by Tommy Dades
“Yeah, Burt’s still thinking about it. He wants to talk to his family before he decides.”
Ponzi and Mark Feldman had been close friends for two decades. But as the weeks passed he began to think that maybe the U.S. Attorney had already met with Kaplan and Hynes’s office was being iced out. Until the day in August when Robert Henoch called. “You ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“We’re flying down to West Virginia to see Burt. I just got the call. His lawyer’s gonna be there.”
It turned out Kaplan hadn’t agreed to anything more than a second meeting; this was just a meet-and-greet, a feeling-out process, but based on his previous hard-line attitude both Vecchione and Ponzi were optimistic he was going to flip. Mark Feldman, Henoch, Ponzi, and Mark Manko from the DEA flew to Morgantown. Oldham was supposed to go with them but failed to show up at the airport; he explained later that he had some difficulty making the flight.
During Ponzi’s more than three decades in the DA’s office he’d seen numerous investigators travel on business to a lot of interesting and sometimes exotic places—and, he mused, he got to go to Morgantown, West Virginia. Kaplan was being held nearby in a federal prison in Glenville, West Virginia. They met with Kaplan and his attorney in a secure DEA facility. This time Kaplan was dressed modestly in trousers and a T-shirt rather than a prison jumpsuit.
The lawyer was tough, telling the investigators at the beginning of the meeting, “I want you guys to know, I don’t represent cooperators.”
Oh, that’s just dandy, Ponzi thought when he heard that. Now how the fuck is this going to work? But the lawyer did his job, letting Kaplan make his own decisions and providing the legal advice he needed to do it.
The beginning was almost the end. Kaplan knew exactly what he wanted in return for his testimony. He wanted the government to admit officially that there had been some irregularities at his pot trial. That would cause the verdict to be overturned or at least provide him with the basis for a resentencing. And he was adamant about it.
Since the deal had to be made with the Feds, that decision was up to Mark Feldman—and he wasn’t about to relent. He couldn’t make that happen, he explained, but instead he offered, “You cooperate with us fully and we’ll bring back the extent of your cooperation to the court, and we’ll do everything in our power to get you a resentencing.”
They sparred over the details for a long time, unable to reach a compromise. Ponzi sat quietly, afraid that the deal was going south. In negotiations like this one the grunts, the cops and the investigators, always want the government to give the informant whatever he needs so that they can hear what he has to say. Ponzi was thinking, Just sign the fucking thing and let’s go, but he knew that neither side was ever going to do that. This was poker for life. Sometimes he could just look at a guy and make a pretty good guess whether or not he was bluffing to get a better deal. But Kaplan? Kaplan knew his value and made it clear, without any smugness or arrogance, that the government couldn’t make the case without him. His confidence in that reality just leaked out of his pores—You want two dirty cops? Then you’ve got to help me. Would he walk away if he didn’t get exactly what he wanted? Ponzi couldn’t even make a decent guess. But he believed without any doubt that Kaplan was capable of doing exactly that. The old man was tough enough to live inside until he died. That was quite a choice he had to make.
And Mark Feldman? Mark Feldman played by the rules; he wouldn’t even hint at anything more than he was legally entitled to offer.
Eventually they maneuvered around that roadblock, agreeing to see what compromise could be worked out. Kaplan had additional concerns. His reputation was at stake. If he agreed to cooperate and was moved to a location to be debriefed, his name would no longer show up on the Bureau of Prisons registry. The registry is a website often checked by inmates, and usually, when someone disappears from the site, there’s a good chance he’s “gone bad.” That worried Kaplan. Not only would it destroy his reputation, if he ever had to go back into the general population, it could cause him potentially fatal problems. Nobody likes a rat, even when he’s ratting out dirty cops.
Feldman and Henoch said that they might be able to manipulate that listing for a while, but clearly if he flipped, at some point people were going to know about it.
When all of the preliminary discussions were done Burt Kaplan finally began talking about the only subject that mattered. He told them he was going to whet their appetite, he was going to give them a taste of the information he could provide—while making sure they knew there was a lot more. A whole lot more. Kaplan was a schmatte salesman; selling was his art. This time though, rather than a truckload of Calvin Klein rip-offs, he was selling his memories. The price was negotiable, so like any great salesman he was trying to convince them he was selling gold.
Kaplan eased into his story. Initially he referred to Eppolito and Caracappa with broad generalizations or characterizations, being careful not to use their names. Eventually he added a wink to his dialogue—You know I know their names, you know I know who they are. And finally he began talking about them in very personal and specific terms.
He was looking directly at Ponzi the first time he said their names. Louie and Steve. A chill literally ran down Ponzi’s spine. Geez, Ponzi thought, we got them. We fucking got them! But the impassive expression on his face never changed.
Kaplan gave them the Lino hit. He gave them Dilapi. And finally he told them about the day they’d grabbed Jimmy Hydell. It was a Saturday and he had called Eppolito that morning to tell him Gas was getting impatient. “C’mon, guys, what’s going on with this?” he asked.
Eppolito had told him, “We’re chasing the kid all over town. We’ve been out to Staten Island a few times already to search around his house.” Later that day Eppolito had called to report, “We got him. We finally got him.”
Ponzi didn’t ask too many questions that first day, content to let the Feds hear as much as they needed before negotiating their deal. But he was impressed by the old man. Kaplan spoke with confidence and clarity, and with enough resignation and sadness in his voice to convince Ponzi that this really was a tough, tough thing for him to do. He was betraying the ideals of a lifetime.
It was much later that Kaplan finally identified the mystery man, the third man. It turned out they had known who it was all along. This whole thing had started with Eppolito’s cousin, Frank Santora. “It wasn’t the two of them alone,” Kaplan said. “It was the three of them. Santora was the connection to the cops.”
By the end of the day Kaplan had firmly established his bona fides. He’d sold himself. No one doubted that his testimony could put Eppolito and Caracappa away for the duration. But Ponzi noticed one other thing: Kaplan appeared to like him. Often after revealing a certain piece of information he’d glance at Ponzi as if he was looking for approval. In response Ponzi was always encouraging, nodding and smiling, That’s good, go on, tell me a little more about that. Ponzi felt the two of them had established a certain comfort level. That was a big part of the art of interrogation: Become the man the subject needs you to be.
Kaplan had made his pitch, but now they had to try to close the deal. After that first meeting Kaplan’s lawyer was in fairly constant communication with Feldman’s office. Kaplan was adamant that the Feds assist him in overturning his conviction or at least paring down his twenty-seven-year sentence. The U.S. Attorney, Roz Mauskopf, was equally adamant that that was not going to happen. Her office was not going to concede that anything improper or inappropriate had taken place. Instead, their offer was pretty straightforward: Cooperate with us, give us substantial information, and at some point we will attempt to get you a resentencing.
At the same time, Feldman was making the necessary arrangements to house Kaplan in the New York metropolitan area—just in case. They were also pushing Kaplan to find an attorney who lived in the area, someone who could be with him on a regular basis.
Vecchione, and to a somewhat l
esser extent Dades, was confident Kaplan was going to take a deal. Ponzi wasn’t sure; he was too experienced to confuse hope with reality. Almost a decade earlier Kaplan had turned down a much better offer, but that was before he’d spent nine years behind bars and was looking forward to basically nothing for the rest of his life. Times change. Kaplan’s daughter Deborah was a respected civil court judge and she and her husband had just adopted a baby from Russia, his grandchild. And just maybe Kaplan had finally accepted the fact that the old rules no longer applied. Even Casso had rolled over like a puppy, going on national TV to confess, on 60 friggin’ Minutes!
There were other things in the equation that Kaplan had to consider; he didn’t know for sure how much the government had on the cops, but it wasn’t too much of a leap to imagine one of them begging for a deal—and putting him on the bull’s-eye.
Whatever his reasons, Burt Kaplan flipped. As soon as Ponzi heard the news he called Mike Vecchione. “No kidding,” Mike said, impressed. “That’s great.”
Tommy Dades was less excited. “We’re out of it now,” he said. “Now Feldman doesn’t need us for nothing.”
Kaplan took the promise. In a secret appearance in a Brooklyn courtroom in late August he stood before Judge Jack Weinstein and pleaded guilty to kidnapping, money laundering, obstruction of justice, racketeering, and murder. Among the specific crimes he admitted to was facilitating the murder of Nicky Guido. At the same time he agreed to drop all of his legal motions appealing his marijuana conviction. Burt Kaplan was making the biggest bet of his life.
The government guaranteed absolutely nothing except that they would write letters to the judges considering his fate acknowleding the degree of his cooperation. When asked later what kind of deal he’d made, he shrugged and admitted, “Zero to life.” He did admit that he received one additional benefit: “The government helped me get some teeth.”
Kaplan was moved to New Jersey. His debriefing began in early October 2004 and lasted six months. Day after day, week after week, Burt Kaplan matter-of-factly described in incredible detail the greatest betrayal in the history of the New York City Police Department.
Kaplan met with representatives of the U.S. Attorney’s office, the DEA, the FBI, and the Brooklyn DA’s office in a large hotel suite located in the Morristown, New Jersey, area. He was housed in a local jail—and hated it. He was inside with a lot of young punks and low-level shitheads, definitely not the class of criminal with whom he had long associated. He was there under an assumed name and nobody knew who he was. After his debriefing had begun, the Feds arranged for him to be carried on the Bureau of Prisons website as “in transit” for almost three months, so the fact that he had flipped remained a secret.
He was allowed to dress casually for these meetings and there was always a supply of his favorite foods, bananas and nuts, on hand. It was a pretty loose atmosphere—where was he going? His keepers went with him on long walks, often with federal investigator Joe Campanella, which he savored. After Bobby I joined the debriefing team, he would go with him to the various locations Kaplan had described, usually places he had met the two cops, like a rest stop on the Long Island Expressway, a cemetery, or even Caracappa’s apartment.
The people allowed to participate in Kaplan’s debriefings changed through the months, but Rob Henoch ran the show. Initially the interrogation went slowly, because Henoch absolutely insisted that the questions asked Kaplan could not be leading, meaning they couldn’t contain nuggets of information that he could simply regurgitate. Cops are notorious for asking questions laden with detail and whenever someone did that Henoch would explode.
The final question that had to be answered was, how was the quality of Kaplan’s memory? Nobody yet knew how his age, his medical problems, and his nine years behind bars had affected his mind. If he ever got on the witness stand a good defense attorney was going to use every small mistake he made to attack his testimony. If he said the curtains were white and they turned out to be yellow, the jury would know about it. A good defense attorney would chip away at each detail until the jury doubted Kaplan remembered his own name. From the very beginning he complained that his memory was not good. He preferred a very structured question-and-answer format, but Henoch wouldn’t permit that. He wanted every detail to come from Kaplan. He didn’t want a defense attorney to be able to claim that Kaplan had been fed the right answers. In fact, after they’d establish a rhythm, when someone asked a leading question Kaplan would shake his head and warn, “He’s going to give you a demerit for that one.”
It turned out the old man’s memory was extraordinary, better than anyone could have hoped. He remembered conversations and locations; he remembered the layout of Caracappa’s mother’s apartment, the color of his cat, and his wife’s first name. He remembered Eppolito’s girlfriend’s name and the clothes people wore and the places they met. It was a depth of detail that no one could possibly know if they hadn’t been there.
As the questioning continued it also became apparent that he was very fond of Caracappa—but despised Eppolito. Like most of the questioners, Joe Ponzi had initially believed that Eppolito was the leader and Caracappa was just going along with him. But as the days and weeks passed he began to realize that it probably was the other way around—the taciturn Caracappa had in fact called the shots, while letting his boisterous partner stay out in front. As far as Kaplan was concerned, Eppolito was a pig, a glutton, and a fool. The two cops used to visit him at his house, he said. When he knew one of them was coming over, he would turn out the porch lights. Ponzi liked that metaphor—most people turn on the lights when expecting guests, but for these guys Kaplan preferred the darkness.
Once, he said, he got into an argument with Eppolito and kicked him out of the house. Ponzi knew he didn’t mean physically; Eppolito was a tough guy, nobody tossed him around. After that though, Kaplan refused to speak to the two cops. Until Caracappa showed up at his house to make amends—and brought Kaplan some cookies as an apology.
The tale Kaplan told was astonishing. While Ponzi had known at least some of the information, the extent of Eppolito and Caracappa’s betrayal, their complete depravity, astonished him. At times he’d just put his head in his hands and wonder, How the hell could these two skells go to work every day, look people in the face, and then screw them so completely? Could they have really hated the people they worked with that much?
Over the next six months Burt Kaplan told the whole story, from his first conversation about the cops with Frank Santora in the Allenwood Prison Camp in 1982—“Frankie approached me and said his cousin was a detective and, if I wanted, his cousin could get me information and could help me if I had problems”—right through his last meeting with Louis Eppolito in Las Vegas more than a decade later, when he was on the run and loaned him $65,000—although Louie had asked for $75,000 for a down payment on a house. He told them about murders and kidnappings; he told them how Caracappa had alerted Casso to the presence of cooperating witnesses like Otto Heidel and painters union official James Bishop. He told them how Louie had found a secretly recorded audiocassette in Heidel’s apartment after he had been murdered—he and Casso had listened to it together and heard both Casso and Vic Amuso’s voice. On one of the tapes, Kaplan remembered, Heidel took a takeout order from Amuso, who wanted soup. Kaplan told them how Casso had tracked down the men who had attacked him and murdered them. He told them about the attempt to whack Sammy “the Bull” Gravano that Eppolito and Caracappa eventually admitted they couldn’t pull off. He told them how Caracappa had tracked down Anthony Dilapi’s location in California by writing to his parole officer—twice. He told them how Eppolito had gleefully recounted the cold-blooded killing of Eddie Lino just off the Belt Parkway. On and on, detail after detail, names, places, small crimes and murders; he told them about how much Casso paid for each job and the fact that Gaspipe had finally put the cops on his payroll at $4,000 a month. Once Kaplan began talking he spilled it all, everything he knew, everything, more than
anyone would have dared hope.
Kaplan remembered details that Casso had neglected to include in his 302. Gaspipe’s initial dealings with the cops apparently took place in 1985, Kaplan said, when Gaspipe asked him if he could launder two stolen $500,000 treasury bills. One of Kaplan’s associates, a Hasidic banker named Joe Banda, used an Orthodox Jewish jeweler to successfully cash the first T-bill in Europe. Kaplan never knew the jeweler’s name. When European law enforcement got a whiff of this jeweler’s trail, Casso and Kaplan were afraid he would roll over and decided to kill him. At Kaplan’s request, Santora asked the cops if they wanted the contract. Were the two detectives willing to commit murder to cover a money laundering scheme? Santora told Kaplan that they would do the job for $30,000.
Several days later Santora told him that the cops had used a police car to pull the jeweler to the side of the road, informed him that he was a suspect in a hit-and-run, and told him that he had to appear in a lineup. The unsuspecting jeweler went along with them and was handed over to Santora, who shot him and buried him. Kaplan didn’t know exactly where they killed him or where his body was buried. Only years later, after Santora’s killing, did he find out that Santora had kept some of the cops’ payment for himself.
According to Kaplan, Eppolito and Caracappa liked the work. They even refused payment from Casso for getting him the names and mug shots of the people who had tried to kill him. That was a favor, they told him, evidence of the quality of the material they could provide.
Ponzi, and later Vecchione, speculated that Casso must have believed he’d hit the wiseguy jackpot when he realized what he had: two NYPD detectives at the top of the information food chain offering to work for him. In the whole history of organized crime there had never been anybody like these two guys. It was like having family members on the job.
