gerry kept saying, why did you get me involved in this? and tom capano kept saying, don t worry, i won t let anything happen to you. so already there was kind of a tension building up between the two brothers. in stone harbor, the two men dragged the cooler down the private dock at gerry s waterfront house. load it onto the boat with a couple of fishing rods as if they re going fishing. they go out on gerry s boat. the summer wind. it s ironic a fishing boat named the summer wind, wistful romantic love song, would be used for such a macabre purpose. and they go out to an area that gerry knows because gerry is an avid fisherman. and this is an area called mako alley, where they often fish for shark. it was about 2 1/2 hours out to mako alley. when they got into the area, they made sure they were a long way off from other boats. and then dumped the cooler into the ocean. it doesn t sink.
government prosecutors were closing in on tom capano from all sides. and when colm connolly got a call from agents on his surveillance team, he decided to act. we were informed at that point from the surveillance team that tom capano had gotten a lot of luggage out and put it in the car and was driving on i-95, towards the philadelphia airport. so i called the head of the surveillance team and gave them the authority to arrest him. after months of painstaking investigation, capano was in custody. and if the cooler was a stroke of luck, other things were falling into place for the prosecutors. revelations about tom capano s private life that had been surfacing since fahey went missing. there is evidence that tom capano had gotten away with something very egregious before. that something was a tawdry tale about another affair capano had back in 1980 with a married woman in his office named linda.
threw it overboard. the assumption is the cooler would sink. it doesn t have a lid now plus it has a bullet hole in it. but for six days this cooler bobs on the ocean. back onshore gerry capano soon learned he did not help his brother dispose of the body of an extortionist. tom had led gerry to believe the body was of a person extorting tom threatening to hurt tom s children. when gerry read in the papers about his brother s affair with anne marie fahey and her disappearance, he realized just whose body he had seen sinking into the ocean. remember, when gerry comes in to us and tells us this story, it s so fantastical, that it rings true. within an hour of gerry being debriefed, we verify that in fact tom capano had bought this type of cooler on april 20, 1996, at the sports authority. and the rest of gerry s story checked out also. we could corroborate that tom capano was in gerry s driveway at 6:00 in the morning.
and then investigators searched capano s home, where they found specks of blood on the baseboard in the den. we find the blood exactly where we thought we would find blood, right next to the carpet. there were just two tiny specks, but they turned out to be anne marie s blood. but still there was no body, no murder weapon, and no witnesses. coming up tales of a fishing trip, a cooler. and a brother. what do you do when your older brother asks you for help? at bayer, we re re-inventing aspirin for pain relief.
they d used a huge cooler as a coffin. there are newspaper and television reports about this cooler that gerry dumped over the side that contained fahey s body. that s the first we hear, any of us, of a cooler. incredibly the day after details about the cooler were made public, investigators get a call from a fisherman about a cooler that he found floating on the ocean the previous summer. the guy is out fishing on the fourth of july weekend. the same weekend that there s a massive search in wilmington in brandywine park for anne marie fahey s body. the same weekend tom capano is in stone harbor with his brothers and his family members having a barbecue. that same weekend this fisherman finds this cooler. fbi agents were sent to retrieve it. 17 months after fahey s disappearance, the cooler was now back and at center stage. capano s defense team was invited to look at it. the bar code said it was purchased in this area. there was nothing, i don t think, realistically, you cou