Friday, March 11, 2005 | 11:06 a.m.
Louis Eppolito has never hidden the fact that he grew up with the mob in New York.
He talks about it at length in his 1992 best-selling book, "Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family was the Mob."
Both his father and uncle were soldiers in the Gambino crime family.
The 56-year-old Eppolito, however, chose a different occupation after his father died. He joined the New York Police Department in 1969. His colorful career as a hard-charging, headline-grabbing police officer also is detailed in the book.
But if we are to believe a federal racketeering indictment returned in Brooklyn on Wednesday, charging Eppolito and his former NYPD partner, Stephen Caracappa, with a string of old mob-related hits in the New York area, Eppolito never really left the Mafia.
And that means the Mafia still hasn't left Las Vegas, long considered an "open city" for the nation's traditional crime syndicates.
Eppolito and Caracappa have lived in Las Vegas for the past decade, befriending many well-known people here, including Sandy Murphy, the one-time convicted murderer who was acquitted in a re-trial last year.
Eppolito, who has dabbled in screenwriting and acting, and the 63-year-old Caracappa have homes across the street from each other in a neighborhood southeast of the exclusive Spanish Trail development.
In papers filed Thursday aimed at keeping the suspected hit men behind bars, federal prosecutors alleged that Eppolito and Caracappa still "maintain their associations" with the Mafia.
Those associations, the prosecutors charged, reached their zenith in the mid-1980s and early 1990s when, while still on the police force, Eppolito and Caracappa went on the mob's payroll and passed confidential law enforcement information to ranking members of New York's Luchese crime family.
Phone records, prosecutors said, show Eppolito has made recent calls to Luchese and Bonanno crime family associates. A Bonanno associate also has been seen driving one of Eppolito's cars.
And Eppolito has been secretly recorded bragging to an undercover witness about his "former and current LCN (La Cosa Nostra) connections," prosecutors wrote.
Sheriff Bill Young doesn't see Wednesday's indictment as the resurgence of the Mafia in Las Vegas.
But Young acknowledged that the indictment does illustrate that the mob isn't ready to give up on the city just yet.
"The mob's profile here is still much less than it was 10-15 years ago," Young said. "What we have is kind of like an ongoing maintenance program. We're always going to be dealing with traditional organized crime until every last one of those people is put in prison."
And that's not likely to happen anytime soon.
"Where there's money, there's organized crime," Las Vegas FBI chief Ellen Knowlton said. "We certainly have money here, and you can take that to the bank."
John Peluso, a top New York DEA agent who participated in the Las Vegas arrests of Eppolito and Caracappa, said authorities will be sorting out their activities for some time.
"These were two very menacing characters," he said. "The only difference between them and the rest of the mob was that they carried badges."
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