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wrote that Ralph had been raised in the mob by the premier boss in the country, Carlo Gambino himself. He turns in his Uncle Jimmy, too, stating that the Clam had rank in the Mafia. Jimmy the Clam had a son, Jim-Jim, who wanted to be a great gangster but did not know the first commandment: Pay or die. He lost twelve thousand dollars gambling and then reneged. The bookmaker was in his seventies and Sicilian, a type whose principles harden with time. He issued a major complaint. Jimmy the Clam paid the debt, but his son’s welshing made him look terrible, too. The father and son were called to a meeting to clear the air. Peter Piacenti, who was an ancient ally of Jimmy the Clam’s, performed the traditional task of taking your closest friend to his murder. Piacenti escorted Uncle Jimmy and Jim-Jim to the school yard of Grady High in Brighton Beach. A deranged mob killer, Roy Roy DeMeo, showed up, too.
    So while it was true, Cutler said, that his client’s father,uncle, and cousin had been mobbed up, Eppolito finished Erasmus Hall High School in 1966 and became a cop at age twenty. At which time, says the lawyer, his client “turned his back on the family and protected the elderly, the children, and was so highly honored by the police for his heroism and devotion.”
    He says that all the government has against him is the word of a crooked informer who moved in on Eppolito after the cop retired. Louie wanted only to write movie scripts and books. The stories on the accountant’s tapes were all cops-and-mobsters tall tales in the tone of I’ll-break-your-head.
    “I heard two hundred hours of those tapes,” Cutler says. He explains the way men speak about violence and states that his client, Eppolito, was merely a creator of canards.
    The U.S. Attorney says that three pages of Eppolito’s book prove he should not be bailed, because he belonged in a zoo. On one of the three pages, Eppolito stated, “Bugs never went anyplace without his handy sawed-off—and he fought like hell even when I had him on the ground with my thirty-eight stuck halfway down his throat.”
    Back in the precinct, Bugs said, “Do what you gotta do, pig.”
    Eppolito reports himself saying, “I must have punched Bugs forty times in the head. But he wasn’t talking. The guy wore out my arms. My hands were swollen. And he just sneered.
    “Finally I took him into a back room, and filled a bucketwith the hottest hot water I could find. I emptied half a jug of ammonia into the bucket. I couldn’t even put my face near it without my eyes burning. Then I grabbed Bugs’s head and dunked. He came up screaming. His face was mutating into a giant purple blotch. But when he caught his breath, he turned to me and told me to ‘Fuck off.’”
    Cutler says that Eppolito’s talent, “his forte, his stock in trade,” was “as a creator of apocryphal stories…. Last year Eppolito told about seven motorcycle Hell’s Angels coming to his house when a contractor, a friend of theirs, wouldn’t do the work and Eppolito threatened to kill him in front of his wife, parents, kids, friends, and waved a hatchet as he said this.”
    The federal prosecutor says that “words are important, because words are a window into what’s in someone’s mind.”
    Cutler has on a light khaki summer suit that could have used ten pounds less to cover. He mentions all Eppolito’s exaggerations while leaning over the lectern and speaking in a pleasant voice, constantly saying, “Your Honor.” Gone was the old Cutler style when he defended John Gotti with a bellow, marching around the courtroom and throwing an indictment into the wastebasket. He is now wonderfully understated. For good reason. Nobody does anything except what Jack Weinstein wants him to do.
    Weinstein’s response to the lawyers’ pleadings is to set bail for both cops, $5 million each, which today can easily be raised on family houses. The New York real-estate market has risen so dramatically that you can put