...And Never Let HerGo

and tell them what you knew . . . or Gerry should?”
    “Yes, in the early summer of 1997, at the Imperial Deli in theFairfax Shopping Center, I told him we should go in and talk to the police . . . It was affecting Gerry tremendously and our entire family.”
    “What did he say to you?”
    “He told me that we shouldn’t go to the police,” Louie said, staring down at Tom. “He told me that they didn’t have enough evidence. And he didn’t want to ruin his life or his daughters’ lives.”
    Louie testified that he had attempted one more time to get Tom to talk to the police. He, Gerry, and Tom had met alone in a conference room in Charlie Oberly’s office. “I told Tom sternly that Gerry and I were going to go to the authorities.”
    “Well, did you go to the authorities then?”
    “No,” Louie answered, “we did not.”
    “Why didn’t you?” Wharton asked.
    “Tom convinced us not to,” Louie said, “and told me that if the situation was reversed, that he would do the same for me—that he didn’t want to, that it wasn’t time. And he talked about his children, et cetera, and convinced us not to go in.”
    “Did he say anything about what would happen to either you or Gerry if you guys got in trouble withholding this information?”
    “He told us that he would protect us,” Louie said, “and tell the authorities everything.”
    Tom had also told Gerry to grow up and be a man, intimating that only a cowardly kid would turn in his own brother.
    “When did you become aware,” Wharton continued, “that the authorities had executed a search warrant on Gerry’s residence?”
    “I was at Rehoboth Beach playing in a golf tournament and apparently they had raided Gerry’s house the night before. Tom called me and asked if I had heard the news.”
    “What did he tell you about that raid?”
    “He told me he wasn’t going to accept responsibility for Gerry using drugs and for getting raided and busted.”
    “Gerry was on his own?”
    “Gerry was on his own,” Louie agreed, at least as far as Tom was concerned.
    From that point on, whenever Gerry told Tom that he couldn’t stand it any longer and he had to tell the police about what had happened to Anne Marie Fahey, Tom had upbraided him for being immature, urging him again to “be a man.”
    L OUIE ’ S turn on the hot seat of cross-examination was coming. Gene Maurer questioned him unmercifully about the lies he had told tothe grand jury, suggesting that no one should believe him now. He submitted that Louie had lied to protect himself just as much as to protect Tom. And then Maurer brought up the dicey subject of Kristi Pepper. Tom was not the only Capano brother whose extramarital affairs became uncomfortable in the last week of June 1996.
    Louie admitted that he had entertained Kristi at his house on June 27 and 28 while his wife, Lauri, was playing in a golf tournament at the shore.
    “Did you have any fear of her coming home that night?” Maurer asked.
    “Yes, I did.”
    “About how many times,” Maurer asked, “did you phone down to the shore?”
    “Lots,” Louie said. “Lots. Probably a dozen. Maybe more.”
    “So you’re calling down to the shore to make sure that she’s still down there so she doesn’t come up and come upon you and Kristi Pepper and her kids hanging out at your mansion in Greenville?”
    “That’s correct,” Louie said.
    “And you got the other people out of there in time for her to come the next night—June twenty-ninth?”
    “That is correct.”
    Maurer submitted that Kristi Pepper had taped Louie’s phone calls. If that was true,
two
women had taped Louie’s calls to keep track of what he was up to. “You were trying to persuade her,” Maurer suggested, “that what she remembered she didn’t really remember?”
    “That’s correct.”
    Louie admitted that he had been concerned about what Kristi was saying to the government investigators and that he had put pressure on her to change the information she was passing on to them.
    “You learned at a later time, did you not,” Maurer asked, “that many of those phone calls that you and she were having, in which the pressure was being imposed, had been taped by her with the consent and understanding of the government? Is that right?”
    “That’s correct.”
    It was rumored around Wilmington that Louie’s wife, Lauri, had been so enraged when
her
tapes of Louie’s phone calls turned up conversations with Kristi that she had taken