October 1986, Staten Island, the corner of Tott Road and Fingerboard Road. It’s late afternoon, the kind of gray October light that flattens everything. A black sedan slows alongside a carrying Anthony Casso, one of the most feared under bosses in the history of the Lucesy crime family. The window drops.
Gunfire rips through the door panel. Nine shots. Casso takes two bullets, one to the stomach, one to the hip. The car screeches away. The shooters think they’ve just done the impossible. They’ve put down gaspipe. They were wrong. Anthony Gaspipe Casso, 50 years old, built like a refrigerator and twice as cold, was not a man you left breathing.
He’d spent 20 years ascending through the Lucesy family by being the most methodical, patient, and absolutely pitiles killer in the five burers. He didn’t get the nickname Gaspipe because he was soft. He got it because when he had a problem with someone, he solved it with a pipe permanently. This is the story of what happens when you try to kill Gaspipe and fail.
It’s the story of Jimmy Hyidell, a 24-year-old Brooklyn shooter who pulled the trigger that day thinking he was going to be a hero. Instead, he became the subject of one of the most relentless revenge campaigns in modern mafia history. And it’s the story of two NYPD detectives on the payroll of a murderer who would deliver Hyell directly to the man he’d tried to kill.
But here’s what makes this story different from every other mafia hit and miss you’ve heard before. The chain of events set off by those nine bullets on Totill Road would eventually bring down one of New York’s most powerful crime families, send dozens of mobsters and two police officers to federal prison, and produce one of the most damning government witnesses the mob world had ever seen.
All because one young gunman couldn’t finish the job. Anthony Casso grew up in Park Slope, Brooklyn in the 1950s. His father was a long shoreman. His neighborhood was a working-class Italian enclave where certain men commanded respect that had nothing to do with a paycheck. Casso was drawn to those men early. He was smart, not book smart, street smart, the kind of intelligence that reads a room in 3 seconds and never forgets a face.
By his midenties, he was already connected to the Lucasi family through lone sharking and stolen goods operations out of South Brooklyn. By the early 1980s, Caso had risen to become one of the family’s most reliable earners and its most feared enforcer. His boss was Victoriao Vic Amuso, a careful, methodical man who trusted Casso completely.
Together, they ran operations that stretched from construction kickbacks to narcotics to murder for hire. Casso was responsible for dozens of killings. Federal prosecutors would later allege he had authorized or carried out at least 15 murders. Other estimates run higher. Court documents and later testimony suggest the number was closer to 36.
Here’s what you have to understand about Casso. He wasn’t impulsive. Other mob bosses killed people in anger out of pride as a message sent in haste. Casso planned. He waited. He gathered intelligence. when he decided someone had to go, the decision was already final before they even knew they were in danger.
That patience, that cold, strategic patience, is exactly what made what happened next so terrifying for everyone involved. The attempted murder on October the 6th, 1986 didn’t come from nowhere. It came out of a war, a low boiling, increasingly deadly conflict between Casso’s Lucesi faction and a loose coalition of freelance hitmen and Gambino connected shooters operating in Brooklyn.
At the center of it was a crew led by a man named Nino Gagi and critically a younger, hungrier gunman named Jimmy Hyidell. James Hyidell was 24 years old in 1986. He’d grown up in Brooklyn, the son of a woman who had dated several organized crime figures. Jimmy wasn’t a made man. He wasn’t even fully connected. He was what the mob calls an associate, a free agent willing to take work where he could find it.
He was ambitious in the way that gets young men killed. He wanted to build a reputation fast, and he found what he thought was the job to do it. The exact origins of the contract on Casso are disputed. What court records and testimony established is this. Hyel along with two accompllices was hired to take out Casso as part of a broader internal conflict.
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Some accounts suggest the contract came from within the Gambino orbit. Others suggest it was a freelance operation, $200,000 to permanently remove one of the Lucesy family’s top earners. Either way, Jimmy Hyel was the trigger man. The plan was straightforward. Catch Casso in transit. Move fast. Disappear. The execution was imperfect.
On October 6th, Casso was riding through Staten Island when the shooters pulled alongside his vehicle and opened fire. Nine shots, two connected. Casso went down, but not permanently. He was rushed to a hospital, he survived. And the moment his eyes focused and he realized what had happened, one thought crystallized. Find out who did this and make them disappear.
For the next 12 months, Caso ran a full intelligence operation from his position inside the Lucesi hierarchy. He was not the kind of man to go half measures. He reached into his network of informants, corrupt law enforcement contacts, and street level sources to identify every person involved in the attempt on his life. He wanted names. He wanted confirmation.
He wanted certainty before he moved. That investigation would take months and it would involve two people nobody expected. This is where the story gets darker. By the mid1 1980s, Caso had cultivated a relationship with two NYPD detectives who were on his payroll. Their names were Lewis Epileto and Steven Caracappa.
Epilito was the more colorful of the two, a heavy set, gregarious detective who had actually appeared in mob movies as an extra cast for his authentic look. Caracappa was quieter, more analytical, the kind of cop who filed everything mentally and never showed his hand. Together, they ran the NYPD’s major case squad. Together, they were feeding Casso sensitive law enforcement intelligence for $10,000 a month.
The arrangement with Epalito and Caracappa was not new to Casso. He had used law enforcement sources for years, but these two were different. They had access to internal NYPD files. They could run license plates, pull criminal histories, access surveillance records, and critically they could find people that the mob couldn’t find on their own.
People who were hiding, people in custody, people who thought they were safe. When Casso tasked them with identifying Jimmy Hyell, they went to work. The problem for H Highle was that after the botched hit, he knew he was exposed. He went underground, limited his movements, avoided his usual locations, tried to disappear into Brooklyn’s geography.
For months, it worked. But you can’t hide from the police department’s own files. Epilito and Caracappa traced Hyell through NYPD records, through family connections, through the kind of granular detective work that usually serves justice. In this case, it served murder. By September 1987, they had him. What happened next is documented in extraordinary detail in court records from the later prosecution of Epileto and Caracappa as well as in Anthony Casso’s own cooperation testimony.
The two detectives lured Jimmy Hyel into a situation where they could grab him. They approached him in the guise of law enforcement which technically they still were. Hyel seeing badges and believing he was being arrested got into the car. He was never seen alive again. Epilito and Caracappa drove Hyidell to a location in Brooklyn where Anthony Casso was waiting.
What happened in that room is the kind of detail that federal prosecutors let speak for itself in court documents. Casso interrogated Hyell. He wanted to know who hired him. He wanted to know who the other shooters were. He wanted every name, every connection, every thread of the conspiracy that had put two bullets in his body. Hyell talked.
According to testimony, he gave up three names. Then Caso killed him personally. The body of Jimmy Hyidell was never recovered. Now, here’s the thing you have to sit with for a second. James Hyel’s mother, Betty Hyel, spent years not knowing what happened to her son. She filed missing person reports. She made inquiries.
She got nothing. It wasn’t until the prosecution of Epileto and Caracappa nearly 20 years later that she learned the full truth about how her son died and who delivered him to his killer. two police officers, two men who had sworn an oath to protect people like her son. Instead, they handed him to the man he’d shot and collected their fee.
The price Epilito and Caracappa received for delivering Jimmy Hyel to Anthony Casso was $30,000. But Casso wasn’t done. He had three more names from H Highel’s confession. And Anthony Casso did not leave loose ends. The names Hyell reportedly gave up led to additional murders in the months that followed.
Casso methodically worked through the list. Some accounts, including Casso’s own cooperation statements, suggest he had as many as eight people killed in the aftermath of the H Highell affair, all connected directly or tangentially to the original attempt on his life. Some of those murders were carried out by Lucesi crew members.
Others, according to prosecutors, again, involved the two corrupt detectives providing intelligence that made the killings possible. The Epileto Caracappa arrangement continued for years. They passed information. They ran names. They were present for at least some of the related killings, according to court findings, and they got paid.
Over the course of their arrangement with Casso, federal prosecutors estimated the two detectives received somewhere in the range of $375,000 total. This brings us to a detail that the history books don’t always emphasize. The corruption of Epilito and Carakappa wasn’t just about individual crimes.
It was about what it meant for the entire law enforcement apparatus meant to contain men like Casso. Every investigation that touched the Lucesy family during those years was potentially compromised. Every surveillance operation, every informant, every subpoena, Casso had a window into the machine that was supposed to stop him, and he used it for several years in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Casso operated with a level of confidence that bordered on arrogance. He knew when investigators were closing in. He knew which phones were tapped. He knew in some cases who was talking to the feds. That knowledge made him more dangerous, not less. It allowed him to eliminate threats before they fully materialized.
But it couldn’t last. In 1990, a federal indictment came down targeting Casso, Vic, Amuso, and multiple Lucesy family members on charges related to the Windows case, a massive fraud scheme involving corrupt contracting on New York City Housing Authority projects. Casso went on the run. For 3 years, he evaded capture while continuing to run the Lucesi family from a series of safe houses in New Jersey and New York.
Think about that. 3 years as a fugitive, still ordering hits, still running operations, still communicating through a network of trusted left tenants. The Windows case indictment alone named dozens of defendants. The FBI and NYPD were hunting him. He was still in business. The end came January 19th, 1993. FBI agents tracked Casso to a house in Mount Olive, New Jersey.
He was arrested without violence. The most feared underboss in New York was in handcuffs. In custody, Casso did something that shocked the mob world. He decided to cooperate with the government. This is where the story takes its most ironic turn. The man who had used two corrupt detectives to kidnap and deliver Jimmy Hyell to his death now became a government witness.
He began to unravel the entire network. He gave prosecutors information about murders, corruption, schemes, and conspiracies spanning three decades of Lucazi family operations. And among the information, he gave them the names of two dirty cops. Epilito and Carakappa had retired by this point. Epilito was living in Las Vegas, writing screenplays and teaching acting classes.
Carakappa had also moved to Nevada. They probably thought they were clear. They probably thought the one man who could definitively place them inside those crimes was either dead or had no credibility left to harm them. The problem with Casso as a witness was real. He was by any measure one of the most prolific killers to ever sit in a federal cooperation chair.
His hands were in dozens of murders. Prosecutors ultimately determined he was too unreliable. He had lied repeatedly to federal handlers, attempted to manipulate his cooperation, and was deemed unsuitable for courtroom testimony. His cooperation agreement was revoked in 1998. He was sentenced to 393 years in federal prison, but the information he provided about Epileto and Caracappa didn’t disappear.
Federal investigators spent years building a case around the two detectives that didn’t rely solely on Casso’s word. They found corroborating witnesses. They found financial records. They found physical evidence. In 2005, nearly 20 years after Jimmy Hyell disappeared into the back of an unmarked car, Louis Epalito and Steven Carakappa were arrested in Las Vegas.
The trial held in Brooklyn Federal Court in 2006, was one of the most extraordinary mob trials in a generation. The two defendants, both retired NYPD detectives, were charged with raketeering, eight murders, and obstruction of justice. The evidence against them was overwhelming. Both were convicted on all counts.
Epilito was sentenced to life in prison. Caracappa received the same. Louisie Epalito died in federal prison in 2022. He was 71 years old. Steven Caracappa remains incarcerated. Anthony Casso died in federal custody on December 17th, 2020 from COVID 1 nine complications. He was 78 years old. He had spent the last 27 years of his life in prison, the cooperation deal that was supposed to reduce his sentence, having collapsed entirely after his lies to federal handlers.
Jimmy Hyell’s body has never been found. Betty Hyell, Jimmy’s mother, lived long enough to see Epileto and Caracappa convicted. She had spent two decades not knowing what happened to her son. The trial gave her answers. Whether those answers gave her peace is a question no prosecutor can answer. Here’s what this story reveals about the mafia at the peak of its power in New York.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
