The Good Rat (3 page)

Legal or illegal, Burt Kaplan did not discriminate. One was as good as the other as long as there was money in the end. There were times when business ventures started out as legit and then, only when that failed, turned shady.

• Q:
  Was there a quaalude case that you went to prison for in approximately 1981?
  
• A:
  I put up some money and rented a warehouse/loft, and originally we were going to make hair products to ship to Africa, and the chemist that was making the hair grease didn’t homogenize the product, and when it was shipped to Africa, it turned brown and we couldn’t sell it, and then we decided to try to recoup the money. The chemist said that he could make the formula for quaaludes, and we attempted to make them.
  

Marvelous! He should be teaching at Harvard Business School, but instead these lessons come to us free of charge. And this is all mere warm-up to the stories he has come to
tell. Burt Kaplan saw into the shadows and understood what they were, for he had lived in them so many years. Now, after doing so much evil, he is at last committing what he believes is an atrocious, unforgivable act.

Throughout the trial Kaplan refers to himself by various street names for an informer. He is asked what he means when he says this.

“A stool pigeon is a rat. Just like me.”

Burt Kaplan’s voice looses eagles that swoop and scream and slap against the walls. He carried his loyalty to the Mafia almost to the end, until he believed there were leopards about to pounce. At the last stroke of midnight he turned in his claws.

Judd Burstein, one of Kaplan’s lawyers, says, “He is probably the last true believer in the code of the Mafia, the
omertà.
” He is about to become what he despises.

Even before Burt Kaplan takes the stand, the trial has moments of wonder. They come in a ceremony out of sight and hearing of the public, the questioning of prospective jurors in a forum known as voir dire. This pretentious use of a French title is insulting, for in Brooklyn it is an issue too important for affectation.

Potential jurors are interviewed in a narrow chamber directly behind the courtroom. Sitting at a table are the lawyers and prosecutors, and at the head of the table, in a black double-breasted suit today, is Judge Jack B. Weinstein. An empty chair on his right is for the jurors.

The court officer, a woman in brown named June Lowe, stands in the doorway and with almost no motion brings a prospective juror into the room.

“How are you this morning?” Weinstein asks.

“I’m a little groggy,” the man says. “I had this on my mind.”

Weinstein says, “You’re not worried about this case, are you?”

“I’ve never been a juror.”

“Why don’t you tell us about yourself?”

“I’m forty-eight and I’m working half my life. I’m a so
cial worker now. I have a son, sixteen. I’m married. Then things fell apart. My nephew was convicted of a crime. There was death involved. I worked and didn’t get involved. Then my car was stolen and I collected the insurance. I go back and forth on legalization of marijuana.”

“Can you be fair to these defendants?”

“I would like to think I could be fair.”

Weinstein thinks not. He dismisses the man.

Next is a woman who says, “I actually have three things. I have a son who is fourteen. I have no way to get him to school. You know, I usually drive him every day. Two, I was supposed to start a new job today. I work for the Board of Ed. I went from one job to another into another position and that was supposed to start today and I’m here, I’m not getting started.”

Weinstein says, “I know, but the board is not going to fire you.”

“No. My number-one problem is my son. I’m a single mother and I drive him. It’s not like he goes—”

Weinstein asks, “Where do you live?”

“I live in Gerritsen Beach.”

“And where is the school?”

“He goes to a Catholic school in…I don’t know what you call it, the Midwood section.”

Weinstein says, “There is public transportation. He’s fourteen years old.”

She says, “I know.”

Weinstein says, “Denied. It’s time he grew up.”

Next is a man with an accent, maybe Russian. “In 1979 I was in criminal court, a victim. A man wanted to kill me because I owed him money. But I got this here,” he says, lifting his shirt to expose a scar.

“You don’t think you could be fair?”

“No.”

“Excused.”

Now another woman. “Your Honor, I wouldn’t be able to be fair in this trial.”

“Why?” Weinstein asks.

“Being that my father was always…the accusation of my father always being in the mob or because you’re Italian and—”

“Was he in the mob?”

“No. But there was always that accusation.”

“By whom?”

“Neighborhood people, people on the streets of Brooklyn.”

“Denied.”

Prospective juror: “I have appointments made for the next three months and I don’t think I can cancel all of my appointments.”

“You better try, you’re not excused.”

Next one up: “I need kosher and I can’t be sequestered on the Sabbath.”

“We’re not going to sequester you. You have to stay here and be selected and you can bring your own lunch if you like. Denied.”

Now a chubby woman in a black suit. She is from Staten Island.

“How did you travel here today?” Weinstein asked.

“I got a ride.”

“But you can take the ferry or train.”

“Yes I can.”

“Tell us a little bit about yourself.”

“My husband is retired. A knitting mechanic. I’m out, retired, by the end of the year. I have a cousin, a woman, who was in an affair, and there was a murder and a suicide in Florida. A very tragic thing. Florida. My son-in-law is a probation officer for this court. I don’t like to know anything about all this.”

There are murmurs from the defense lawyers, who don’t want the woman within fifteen miles of the courthouse.

The judge says thank you.

Now there is a man of color who works as a hospital technician and has three girls and three boys and likes meat loaf and mashed potatoes, a lot of mashed potatoes; then a man from Deer Park who says it takes him an hour to get here. He was in the navy eight years and eleven months, some of it in Iraq, and he is a volunteer firefighter, with an uncle in the West Palm police department in Florida and a friend with a bar in Riverhead who got into a huge fight. Next, a woman with big eyes who takes the Number 3 train for two stations to get to court. “I have two children, a daughter in premed at North Carolina and a son a plumber.” A woman from Crown Heights got here by subway. A child
in the army, in Arkansas, a daughter on the stock exchange. A lot of running. Her husband was a butcher. Now deceased. Lives in Staten Island. Got here by car. “Where did I park the car? Garage across the street. My job only pays ten days for jury duty. I do work.” “We can see what we can do. We can be very persuasive.” “I work as a substance-abuse counselor. My grandmother was mugged years ago. Tough old lady, didn’t give up her purse.” “Are you not well?” “Not well. Got a cold. Been a bad season. I’m a bus operator. I grew up in the Bronx. I feel I can be objective….”

This goes on for days. Somewhere, among the people who spend an hour and a half on the Long Island Rail Road each way and who have two stepchildren and five grandchildren and a husband who likes to talk—“I’ve got a talking marriage”—there was a slim woman of color who spoke in such a small voice that nobody remembers her being in the room. She took the train from Crown Heights and works in patient care at a hospital and is here from Barbados for thirty-two years. She has a daughter twenty-eight and a son who works at Medgar Evers College. She seemed impressive, but in her West Indian accent so low that you wondered if anybody could hear her.

They all could. When the jury is seated and sworn in, she is the forewoman.

U.S. District Court Judge Jack Weinstein, who is proud of his age, eighty-four, appears to be the only jurist in the city who can draw spectators. There is nothing flamboyant
about him. He brings so much nobility and warmth and common sense into the air that people who drop in on his courtroom wish not to leave. He is also the right judge to sit on Mafia cases. He knows that numbers, as in years in prison, not speeches, are the way to end the Mafia.

He is a large man with a strong voice and broad shoulders, eyebrows sharp enough to scrape the air, framing a hawk’s nose. He needs no animation to let you know he runs the place. Throughout the famous trial of Vincent Gigante, the mob boss mumbled to himself like an imbecile, and his head lolled and slumped as though his brain were severely damaged. Weinstein waited. On sentencing day he quickly took the bench and said, “Good morning, Mr. Gigante.”

Gigante, startled by the snap of a trap, blurted, “Good morning, Your Honor.”

He had just blown his act.

On another day, Vic Orena, which is pronounced “Vicarena,” was convicted before Weinstein of mayhem. Orena’s campaign for the top job of the Colombo Mafia family was interrupted by Weinstein’s sentences of two lifetimes plus one eighty-year term.

“Which one should I do first?” he asked the judge. Weinstein looked at his clerk.

“You name it,” the clerk said.

“Put me down for the eighty years first,” Orena said.

He went to prison in Atlanta but his lawyers soon entered a motion to throw everything out and bring Vic home. He called Gina, his girl in Long Island, and told her, “Get
my suits and have the tailor take them in. I’ve lost weight down here. Then go and get me some new shirts. I’m going to win this motion and make bail. We’re going to Europe on the first day.”

Orena was brought up by prison bus from Georgia. It took a couple of weeks, and he spent the nights with bugs and rodents in county jails. When he arrived in the courtroom, his motion was a foot-high pile of paper on Weinstein’s desk.

His girlfriend Gina was in the room with a suit all ready. The clerk called out “All rise,” and Weinstein entered. The door to the detention pens opened and Vic came in, eyes glistening with hope, in splendid shape.

“What is he doing here?” Weinstein said. “He belongs in prison.”

“He is here on his motion,” the lawyer said.

“Motion denied,” Weinstein said. “Marshal, take this man back to prison.”

Orena had been in the courtroom for a time usually clocked in a Kentucky Derby: 2:03
²
/
₅
. The bus ride back to Atlanta went on for weeks.

Sal Reale of Ozone Park once was a defendant in Weinstein’s courtroom over a parole violation. He sat at a table and the judge, in a gray suit that day, sat across from him. The informality gave Sal enormous hope: He might even let me go home. Then Sal became uneasy. Why are Weinstein’s glasses down at the tip of his nose? he asked himself. I don’t like that. No, he did not. Weinstein said he was sorry, but the violation of his ten-year parole meant Sal now
had to do the ten years. The marshals closed in. The last thing Sal saw was Weinstein pushing his glasses back up.

Judge Weinstein is from the same Bensonhurst as the hoodlums for whom Eppolito and Caracappa worked. He still talks about how people ate in the Depression: food fell off the back of a truck. He was a child actor at eight. He remembers being in a Broadway play,
I Love an Actress,
and on matinee days the stage manager had to pull him in from the sun on the sidewalk. He later folded his six-foot-four frame into submarines in World War II. In the last days of the war, he asked the commander if they really had to sink the Japanese ship they were stalking. “That’s our orders,” the man said, directing the enemy vessel to be torpedoed. Each Memorial Day, Weinstein wears a red poppy.

• Q:
  Mr. Kaplan, did you ever cooperate with anybody from the FBI until now?
  
• A:
  I never cooperated with the FBI, never cooperated with anybody.
  
• Q:
  How many times have government agents or police officers approached you and tried to get you to cooperate with them?
  
• A:
  Many times. Over ten. When I was arrested this last time, I was taken to DEA headquarters, and when I walked into the room, when they brought me in, they had about fifteen or twenty people in there, and there was high-ranking members of the New York Police Department, inspectors, and FBI agents and DEA people. The police department said, Listen, we are interested in two dirty cops, and if you want to help yourself, then tell us what you know about them right now. I said, I appreciate your conversation, but at this time, without being facetious or nasty, I don’t want to talk to anybody about anything.
  

Without Burt Kaplan they couldn’t convict the cops for illegal parking. His wife and his daughter, who had just given him a new grandson, implored him to bargain with
the years left of his life. By late 2004 he was sure that his ex-partners Eppolito and Caracappa were going to be indicted. This could lead to either of two outcomes, Burt reasoned. The cops could join together, turn informant, and testify against him in court. Or Burt Kaplan would be murdered in prison.

He could solve all his problems by one sure, direct, and utterly distasteful method. Tell. Rat.

Voices were starting to break down his defenses. Voices that came back to him from every room they had ever put him.
Tell us.
I’m sorry, I don’t do that.
Tell us.
This last time he was in a government office outside the walls of the federal penitentiary at Gilmer, in West Virginia. They had him there because if anybody inside saw him talking to the law, Burt Kaplan would be dead by first light. He had always said no. Now his feelings were changing. He could imagine his friends Eppolito and Caracappa testifying against him on the murders. Unbelievable. Yet he could hear it. Now in this office were these agents down from New York, as they had always been, but this time there was a heavyweight with them. He was Mark Feldman, who was in charge of organized crime in the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, which was Brooklyn.

“What are we talking about here?” Feldman said.

“I can do my time,” Burt said.

“What are you, the last honorable man?” Feldman said. “Do you know what’s going on? Do you know how many of these guys have turned? I’ll tell you: all but you.”

“I can do my time,” Burt Kaplan said. But now his voice was drained of faith. He was arguing with a man who had a letter in his desk saying that Kaplan could get out of jail at once. Suddenly he could sense what it would be like to be on the outside. He could feel the breeze on Bay Parkway in Brooklyn. Kaplan did not say any of this in the office, however. He didn’t have to.

Leaving the room, Feldman said, “He’s turning.”

The Mafia’s final hours pass in moments like this, of quiet anguish and betrayal. Once, a gangster might answer such questions in style, as was found in this account, among the papers of Chicago’s Mike Rokyo, the late national treasure,

• Q:
  Do you know Al Capone?
  
• A:
  No.
  
• Q:
  You don’t?
  
• A:
  No.
  
• Q:
  I show you this picture. Who is in the picture?
  
• A:
  Me and Al Capone.
  
• Q:
  You just said you didn’t know him.
  
• A:
  I met him. That don’t mean I know him.
  
• Q:
  What does Mr. Capone do for a living?
  
• A:
  He told me he sold ties.
  

Today step into any federal courtroom and you can’t get tough guys to shut up. In the big new courthouse in
Manhattan not long ago, you could hear a rat named Joseph Quattrochi, whose confessions are like purse snatching when compared to Kaplan’s.

• Q:
  You had a Ponzi scheme.
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  You’d agree that you’re a dishonest guy.
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  You didn’t have an honest day in your life.
  
• A:
  Yes. I made my bed and had to lie in it. It’s all right, as long as the bed doesn’t roll me into a prison.
  

In March 2005, in a sealed tenth-floor courtroom in the federal courthouse in downtown Brooklyn, Burton Kaplan walks in with two platoons of prosecutors, FBI agents, and marshals. He pleads guilty to all his crimes. Choose a number—eighteen hundred, two thousand, whatever you like. On paper, Kaplan named Eppolito and Caracappa in eight murders that could be proved at the moment, with many more to come, all committed by the men while wearing the badges of the Police Department of the City of New York.

After Kaplan’s guilty pleas, Judge Jack B. Weinstein goes over the charges against Eppolito and Caracappa. He tells Mark Feldman, Robert Henoch, and the other assistant U.S. Attorneys present that he sees a big problem.

The problem is with the calendar, which has never been stopped, not even by the U.S. government. To understand why this is troubling to Weinstein, let me tell you a little
about the federal law known as RICO, which stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. RICO was born of the fervent love of punishment possessed by a man named Robert Blakey, a law professor at Notre Dame who wrote it in 1970 for the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs. He named the law after Edward G. Robinson, who played a racketeer named Rico in the movie
Little Caesar.
Beautiful! Blakey thought that was exciting. He also was an admirer of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Before RICO the usual federal sentence for gangsters was five years or so. Most tough guys could do that standing on one hand. And they did. That’s why there were no rats back then. You kept your mouth shut, did your time, and came home a hero. Once RICO was put in, suddenly there were fifty-year jail terms. If you were committing federal crimes together with other tough guys as part of an ongoing operation, you got RICO. And if you got RICO you got a sentence that makes Siberian justice look easy.

The language of a RICO indictment usually goes something like this:

“On or about November 12, 2006, the defendants Joseph Orlando and Jerry Degerolamo attended a meeting…”

That alone is a crime. And under RICO the sentences are diabolical. For a cup of coffee, you could do decades.

But RICO also comes with a five-year statute of limitations. The indictment must be handed down no more than five years after the last criminal act in the conspiracy was
committed. Anything more than that and, as far as RICO is concerned, it’s like it never happened.

The cops’ last known murder for the mob was in 1992. The indictment was dated March 2005. No good.

If the U.S. Attorney’s lawyers tried something cute to slip around that technicality, they would have to get by the mountain named Judge Jack B. Weinstein. Sitting in the Brooklyn federal courthouse, Weinstein for all his life has been a lighthouse in the fog. His books
Weinstein on Evidence
and
Cases and Materials on Evidence
are religious documents in law offices and classrooms. And his thought here on opening day was that the statute of limitations remained in the way of this case.

For an example of how these problems can turn out, all anybody had to do was remember what had taken place in a courtroom just down the hall. Joe Massino, the last big Mafia boss, commander of the Bonanno outfit, was convicted of federal hijacking charges while being acquitted of several more serious matters, such as conspiracy to leave dead bodies scattered around the city. His lawyer jumped up and said that the hijackings occurred more than five years before the indictment. The judge turned it over to the jury. It took them minutes to throw the case out. Soon Massino was back out on the streets, though he would not remain there for long.

Because of Weinstein, I start taking notes with the tiring feeling that it could all be useless. If the judge is warning
about the statute’s time limitations this early, he could throw the thing out and leave me with nothing.

Herewith to the government’s rescue comes the only crooked accountant whose clients might have been more dishonest than he was. Before Weinstein the U.S. Attorney now states that a man named Stephen Corso can show that the criminal conspiracy kept going even after the cops retired to Las Vegas. Corso himself is quite a solid citizen: He stole clients’ tax-return money, then told them that if they didn’t wire him more funds immediately, they’d be arrested for fraud. Of course he had never sent in the clients’ taxes to begin with.

Comes now June of 2002, and Corso is driving to work in Manhattan from his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, when on his cell phone a worried person in his office tells him that FBI and revenue agents busted in early and were all over his files. As by now he had taken over $5 million in tax money, he thought this could get tricky.

So he drove to Kennedy Airport, left the car in long-term parking, and fled to his Las Vegas office. And here, too, they came, an agent’s hand in every file. Next an officer walked in holding out handcuffs and asked Corso if he wanted to wear them or—now offering a miniature tape recorder—this wonderful gadget instead. Corso’s first choice was not jail. They put him out on the streets of Las Vegas with the recorder.

Swaggering down the same streets was loud Louie Eppolito. Of course they met in the sun—the FBI steered it
that way. Corso told Louie that he had two Hollywood producers, young imbeciles, coming into town. They wanted movie scripts about authentic cops and crooks. That huffing noise whistling through the room was Louie blowing the dust off some old movie scripts he had written. They also wanted methamphetamine. Being a decent parent, Louie sent his son Anthony out to buy drugs in a nightclub for nine hundred dollars, a figure that might prompt the law to say it was a crime. Young Eppolito brought the drugs to Corso, whose office now was a control room for federal agents. According to the U.S. Attorney, this was proof of Eppolito’s involvement in an organized conspiracy of murder and other crimes that continued to a point in time well within the five-year statute of limitations.

Weinstein disagreed, enough to shake the prosecutors. “This connection between the end of the action in New York and what’s happening now in Nevada is questionable,” the judge said. “I never heard of a Vegas mob. I’ve heard of Cincinnati and Cleveland—I’m always confused by both—it’s in Ohio. But I never heard of a Vegas mob. There is no national mob. There is no conspiracy between New York and Las Vegas. The evidence is not strong on the statute of limitations. The charges seem to me to be relatively stale, and the statute of limitations problem is going to be a serious one.”

Now the continuing conspiracy required under RICO is
hanging by a thread, one that could simply dissolve at any moment.

Jack Weinstein turns to the prosecutors. “Give me a date when you will have your full discovery materials.”

“Soon,” one of the lawyers says.

“That’s not sufficiently precise,” Weinstein says. “Discovery by July eighteenth. How long will it take to try the case?”

“Twelve weeks,” the lawyer says.

“Why?”

“We have a hundred witnesses,” the lawyer says.

“I’ll tell you how many witnesses you are going to have,” Weinstein says. “I’m not going to keep jurors here all year. The trial dates are either August eighth, twenty-second, or September sixth.”

“I’ll need three to four months to investigate,” the lawyer says.

“The trial date is September nineteenth,” Weinstein says.

Suddenly, to confuse matters further, the prosecutor has a new homicide to add to those already in the indictment. Into the long day of talk about murders and mayhem, bloodshed and beatings, snatching and strangling comes another name, that of Israel Greenwald. In trial testimony he would emerge as the late Jeweler Number Two. It turns out his was actually the first murder committed by these conspirators.

In wonderment Judge Weinstein says, “If you amend the indictment at this time, I can’t keep the defendants incarcerated.” There is some reeling at the government’s table.

Another courtroom appearance again puts the legal system under the lights. The issue this time is bail, which would usually be a perfunctory, rather pointless discussion. The law would sooner put Son of Sam on the street than these two ex-cops who have been described on television and in newspapers as horrible killers.

But there is a small surprise, another ripple on a calm lake. Weinstein is allowing an unexpectedly generous amount of time for Eppolito’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler, and Caracappa’s lawyer, Edward Hayes, to argue for bail. Ordinarily the judge tolerates a few minutes and then sends defendants like Eppolito and Caracappa back to detention cells in time for lunch. Today the speeches go through the afternoon, with no pauses.

The hearing begins with Bruce Cutler about to speak and then purring, “Excuse me, I’ll wait,” aware that the judge is talking to one of his clerks, a woman in a black suit.

Weinstein doesn’t even look up at him. “Go ahead, I’m listening,” he says, just in case you forgot that he’s been paying attention to two and three conversations at once for the last forty years.

After that, Cutler speaks softly and so much more effectively than in his loud years of fame while representing and virtually merging with client John Gotti.

The lawyer says that Eppolito had written a nonfiction book that was first titled
The Man in the Middle
before it became
Mafia Cop.
The book, which Eppolito dictated to a writer named Bob Drury, is the smoking gun of crime publishing. It would become primary reading for all cops, lawyers, and news reporters in and around the trial. Also psychiatrists interested in suicide. Since you couldn’t talk to Louie, you read his book, which for Louie was worse. During the reading, the page numbers seemed to lengthen into prison numbers. Louie Eppolito opens this book by giving up his father, Ralph Eppolito, on a homicide. Louie wrote that Ralph had been raised in the mob by the premier boss in the country, Carlo Gambino himself. He turns in his Uncle Jimmy, too, stating that the Clam had rank in the Mafia. Jimmy the Clam had a son, Jim-Jim, who wanted to be a great gangster but did not know the first commandment: Pay or die. He lost twelve thousand dollars gambling and then reneged. The bookmaker was in his seventies and Sicilian, a type whose principles harden with time. He issued a major complaint. Jimmy the Clam paid the debt, but his son’s welshing made him look terrible, too. The father and son were called to a meeting to clear the air. Peter Piacenti, who was an ancient ally of Jimmy the Clam’s, performed the traditional task of taking your closest friend to his murder. Piacenti escorted Uncle Jimmy and Jim-Jim to the school yard of Grady High in Brighton Beach. A deranged mob killer, Roy Roy DeMeo, showed up, too.