Mafia Cops | The Crystal Ball | 3

In 1990, the FBI executed a massive raid on New York's mob families, only to discover that two NYPD detectives—Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracapa—had been feeding intelligence to the Lucchese crime family for years. Their betrayal, enabled by the RICO Act and a network of corrupt informants, allowed mob boss Anthony Casso to evade capture for nearly three years. But when Eppolito published a memoir titled *Mafia Cop*, exposing his partnership with Caracapa, the mob’s secrets began to unravel. Casso, now in hiding, was eventually tracked down and arrested—but instead of cooperating, he flipped on the FBI, revealing the detectives’ identities and the $350,000 they’d been paid. This confession triggered a chain reaction: Burton Kaplan, a mob associate, fled to Mexico, while Caracapa fled to Las Vegas. Yet the FBI’s case collapsed when Casso himself violated his deal by running a prison drug empire, rendering his testimony unreliable. The investigation into the corrupt cops was abandoned—until decades later, Kaplan was finally arrested for drug trafficking, his black address book revealing a hidden network of mob contacts. The episode ends with the chilling realization that the men who betrayed the law were never truly brought to justice. The story exposes a deep rot in law enforcement: a system where loyalty to the badge was replaced by loyalty to the mob, and where the pursuit of justice was undermined by the very people sworn to uphold it.