...And Never Let HerGo

wiseguy and he needed something done for him.
    Meeting in Tom’s office, Riley, who had been convicted of threatening bodily harm to someone almost twenty years earlier, saw a man who looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week. Tom said he had “a problem” with a woman. He told Riley that he was “crazy” about a woman who wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He confided that he loved her and couldn’t live without her. She had told him off and he couldn’t eat or sleep thinking about it. He wanted Riley to find someone to knock her over the head or have her run over by a car. “I want her hurt very bad,” Tom said. Hewanted her punished, physically punished. “Her name is Linda Marandola.”
    Riley was in his sixties and had seen the other side of the law in his day, but he had never met wiseguy qualifications. His rap sheet was short and he had long since become a police informant. He was getting a little long in the tooth, and he wasn’t enthusiastic about breaking some poor woman’s legs.
    “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” Tom said. “I haven’t told anyone about Linda.”
    “Maybe you feel guilty about what you’re thinking of doing,” Riley said. He warned Tom that if they ever found out, the Bar Association wouldn’t look upon what he wanted to do very favorably.
    “I can take care of that,” Tom said confidently.
    It was September 1980, and Riley found himself a guest at Tom’s house, eating dinner with Kay and Marguerite. Kay had given birth to their first daughter only a month before. As far as the women knew, Riley was one of Tom’s political acquaintances; he brought a lot of people home to dinner.
    Joe Riley didn’t say much, but he looked at Tom’s pretty young wife, his mother (a widow less than a year), and he asked himself what the hell the guy was thinking of. A few days later, he went to Tom’s office. “You got a nice wife, a nice home,” he began. “You sure you wanta do this thing?”
    Tom said he was sure. He wanted to get even with Linda for rejecting him.
    Riley believed he meant it, and he wasn’t about to be part of it. He went to a retired FBI agent, whom he had once worked for as an informant, and told him about what Tom Capano wanted. They agreed that Riley would be wired so he could tape Tom’s requests. Riley would always claim that he only wanted to knock some sense into the young attorney.
    They met again, and as the tape wound, Tom repeated that he wanted “to hurt that bitch.”
    “You want her killed?” Riley asked.
    “No,” Tom answered. “I couldn’t live with that. Just badly beaten or run over.”
    They left the matter at that, but first Riley agreed to make some threatening phone calls. Tom asked him to tape the calls so that he could listen to Linda’s response to the harassment. Riley was playing both ends against the middle; he apparently had no problem with making a few phone calls. There was money in it, and it wouldn’t really hurt the girl.
    When Linda refused to quit her job or leave Delaware, Tom had flexed his muscles. Tom had arranged to have Linda and her husband evicted from the Cavalier Apartments. She began to believe that he
did
have great power, and it scared her enough to know that she didn’t want to live in “his” state any longer.
    In that September of 1980, the young couple moved to Penns Grove, New Jersey, but Linda still refused to give up her job in Wilmington. Despite his threats, Tom did not own Delaware or even close to it. Not then—but he had connections.
    It wasn’t that hard to find Linda’s phone number in New Jersey, and Riley
did
tape his first call to her. When Linda answered, he told her that he was someone who knew all about her trysts with Tom Capano. He was fully prepared to go to her husband and tell him that she had cheated on him, and with whom, if she didn’t come up with some money.
    There was a long silence and then Linda said firmly, “I don’t know what you are talking about, sir,” and hung up on him.
    That didn’t leave much on the tape for Tom to gloat over. But Riley had made many more tapes of Tom talking about the calls he wanted to have placed to Linda. He also had tapes he’d made of Tom’s conversation after he had lost track of Linda. (Hounded by Riley, Linda convinced her husband that they had to move again, although she was able to keep the real truth from him. He knew only that she was being harassed by a “former client” of her boss.