Friends of the Family (20 page)

Dades and Ponzi, Bobby I, Oldham, they just kept going, checking leads, following paths that led into rooms of mirrors, going nowhere. What makes cold cases so tough is that the network of informants that every good detective builds has little value. Dades had maybe fifty informants on the street, multiplied by the number of people each one of those guys could reach out to and question. But this was the next generation of skells. The old-timers, the class of ’86, were mostly gone, dead or in prison. Those few guys still around who had been there back when remembered nothing. Maybe they knew the price of every score they’d made, and they remembered the legendary deals and the disputes and the big-time players. But even Tommy and Mike had to admit that Casso had been smart enough to keep the biggest secret of his career to himself—the identities of the Mafia cops.

Burt Kaplan was going to be the key to convicting the cops. That had become apparent to everyone. Dades, Ponzi, and Vecchione would talk about it a lot. How do we approach him? What can we offer him? What would convince him to flip now when he refused offers years earlier, when he easily could have negotiated his get-out-of-jail-free card? Meanwhile, as is often the case, things they didn’t even know were happening were about to make all the difference.

In Las Vegas, the current investigation was
progressing into the past. The Feds were trying to pull off a pretty complicated trick, attempting to find evidence proving that Eppolito and Caracappa were committing crimes in the present that had a connection to criminal acts committed less than ten years earlier. That was the only possible way to create a RICO charge. Eppolito’s subpoenaed telephone records showed that he was in contact with known members of both the Lucchese and Bonanno crime families. And surveillance had videotaped a known Bonanno associate driving a car owned by Eppolito. Most importantly, the DEA’s undercover operative, Steve Corso, the gambling accountant posing as an accountant interested in getting involved in the movie business, had successfully forged a relationship with Eppolito. In fact, Eppolito had even given him an autographed copy of his memoir,
Mafia Cop
. Eppolito apparently liked to impress Corso by dropping the names of organized crime celebrities. He secretly had been recorded bragging about his “former and current LCN [La Cosa Nostra] connections,” among them Gambino family leader John Gotti. He told the undercover that he was trying to raise money to produce one of his scripts and that he had already received $25,000 from a Bonanno
family associate. When asked if he was nervous about taking money from the mob he replied that he “doesn’t give a shit.”

Meanwhile, the DEA was setting several traps for him. Their belief was that Caracappa was tied to him by history and would be forced to go wherever his garrulous partner led. Caracappa wasn’t stupid; he knew that Eppolito’s problems would quickly become his, so he couldn’t afford to let Eppolito freelance. One DEA plan called for Steven Corso to ask Eppolito to launder $75,000 he’d made in drug deals, enabling the government to follow the money. In the second scenario the undercover told Eppolito that several friends—two of them “famous” players who might be willing to invest in a screenplay Eppolito had written entitled
Murder in Youngstown
—were flying in from Los Angeles for the weekend and wanted to have “a good time.” “These guys,” Corso told Eppolito, “being young, they like to party. And they do things I have no knowledge about. Basically, that’s designer shit, designer drugs…They want me to get them either Ecstasy or speed.”

Eppolito understood and replied that he would contact “Guido,” a friend of his son Anthony—the clear implecation being that he could handle that request. Every word was caught on tape.

Weeks later Anthony Eppolito was videotaped selling an ounce of crystal meth to Corso for $900 and guaranteeing the drugs would be good—proudly adding that he was sure of that because the people who supplied them knew it was for a deal involving Louis Eppolito.

The cooperating witness, Corso, captured Eppolito telling his tales on hundreds of hours of tape in meetings that took place all over Vegas, from fashionable Italian restaurants at places like Caesars Palace and the Venetian to their living rooms. During their many conversations, it became clear that Eppolito may have retired from the NYPD, but he still enjoyed playing the tough-guy role. He bragged to Corso about a fight he’d had with a contractor who was late finishing some work for him. The contractor was holding a hatchet. Eppolito took it from him. “I told him, ‘Don’t think I won’t put this through your fucking head, faggot.’ I said, ‘You are nothing but a faggot,’…I said, ‘If you don’t finish this job today or tomorrow,’ I said, ‘I’m gonna personally kill you in front of your friends, then I’m gonna kill your friends.’ And he fixed it. I said, ‘You’re taking kindness for weakness. Don’t do that…If you ever want to push, I will personally kill
you, and I’ll do it in front of your mother and father and then I’ll kill them.’ Got to let them know that you’ll kill first…that’s embedded in me.”

At another meeting Eppolito boasted about his mob connections, explaining, “My whole career, every time I’d walk into a club with these guys, cops would be watching…They ask me what I’m doing with John Gotti. I’ve known John since he was a fucking kid…”

Corso was appropriately impressed. “So you were respected by everybody?”

“All of them.” He was immensely proud of that fact, that he was respected by all of them. Eppolito was performing a great balancing act, living his life on both sides of the law. One night, he told Corso, he was in a late-night place in Brooklyn when a wiseguy walked in, obviously unaware that Eppolito was a cop, and muttered, “I shoulda shot him. I shoulda shot him. I must have stabbed this cocksucker a thousand times. I’m holding his arm, I’m stabbing him in the fucking back, in the neck, in the head…”

It was bona fide mob talk, better than any movie, and Corso played the wide-eyed innocent, asking, “If you heard something, even as a cop, that this guy got whacked and it was none of your business, you didn’t hear it?”

It’s easy to imagine Eppolito’s confident smile as he said, “I didn’t…That’s why I was always so respected by them.”

As much as Eppolito clearly enjoyed reminiscing about the past, he was struggling to survive in the present. Increasingly desperate to raise money to finance his screenwriting career, Eppolito told Corso he didn’t care where the cash came from. “If this is the biggest drug dealer in the United States,” he said, “I don’t give a fuck. If you said to me, ‘Lou, I want to introduce you to Jack Smith, he wants to invest in this film,’ [if] he says, ‘The seventy-five thousand dollars comes in a fucking shoebox,’ that’s fine with me. I don’t care.”

Eppolito gradually was being ensnared. He trusted Corso so completely that he even asked him to prepare his tax returns for him and provided all the essential financial data. As a result, the IRS was brought into the investigation.

For a case that had been in the freezer for almost a decade, Eppolito and Caracappa were attracting a lot of attention. In addition to Brooklyn and the U.S. Attorney, there were now three federal agencies, the DEA, FBI, and IRS, involved in the investigation. But the question still remained:
Would the cops reach far enough into the past to enable the Feds to make a RICO stick? Or would Mike Vecchione get to try him and Caracappa for the murder of Jimmy Hydell?

Eppolito was going to jail, it was just a question of how long and who held the keys. His drug dealing was a criminal act; it was enough to put him away. In addition, Corso had uncovered evidence that Eppolito had evaded taxes by not declaring his screenwriting income. But unless those crimes could be connected to the crimes he’d committed years earlier, Vecchione still didn’t believe there was enough evidence to support a RICO charge. It was also obvious that Eppolito was still associating with known members of organized crime—he was talking to them on the phone, lending them his car—but talking to criminals wasn’t a crime. The basis of a RICO charge wouldn’t come from there either.

Several investigators from Brooklyn went out to Vegas to see what was going on. Bobby Intartaglia spent some time out there; so did Oldham. Nobody got the whole picture, but they did get some of the big brushstrokes. In 1994, Kaplan was in his bathtub when he received a phone call from his well-respected criminal attorney, Judd Burstein, telling him that Casso had fired his attorney and agreed to cooperate with the FBI. Kaplan knew exactly what that meant to him. He calmly dried himself off and went on the lam. He went directly to Steve Caracappa’s apartment to explain to him what was happening. He was going to disappear and he didn’t want Caracappa to think he’d gone bad, meaning cooperated with the law. Eventually he kissed Caracappa good-bye and took off.

He’d flown to San Diego, then spent time in Mexico before going to Las Vegas to meet Eppolito. In Vegas Eppolito had asked Kaplan to arrange a $75,000 loan so he could buy a new house. That wasn’t much information, but it meant that both Eppolito and Caracappa had remained in contact with Kaplan. The Feds were positive that Kaplan had earned the money he loaned Eppolito in a marijuana deal, which established at least a tenuous link between the cops and Kaplan’s criminal enterprise. It wasn’t much, but as it had occurred well within the ten-year span mandated by RICO, it moved the clock forward. Vecchione couldn’t believe this was strong enough to support a conspiracy charge, but the Feds were elated. As far as they were concerned this was proof Eppolito and Caracappa were still part of a criminal conspiracy.

Back in New York a much happier event would also become part of the equation. Unknown to the investigators, Burt Kaplan had a daughter with whom he was very close. Ironically, Deborah Kaplan was a judge; she had been elected to the New York State Civil Court bench in 2002 and was eventually assigned to Manhattan’s Criminal Court. A friend of Judge Kaplan’s once claimed, perhaps facetiously, that Kaplan had become an attorney “to get her father out of jail.” Years earlier, when Vecchione had spent a lot more time in the courtroom, he’d dealt with her often. In those days she was a legal aid lawyer, and he remembered her as quiet and competent. But until he’d read it in the newspapers he did not know that her father was mob associate Burt Kaplan. And he certainly did not know that she and her husband had adopted a baby born in Tula, Russia, in November 2002. And it was this baby who changed everything.

Burt Kaplan’s criminal life was no secret to his daughter. In 1973, after Judge Jack Weinstein had sentenced Kaplan to four years in prison for selling stolen clothing, camera flash cubes, and hair dryers, twelve-year-old Deborah and her mother appealed to the respected judge to reduce that sentence. They claimed that Deborah had become isolated and depressed because of her father’s absence. While Weinstein did not reduce that sentence, he did recommend that Kaplan be paroled early. Almost twenty-five years later, when Kaplan was on trial in 1998 for selling twenty-four tons of marijuana, Deborah Kaplan, by that time a legal aid attorney, testified in her father’s defense, attacking the key prosecution witness Monica Galpine as an alcoholic and a liar “not capable of telling the truth.” Her testimony apparently had little impact; her father was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. That was a tough sentence for an old man convicted of nonviolent crimes. If he did the whole stretch he would be ninety-two years old the next time he took a breath as a free man. He would never live to kiss his grandchild.

But prosecutors who thought it was the hammer they needed to get him to cooperate and provide the information they needed to prosecute Eppolito and Caracappa were disappointed. While all around him onetime wiseguys were making deals to reduce their sentences, the real stand-up guy turned out to be the Jew. Because he wasn’t Italian Kaplan could never be “made,” never be inducted into the Mafia, but he was a respected associate, and far more than some of the big-time made men, he was faithful
to the old ways, to omertà. Silence. Basically, when approached by federal prosecutors he’d suggested politely that they go fuck themselves.

Kaplan was a hard case. But he wasn’t only the best shot, as Vecchione told Dades: “I’ll tell you, Tommy, he’s the only shot we got. Without him, we might as well pack up and go home. There’s nothing we can do.” The first thing every good cop does at the beginning of an investigation is learn as much as possible about the people involved. You just never know what information is going to be handy. So all of them, Dades, Vecchione, and Joe Ponzi in particular, started learning everything they could find out about this man in the middle.

Burt Kaplan was another Depression kid from Brooklyn, from Bed-Stuy, where his family owned an appliance store on Vanderbilt Avenue. He had started gambling as a kid, poker and the horses mostly, and never stopped. “I couldn’t control myself,” he once said. “I was doing every bad thing to get money to gamble.”

After dropping out of Brooklyn Tech, Kaplan served as a naval radio operator in the early 1950s, stationed in Japan, where he deciphered and analyzed Russian army codes. He often claimed that the National Security Agency had tried to recruit him, but he’d turned down their offer. Instead he returned to work in the family appliance store. His life changed the day he installed an air conditioner in the Grand Mark, a social club run by, coincidently, Jimmy “the Clam” Eppolito—which happened to be around the block from the apartment in which Mike Vecchione had grown up. He began hanging out there, playing in the card games.

The only thing worse than being a degenerate gambler is being bad degenerate gambler. And that was Burt Kaplan. To settle his gambling debts Kaplan began borrowing money from loan sharks, including Lucchese consigliere Christy “Tick” Furnari. Eventually he got into the
schmatte
business, building a legitimate clothing distribution company in Bensonhurst selling designer knock-offs, but his real business was buying and selling anything he could turn over quickly and profitably, from hair dryers that fell off the back of that legendary truck to heroin. He sold counterfeit watches and homemade quaaludes and smuggled tons of marijuana. He got involved with diamond mines; he was wrapped up in some scheme to manufacture clocks that featured Muslim prayers; he even tried to sell a hair lotion in Africa, but when his chemist forgot to put in some chemical
the whole shipment turned brown. To square things the chemist offered to make crystal meth for him. So he went into the crystal meth business.