A Crooked NYPD Cop Working with the Mafia Framed Barry Gibbs for Murder: 'I Know Where Your Mother Lives' (Exclusive)

Mar. 15, 2025

Minotaur Books; AP Photo/Hiroko Masuike

Below, in an exclusive excerpt shared with PEOPLE, we hear the story of how Eppolito framed Barry Gibbs for murder, and what happened when he was finally exonerated.

Minotaur Books

He married a woman he met on his postal route. They had a son. After their divorce, he fell into a dissolute life of clubs, drink and addiction. Gibbs hit a low ebb in early 1986. Con Edison cut his power when he fell into arrears, leaving him to smoke crack alone in the dark. The post office suspended him after he missed shifts.

On the afternoon of Nov. 4, 1986, Peter Mitchell, a 29-year-old former marine, went for an early afternoon jog beside the Belt Parkway. Along the way, he passed a gray Oldsmobile Cutlass pulled awkwardly to the roadside. The driver was a White man with a “big nose, baggy face … like a prune,” Mitchell later said. His salt-and-pepper hair was “combed down on the sides and frilly on top.” Beside him sat a Black woman wearing a frowsy brown fur coat. “She was looking straight out at Jamaica Bay,” Mitchell said, “like a dead stare.”

When the man was safely out of sight, Mitchell knelt beside the body. The woman’s head protruded from the quilt, as if she were sleeping in a comfortable bed. Blood smeared her mouth. An abrasion from a rope or some other ligature encircled her neck.

Two years earlier, while stationed in California, Mitchell had pleaded guilty to DUI. Months later he was convicted for trying to cash a stolen check. He was released on parole after four months in jail. He had broken parole to stay with his brother in Brooklyn.

Mitchell was a Black man with a criminal record. He was uncomfortably aware that involvement with the police, however innocent, could end badly for him.“I could have gone home,” he later said, “but I wanted to do the right thing for the woman.” So Mitchell entered the riding school and asked a manager to call 911.

Detective Richard Canderozzi, from the Sixty-Third Precinct, arrived and collected evidence. Canderozzi took Mitchell’s statement. He described the man who had dumped the body as about 5 feet, 6 inches tall, 50 years old or so, with longish white hair flecked with gray. Canderozzi, who had worked in the Organized Crime Division, thought the description matched Steven Brigante, a neighborhood car thief with ties to the Mafia.

Police Officer Louis Eppolito holds door chains in apartment on Surf Ave. in Brooklyn of an elderly robbery victim. Cops caught the suspect.Charles Frattini/NY Daily News Archive via Getty

Charles Frattini/NY Daily News Archive via Getty

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Detective Eppolito arrived midafternoon and abruptly announced himself in charge. Mitchell pointed out the beer cans, which presumably contained fingerprints. Eppolito threw them away.

The woman’s body was removed to the Kings County Mortuary, where a medical examiner found that she had died of strangulation with a cord or belt. Fingerprints identified her as a 27-year-old prostitute named Virginia Robertson, the mother of a young girl.

Eppolito may have targeted Gibbs for Robertson’s murder in order to protect Brigante, a Lucchese associate. Or he may have sought an easy way to boost his arrest count.

According to Mitchell, Eppolito then drove him to the precinct house and parked him in a cold interrogation room. He stood over Mitchell, saying that the man they saw, the lowlife Barry Gibbs, was a pervert and a pedophile. When Mitchell repeated that Gibbs was not the man he saw, Eppolito bore down. “I know where your mother lives,” he told Mitchell. I" know where your brother lives. What if the police found drugs in their homes?" By midnight, after almost six hours in the interrogation room, Mitchell acquiesced: he agreed to identify Gibbs as the suspect.

Ex cop and current actor Louis Eppolito in the Daily News Studio.Anthony Pescatore/NY Daily News Archive via Getty

Anthony Pescatore/NY Daily News Archive via Getty

Eppolito and a partner arrested Gibbs outside his housing project. “I got thrown against a car and they tell me to empty out my pockets,” Gibbs said. “I say what’s this about? He throws me in the back of the car and he says I’m Detective Louie Eppolito.”

Fifteen months later, Mitchell testified against Gibbs, with Eppolito watching from the back of the courtroom. Gibbs naively assumed the jury would acquit him. When the verdict came in, Gibbs’ lawyer put his hand on his shoulder. “He asked me if I heard what they said,” Gibbs said. “I couldn’t answer him. I was in shock.” The jury had convicted Gibbs of murder in the second degree. The judge sentenced Gibbs to a minimum of 20 years.

Retired New York detective Louis J. Eppolito leaves the courthouse for lunch with his wife, Fran and other family members. Photo taken on April 3, 2006.Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty

Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty

Gibbs went to Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York. On Jan. 30, 1992, he wrote to a prominent forensic scientist in California who, in turn, referred him to the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that advocates for the wrongfully convicted.

The Innocence Project accepted Gibbs’s case in hopes that DNA tests could exonerate him. Vanessa Potkin, his attorney, obtained a police document listing all crime scene evidence. “New York is a particularly problematic jurisdiction for finding evidence,” she said. “It’s very complicated because the storage for evidence was archaic. They relied on carbon copy papers. If a paper was misfiled it’s hard to find the evidence.”

The search continued for years, but eventually ran dry. The police file had mysteriously disappeared. Potkin noted that Eppolito was the last person to have custody of several critical items, including the police file. “If we can’t find the evidence,” Potkin said, “we’re in an unfortunate position where we have to close the case.”

Gibbs was lying awake in his jail cell at 5 a.m. one morning, in March 2005, when he heard a radio news report: authorities had arrested two former NYPD detectives on racketeering and drug charges. Louie Eppolito was one of them. “There is a god,” Gibbs yelled.

Gibbs had exhausted his options, until Eppolito’s arrest. When federal agents searched Eppolito’s home they found the 19-year-old Robertson homicide file. Eppolito had taken it when he retired, a violation of police procedure. His breach raised suspicions about his handling of the case.

Debbie Egan-Chin/NY Daily News Archive via Getty

The US Attorney’s Office brought Gibbs to Brooklyn for questioning. Meanwhile, FBI agents tracked down Peter Mitchell, the primary witness, who, under questioning, recanted his testimony. “He broke down as soon as they came,” Potkin said. “He said, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to come here.’”

On Sept. 29, 2005, Barry Gibbs, now 57, stood before Judge Michael Gary. He was barrel-chested and unkempt, with a tousled white beard. When Judge Gary threw out his 1988 conviction, Gibbs raised his hands over his head, then rubbed them together under his chin as if in prayer. “Mr. Gibbs,” the judge said, “the case is over.”

Gibbs walked from State Supreme Court a free man after 18 years, 10 months and 14 days in jail. Riding downstairs in a courthouse elevator, Gibbs said what he really wanted was a good cup of coffee and a hot bath, luxuries unknown in jail. He walked outside with his right arm around Vanessa Potkin and his left around Barry Scheck, a founder of the Innocence Project.

That evening, Gibbs got his hot soak in the bathroom of Scheck’s loft in the DUMBO neighborhood of Brooklyn. “I’m scrubbing, and I’m crying,” Gibbs said. “I wanted to get the jail off me.”

Afterward, Gibbs met Scheck’s dog, Barney. “As I went to kneel down,” Gibbs said, “I got all the way down and Barney came all the way up to my face and gave me a kiss. That is when I knew I was free, after a kiss from that dog. It was the most uplifting day I ever had.”

Blood and the Badge: The Mafia, Two Killer Cops, and a Scandal That Shocked the Nationwill hit shelves on Jan. 14, 2025 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

source: people.com