The Good Rat (2 page)

DIRECT EXAMINATION OF BURTON KAPLAN BY ASSISTANT U.S. ATTORNEY HENOCH.

• Q:
  Who is shown in those photographs?
  
• A:
  Tommy Galpine and myself. Number A was in my house. Number B I believe is Bonaparte’s Restaurant when my wife and I were godparents for his kid, for his oldest boy.
  
• Q:
  When did you meet him?
  
• A:
  I met him when I came out of Lewisburg. He was sixteen.
  
• Q:
  How old were you?
  
• A:
  Probably forty. He worked for Ciro Sales. He worked in their warehouse loading trucks. I was doing my air-conditioning installations.
  
• Q:
  Did you also do illegal things together?
  
• A:
  Tommy sold some cocaine that I had—that I shared in the profits. We were—he worked for Ray Fontaine in the marijuana business, and when Ray Fontaine was missing, Tommy became my partner in the marijuana business.
  
• Q:
  Tell us the other types of crimes you committed, Mr. Kaplan.
  
• A:
  Kidnapping, money laundering, obstruction of justice, murder. In 1981, I went to jail for conspiracy to
  manufacture quaaludes. I got a habit of being arrested in my life.
  

I can barely handle legitimate people. They all proclaim immaculate honesty, but each day they commit the most serious of all felonies, being a bore. To whom do you care to listen, Warren Buffett, the second-richest and single most boring person on earth, or Burt Kaplan out of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn?

He testifies in simple declarative sentences, subject, verb, and object, one following the other to start a rhythm that is compelling to the jury’s ear. As I listen on this first morning of excruciating excitement, Kaplan comes out of all the ages of crime, out of Dostoyevsky, out of the Moors Murders, out of Murder Inc. A few words spoken by Burt Kaplan on his Brooklyn porch send animals rushing out to kill. I am thinking this when the court breaks for lunch. I go over to the Park Plaza Diner right across the street. When I walk in, Bettina Schein comes up to me. She is a pretty and smart criminal lawyer assisting Bruce Cutler, who represents one of the cops.

“What did you think of the witness?” she says.

“I was just thinking of—”

“Raskolnikov!” she says.

• Q:
  Where were you born and raised?
  
• A:
  Brooklyn, New York. I was born in Sheepshead Bay, and I moved to Vanderbilt Avenue, I guess it’s the start of
  Bed-Stuy, when I was four, five. And I moved to Bensonhurst after I got married.
  
• Q:
  Can you tell the jury what your father did for a living?
  
• A:
  He was an electrician.
  
• Q:
  Can you tell the jury the address of where you were raised?
  
• A:
  595 Vanderbilt Avenue. Between Bergen and Dean. It was an appliance store that was my family’s—mine, my brother’s, and my mother’s—before my brother got the liquor store.
  
• Q:
  Can you tell the jury, are you married?
  
• A:
  Forty-nine years. I have a daughter and one grandchild.
  
• Q:
  Tell the jury about your educational background, sir.
  
• A:
  I graduated high school, and then after I got out of the navy, I went to electronics school….
  
• Q:
  Can you tell them a little more about your job in the navy?
  
• A:
  I was doing copying codes, Russian codes, cryptography and crypton analysis. Most of the time I was in Japan. The last year that I was in the navy, I worked in Fort Meade and I was offered a job with NSA.
  
• Q:
  When you got out of the navy, what jobs have you held?
  
• A:
  1956, I went back into the appliance business. I was partners in a store with my brother and my mother. We sold appliances and we installed them and repaired them. After that I became incarcerated in Lewisburg Prison, and when I got out it was 1973, and I went to work for a company by the name of Ciro Sales, P. C. Richard, M and B Radio. I did all their installations of washing machines, dryers, air conditioners, dishwashers. In 1975, I went into the clothing business. When I was on Vanderbilt Avenue, with my brother and my mother, I did an air-conditioning job of a social club near my business, for a gentleman by the name of Charlie Parasella, and he introduced me to Jimmy Eppolito, who had a club on Grand Avenue called the Grand Mark. They played cards upstairs, and they asked me to go there and measure it for air-conditioning, and I did it, and he gave me the job, and I installed the air conditioners. There was somebody in Ciro’s warehouse that asked me if I wanted to buy some air conditioners off of him, and I did.
  
• Q:
  So what? That doesn’t sound illegal.
  
• A:
  No. It was Ciro’s property, not the guy’s in the warehouse.
  
• Q:
  So they were stolen?
  
• A:
  Yes, they definitely were stolen.
  

Before he continues with his résumé, we should note that the above-mentioned Jimmy “the Clam” Eppolito, a well-known gangster, is the uncle of one of the Mafia Cops on trial here, and thus provides his murderous nephew with a low-life pedigree. The uncle will come up again before we are through.

• Q:
  Mr. Kaplan, have you ever committed a crime in your life?
  
• A:
  Yes. Most of my crimes in the early days was selling goods stolen from interstate shipment. The first time I went to—I went to prison for flashcubes. I received probation and then I—I sold some pants from an interstate shipment and was sentenced to four years in Lewisburg Penitentiary. I was arrested for having hair dryers in my possession that were stolen, but the case was dismissed. In 1983, I was arrested for possible participation in a heroin conspiracy. It was dismissed because I wasn’t involved in it.
  

In 1993, I was arrested in a conspiracy to sell stolen Peruvian passports. That was also dismissed, because we proved that we believed the passports were legal and that we were selling them in Hong Kong, and the selling of passports in Hong Kong to Chinese people was legal. I flew to China with my lawyer to prove it. The case was dismissed.

In—in 1981 I was, I went to jail for, I already said that.

In 1996, I was arrested for selling marijuana, conspiracy to sell and possession of marijuana. I was sentenced to twenty-seven years in prison. And I pleaded guilty to this present RICO conspiracy.

• Q:
  You mentioned marijuana trafficking.
  
• A:
  I got involved originally in the mid-eighties, and then I got involved in it again at the end of ’91, ’92.
  
• Q:
  What was the least amount of marijuana that you and people you were working with sold?
  
• A:
  Probably five hundred to a thousand pounds.
  
• Q:
  What was the most amount of marijuana you sold?
  
• A:
  Around twelve, thirteen thousand pounds in a year.
  
• Q:
  Did the indictment against you and the charges against you charge you with being a major marijuana trafficker?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  Were you a major marijuana trafficker?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  You said you are currently incarcerated?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  How long have you been incarcerated?
  
• A:
  Nine years.
  
• Q:
  You mentioned a little bit to the jury before some other previous periods of incarceration you had.
  
• A:
  I was incarcerated in, I believe, 1972 to ’73 or beginning of ’74, Lewisburg Penitentiary. I was incarcerated in ’81 to ’83, in Allenwood Camp, and I was incarcerated in 1997, and I started in Lewisburg and then I went to Allenwood FCI. Then I went to Butner for my cancer operation, and I went back to Allenwood, and then I went to Gilmer, West Virginia.
  
• Q:
  Mr. Kaplan, do you know how many criminal convictions you have total?
  
• A:
  Five.
  
• Q:
  How many times have you gone to trial?
  
• A:
  Twice.
  
• Q:
  So you have pled guilty three times?
  
• A:
  I pled guilty, including this case, three times.
  
• Q:
  Okay. In your trial cases, were you guilty of what the government said you did?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  Were you guilty of the things you pled guilty to?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  Why did you go to trial?
  
• A:
  I felt that I had the right to make the government prove I was guilty.
  
• Q:
  Did you ever commit a crime in prison?
  
• A:
  Yes. I was involved in an assault on an inmate who assaulted me and he was assaulting other people, and I paid a Mexican a thousand dollars to have him assaulted.
  
• Q:
  How did you get the thousand dollars to the Mexican?
  
• A:
  I asked one of my friends to send it to him.
  
• Q:
  How badly hurt was this fellow after he was assaulted?
  
• A:
  He was assaulted pretty bad. That’s part of what prison life is all about.
  

At this time we point out that Kaplan required no help from mobsters in any of his business ventures, legal or not. He made millions selling marijuana, for example, and virtually nothing went to gangsters. He was a big earner for the Lucchese Mafia family in many businesses, though, and everybody was afraid of bothering him. Some associates
believed he could have them killed. Mafia danger is the illusion of Mafia danger. Also, the mob families couldn’t move in on him because they didn’t know how to do what he was doing. He was in crime as a business, not an underworld dodge played on street corners and alleys. Gangsters can’t do what he did because it requires effort and thought. Kaplan ran legal garment businesses that made great money and let implied threats do the heavy lifting. Gangsters can manage private sanitation pickups or union organizing with violence, but Burt’s schemes required actual work.

• Q:
  What got you into the garment business?
  
• A:
  A friend of mine came home from prison, and he needed clothes, and I took him to flea markets and stores. In one place the people who owned the business were friends, and the guy had some leisure suits, and he asked me what I thought they were worth. And I asked him if he wanted a price for swag, which is stolen, or legitimate. He said swag. And I said twenty dollars. He said to me, How would you like to buy these legitimate for twelve dollars? I said, I would love to buy a lot of them, and I said, Could I borrow one for a few hours? And he said yes. And I took the fellow that came home from prison, and we drove up to Connecticut, and I showed them to a discount store that I knew up there, and I said, How would you like to buy a lot of them for eighteen dollars or seventeen dollars? And he said, I’d like to buy a lot. I said, The guy has three thousand. He said, I’ll buy them
  all. And I went back to Brooklyn and saw the guy, and I told him the guy wants to buy the three thousand suits, and he said to me, If I bring the three thousand suits into my warehouse and the guy don’t take them, there won’t be no room for my customers to shop.
  

So I said, Why don’t you call him directly? And I put him on the phone with the guy in Connecticut, and the guy said he would buy them, and they made an arrangement to ship them up on Saturday by truck. We would bring them up to the guy.

And Friday night I got a call at my house about two thirty in the morning from the guy who owns the store, and he said he can’t make the delivery tomorrow. I said, You gotta be kidding me, you’re going to destroy my friend’s business. He says, I can’t help it, my roof caved in from the snow.

And I went back, and at five o’clock the next morning we were supposed to meet the guy who owned the business, and we went there, and I told him the bad news, and he got all excited, and I said, You know, maybe I can take a thousand of the suits.

The kid went with me. We went to New Utrecht Avenue and rented an empty fruit store, and we took two-by-fours and crossed them, put some pipe on them and set up some racks for suits.

We took the thousand suits there, and we started calling a lot of people. This was eight, nine in the morning, we started calling a lot of people we know, and we
told them we had swag suits and we wanted eighteen, twenty dollars for them, and by one o’clock we sold the thousand suits. And we went back and took another thousand, and by Sunday we had sold the three thousand suits, and I thought this was a very good business, and we decided to go into it.

• Q:
  You used an expression, “swag.” What does that mean?
  
• A:
  Swag is stolen merchandise.
  
• Q:
  Okay. So with respect to your clothing business, did you always buy stolen merchandise and resell it, or did you occasionally buy nonstolen merchandise?
  
• A:
  My clothing business was 100 percent legitimate clothing. The suits were legitimate.
  
• Q:
  What do you mean by that?
  
• A:
  They were bought from the factory. This guy was a legitimate guy who bought closeout goods from factories.
  
• Q:
  And you just said—you used the expression “my clothing business was 100 percent legitimate.” Did you occasionally sell knockoffs?
  
• A:
  Yes. When you take a label that a designer makes or a large company and you counterfeit it, you copy it. We bought sweatshirts from China, had them made to the exact specifications as Champion and put their labels on it.
  
• Q:
  And just from 1975 until 1996 when you go to prison, do you pretty much stay in the clothing business?
  
• A:
  I had some illegal affairs, too. I found a big warehouse in Staten Island, and I moved the business there.
  
• Q:
  And, Mr. Kaplan, generally who were your customers for this clothing business?
  
• A:
  When I got to Staten Island, my customers were Macy’s, Kmart, Dillard’s, Nordstrom, and a whole bunch of discount chains throughout the United States.