“Nothing Has Hurt People More In This Country Than Wanting To Be In The Movies”

The Times’ Alan Feuer shows how overenthusiastically pitching your film script can get you into big trouble, even years later:

Just beneath the surface of the federal trial of Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa is a cautionary tale about the entertainment age. If one were a screenwriter or, say, one of the half-dozen authors writing about the case, one might propose a work titled, “The Deal Got Him: How a Former Lawman Was Charged With Conspiracy Because He Tried to Get His Movie Made.”

Mr. Eppolito, 57, a retired New York detective, has found himself in exactly this situation. After leaving the police force in the early 1990’s, he went to act in films and write scripts in Las Vegas, where years later he was charged with his former partner, Mr. Caracappa, 64, in a federal narcotics case.

The drug case in Las Vegas revived the government’s desire to pursue a much bigger and much more gruesome case against the two men — accusations that they had killed at least eight people for the mob. That case, based on events said to have occurred in Brooklyn in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, was in jeopardy of being voided because of a five-year statute of limitations — which is where Mr. Eppolito’s writing career comes in.

He has always had a touch of the poet in him, penning “Mafia Cop,” a book that describes his break with the Brooklyn gangsters in his family, and scripts like “Turn of Faith,” a cop-mob-priesthood potboiler produced by the former lightweight champion Boom Boom Mancini. And yet his current troubles began in 2004, prosecutors say, when a government informant with a micro-recorder approached him in Las Vegas, posing as a rich accountant with investors interested in his next script.

If you believe the government the informant, Steven Corso, risked his life recording Mr. Eppolito boasting about all sorts of gangsters he knew and then agreeing to secure an ounce of methamphetamine for some Hollywood big shots. Mr. Corso seemed, after all, to hold the keys to the film world and was, therefore, a man Mr. Eppolito wanted to impress.

But if you believe Bruce Cutler, Mr. Eppolito’s lawyer, Mr. Corso was “a defrocked C.P.A.” and a man worthy of “a nice smack in the face,” who played upon his client’s celluloid dreams to entrap him.

Even though Mr. Corso recorded Mr. Eppolito saying some fairly rough things on tape, Mr. Cutler has argued they were not criminal things — and not even, in the factual sense, true. They were rather fictions produced by Mr. Eppolito’s Brooklyn-steeped imagination — “Mafia folklore, stories,” Mr. Cutler said — the very thing that made his client worthy as a writer.

What is not in dispute is this: one ounce of methamphetamine said to have been procured by a struggling screenwriter for some “Hollywood punks,” as Mr. Cutler called them, has allowed the government to jump across the statute of limitations and indict the two detectives in a continuing criminal conspiracy — recall the title from above? — that stretched from the streets of Brooklyn to the subdivisions of Las Vegas.

Which may be why Edward Hayes, Mr. Caracappa’s lawyer, had this to say in his opening arguments last week: “Nothing has hurt people more in this country than wanting to be in the movies.”

(It’s Fuhrmanesque, no?)