Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [108]
Yet as the team members prepared to set off on their quest, they were also given a warning. Keep this secret, they were instructed. We don’t know whom we can trust. Wiseguys, feds, cops—there’s no guarantee which side they’re playing on. No telling who will try to stop this investigation if word gets out of what we’re up to.
Joe Ponzi, chief investigator in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office, set the team’s direction. The son of a detective sergeant who had worked with Eppolito in the Brooklyn South Robbery Squad, Ponzi needed to find a path through the complex evidence. He looked at the daunting pile of old reports and files reaching toward the ceiling of the war room and realized he had no choice but to plunge in.
For long, intense days, he locked himself in his eighteenth-floor office, file after file open on his desk, and relived a time when wiseguys routinely delivered their own unforgiving justice on the streets of New York. His concentration was so complete that, he would tell people, he “could almost hear the bullets zipping by as I turned the pages.”
When he emerged from his self-imposed isolation, it was with a smile of triumph. There was, he realized, “one small thread we could pull.”
BURTON KAPLAN WAS KNOWN AS “the old man.” The nickname seemed appropriate. Heading into his seventies, wizened and liver-spotted, he squinted out at the world through thick, dark-framed glasses. But one had only to listen to the deference in a wiseguy’s voice as he spoke of Kaplan to understand that the shorthand was a term of respect, a tribute to Kaplan’s sagacity more than his age. For Burton Kaplan had accomplished the one goal every Mob guy, from soldier to capo, admired without qualification: he made money.
The old man had done well in the Garment District, importing knockoffs of designer jeans from Hong Kong. And he had schemed his way to even bigger profits trafficking in heroin, cocaine, and, his biggest seller, marijuana. In the early 1990s, according to the government’s estimate, he began smuggling about four thousand pounds of marijuana per month from Texas to New York.
With all that money coming in, with all those drugs going out, not to mention the old man’s penchant for gambling hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single night, it was only a matter of time before he crossed paths with another Brooklyn player out to make it big any way he could—Gaspipe Casso. And the two hit it off. In fact, Casso, eager to hide his assets from prying government eyes, reportedly thought enough of Kaplan to put the deed to his family’s home in the old man’s name.
According to investigators, they cemented their friendship and business relationship when, in the early 1980s, after Kaplan finished a three-year stint in Allenwood for manufacturing and distributing quaaludes, he suggested a new and promising deal. In prison, the old man had met a wiseguy named Frank Santora, who confided that his cousin Lou Eppolito was a hotshot Brooklyn detective. But despite his badge, Santora reportedly told him, Lou was one of us: he was always looking to make a little extra money, and he was not too judgmental about what he had to do to earn it. Shortly after Santora was released, around 1985, the way Casso told it to the FBI, the two greedy detectives, with an accommodating Kaplan acting as the go-between, went into business with the Lucchese family.
To bolster his short-lived deal with the government, Casso had unhesitatingly ratted out Kaplan. Then, concerned that his close friend might feel upset about having been betrayed, Casso, in prison but not out of touch, decided there was one way to ensure that the old man wouldn’t have any hard feelings: he reportedly ordered a hit on Kaplan.
The government got to Kaplan first. The feds pounded him with a massive indictment. In 1998, after reportedly posting bail of twenty million dollars and