Opinion ID: 1212404
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Evidence as to the Continuation of the Services Enterprise

Text: In the present case, the determinations as to whether an enterprise conducted by Eppolito and Caracappa continued to exist into the limitations period, and as to whether the early acts and the later acts were part of the same pattern of racketeering activity, depend on the level of generality at which the racketeering enterprise is defined. Our principal difficulty with the district court's statute-of-limitations-based acquittal as a matter of law is that the court's views of the enterprise, its purposes, its location, and its duration were more restricted than what was alleged in the Indictment and than what the jury could infer from the evidence at trial. To begin with, the district court stated that the enterprise consisted of Eppolito, Caracappa, Santoro, Kaplan, and Casso (and unnamed others), Eppolito I, 436 F.Supp.2d at 539, and was a `subcontracting' arrangement that Kaplan, Santoro, Eppolito, and Caracappa had with members of organized crime, represented primarily by co-conspirator Anthony Casso, id. at 571. The court stated that in this enterprise, Eppolito and Caracappa exploited their positions as present or past officers of the New York City police department in order to supply confidential law enforcement information to Casso and to carry out murders and kidnapings under color of law. Id. (emphasis added). The court ruled that, although perhaps ending even earlier, this conspiracy came to a definite close when Eppolito and Caracappa retired from NYPD and moved to Las Vegas, no longer had access to confidential law enforcement information [,] and were no longer in contact with their old associates in the Lucchese crime family. Id. This view was at odds with the generality with which the enterprise was alleged in the Indictment. The Indictment loosely alleged that the RICO enterprise comprised a criminal organization and its members and associates, that its leaders included Eppolito and Caracappa, and that its members and associates [a]t various times included Santoro, Kaplan, and Casso, as well as unnamed others. (Indictment ¶¶ 1, 2, 6.) The district court's view that, as a matter of law, the RICO enterprise and the RICO conspiracy must have ceased to exist no later than when both Casso and Kaplan were in prison failed to recognize that Eppolito and Caracappa themselves could constitute a RICO enterprise as defined by 18 U.S.C. § 1961(4) and interpreted by the Supreme Court in Turkette, see Part II.D. above. There was evidence that Eppolito and Caracappa referred to themselves as partners, that they were associated in fact, and that they functioned as a continuing unit. For example, while they were employed by NYPD in the 1980s, they collaborated to provide confidential law enforcement information to Kaplan and Casso. During both the period in which both Eppolito and Caracappa were police detectives and the period following Eppolito's retirement from NYPD in early 1990, Eppolito and Caracappa committed kidnapings and murders together. In Las Vegas in the 1990s, Eppolito started a film production company in which Caracappa was vice president. Caracappa started a security business in which he employed Eppolito. When Corso inquired about a source for designer drugs for clients who might be willing to invest in Eppolito's film, Eppolito called Corso to give him the telephone number of an associate of Caracappa. When Eppolito and Caracappa met with Corso in 2005, Caracappa said he trusted Corso and that if Caracappa didn't trust him, Corso would not be doing business with Eppolito. On this record, we cannot conclude that the association of Eppolito and Caracappa as partners in providing services to members and associates of organized crime had ceased to exist before March 9, 2000, as a matter of law. That issue was within the province of the jury to decide as a question of fact, and the record provided ample evidence to permit the jury to find that that enterprise continued to exist well into the five-year period that preceded the commencement of this prosecution. Further, the goals of the enterprise as alleged in the Indictment were considerably more general than the goal described by the district court in its opinion. The Indictment alleged that [t]he principal purpose of the Enterprise was to generate money for its members and associates. This purpose was implemented by members and associates of the Enterprise through various legal and illegal activities, including murder, attempted murder, assault, kidnaping, criminal facilitation, bribery, obstruction of justice, extortion, fraud, money laundering, tax evasion and narcotics trafficking. (Indictment ¶ 3 (emphases added).) Thus, although the Indictment also alleged that the purposes of the enterprise included the purchase and sale of confidential law enforcement information, it in no way suggested that the enterpriser purpose was limited to that activity. And despite the more restrictive view stated in the district court opinion, i.e., that the RICO enterprise was based solely on the access of Eppolito and Caracappa to official law enforcement information and their conduct under color of law, Eppolito I, 436 F.Supp.2d at 571, the jury was not required to adopt that view. The jury could well have inferred that Eppolito and Caracappa sometimes sold their services to Kaplan and/or Casso in New York as hit men in instances that did not require their access to law enforcement information and did not call upon their NYPD connections. For example, our attention has not been called to any evidence to show that Eppolito and Caracappa used law enforcement information in connection with the killing of Eddie Lino; and for that mission, Casso provided the guns. Similarly, in Kaplan's testimony describing his hiring of Eppolito and Caracappa to kill Greenwald and Tabak, there was no suggestion that Eppolito and Caracappa were called upon to use any law enforcement information. Kaplan testified that he obtained Tabak's home and work addresses and the make of Tabak's car from another coconspirator. ( See Tr. 749-50.) Further, there was evidence that defendants' retirements from NYPD did not end their association with each other or with Kaplan. Eppolito retired from NYPD in 1990 and, as summarized in Part I.A.12. above, continued to collaborate with Caracappa in providing services to Kaplan. And after Caracappa retired from NYPD in 1992 and went to work for a new employer who provided him with a beeper, Caracappa gave his beeper number to Kaplan. Kaplan retained that number (or an updated number) for several years thereafter. Thus, in both his 1993 and 1996 telephone books Kaplan had Caracappa's beeper number; it was listed under the code name Marco. And, as discussed below, Kaplan testified that in 1994-1996, he still considered himself a possible future money earner for Eppolito and Caracappa (Tr. 914-15). In sum, the jury was not required to find that the enterprise alleged in the Indictment was dependent on defendants' access to confidential law enforcement information or that the enterprise ended with defendants' retirements from NYPD. Moreover, although the district court viewed Eppolito and Caracappa as providing services solely to members and associates of the Lucchese Crime Family, the Indictment was not so limited; it alleged that the members and associates of the enterprise sought [e]nrich[ment] . . . through assisting La Cosa Nostra (`LCN'), a nationwide criminal organization  (Indictment ¶ 4(a) (emphasis added)). Nor was defendants' offer of their services so limited. When Eppolito proposed that he and Caracappa be put on retainer, he said they would give [Kaplan] everything that we get on every family. (Tr. 620 (emphasis added).) And indeed, although Eppolito and Caracappa were being paid their $4,000-a-month retainer by Casso, and Casso insisted that in return they work only for him, Eppolito and Caracappa in fact provided information that was designed to and did assist all of the crime families. For example, Eppolito and Caracappa alerted Kaplan that there was a listening device in a restaurant owned and frequented by members of the Genovese Crime Family and that various members of the Genovese or Colombo families had become government informants. Kaplan testified that when information provided by Eppolito and Caracappa concerned someone from a crime family other than the Lucchese, Casso would pass it to the different families. He'd pass some information to the Bonannos and he passed some information to the Genovese. (Tr. 442; see also id. at 665-66 (describing Casso's relaying such information to the Colombo Crime Family).) In addition, there was evidence that Eppolito and Caracappa had previously worked with members of organized crime other than Kaplan and Casso. Santoro, who himself was loosely affiliated with the Gambino Crime Family, indicated as much when he first approached Kaplan to offer the services of Eppolito and Caracappa, assur[ing] Kaplan that [Santoro] had done things with [Eppolito and Caracappa] previously and that they were good stand-up guys (Tr. 517). And Eppolito himself indicated that he had such a past history when he told Kaplan that he liked doing business with Kaplan and Casso, because when [Eppolito] gave [Kaplan and Casso] information people got taken care of that deserved it, and that in the past he gave information to other people and they never acted on it. (Tr. 657.) Further, in contrast to the district court's view that defendants' relocation to Las Vegas marked the end of the enterprise through which Eppolito and Caracappa sought to earn money by providing services to members and associates of organized crime, the jury could have found otherwise based on, inter alia, Kaplan's testimony in response to cross-examination by Caracappa's attorney: Q . . . [B]y the time you were in Las Vegas with Caracappa and Eppolito, you sure were not a future money earner for them. A I disagree with you there. There was never no break in the friendship. There was just a break in doing business with Casso. . . . . There could have been some possible earners. It's the same reason I went to Steve and tried to do the OVC deal. I had the connections. Steve knew that. (Tr. 914-15 (emphases added).) The jury could also have found that Eppolito continued to pursue the principal goal of the enterprise in Las Vegas by, inter alia, offering services in the nature of money laundering, i.e., accepting investments of money generated by criminal activities such as drug trafficking, and obscuring its source by returning to the investors money that would come from the sale of film scripts. Although the district court characterized the organized crime connection to Eppolito's Las Vegas film endeavors as tangential[ ], Eppolito I, 436 F.Supp.2d at 572-73, the jury was hardly required to adopt such a view. Eppolito told Corso that the Gambino crime family had always offered him money for script[s] or for movies, . . . they always come to him and said Lou, I can give you money for this or that. (Tr. 1618; see also id. at 1624 (Eppolito says: 'Listen to me, I got people from the Gambino family that call me all of the time[, saying,] You know, Louie, we got money, you know. . . .').) Further, from the evidence viewed in the light most favorable to the government, it was clear that Eppolito had members of organized crime working to help him find others to invest in his film project. Corso was approached by members of two crime families seeking funding for Eppolito's film: first Dibari, a member of the Gambino family, and then John and Mike Frate, members of the Bonanno family; Eppolito had even given the Frates a copy of his script. John Frate was to be a part of the whole process of funding the movie. (Tr. 1445.) And when Corso (who had been introduced as an associate of the heir-apparent to the Bonanno Crime Family) told the Frates that he did not want to meet with Eppolito because Eppolito was a cop, Mike Fr[ate] said that he understood [Corso's] concern but that Corso shouldn't worry because  Lou was one of us .... (Tr. 1565 (emphasis added)). As discussed in Part II.C. above, a conspiracy does not end or divide into multiple conspiracies merely because there has been some change in membership or locale. Viewing the evidence as a whole, the jury was entitled to take into account the testimony that various information provided to Kaplan and Casso by Eppolito and Caracappa as NYPD detectives was given to all the New York area crime families; the testimony that Eppolito and Caracappa had provided services to other members of organized crime in the past; the testimony that Caracappa was given an opportunity in 1996 to earn money by arranging a meeting between QVC executives and one of Kaplan's connections; and the testimony and audio tapes indicating that in Las Vegas in 2004-2005, Eppolito sought to earn money from members of organized crime by offering a money-laundering service and indeed was inundated with requests for that service. This record did not permit the conclusion as a matter of law that the retirements of Eppolito and Caracappa and the imprisonment of Casso and Kaplan either put the Eppolito/Caracappa services-to-organized-crime enterprise out of business or put an end to the Eppolito/Caracappa conspiracy to conduct that enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity. We note that by redefining the enterprise strictly as one limited to the use by Eppolito and Caracappa of their positions as police detectives and the selling of confidential law enforcement information to Kaplan and Casso, the district court relieved Eppolito and Caracappa of their burden of showing that the RICO conspiracy alleged in the Indictment had come to an end or of showing withdrawal from the conspiracy. Given the evidence of the defendants' conduct in Las Vegas, including Eppolito's avidly seeking large sums of money from drug dealers and members of the Mafia for scripts he would agree to write, his manifest impatience in 2005 at the slow arrival of money from Corso's supposed Mafia drug dealer in Florida, and the ready response of Eppolito and Caracappa in 2005 to the request for narcotics to induce Corso's clients to provide money for Eppolito's film, the jury was easily entitled to find that neither Eppolito nor Caracappa had carried his burden of showing that he had withdrawn from the conspiracy or that the principal purpose of the enterprise as alleged in the Indictment, i.e., earning money through providing assistance to members and associates of organized crime, had been either accomplished or abandoned. We also reject the district court's view that as a matter of law, because of the different types of racketeering activity, the enterprise that began in the 1980s and continued into the early 1990s could not be considered the same enterprise that engaged in the Las Vegas conduct that included Eppolito's mid-1990s monetary transactions involving proceeds from Kaplan's narcotics trafficking business, Eppolito's 2004-2005 attempted money laundering of narcotics trafficking proceeds obtained through Corso, and Eppolito's and Caracappa's 2005 participation in narcotics distribution offenses. The district court reasoned that these mid-1990s and 2004-2005 acts were sporadic and unconnected to the original enterprise, Eppolito I, 436 F.Supp.2d at 572, in part because the court regarded the later acts of narcotics trafficking and laundering of the proceeds of narcotics trafficking as type[s] of activity that were entirely different from the racketeering acts performed in the 1980s and early 1990s, id. But the jury, which was accurately instructed that the indictment allege[d] that the principal purpose of the enterprise was to generate money for its members and associates by means of various legal and illegal activities (Tr. 3269 (emphasis added)), could have inferred from the evidence that the conduct in question was sufficiently similar in purpose, when viewed at the level of generality alleged in the Indictment, to show that the enterprise that began in New York continued to exist in Las Vegas. For example, Kaplan testified that he had been involved in narcotics trafficking during the period in which Eppolito and Caracappa were working for Kaplan and Casso in New York, and that although Eppolito and Caracappa had not actually participated in that business, they had repeatedly offered to do so. The district court described those offers as proffers of `law enforcement' services, Eppolito I, 436 F.Supp.2d at 572; but according to Kaplan's testimony, the offers were not so restricted. First, Kaplan testified that Eppolito and Caracappa had offered to assist him in his narcotics trafficking business not only by surveilling his warehouses to make sure that he was not being investigated, which of course would have been a law-enforcement-related service, but also by following him when he went to meet associates. ( See Tr. 783.) The jury was entitled to view the latter as an offer of protection services unrelated to defendants' official positions. Second, the offers to assist in Kaplan's narcotics trafficking business were not limited to those two types of service but were open-ended: Kaplan testified that Eppolito and Caracappa offered to help me in any way ; they said, any[ ] way that they could help me, they were willing to do it. ( Id. (emphases added).) Although Kaplan also testified that Eppolito and Caracappa offered these narcotics-trafficking-related services out of friendship and for free, and on its face such an offer might seem to be beyond the enterprise goal of earning money for such services, the jury was not required to view that offer in isolation and take it at face value. Rather, the jury could assess the offer of free services against the background of defendants' actions with respect to the first task that they performed for Casso, i.e., obtaining information as to who had made the attempt on Casso's life. Eppolito and Caracappa assembled that information, and Santoro delivered the packet to Kaplan stating that it was a gift and an act of friendship for which they would not accept payment. But when Casso asked for an address for and picture of Nicky Guido, who was mentioned in the packet, Santoro, Eppolito, and Caracappa demanded payment of $4,000. The jury, assessing the evidence as a whole, rather than piecemeal, was entitled to view the offers by Eppolito and Caracappa of free services for Kaplan's marijuana business as, like the original gift to Casso, a loss-leader that would doubtless be followed by requests for payment for their services. Finally, although the district court emphasized that Kaplan had rejected defendants' offers to assist in his narcotics trafficking business, the facts that Eppolito and Caracappa did not actually participate in that business and that Kaplan viewed that business as unrelated to his other activities with Casso, were not material here. Count One charged Eppolito and Caracappa not with the substantive crime of conducting the enterprise that provided services to members of organized crime but rather with conspiring to do so; it was permissible for the jury to find that precisely such a conspiracy was reflected in their open-ended offer of assistance to Kaplan for his narcotics trafficking operation. In sum, we conclude that given the level of generality at which the Indictment alleged the principal purpose of the RICO enterprise, the evidence, viewed as a whole and in the light most favorable to the government, does not permit a conclusion that the enterprise ceased to exist prior to March 9, 2000, as a matter of law.