many years of dirt and grime you had to put on the fluorescent lights to find them.
In the days before terrorism changed the world the DA’s office was run pretty casually. The more productive detectives could pretty much pick the DA they wanted to work with. Tommy Dades knew just about everyone in the office and he knew the Casatelli case was going to be a problem. There were a lot of conservative lawyers in that office, men who needed to see the smoking gun before they would get involved in a case. Tommy barely had smoke, and those people weren’t going to roll the dice on his evidence.
Tommy needed someone in the DA’s office to issue a subpoena to force a potential witness who had left New York State to return to testify. Initially he took his evidence to a prosecutor he’d worked with several times before. As Dades remembers, “I told him what I had and he laughed in my face. He told me to forget it, he’d never be able to get an indictment with what I had. He told me to come back when I had enough evidence to go to the grand jury. I decided to go over his head.”
That’s when he approached Mike Vecchione for the first time. The two men liked each other immediately. Both of them spoke Brooklyn and neither one of them had any illusions about the law. Both of them knew how it worked in real life. Tommy was straight with Mike. He told him what he had, what he needed, and how he intended to get it. He admitted it wasn’t much of a case yet. It wasn’t even a homicide. But he promised Vecchione that he would do whatever was necessary.
What impressed Vecchione most at that first meeting was Dades’s passion for justice. He made this ordinary case seem unique and important. Vecchione had worked with literally thousands of police officers, but he’d never met anyone who spoke as deeply from his heart as Dades. Tommy told him about the mother and how much this case meant to her, saying, “It’s all she’s got, the hope that we’re gonna nail these guys.” He told Mike he had promised her that he would give this case his maximum effort and that he intended to do exactly that. It was a masterful selling job. And when he was done Vecchione agreed to work with him.
It was two years before they finally got a break. Somehow Vecchione had managed to convince a grand jury to indict both fugitives based on Tommy’s admittedly flimsy evidence. An arrest warrant had been issued. Two years later that warrant paid off. Tommy Kane was picked up in Florida for driving under the influence. When the arresting officer ran his driver’s license the warrant popped. He was extradited to New York and sentenced to nine and a half to twenty-two years. Two down. The Kane brothers were in prison, but Hynes was still a fugitive.
Tommy’s relationship with Mike continued to grow stronger. During this time they worked together to solve several other seemingly impossible cases. In one of them, they worked with FBI agents Gary Pontecorvo and Jimmy DeStefano to successfully put a name on a skull that had been fished out of a small river several years earlier and used it to put the killer in jail for murder. But as their friendship grew, even as they wrapped up old cases, the Casatelli case just hung there, a dark cloud that wouldn’t float away.
More than three years passed. Tommy Dades was still speaking regularly to the mother. Finally, one afternoon he sat down at his desk and he just decided, I’m gonna find that scumbag today.
He began rereading his notes, searching for the key that would open up the case. He knew it was there; it was always there. He just had to be smart enough to find it. He began by searching for a connection to the system—an application for license plates, a tax return, maybe credit problems. Anything that would leave an identity trail. But if Hynes was in the system, he couldn’t find him.
Then he remembered a rumor that he’d heard a while back. Supposedly Hynes’s mother had left Brooklyn with him.
In the days before terrorism changed the world the DA’s office was run pretty casually. The more productive detectives could pretty much pick the DA they wanted to work with. Tommy Dades knew just about everyone in the office and he knew the Casatelli case was going to be a problem. There were a lot of conservative lawyers in that office, men who needed to see the smoking gun before they would get involved in a case. Tommy barely had smoke, and those people weren’t going to roll the dice on his evidence.
Tommy needed someone in the DA’s office to issue a subpoena to force a potential witness who had left New York State to return to testify. Initially he took his evidence to a prosecutor he’d worked with several times before. As Dades remembers, “I told him what I had and he laughed in my face. He told me to forget it, he’d never be able to get an indictment with what I had. He told me to come back when I had enough evidence to go to the grand jury. I decided to go over his head.”
That’s when he approached Mike Vecchione for the first time. The two men liked each other immediately. Both of them spoke Brooklyn and neither one of them had any illusions about the law. Both of them knew how it worked in real life. Tommy was straight with Mike. He told him what he had, what he needed, and how he intended to get it. He admitted it wasn’t much of a case yet. It wasn’t even a homicide. But he promised Vecchione that he would do whatever was necessary.
What impressed Vecchione most at that first meeting was Dades’s passion for justice. He made this ordinary case seem unique and important. Vecchione had worked with literally thousands of police officers, but he’d never met anyone who spoke as deeply from his heart as Dades. Tommy told him about the mother and how much this case meant to her, saying, “It’s all she’s got, the hope that we’re gonna nail these guys.” He told Mike he had promised her that he would give this case his maximum effort and that he intended to do exactly that. It was a masterful selling job. And when he was done Vecchione agreed to work with him.
It was two years before they finally got a break. Somehow Vecchione had managed to convince a grand jury to indict both fugitives based on Tommy’s admittedly flimsy evidence. An arrest warrant had been issued. Two years later that warrant paid off. Tommy Kane was picked up in Florida for driving under the influence. When the arresting officer ran his driver’s license the warrant popped. He was extradited to New York and sentenced to nine and a half to twenty-two years. Two down. The Kane brothers were in prison, but Hynes was still a fugitive.
Tommy’s relationship with Mike continued to grow stronger. During this time they worked together to solve several other seemingly impossible cases. In one of them, they worked with FBI agents Gary Pontecorvo and Jimmy DeStefano to successfully put a name on a skull that had been fished out of a small river several years earlier and used it to put the killer in jail for murder. But as their friendship grew, even as they wrapped up old cases, the Casatelli case just hung there, a dark cloud that wouldn’t float away.
More than three years passed. Tommy Dades was still speaking regularly to the mother. Finally, one afternoon he sat down at his desk and he just decided, I’m gonna find that scumbag today.
He began rereading his notes, searching for the key that would open up the case. He knew it was there; it was always there. He just had to be smart enough to find it. He began by searching for a connection to the system—an application for license plates, a tax return, maybe credit problems. Anything that would leave an identity trail. But if Hynes was in the system, he couldn’t find him.
Then he remembered a rumor that he’d heard a while back. Supposedly Hynes’s mother had left Brooklyn with him.
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