{"id":312,"date":"2006-07-01T01:36:28","date_gmt":"2006-07-01T01:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.israelgreenwald.com\/?p=312"},"modified":"2015-03-13T01:36:43","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T01:36:43","slug":"victims-kin-call-ruling-so-absurd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/?p=312","title":{"rendered":"Victims’ kin call ruling ‘so absurd’"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/strong><\/span>New York Daily News<\/p>\n

BY GREG B. SMITH
\nDAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
\nSaturday, July 1st, 2006<\/p>\n

Anger and disbelief.
\nThat’s how families of the murder victims reacted after a judge tossed the Mafia cops’ convictions despite concluding they had committed some of the most heinous crimes he’d ever seen.<\/p>\n

“I never heard of anything so stupid,” said Betty Hydell, whose son Jimmy was kidnapped and turned over to a mob hit man in 1986. “I thought this was all over.”<\/p>\n

“We were surprised to hear this. I’m sure the family is going to be upset,” said Mark Longo, an attorney representing the family of Nicholas Guido, a telephone installer who was killed by mistake on Christmas Day 1986.<\/p>\n

In April, a jury convicted Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa on all counts in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy that prosecutors say dated to their days as a decorated NYPD detectives.<\/p>\n

They were found guilty of participating in eight murders, one kidnapping and an attempted murder – as well leaking the names of informers to the mob, and warning Luchese crime family gangsters when they were about to be busted.<\/p>\n

Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein threw out the racketeering conviction because he found prosecutors failed to show the cops participated in a continuing conspiracy into 2000 – the statute of limitations cutoff.<\/p>\n

But the legal distinctions in Weinstein’s ruling carried little weight with the victims’ kin.<\/p>\n

Hydell’s daughter, Linda, was the last person to talk to her brother the day he was kidnapped and killed in September 1986.<\/p>\n

She called yesterday’s ruling “so absurd it’s not even funny.”<\/p>\n

“It’s gotta end somewhere. They were convicted on 72 counts. What are people going to say?” she said. “There’s no closure on this for my family. It just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.”<\/p>\n

There was similar reaction from the family of Israel Greenwald, a jeweler who was murdered because a mob associate feared he would become an FBI informer.<\/p>\n

Greenwald’s wife, Leah, said she respected the judge’s decision but said she was upset because next week the two cops are expected to ask the judge to be released on bail.<\/p>\n

“Of course we are upset because we do not want them to be free after knowing that they are guilty,” she said. “In our minds they are guilty, and we want them to be in jail.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York Daily News BY GREG B. SMITH DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Saturday, July 1st, 2006 Anger and disbelief. That’s how families of the murder victims reacted after a judge […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles-from-april-2006-dec-2006"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":313,"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/israelgreenwald.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}