Many years before he hooked up with the celebrated “Mafia Cop” Louis Eppolito, Stephen Caracappa had a rap sheet that originally kept him from being hired by the New York City Police Department, Gang Land has learned.

On January 5, 1960, nine years before he and Mr. Eppolito would join the NYPD, police arrested Mr. Caracappa on grand larceny charges for a commercial burglary on Staten Island, where the 18-year-old Mr. Caracappa lived at the time, according to court records obtained by Gang Land.

At the time of his arrest, Mr. Caracappa, who dropped out of New Dorp High School at 16, “was working with his father as a laborer in New Jersey,” according to court papers filed in the murder and racketeering case slated to begin later this month.

Two weeks later, a Staten Island grand jury indicted Mr. Caracappa and a cohort on felony grand larceny charges for what one police source described as a “well-planned, well-organized commercial burglary” that included lumber and other construction materials.

Records of the case are sealed, but according to ledgers maintained at Staten Island Supreme Court, Mr. Caracappa was declared a “youthful offender” and the felony charges were dropped. On June 17, 1960, he pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges and was sentenced to probation by Judge James Crane.

Because the plea bargain called for no jail time, NYPD hiring practices at the time did not preclude Mr. Caracappa from becoming a police officer. Even so, sources said, he was rejected on his first go-round because the assigned applicant investigator determined that the crime was neither a penny-ante offense nor the work of amateurs, but a sophisticated operation.

“They rented a truck to pull off the heist and apparently stole building materials for which they had a buyer,” the source added.

Mr. Caracappa’s attorney, Edward Hayes, downplayed the burglary rap as a “youthful offense, not a sophisticated crime.” Mr. Hayes insisted the old conviction was not an indicator that his client was a criminal who joined the police department to line his own pockets, as authorities asserted when they unveiled the allegations against the ex-detectives. “He stole insulation and wallboard, not machinery,” Mr. Hayes said.

“This is not a case where the defendants have clearly been involved in organized crime since childhood. Steve Caracappa, until the government raised these allegations, was universally regarded as a hero,” he said.

Sources placed the value of the stolen merchandise at “thousands of dollars,” but Gang Land could not determine the actual amount or the identity of Mr. Caracappa’s accomplice in the 1960 caper. Records for both defendants were sealed in the 1970s, the chief clerk of the Staten Island Supreme Court, Joseph Como, said.

At the time of the of the burglary, a second-degree grand larceny charge required the total value of the stolen property to be greater than $100, according to a New York University Law School professor, Stephen Gillers.

Because the conviction happened 19 years before the alleged racketeering conspiracy began, prosecutors could not even consider introducing evidence of it at the upcoming trial unless Mr. Caracappa were to testify in his own defense – which is very unlikely.

Last month, in an appearance that has elicited assessments too numerous and too varied to categorize, Mr. Caracappa publicly declared his innocence to Ed Bradley on “60 Minutes.” The most poignant assessment Gang Land has heard came from a longtime NYPD detective, who responded to Mr. Caracappa’s assertion that he never “disgraced the badge.”

“I never called my shield a badge, and in all my years on the job I never heard a cop use the word badge. It’s a shield,” the detective said.

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Last week prosecutors alerted Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein that they want to introduce evidence that Messrs. Caracappa and Eppolito were involved in five uncharged slayings in addition to eight murders the indictment alleges they committed from 1986 to 1990.

To help prove their case, prosecutors Mitra Hormozi, Robert Henoch, and Daniel Wenner also want to introduce testimony that no crime was too small for the Mafia Cops during their alleged 25-year-long racketeering conspiracy. Among other crimes, Messrs. Eppolito and Caracappa allegedly robbed delis, assaulted prostitutes, bribed a robbery suspect, threatened numerous people, used and sold drugs, and evaded taxes on legal and illegal income.

Mr. Hayes and Mr. Eppolito’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, tomorrow will ask Judge Weinstein to limit severely the number of uncharged crimes.

Mr. Hayes ripped the recent submission, also alleging Mr. Caracappa ran a shady private detective agency that used retired detectives, saying it “has tarred a number very talented NYC police officers.” The allegations are a smear against the entire NYPD, Mr. Hayes said, because for Messrs. Caracappa and Eppolito to have committed these crimes, “it would be as if everyone in the NYPD was asleep at the switch.”

“This case has been transformed from an attack on these two detectives into a broad-based attack on the entire Police Department in an attempt to vindicate the Justice Department’s policy of giving hoodlums millions of dollars to spin tales from the witness stand,” Mr. Hayes said. For example, he said, the feds have spent $2 million to provide for the expenses related to years of trial testimony by a onetime Luchese acting boss, Alphonse “Little Al” D’Arco, who began cooperating in 1991.

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Mob lawyer Joseph Corozzo, whom the feds describe as “house counsel” for the Gambino family, stuck it to the government last week in a trial that had nothing to do with so-called traditional organized crime.

The beleaguered attorney, whose father and uncle are heavyweight Gambino mobsters, won an acquittal for Kenrick Caesar, a client charged with being part of a drug smuggling conspiracy when a half a ton of marijuana was delivered last May to a garage owned in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

The jury acquitted Mr. Caesar, even though he was seen wearing a mechanic’s uniform in an animated discussion with the truck driver minutes before he drove the truck into Mr. Caesar’s garage to unload the load of marijuana.

This week, the feds pushed their effort to bounce Mr. Corozzo from the racketeering and murder trial of Dominick “Skinny Dom” Pizzonia, not because of his prowess as an attorney, they say, but due to conflicts of interest he has with the crime family and a key witness in the case, turncoat Gambino capo Michael “Mikey Scars” DiLeonardo.

DiLeonardo testified that he hired Mr. Corozzo to do work for him in 2001 and that the attorney has been on the crime family’s payroll since he was admitted to the bar in 1992. On one occasion, DiLeonardo said, he saw then acting boss John A. “Junior” Gotti give the lawyer $4,000 of a $10,000 tribute Mikey Scars had just given Junior while the three men were having dinner at a Queens restaurant.

Mr. Corozzo, represented at the hearing by Henry Mazurek, denies ever representing DiLeonardo. Mr. Corozzo argues that because his client waives any other possible conflicts the lawyer may have, he should be allowed to remain on the case. Judge Weinstein reserved a final decision in the matter.

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