On the morning of February 10th, 1986, Israel Greenwald kissed his wife Leah goodbye. He kissed his two daughters, Michal and Yael. Michal was 9 years old. Yael was 7. Israel straightened his tie, picked up his briefcase, and walked out the front door of his home in Far Rockaway, New York. He got in his car.
He drove toward Manhattan, toward the Diamond District, toward the life he had built with his own hands. He never came home. For the next 19 years, his wife would wait. His daughters would grow up without a father. No body, no explanation, no closure, just absence. The kind of silence that slowly destroys a family from the inside out.
Leah Greenwald would later say, standing in federal court, her hands shaking as she read from a typed statement, that she remembered the waiting, waiting and waiting for him to come home. This is not a story about a mobster. Israel Greenwald was not a gangster. He was a 34-year-old Orthodox Jewish diamond dealer who made an honest living, supported his community anonymously, and trusted the wrong people.
This is the story of how two New York City police detectives, carrying real badges and real guns and a total absence of conscience, used the American legal system as a murder weapon. And it is the story of how one innocent man got caught in the machinery of a crime network so deep, so corrupt, so protected that it took nearly two decades for the truth to crawl out from under a concrete floor in Brooklyn.
Here is what makes this case unlike anything else in the history of organized crime in America. The men who killed Israel Greenwald were not mobsters. They were not hit men in track suits or hoods in stolen cars. They were active-duty New York City police detectives. Decorated members of law enforcement.
Men who swore an oath to protect. And they used their badges, their police computers, their government authority to hunt an innocent man down and deliver him to his death. That is not a mob story. That is something darker. You have to understand the world Israel Greenwald was navigating before you can understand what happened to him.
This was New York City in the mid-1980s. The Diamond District on West 47th Street was one of the most concentrated trading hubs in the world. Billions of dollars in gems and precious metals changed hands every year, often in cash, often in handshakes, often across cultural lines that blurred the boundary between formal finance and informal trust networks.
Israel operated in that world. He was good at it. He ran his own business, Blue River Incorporated. And he was respected in his community as a man of integrity. He was also, in 1985, asked to do a favor for a friend. The friend was a fellow Hasidic jeweler. We will call him HT, which is how the family identified him publicly.
HT asked Israel to deposit a bond in Europe during one of Israel’s regular business trips. Israel traveled frequently. He held diplomatic status through Liberia, which made him a less suspicious figure for overseas transactions. HT framed it as a simple errand. “Deposit this for me. Collect some fees. Come home.
” That was it. Israel said yes. He trusted his friend. He had no reason not to. What he did not know was that the bond was stolen. Not slightly problematic. Not a gray area. A stolen United States Treasury bill lifted from a major financial institution and funneled through an elaborate criminal network run by Burton Kaplan, a 60-something career criminal from Brooklyn who had spent 20 years operating on the fringes of the New York mob.
Kaplan, known in certain circles as the old man, was a compulsive gambler who had been in and out of court on fraud and theft charges since 1967. He was not a made member of any family. He was something the mob prized even more. He was reliable, quiet, and smart enough to be useful without being ambitious enough to be threatening.
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Kaplan had a relationship with Anthony Gaspipe Casso, the underboss of the Lucchese crime family. Casso was one of the most violent and calculating organized crime figures of his generation. By the mid-1980s, Casso ran the Luccheses like a private military operation with absolute intolerance for leaks, betrayal, or loose ends.
When Kaplan brought him the Treasury bill scheme, Casso saw the opportunity immediately. The Luccheses had a contact inside a financial institution. They obtained stolen Treasury bills worth millions. The plan was to move those bills through trusted diamond dealers, cash them overseas through informal transfer networks, and have the money come back clean on the American side.
To test the system, Kaplan arranged for a single bill worth $500,000 to be sold in London. Joe Banda, a Hasidic financier from Williamsburg, connected him to a jeweler who could handle the transaction. That jeweler connected them to Israel Greenwald. The bill was moved. The money came back. A quarter of a million dollars landed in Kaplan and Casso’s pockets without a wire transfer, without a bank record, without a trail.
The system worked perfectly. And then Israel Greenwald returned to the United States and was stopped by federal agents at customs. The FBI’s C3 squad, which specialized in stolen negotiable securities, had been watching Treasury bill thefts from several New York financial institutions. When word came back through an IRS informant that a bill had surfaced in London, they traced it, and the trace led to Israel.
He was pulled into questioning. He told them the truth about what he knew, which was not much. He had been asked to deposit a bond by a friend. He had no idea it was stolen. But the FBI wanted more. They told him he needed to cooperate. He needed to record a conversation with his contact. Israel Greenwald went to confront the man who had used him.
According to court records, he was carrying a small recording device in his coat pocket. In the middle of the conversation, the tape stopped running. The other man reached forward and patted Israel’s chest. He found the recorder. From that moment, the clock started ticking. The panic spread upward through the network almost immediately.
The other jeweler involved in the scheme, and through him Burton Kaplan, learned that Israel had been approached by the FBI and had attempted to record a conversation. To Kaplan, this was an existential threat. If Israel talked, Kaplan went back to federal prison. And Kaplan had a contact who could solve this kind of problem.
His name was Frank Santora Jr. Santora was a mob associate and an old prison contact of Kaplan’s. They had met while doing time, and Santora had once mentioned something that Kaplan had filed away. He had a cousin on the NYPD, a detective in Brooklyn named Louis Eppolito, and Eppolito had a partner, a man named Stephen Caracappa.
And according to Santora, these two men were willing to do certain kinds of work for the right amount of money. In late 1985, Kaplan had initially declined Santora’s offer. He was cautious. He did not like the idea of involving active law enforcement personnel in his criminal operations. The exposure was too unpredictable. But by early 1986, with the FBI circling and Israel Greenwald potentially talking, caution became a luxury he could no longer afford.
He went back to Santora. He said he had a problem, and he asked if the cops were still available. Santora said, “Yes.” Now, you need to understand exactly who Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa were, because this is where the story becomes genuinely disturbing, not just as crime history, but as a study in institutional corruption and the failure of every system that should have stopped this before it started.
Louis Eppolito was 42 years old in 1986. He was a big man, a former bodybuilder, built for intimidation. He had grown up in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, surrounded by organized crime at such close range that it was practically atmospheric. His father, Ralph, was a Gambino crime family associate. His uncle, James Eppolito, was a made member. His cousin, James Eppolito Jr.
, was also made, operating under Gambino capo Nino Gotti. When Louie applied to the NYPD in 1969, he lied on his application and stated he had no relatives in organized crime. It was technically a disqualifying falsehood. No one checked carefully enough. Once inside the department, Eppolito built a real career.
He was cited for bravery. He earned commendations. He genuinely arrested criminals. And in 1983, he was investigated for passing NYPD intelligence to a relative of Gambino boss Paul Castellano. Internal Affairs could not make the case stick. Ippolito was cleared. He was furious about the investigation, claimed it had ruined his reputation, and eventually wrote an entire book about it.
The book was called Mafia Cop, the story of an honest cop whose family was the mob. He published it in 1992. Lucchese underboss Anthony Casso reportedly bought a copy and is said to have found it amusing. Stephen Caracappa was 58 years old when he was arrested in 2005. Quieter than Ippolito, more controlled, less visible. He had spent years working inside the NYPD’s Organized Crime Homicide Unit, which gave him access to something infinitely more dangerous than anything Ippolito could offer.
Caracappa had access to federal task force files, joint FBI and NYPD intelligence, wiretap records, informant identities, the names of people cooperating with the government against organized crime. He knew who the rats were before the rats knew they had been exposed. By 1985, federal investigators had already flagged both Ippolito and Caracappa as suspected mafia associates.
Nothing had been done about it. So when Burton Kaplan needed a jeweler to disappear in February of 1986, he had two men on his side who held the full authority of the New York City Police Department in the palms of their hands. Here is how the scheme worked. Santoro, Ippolito, and Caracappa obtained Israel Greenwald’s home address using an NYPD database lookup on his license plate.
This was not guesswork. This was not a street informant. This was a government computer query run by a detective with legitimate system access used to locate a murder target. Once they had his address, the three men drove to Long Island to identify his residence and confirm his vehicle. They studied his routines.
On the morning of February 10th, they were waiting. Eppolito and Caracappa followed Israel’s car onto the highway. They turned on a flashing light, the kind mounted on the dash of an unmarked police vehicle. To any driver in any state, that light means one thing: pull over. You are being stopped by law enforcement. Israel pulled over.
Eppolito and Caracappa walked to his window. They showed him their badges. Both shields were real. Both men were real detectives employed by the city of New York on that exact morning. They told him he was a suspect in a hit-and-run accident. They told him they needed to take him in for a lineup. It would be quick, just procedure.
He needed to come with them. He got in their car. Think about that for a moment. Israel Greenwald, a 34-year-old man with a wife and two daughters at home, was sitting in the back of what he believed was an unmarked police car, cooperating with what he believed was a legitimate law enforcement stop, about to be cleared of a misunderstanding.
He trusted the system. He believed in it. He had no reason not to. They drove him to a garage on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. It was a working auto repair shop managed by a man named Peter Franzone. Franzone was not part of the plot. He was a hard-working man with a sixth-grade [clears throat] education who had done some car repair work for Santora in the past, and who had casually met Eppolito through that connection.
He had no idea what was about to happen on his property. Eppolito stayed in the car at the edge of the lot. Santora and Caracappa walked Israel into the single car enclosed garage and shut the door behind them. Franzone, in his office nearby, saw this happen. Moments later, the door opened again. Santora and Caracappa walked out. They left without Israel.
Franzone said Santora came to his office shortly after. Santora walked him to the garage and opened the door. Israel Greenwald was slumped in the corner, dead. Santora told Franzone what he needed to do. He needed to dig a grave. Franzone was terrified. He was not given a choice. He helped bury Israel Greenwald beneath the concrete floor of the garage.
Kaplan later learned the details from Santora. He paid $30,000 for the job. Santora kept $5,000 for himself off the top without telling his partners. Ippolito and Caracappa each received approximately $8,333 for killing an innocent man. Santora would be killed in a separate mob dispute in September of 1987, taking a significant piece of the direct evidence with him.
Israel Greenwald’s daughters were 9 and 7 years old the morning he left for work and never came home. But here is the thing that no one outside the FBI would understand for years. This murder was not even the beginning of what Ippolito and Caracappa had to offer. Kaplan recognized what he had. He had two active duty detectives who would kill on command with access to the most sensitive investigative databases in New York law enforcement available at a monthly retainer rate.
He brought the arrangement to Anthony Casso. And Casso, who called the two men his crystal ball, immediately understood the strategic value. In 1986, Casso placed Epolito and Caracappa on a formal monthly salary of $4,000. $4,000 a month paid through Kaplan as the intermediary in exchange for a standing arrangement.
The cops would copy intelligence reports. They would pull files on individuals under investigation. They would identify informants and they would eliminate problems. From 1986 to 1990, the body count grew. In September of 1986, three gunmen attempted to assassinate Anthony Casso outside his Brooklyn home. One of the rounds hit him. He survived.
He was enraged. He wanted names. He wanted the men who had approved the hit or ordered it or participated in it. He went to Kaplan. Kaplan went to the cops. The cops ran names through their databases, through their task force files, through the joint FBI intelligence network that Caracappa accessed every working day.
They came back with a list. On that list was a man named James Jimmy Hydell, a Gambino family associate. Casso wanted Hydell alive. He wanted to ask him questions first. In October of 1986, the three-man crew conducted a second fake traffic stop, this time on Staten Island after tracking Hydell to a neighborhood in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
They pulled Hydell over, forced him out of his car, handcuffed him, and locked him in the trunk. They drove to a Toys R Us parking lot in Brooklyn where Kaplan met them. Kaplan handed the car keys to Casso, who was standing in the lot. Casso paid the crew $35,000. Jimmy Hydell’s remains have never been found.
And then came Christmas Day of 1986. And it is the moment that reveals just how truly reckless and corrupted the entire operation had become. Casso asked Kaplan to have the cops pull the address and photograph of a Gambino associate named Nicholas Guido, another name from the list of men suspected in the assassination attempt.
The cops ran the search. They pulled a name and an address. On December 25th, 1986, Casso sent a hit team to that address. They shot the man in his car 10 times. He died at the scene on Christmas morning in front of his house. The man they shot was the wrong Nicholas Guido. He was a 26-year-old completely uninvolved Brooklyn man who happened to share a name with the intended target.
He had nothing to do with the Gambino family, nothing to do with Casso, nothing to do with any of it. His mother, Pauline Pipitone, would appear in federal court 20 years later, too grief-stricken to attend the sentencing herself, sending word that she wanted responsible to live long lives in prison so they could feel what she had felt.
The detectives kept working. In November of 1990, Casso paid them $70,000 to murder Edward Eddie Lino, a Gambino family captain believed to have been connected to the assassination attempt. On November 6th, 1990, Eppolito and Caracappa followed Lino from his social club in Brooklyn. They pulled him over on the Belt Parkway. They shot him nine times.
He was dead within minutes. In total, the two men were directly involved in eight murders and two additional attempted murders across a period of roughly four years, all while drawing their city paychecks. All while attending to their police duties. Eppolito, during this same period, was pursuing a side career as an actor.
He had small roles in the film Goodfellas and in Predator 2. He had already begun work on his memoir. Caracappa remained low-profile, methodical, reliable. By the early 1990s, the wholesale indictments rolling through every major New York crime family finally made both men nervous. Casso was arrested in 1993 and began cooperating with the government.
That should have been the end. Casso told federal prosecutors about his crystal ball. He described a monthly payment arrangement to NYPD detectives, a handler named Kaplan. The FBI investigated. But without Kaplan, without corroboration, without physical evidence, the case stalled. Casso eventually proved to be an unreliable cooperator, still engineering violence from inside prison, and the government ultimately refused to use his testimony as a foundation for prosecution.
The case went cold. Eppolito retired from the NYPD around 1990 and moved to Las Vegas in 1994. Caracappa also retired on a disability pension in 1992 and eventually followed him west. Both men lived quiet suburban lives in the Nevada desert. Eppolito sold cars at an Infiniti dealership and entertained his coworkers with crime scene photographs from his time on the force.
Israel Greenwald’s daughters grew up without a father. Lea Greenwald, their mother, struggled financially. Without a body, without a death certificate, the family could not collect life insurance for years. They were at various points preyed upon by opportunists and tormented by rumors. They did not know whether Israel had abandoned them, whether he had been killed, whether he was somewhere alive and unreachable.
The not knowing was its own particular cruelty. The case came back to life because of a detective who refused to let it go. NYPD Detective Tommy Dades began examining the Epolito and Caracappa case files in 2003. He pulled work records, looked at the pattern of the murders, and began piecing together a circumstantial timeline. He also tracked down Betty Heidel, the mother of James Heidel, who had never stopped asking questions about what had happened to her son.
She told Dades that the two detectives had personally appeared at her Staten Island door before her son’s disappearance, asking where Jimmy was. That was a thread. Dades pulled it. The real break came in 2004. Burton Kaplan, by then serving a 27-year sentence on a separate narcotics trafficking conviction, and watching his granddaughter grow up without him present, made a decision.
He had spent years refusing to talk to the DEA, the FBI, and the NYPD. He had maintained omerta long past the point where it served him. But in 2004, he sat down with DEA agents and began talking. He told them everything. The monthly payments, the murder of Israel Greenwald, the kidnapping of James Heidel, the killing of Nicholas Guido, and Elino. All of it.
He could not remember Israel Greenwald’s name. He called him a Jewish jeweler. He could not remember exactly where the garage was. He said it was somewhere on Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn. Nostrand Avenue runs for several miles through Brooklyn, from Sheepshead Bay to Williamsburg.
Then investigators found a phone book. Working through a cold case file related to Frank Sentora, who had been killed in 1987, investigators located a homicide file that contained a small address book. Inside the address book was the phone number for Peter Franzone’s Towing Company. Fronzone, by now years removed from that February morning, was located and confronted.
He cooperated with investigators. He walked them to the garage. He showed them where the body was buried. In March of 2005, investigators began excavating the floor of the Brooklyn garage. They found the skeletal remains of Israel Greenwald buried beneath the concrete. He had been there for 19 years. On March 9th, 2005, federal agents arrested Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa as they dined at Piero’s Italian Cuisine in Las Vegas.
Eppolito was 56 years old. Caracappa was 62. Both were charged with racketeering, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, narcotics trafficking, eight counts of murder, two attempted murders, and more. They pleaded not guilty. Their defense attorneys argued the statute of limitations had expired on the central racketeering charges.
The trial began in the spring of 2006 in Brooklyn federal court. The government’s central witness was Burton Kaplan, 72 years old, who delivered two days of testimony so specific and so methodical that even defense counsel struggled to find meaningful gaps. Kaplan described the monthly payments, the code words, the handoffs in parking lots and cemeteries.
He described a conversation he later had with Caracappa about the Greenwald killing, in which Caracappa asked what had been paid to Santora. Kaplan told him $30,000. Caracappa said Santora had only told them 25. Kaplan had not known Santora had skimmed from the top. That detail, that small human detail of one crook shorting his partners landed at trial like a thunderclap.
On April 6th, 2006, the jury convicted both men of racketeering, murder conspiracy, obstruction, and additional charges. Judge Jack Weinstein, who presided over the case, called it probably the most heinous series of crimes ever tried in his courthouse. Federal prosecutor Daniel Wenner described it as the bloodiest, most violent betrayal of the badge this city has ever seen.
At sentencing in 2009, the victims’ families were given time to speak. Michael Greenwald, Israel’s daughter, now 29 years old, addressed the court. She described a final memory, her father heading off to work one February morning, seeing her standing outside waiting for her school bus, turning around to give her one more hug.
She said that was the last time she felt his arms around her. She said she was 1 month shy of her 10th birthday. Lia Greenwald, Israel’s widow, addressed the court with shaking hands. She said she still remembered the waiting and all the years of not knowing. Judge Weinstein sentenced Ippolito to life in prison plus 100 years.
Caracappa received life plus 80 years. Neither man would ever be free again. Stephen Caracappa died on April 8th, 2017 at a federal medical detention facility in Butner, North Carolina. He was 75 years old. Louis Ippolito died on November 3rd, 2019 at the same facility. He was 71. In 2015, the city of New York settled a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the Greenwald family for $5 million.
The city of New York paid $5 million to the family of a man its own employees murdered. Let that sit for a second. Israel Greenwald’s body was flown to Israel. He was finally buried there in his ancestral homeland 19 years after two men with badges drove him to his death. His family says that in the years after his death, several people in his community quietly came forward to reveal that Israel had been anonymously supporting their families financially.
He had given money to people without telling anyone. He asked for nothing in return. He was 34 years old when they killed him.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
