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Finish the remodeling - or else

By JUDY STARK
Published July 16, 2005

Sure, we all wish our remodeling contractor or builder would finish the job sooner, but death threats? C'mon!

That's how an ex-New York City cop, charged with acting as a mob assassin, tried to persuade his contractor to get a move on, court papers say.

The New York Times described the situation this way:

Louis J. Eppolito, 56, is a retired police detective whose family, he freely admits, has ties to the Mafia. Eppolito became unhappy when the contractor working on his home fell behind on the job. According to court papers, Eppolito told a government informant that he grabbed a hatchet from the contractor's hand and said, "If you don't finish this job today or tomorrow, I'm personally going to kill you in front of your friends. Then I'm going to kill your friends."

Then he raised the ante, the papers say, threatening, "I will personally kill you and I'll do it in front of your mother and father. And then I'll kill them."

If this sounds like something out of Elmore Leonard or George V. Higgins, it's no surprise. After Eppolito left the force, he aspired to write screenplays. He told the story of his family's Mafia connections and his experiences on the police force in a book, Mafia Cop: The Story of an Honest Cop Whose Family Was the Mob, written with Bob Drury (Simon & Schuster).

Eppolito and his partner, Stephen Caracappa, are charged with taking part in at least eight murders for the mob. The papers were filed in Brooklyn federal court as their lawyers attempt to win their release pending trial.

The architectural connections between the democracies of Greece and Rome and the emerging democracy, the United States, gave rise to hundreds of beautiful Greek Revival courthouses in the first decades of our life as a nation.

But that golden era of architecture ended after World War II. We became wedded to the ideas of utility, efficiency and cost containment, "and the aesthetics got lost," says F. Joseph Moravec, commissioner of the Public Buildings Services of the U.S. General Services Administration.

PBS owns or leases nearly all civilian federal office space, courthouses, border stations, laboratories and storage facilities.

Things changed for the better in the 1980s, Moravec says, and now the federal government is "a preferred patron of architecture and art," seeking out eminent architects to design "iconic buildings."

They face some tough challenges. Since the 1995 bombing at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, security concerns have leaped to the top of the list of design considerations. No more close-in parking; larger setbacks; antiblast glass, anticollapsing construction: How does an architect incorporate these "and not diminish the aesthetic appeal or create a climate of fear?" Moravec asked. He spoke at the spring conference last month of the National Association of Real Estate Editors.

In the post-9/11 era, we've come to equate ugliness with lots of security. A building ringed with concrete Jersey barriers looks awful but it says "safe."

"Architecture has always been about security," architect Stuart L. Knoop, who specializes in government facilities, told the real estate editors. "It provides protection from bad guys, whether it's the lock on the door or the moated castle."

The Renaissance palazzos of Italy, he said, have grilled windows, massive doors and rough stone exteriors at the lower levels to keep intruders out. The materials and design "are refined as you go up," leading to smoother walls, larger windows and open balconies on higher floors. "Security builds the architecture," he said.

One of the unintended consequences of making some buildings window-free or more secure is that those who want to do harm will target substitutes - hotels, shopping centers and offices.

We've come to think of glass openings as hostile, because people can be killed by flying glass in a bombing. So we reduce the amount of glass. "But does a window-free building have to be ugly?" Knoop asked. No, he answered, citing theaters, banks, art museums and performing-arts centers as traditionally window-free buildings that can still be beautiful.

- Judy Stark can be reached at 727 893-8446 or stark@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 15, 2005, 09:10:05]