Even mobsters like to read a good book while on vacation. In the summer of 1992, a Luchese underboss, Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, had a chance to do a lot of reading while he hid out from law enforcement at a hilly, wooded New Jersey hamlet.

Casso was on the lam for 32 months, much of which he spent like a country squire in a large frame house at 79 Waterloo Road in Mount Olive, N.J.

While there, he picked up a copy of a book called “Mafia Cop,” the story of an allegedly straight-shooting NYPD detective who complained that he was wrongly accused of being tied to the mob.

“He couldn’t believe his eyes,” one law-enforcement official said, describing Casso’s reaction when he spotted a picture of the book’s author, Louis Eppolito, and his former partner, ex-detective Stephen Caracappa.

Casso, sources tell Gang Land, immediately recognized the pair as the detectives who had helped him carry out eight separate hits – and who had even alerted him about his pending arrest two years earlier.

“Gaspipe had seen them once, but he never knew who they were until he read ‘Mafia Cop,’ ” another law-enforcement source said.

Casso had gotten only a single, fleeting glance of the detectives on October 31, 1986, when they allegedly turned over Gambino associate James Hydell to Casso in a Brooklyn parking lot after the detectives “arrested” Hydell, but sources said Casso never learned their names.

Messrs. Eppolito and Caracappa allegedly received $4,000 a month from Casso for six years, but sources said their identities were a closely guarded secret of Burton Kaplan, a trusted Casso associate who served as an intermediary between the employer and his employees.

The cagey and street-smart Kaplan realized that his singular access to the detectives was a life-insurance policy, one that the treacherous Casso – he would later admit 36 murders – would never cash in without first finding out who they were.

The services the two NYPD detectives provided Casso were staggering, too important to risk losing through murdering Kaplan. According to court papers, they passed along the names of police informers, pending investigations, and arrests. Casso called them his “crystal balls.” They also allegedly served as hit men for the bloodthirsty gangster.

“Who knows if he ever would have found out who they were if Louie hadn’t written his book,” a law-enforcement source said with a chuckle. “He hadn’t done it by then, and they were on his payroll for years.”

The book, whose full title was “Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob,” was written by Mr. Eppolito in 1992, and cowritten by journalist Bob Drury.

As it was, it took the feds 11 years to obtain an indictment against the ex-detectives even after Casso became an informer in 1994 and told the FBI their names, most of their alleged crimes, and the identity of their intermediary.

If not for the book, it appears that all Casso would have been able to tell the feds was that two nameless detectives, a fat guy and a skinny guy, had helped him kill people. Not exactly the most believable story, particularly from a serial killer like Casso.

The Luchese underboss would have told them about Kaplan, but it’s impossible for Gang Land to envision any scenario in which knowing only the go-between’s identity would have been enough to crack the case.

Armed with all three names, the feds pressed Kaplan to the hilt. They prosecuted him for marijuana smuggling, engineered a heavy 27-year prison sentence, and finally saw him decide to cooperate against the detectives last summer for reasons that are still fuzzy.

Penning his autobiography may not have been – as many law-enforcement officials have told Gang Land – “the dumbest thing Louie ever did.” But it certainly wasn’t one of the smartest things he ever did during his life as a “Mafia Cop.”

Mr. Eppolito’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, said he was “not surprised to learn” that Casso came up with his client’s name after reading “Mafia Cop,” but declined further comment, stating that he hoped he would be able to question Casso about all his “so-called recollections” in court.

“He still doesn’t know the names [of the cops on his payroll],” Mr. Caracappa’s lawyer, Edward Hayes, said.

Kaplan’s decision to keep Casso in the dark about Messrs. Eppolito and Caracappa, as it turned out, was the correct one. According to FBI documents obtained by Gang Land, after Casso found out their identities, he plotted to have Kaplan murdered.

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Meanwhile, the feds have found a witness who backs up Kaplan’s assertion about two murders the ex-detectives allegedly committed, including the 1986 slaying of a gem merchant whose bones were dug up earlier this month from under a Brooklyn garage, Gang Land has learned.

The new witness, sources say, is the former owner of the garage, who told the feds about the makeshift gravesite and fingered the detectives and Mr. Eppolito’s cousin, mob associate Frank Santora, as the hit team that killed Israel Greenwald and buried him there. Santora, who was murdered in 1987, had met Kaplan in the early 1980s while both were in prison. After they were released, Santora introduced him to Mr. Eppolito, Kaplan has told the feds.

The garage owner, sources said, was not a mob associate, but an extortion victim of Luchese gangsters, including soldier Bruno Facciola, who was killed in 1990 and is listed in the racketeering indictment as one of eight alleged murder victims of Messrs. Eppolito and Caracappa.

Sources say the unidentified garage owner is referred to in court papers as a “friend of Eppolito’s in Brooklyn” who was being extorted by Facciola but was later left alone “after Eppolito asked Casso through intermediaries to stop harassing his friend.” The intermediaries, sources said, were Santora and Kaplan.

In recent months, the sources said, investigators painstakingly reviewed files of many murders and other cases in the 63rd precinct, where Mr. Eppolito first worked after joining the police force in 1969, and located the garage owner and convinced him to cooperate.

The detectives and Santora pulled Greenwald over on the New York State Thruway, “arrested” him, and took him to the garage at 2232 Nostrand Ave., a block from Brooklyn College, where they killed and buried him, sources say.

Eight months later, Messrs. Eppolito and Caracappa allegedly used similar tactics to abduct Hydell. That time, however, they used the garage not as a burial ground but as a secure location to transfer Gambino associate Hydell from the backseat to the trunk of the car for delivery to Casso. The gangster has admitted torturing him to learn the identities of Hydell’s cohorts in an assassination attempt in September 1986, and then executing him.

Assistant U.S. attorneys Robert Henoch and Mitra Hormozi, who are expected to ask a federal grand jury to add Greenwald’s murder to the racketeering indictment against the ex-detectives, declined to comment about the continuing grand jury probe.

“It’s more likely that the dead man and Kaplan were in the crime business together and that’s why he was killed. Nothing to do with my client,” Mr. Hayes said.

Said Mr. Cutler: “When we uncover everything” – meaning relevant police and FBI reports from the 1980s and 1990s about the charged homicides – “we will show that the entire case is based on lies. Lie after lie after lie. Casso and Kaplan. Lie after lie after lie.”

This column and other news of organized crime will appear later today at www.ganglandnews.com.