Spotlight for Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation by Michael Cannell

 

Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation by Michael Cannell

Published:  January 14, 2025 by Minotaur Books

Genre:  True Crime, Non-Fiction

Taken from Goodreads:  For the first time in forty years, former New York Times editor Michael Cannell unearths the full story behind two ruthless New York cops who acted as double agents for the Mafia.

No episode in NYPD history surpasses the depravities of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, two decorated detectives who covertly acted as mafia informants and paid assassins in the Scorsese world of 1980s Brooklyn.

For more than ten years, Eppolito and Caracappa moonlighted as the mob’s early warning alert system, leaking names of mobsters secretly cooperating with the government and crippling investigations by sharing details of surveillance, phone taps and impending arrests. The Lucchese boss called the two detectives his crystal ball: Whatever detectives knew, the mafia soon learned. Most grievously, Eppolito and Caracappa earned bonuses by staging eight mob hits, pulling the trigger themselves at least once.

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Meet MichaelCannell (taken from his website):  Michael is the author of five non-fiction books, most recently Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nation. His previous books are A Brotherhood Betrayed: The Man Behind the Rise and Fall of Murder, Inc., Incendiary: The Psychiatrist, the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling, The Limit: Life and Death on the 1961 Grand Prix Circuit and I.M. Pei: Mandarin of Modernism.

Michael has worked as a reporter for Time and an editor for The New York Times. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated and many other publications.