i find this trial so intriguing...

The witness was a geriatric pot dealer who, along with smuggling drugs, had illicit fingers in everything from Burkina Faso diamonds to leisure suits.

The two detectives were career policemen who had risen in the ranks — one to an elite investigative team that tracked the mob — before retiring to a subdivision in the Las Vegas desert sands.

Nonetheless, testimony suggested that the unlikely group had formed a partnership, one in which for years gangland cash was swapped for blood. The witness said he served as the crucial link between the lawmen and their patron in the mob, a brutal Brooklyn mobster who, the witness said, employed them as his spies and as executors of his wrath.

Yesterday, the witness, Burton Kaplan, took the stand and in measured tones told jurors of a secret meeting in a Staten Island cemetery, a kidnapped mobster screaming in a trunk and a bullet-laced Mercedes, its driver dead, abandoned on the shoulder of the road. These were a few of the vivid details offered at the racketeering trial of the retired detectives, Louis J. Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. They stand accused of taking part in at least eight murders for the mob.