeal to the lowest common denominator, but small on genuinely clever laughs.

Marlon Wayans, technologically manipulated to play a pint-size jewel thief who pretends to be a baby, does look ridiculous in his onesies and matching beanies, which is good for a guffaw here and there. But you can only get so much mileage out of that image, even over a film that's under 90 minutes long (but still feels interminable).

Marlon and his brother/co-star, Shawn, co-wrote the script with brother Keenen Ivory Wayans, who also directs. So if you've seen any of the family's other films ("Scary Movie,""White Chicks"), you know exactly what you're in for: boob jokes, poop jokes, penis jokes, jokes about getting kneed/hit/kicked in the groin.

It's juvenile and repetitive but not all that offensive, until Marlon's character, Calvin Sims, gets pummeled during a beer-soaked arena brawl by a professional hockey player who truly believes he's a baby. That's when you can put away the cake and send home the dinosaur costume guy — the kiddie birthday party is over.

Calvin ends up in this infantilized state after pulling a jewelry store robbery with his partner, wannabe rapper Percy P (Tracy Morgan, making fun of Master P). The two have just stolen a $100,000 diamond at the request of a Chicago mob boss (Chazz Palminteri, eternally stuck in the same role), but with police chasing them, Calvin drops the stone into a purse belonging to up-and-coming ad executive Vanessa Edwards (Kerry Washington, a long way from "Ray").

Vanessa and her husband, Darryl (Shawn Wayans), had just been talking about whether they were ready to start a family, which gives Percy the idea to dress Calvin up as a baby and sneak him into the house to steal the diamond back. Logical, right?

We never see the transformation take place — and we should have, because it actually could have been funny — but all of a sudden, Calvin is lying in a basket on the front porch of Darryl and Vanessa's suburban home, dressed in a diaper and bonnet and swaddled in a pastel blanket. (Naturally, in the three seconds before Darryl steps outside and finds him, a dog lifts his leg to pee on Calvin.)

All the adults are complete idiots, of course, because no one seems to notice or care about how freakish baby Calvin is — the fact that he has a full set of teeth, for example — not even the doctor who examines him. The only one who's onto him is Vanessa's cantankerous dad (comedy veteran John Witherspoon), whom everyone assumes is senile.

Nonetheless, the couple takes him in for the weekend. Hijinks ensue, including nipple biting and violently soiled diapers. In one of the more disturbing sequences, Calvin not only watches Vanessa and Darryl having sex from the railing of his crib, he later joins them in bed.

In this instance, apparently size doesn't matter.

Reviewed by Christy Lemire

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Chicago Mob Hitman in Omaha, Ooops! It's the FBI Instead

A Plattsmouth man has been ordered to stand trial in District Court on a charge of Conspiracy to Commit Murder.

Thirty-five-year-old Robert Harden had faced three conspiracy counts in the case but the judge reduced that to one count on Wednesday. Prosecutors claim that Harden tried to arrange the murders of his wife and her parents. The man he tried to hire was an undercover FBI agent.

Prosecutors say that Harden, who worked in Omaha, asked a coworker to help him kill his wife. That coworker went to Omaha police who contacted the FBI. The coworker brought Harden to a motel at 84th and Grover to meet a hit man who claimed his family had connections with the mafia.

After his arrest last month, Harden talked with us from jail and said the coworker involved, "always talked about his connections that he had with the mafia; people in Chicago -- and how people from Chicago take care of business and get things done." (Strangely, my co-workers tell me that I make the same claims ;-))

Harden and his wife had a rocky relationship and she had left their Plattsmouth apartment with their daughter. She took out a protection order and moved in with her parents in Iowa.

Harden claims that meeting a mafia hit man at the motel was a joke to cheer him up. "All I know is I was there and I was talking to a supposed hit man," he said. "Like I said, Brent has always done stupid stuff to make me smile so I figured this was another way to make me laugh and giggle." But the FBI agent who posed as a hit man testified Wednesday that Harden wasn't kidding around -- that he even provided pictures of his wife and her parents, a map to their house in Mallard, Iowa, a diagram of the house, information on dogs and suggested a time to carry out the hits.

The agent said that during the meeting at the motel, he gave Harden chances to back out and the agent said those opportunities were refused. The agent testified that at one point he told Harden, "If I leave this room, it's a done deal."

Harden says, "There was never any money traded whatsoever, okay?" The agent says Harden agreed, "the murders would be considered a favor from the mafia." (A favor from the mafia?! That really does not need it's own joke.) But Harden claims, "You can ask any psychiatrist, if you are emotionally or mentally distressed, you can be talked into anything."

The FBI says that Harden, who has the initials of his young daughter tattooed on his arm, knew the child would be in the house when the murders were to have taken place.

Even though two of the three counts of Conspiracy to Commit Murder were dismissed, prosecutors say they have a strong case and they say that Harden could get 20 years to life.

Thanks to WOWT

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Overheard: Mafia Hit in North Korea?

Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns declared Sunday the U.S. wants China to pressure North Korea. We could do it ourselves but we'd rather have China do it. Chinese hit men work for nine cents an hour and New Jersey guys get ten grand a day.

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Overheard: Mafia Senate Subcommittees

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig denied Jose Canseco's charge that Major League Baseball is run like the Mafia. Appearances are deceiving. It's just a coincidence that everyone in baseball has developed a short neck from shrugging in front of Senate subcommittees.

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