The Good Rat (5 page)

I keep hearing people talk about the end of the Mafia, but I don’t know what that means. I do know that illegal gambling, which once was a glorious fountain of cash for the outfit, now is a government-owned lottery machine that buzzes in every newsstand and deli in the city. Years ago the state looked upon gambling as a low vice, a depravity, and those who profited from it were no better than cheap pimps and deserved years behind bars. That opinion held right up until the government took it over, at which point it became a civic virtue to lose the rent and all other money you didn’t have on rigged games of chance. The states tell the citizens that their lottery and slot-machine money goes to public schools. Never. Tax money to school districts is unchanged. Schools do not get forty dollars more from gambling. The mountain of money suckers pour into the lottery machines goes into the running of government, which means that the mayors and commissioners and councilmen take it.

In its early days, the American Mafia grew big thanks to Prohibition. After which, liquor became legal but drugs were desired. They were an exclusive business of the Mafia for a while, but now every country on earth is sending us
dope. The only way the mob can again be its exclusive seller is to enlist and go fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Shylock” as a word has become disreputable wherever anti-Semitism is an enemy. But it is difficult to banish entirely, since Shakespeare coined it with a too-memorable character. On the streets somebody who can’t get the rent or, much more important, money to bet with, takes cash from a shylock. Who will get paid. “You’re getting married?” Tony N. said to a debtor rehearsing for his wedding the next day at Gate of Heaven Roman Catholic Church in Queens. “You owe a lot of money here. What is this, you going to go down the aisle on crutches?”

Extortionist loans, as the federal indictments call them, have almost disappeared in the rush of people taking brand-new credit cards to automatic tellers that give cash to the touch. When you see people punching numbers into a wall and getting money inside bodegas in the poorest of neighborhoods, then you are an observer of terrible financial misdeeds. There’s your shy.

Once the mob could have a hand in politics. It was possible back then for Mafia bosses and government officials to scheme together. A man with a gun and a politician in his pocket is rather formidable. Today mobsters are so unsavory that even elected officials are expected to shun them.

“There are two people coming in,” Betty, the receptionist, was told. This is going back some years. “A Meade Esposito and Paul Castellano. If they come while I’m out, put them in the back office and then walk away. Don’t stand there.”

Betty didn’t have the least idea who they were. She was young and just out of college, where she had studied architecture. She had this job in the law office, back in the seventies, until she could start working in her chosen field.

Some minutes later a short man with square shoulders walked in. “I’m Meade Esposito,” he said in a raspy voice.

She escorted him back to the office, and he shut the door as she left.

Ten minutes later a tall man with large glasses sauntered in. “Mr. Castellano,” he said.

She took him back to the office and said, “Mr. Esposito is already there.” Castellano went in.

Betty was told, “Esposito is a politician. Castellano is the Godfather.”

“A killer?” Betty said.

“He gives the orders to get people killed.”

At the meetings of the two, which were often, she never said a word to them and always tried to be busy so she wouldn’t have to look.

Castellano, the boss of his crime family, was the man in charge, and Esposito was a loud messenger boy. He was the boss of everything in local politics in Brooklyn and a lot of the city, and he had a rough charm, which was fine in cheap politics, but his true strength was the field-artillery battalion lined up behind Paul Castellano.

On one occasion Betty was aware of Castellano leaving for the elevator, but Esposito did not come out for some time. She wondered if she should go back and look in the
office and see if he had been killed there. She saw the door slightly open. Esposito was on the phone.

“I knew the FBI was around,” Betty was remembering. “Castellano was friendly with one of them. I know they even came up to the office. They weren’t there to arrest him. They liked him. I don’t know what that was about. Were they working for him? I don’t know. It looked like it.”

Today the number of Mafia members with long-range money is infinitesimal. You need no complicated thinking to be a gangster. You can be an illiterate in good clothes, and you don’t have to work. All through the years, the worst penalty for these men has been honest labor. A neighborhood tough guy I used to know, his name was Jack, was up for parole at Attica and needed a legitimate job, a can opener, or he would have to remain for the last six months of a long sentence. I went to three people, who told me, “Please, no ex-cons. They don’t want to work.” Finally a guy I knew who had a fuel-oil delivery business took Jack on. That got him out of jail. He came home from Attica. With flourishes, amid vows to the sky of total honesty, Jack started his job on a Monday. On Wednesday his boss called me. “Where is he?” he asked. I stuttered, then said, “He’ll straighten out. Let me get at him. It’s just one day.” The boss said, “He wasn’t here yesterday either.”

These people are not attracted to work even in illegitimate places. Sal Reale had his airline workers’ union office
just outside Kennedy, and it was all right, except he had to hire people highly recommended by the Gambino family. Sal had a list of employees’ credentials. Typical was:

Each morning the list ruled the office, particularly when work orders started to fill the in-baskets.

“The morning starts with sixty-two people in the office,” Sal recalls. “By ten o’clock there were twelve people working. We had a lot of paperwork. You had to fill out insurance forms, various federal forms, everything you think of that they could put on paper. We were left with twelve people to do the work. Where did the others go? Here’s a woman who gets up, picks up her purse, and walks past me without even nodding. I call after her, ‘Couldn’t you give us a hand?’ She says, ‘I was told I didn’t have to do any of this work. I have to get my hair done. I’m Paul Vario’s cousin.’”

The Mafia no longer sends great chords crashing down from the heavens. As it dissolves, you inspect it for what it actually was, grammar-school dropouts who kill each other and purport to live by codes from the hills of Sicily that are actually either unintelligible or ignored.

It lasted longest in film and print, through the false drama of victims’ being shot gloriously with machine guns but without the usual exit wounds the size of a soup plate.
The great interest in the Mafia was the result of its members’ being so outrageously disdainful of all rules that just the sight of a mobster caused gleeful whispers. Somebody writing for a living could find it extremely difficult to ignore them.

The Mafia became part of public belief because of movies with stars who were Jewish. This dark fame began with Paul Muni playing Al Capone. After that came Edward G. Robinson, Tony Curtis, Lee Strasberg, Alan King, and on and on, part of an entire industry of writers, editors, cameramen, directors, gofers, lighting men, sound men, location men, casting agents—all on the job and the payroll because of the Mafia. Finally two great actors, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, put a vowel in there.

It started with great Jewish actors, and now it fades on the words of one of the greatest Mafia witnesses ever, who comes up Jewish. As the obsession with the Mafia slips away, Burt Kaplan gives it a final shove.

The American Mafia was founded when, back in the 1920s, Meyer Lansky, young and vicious, Jewish and from Eastern Europe, went around the streets of downtown New York looking for somebody he had heard about, Charles Luciano, nickname “Lucky,” equally young, just as vicious, born in Sicily, in a village that was waterless at noon.

The two grew up to be frightening marauders and the foundation of the Mafia.

It then became common for Jewish women and Italian tough guys to marry. When John Gotti put his son in
charge of the Gambino family, the guys hollered. Junior was not pure Italian, they charged. “The mother is a Jew from Russia. He can’t be a boss. He can’t even be a member.”

“My family comes from Moscow,” the mother, Victoria Gotti, hissed, “but I’m not Jewish. That comes from Johnny. We went to the track, and he used to give me a hundred dollars to bet a race, and I would put ten dollars in the window and keep the ninety dollars in my purse. I did that every race. One day after a race, I went into my purse for something, and Johnny saw all this money, and he said to everybody at the table, ‘Look at this Jew!’ That’s where it started from.”

Joe N. Gallo, the old man of the Gambino bosses, once told a mafioso named Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso, “The only way to survive is to get a strong Jew as a partner.” Casso found Burt Kaplan in a saloon, and together they did great until they did not.

Even his friend Burt Kaplan described Anthony Casso as a homicidal maniac. Still, Burt had Gaspipe at his house for dinner a couple nights a week.

When they met, Casso was already moving up in the Lucchese crime family. He was short, a little chunky, with dark hair slicked back. He began in South Brooklyn by shooting some hawks that were chasing everybody’s pigeons. Then he started beating up people and hoping to make the Mafia. The only way to get into the mob was to murder somebody. Then murder again to remain fearsome, and murder more to get ahead, and murder more and more until you’re the boss and have others murder for you. Casso had no problem with this system. His one great ability was to pull a trigger. He was the son of a longshoreman who was called Gaspipe because he used one to break heads. Young Anthony took the same nickname and the same weapon. I don’t know much more about the father, but I do know that the son batted right-handed.

At first Kaplan needed a friend like Gaspipe because he was in danger of drowning in shylock debts. It’s easy to see how such a thing could happen.

• Q:
  Sir, you talked earlier about having a gambling problem. Can you tell the jury a little bit about that?
  
• A:
  Yes. I was a compulsive gambler from the time I was thirteen.
  
• Q:
  And how did that start?
  
• A:
  I went to the racetrack with my father a few times, and then I started playing poker in the neighborhood, and I enjoyed it and I became sick with it.
  
• Q:
  You said you became sick with it. What do you mean by that?
  
• A:
  I couldn’t control myself. I was doing every bad thing to get money to gamble. I was thirteen when I started gambling, and then in 1975 I joined Gamblers Anonymous, and I didn’t gamble for thirteen years.
  
• Q:
  And after joining and not gambling for thirteen years, what happened in the late eighties?
  
• A:
  I went back to gambling. I didn’t become anywhere near as degenerate a gambler as I was.
  
• Q:
  As a result of all this gambling you did, did you lose money?
  
• A:
  In my lifetime? Probably around three million.
  
• Q:
  Did you find yourself owing various people money?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  And for how many years in your life did you owe people money with respect to your gambling habit, not like a house loan or something like that?
  
• A:
  Probably from the time I was in my twenties until 1975.
  
• Q:
  And did you have to borrow money from people to support your gambling habit?
  
• A:
  When my credit got used up in the banks, I borrowed from finance companies.
  
• Q:
  Did there come a time that you started borrowing money from family and friends?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  And did there come a time you started borrowing money from loan sharks?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  Did owing money from gambling lead to you becoming involved with organized-crime figures?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  

At this time Kaplan owed money to a dozen shylocks. After a weekend of unlucky gambling, he would awaken on Monday in a sweat, imagining the sound of clicking triggers in the street outside. He had a loving wife who turned for help to her father, a legitimate working New York police officer. He knew a mob leader, a man named Christy “Tick” Furnari. One day the father-in-law walked Burt over to the 19th Hole bar, near the Dyker Heights public golf course, and he asked Furnari if they could get all his son-in-law’s loans put into one manageable debt. And also let him pay down the principal, which wasn’t a shylock’s idea of a good arrangement. They wanted men like Burt to pay interest of 2, 3, and 4 percent every week for the next millennium. At Furnari’s request, Casso arranged what was asked, thus saving Burt’s life.

Casso and Kaplan were at the bar together from then on. The 19th Hole had a cluster of minor thugs hanging outside, and a few major thugs, such as Casso, inside. Kaplan belonged, too. He was coming up as a known drug dealer. That he spent time with Casso was powerful evidence that he could live and work in the lion’s mouth.

Back then Kaplan had a young daughter who dreamed of stepping out of the shadows and into brightness, which she did, becoming a lawyer and now a judge, despite so many nights looking across her fork at a dinner guest named Gaspipe, who arrived reeking of murder.

The man who started Casso’s crime outfit, Thomas “Three-Finger Brown” Lucchese, is long dead, but his name remains on the stationery, which is newspaper crime stories. In this the Mafia copies law firms, who keep their dead on the door, in bright gold letters, in order to perpetuate income. Their first lies are their letterheads.

• Q:
  Can you tell the jury, sir, at the time you had that relationship with Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa, when it began, where were they employed?
  
• A:
  New York Police Department.
  
• Q:
  Was there an intermediary or a go-between?
  
• A:
  Frank Santora Jr.
  
• Q:
  How did you meet Mr. Santora?
  
• A:
  I met him in prison. Allenwood Camp. I was there 1981 to 1983. Frankie approached me and said that his cousin was a detective and that if I wanted his cousin to get me
  information [he] could help me if I ever [had] a problem and could probably help me on ongoing investigations. A detective. He said he—he was—he gave me his name, Louie Eppolito, because I had known his—his uncle. Jimmy Eppolito. Jimmy the Clam. Santora said Mr. Louie Eppolito and his partner—I didn’t know anybody else’s name at that point—but they would do murders.
  
• Q:
  Turning to the time you were in Allenwood prison. Had you met Frank Santora before that?
  
• A:
  No.
  
• Q:
  Can you explain to the jury, if you say you were housed with him, how did that work? What was that arrangement?
  
• A:
  In prison camp it’s dormitories, and Frankie slept about two or three beds away from me.
  
• Q:
  How often would you see him in that environment?
  
• A:
  Four, five times a day. We ate together.
  
• Q:
  Did you have jobs? Where did Santora work in the jail, do you remember?
  
• A:
  He worked in the powerhouse.
  
• Q:
  Where did you work?
  
• A:
  I worked in the powerhouse.
  
• Q:
  Santora was an associate of which family?
  
• A:
  Gambino.
  
• Q:
  Did you continue your relationship with Mr. Santora once you got out of prison?
  
• A:
  Frankie and I were friends. He used to come to my business and talk, and he also met me at my house and I
  went to his. I lived on Eighty-fifth Street between Twenty-first Avenue and Bay Parkway. Santora was on Seventy-ninth Street between Twenty-first Avenue and Bay Parkway.
  
• Q:
  What was it that Mr. Santora offered you?
  
• A:
  He offered to get me information on any investigation that was going on, and if I had a serious problem in the street, he offered to do murders for me.
  
• Q:
  When Mr. Santora initially made that offer to you, did you accept it or reject it?
  
• A:
  Rejected it. Because, number one, I wasn’t doing anything at that time where I needed that help and, number two, I told him I didn’t want to do business with any cops.
  
• Q:
  Why did you not want to do business with cops?
  
• A:
  I felt it was—it was something that could come back and haunt me, and I didn’t want to do it. It would come back and haunt me with my friends on the street, the friends that I had in organized crime, and possibly could come back and haunt me if one of them would later on in life become an informant.
  
• Q:
  Did you later accept Santora’s offer to pay him as well as his cousin and his cousin’s partner money in exchange for law-enforcement information?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  Did Mr. Eppolito and Mr. Caracappa ever carry out murder contracts for you?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  Mr. Kaplan, was it your first murder?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  

It happened in 1986, and the victim was Israel Greenwald, a New York jeweler who was also a participant in a crime arranged by Burt Kaplan. His role changed to murder victim when he decided to take all the proceeds of a theft and disappear with them instead of sharing them with his co-conspirators. He thought he could then go home to his family in a nice suburb without suffering as much as a wondering look from anybody. He was somewhat off the mark. He became but the first of eight murders that Burt Kaplan admits to perpetrating along with Gaspipe Casso and the two detectives Eppolito and Caracappa. That there could be more than only eight is at least possible. You get tired of confessing to all these killings and just stop. Anyway, who wants to hear about another in a long line of bad guys shot in the back of the head? These men also arranged and committed a kidnapping. Again, this is the only kidnapping Kaplan mentions. Maybe there were many.

The numbers are unimportant. What we need to understand is only the purpose of these men. Lucchese family boss Gaspipe Casso would tell his associate Burton Kaplan to get confidential information about impending arrests, wiretaps, informants, and anything else that seemed useful. Kaplan then went to the two detectives, one of whom, Caracappa, was on an anti-Mafia squad and had easy reach into the police headquarters records room. The other cop, Eppolito, was
stationed in a busy precinct where mob guys were concerned. Kaplan paid the men four thousand dollars a month salary and then waited at home while they combed the files and brought him packets of wiretaps and secret police reports. He passed the information to Casso, who often handled the dirty work. There were also times when the cops earned extra money by doing the mob’s murders themselves.

• Q:
  And as far as you knew, it was Mr. Santora’s first murder?
  
• A:
  I don’t know that. I knew that Frankie was a hoodlum. I know that he was capable of doing things like that.
  
• Q:
  Why didn’t you ask the guy, Frank, have you ever killed somebody before? This is an important thing?
  
• A:
  If I asked that question on the street, Frankie would probably kill me. Why do you want to know what I did? he would say. Are you going to become an informant or something?
  
• Q:
  Did they ever carry out a kidnapping contract for you?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  What was the name of the person that was kidnapped?
  
• A:
  Jimmy Hydell.
  

In the back of the courtroom, a young woman clenches her teeth and hisses. “Motherfucker…. My mother wants Jimmy’s bones back…. Put a woman at peace….”

The young woman sits next to me and whispers like this through a whole morning’s testimony. Her name is Elizabeth
Hydell, age forty-two, full of hatred. Her brother Jimmy was shot to death as directed by Kaplan and Casso and carried out by Caracappa and Eppolito.

Jimmy Hydell, twenty-six, was a light-haired, hefty thug, an office boy with a gun. He ran around frothing at the mouth and shooting. He was still living with his mother, in Staten Island, when he died. The family originally came from Bensonhurst, on Eighty-third Street, which was dominated by St. Bernadette’s Catholic Church and school. The Hydells merely had to stroll across the street to mass. The family bloodlines were German and Irish. The father worked in the transit system.

“My father paid forty thousand for that house. We had to walk away from it,” Elizabeth Hydell mutters. “It was up for two hundred and twenty thousand, and they came and took the deed away from him.” I ask her why.

“Because my father got told.”

“Who told him?”

“He got told by the top.”

About this she will say no more. It makes no sense to wonder.

“Jimmy was mesmerized by the Mafia,” she tells me. “The clothes, the cars, the way they just walked around with their jewelry and never had to go to work. He went on killing sprees. At the same time, he was a mama’s boy. He called his mother twenty times a day. The night he got engaged, he called her from the hotel room where he was in bed with his fiancée.”

She remembered how Jimmy later became uncontrollable when the young woman, whose name was Annette Dibiase, broke up with him. He kept pacing up and down the hallway at home. “Then, I don’t know what he did, he took her car and tied her up and drove out by the airport like he was rehearsing a kidnap. I guess he was.”

Riding around with him was Robert Bering, a former transit cop who thought that if he piled up enough dead bodies, they would let him in the Mafia, even if he didn’t have enough Italian in him to order dinner. Witnesses saw the fiancée being yanked into a car in front of her house. They found her with five bullets in her head, buried near a road in Staten Island. Hydell seemed an insane killer at this point. He had supposedly also murdered two shylocks, one drug seller, and two people who ran school-bus companies.