...And Never Let HerGo

shy to ask—so she’ll have to ask him.
    Tom ended his letter to Steve by wishing him a true love and soul mate, “as I found your mom.”
    Fortunately, Steve didn’t read the letter, beyond scanning it and seeing that it looked very long and complicated. Nor did Debby. It ended up in the growing stack of Tom’s correspondence in the prosecutors’ file.
    F OR all of his fascination, obsession, and fixation on the psychology of women, Tom saw their world through weirdly slanted lenses. He loved to talk about the private parts of their lives and their bodies; he remembered the details of their menstrual cycles, their problems with PMS and even their ovulation patterns in a way that was faintly creepy. And yet he had not a clue about how a woman’s mind worked. But how could he have thought that supplying Debby with a surrogate sexual partner—a man with whom she had no emotional connection beyond friendship—would make her contented and serene, and grateful to him? His bland assumptions had horrified Shopa, but Capano had taken his silence for assent.
    And thus encouraged, he had written to a teenage boy about his mother in unmistakably suggestive terms and had asked him, in effect, to be a pimp for her, telling his mother to be “extremely nice” to Shopa.
    Before Debby stopped writing to him, Tom had asked her for Steve’s telephone number often. And he had been particularly insistent about wanting her daughter, Victoria’s, phone number and address at college. “What if there was an emergency?” he asked Debby. “What if I couldn’t get in touch with you?”
    “I never wanted him to have Victoria’s address or phone number,” Debby recalled. “I couldn’t imagine any emergency where he’d need that. Later, I was awfully glad he didn’t have it.”
    W HEN his crude ploy to win Debby back with surrogate seduction failed, Tom set out on another scheme. If he could not be sure that she was part of his team, then he would have to make certain that she didn’t play for the opposition.
    Tom’s new neighbor in Cell 2 was a cocaine dealer, Wilfredo “Tito” Rosa. Rosa’s operation in the Wilmington area had been extensive, and he was looking at thirty years in prison for his part in a ring that had sold seventy pounds of the addictive white powder in two years.
    The month after Tom was jailed, Rosa had been moved into the cell next to Tom’s. Thus, their “friendship” extended further back than Tom’s and Nick Perillo’s. Rosa wrote to Colm Connolly and said that he and Tom had once managed to talk to each other threeor four hours a day by using the slots at the bottom of their cell doors or the window-yard technique.
    In December of 1997, Rosa told the prosecutors that Tom had been seething over his brother Gerry’s betrayal. They whiled away the hours in the 1-F pod kidding about what Tom could arrange to have done to his enemies. Rosa told Connolly that
he
was the first on Tom’s hit list. Tom wanted Connolly “‘taken care of.’ I told him no way,” Rosa confided. “No federal prosecutors!
    “We were kidding about having Gerry whacked,” Rosa said. “But then it got serious. He wanted me to look into what the cost and what the details were about having Gerry killed.”
    Surely, he couldn’t have been serious. A brother was a brother. But according to Tito Rosa, Tom
was
serious. Through their talks, he learned that Rosa was worried about how he was going to pay off the mortgage on his house down in Townsend while he was in prison in Smyrna, only a few miles away. He had $95,000 owing on it, and his wife and baby wouldn’t have any place to live if he lost it. If Rosa helped him kill Gerry, Tom assured him, he would pay off his mortgage as well as any expenses connected with a hit man.
    Rosa told Connolly that he never intended making good on the hit on Gerry, but he planned to take the money. Then he was going to snitch on Tom to the state and hope for a reduced sentence. But Rosa didn’t go down to Smyrna; at the end of December, he was sent instead to the federal penitentiary in Fairton, New Jersey.
    Nevertheless, Rosa said he had managed to stay in touch with Tom through his wife, Lilia.* Tom wrote to Lilia and she forwarded his letters to her husband. And it worked in reverse, too. Reportedly, Rosa sent Tom a picture of Lilia and their baby. Rosa said he’d done other errands for Tom; he was only one of many inmates whose phone privileges Tom had taken over. After he