NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP) — The City of New York on Friday agreed to pay $5 million to the family of a man killed after being mistaken for a mobster with the same name — thanks to information the killers gleaned from two former police detectives later convicted of moonlighting as hit men for the mob.
The city Law Department called Nicholas Guido’s 1986 death tragic in a statement Friday and says settling is in the city’s best interest.
The family’s lawyer did not immediately return a call from the Associated Press.
The 26-year-old Guido was shot outside his mother’s home on 17th Street in Park Slope, Brooklyn on Christmas Day 1986, according to a New York Daily News report.
Federal prosecutors said the gunmen had Guido had no ties to organized crime, but happened to share a name with an associate of the Gambino crime family who was part of a team of hit men that tried to kill Lucchese family underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso three years earlier.
Casso who paid two detectives – Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa — to help in eight murders, according to the Daily News report. They were accused of carrying out two of those killings themselves.
Eppolito and Caracappa were both sentenced to life in prison.