Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [109]
Nevertheless, according to the frustrated accounts in the case memos Ponzi had read, the old man was determined to hang tough. He would not share what he knew about the two detectives.
But the way Ponzi figured it, nearly seven years in jail might have softened Kaplan’s resolve. And looking at things with as much objectivity as he could muster, Ponzi felt confident that “if there’s anything I can do, it’s speak to people.” After all, he had spent most of his years in the D.A.’s office as a polygraph interrogator and had managed to secure 125 murder confessions. (HE GETS SLAYERS TO SING, marveled the headline of a laudatory 1988 newspaper profile.) He’d sit down with Kaplan and give it his best shot.
Ponzi couldn’t simply rap on Kaplan’s cell door and ask to talk, however. The old man was a federal prisoner in a federal jail. The team would need federal muscle to get ongoing access. They decided to ask the Drug Enforcement Administration to come on board.
The pitch was made to John Peluso, the assistant special agent in charge of the New York office. A hulk of a man with a bushy mustache and a Kentucky drawl, Peluso was a veteran who had spent twenty-two years fighting the drug wars in the United States and South America. Along the way, he had perfected the undercover operative’s knack for affecting a disinterested calm. So as Intartaglio and Oldham laid out the case one morning in November 2003, Peluso sat mute, his eyes fixed on some imaginary point on the horizon. “My thousand-yard stare,” he calls it. But when they were done, he spoke up without hesitation: “I see the challenge. But I also see the promise. We’re in.”
Peluso and Ponzi now went off to see Kaplan, to try to pull the thread. They spoke to him as a team. And they confronted him individually: Ponzi in his laid-back, persuasive way, one kid from the neighborhood talking to another; Peluso more commanding and direct, an authoritative voice hoping to instill confidence that a promise made by the government would be a promise kept.
In the weeks of conversations, they made sure, as Peluso puts it, “to touch all the buttons.” Kaplan, old and growing older, could face death alone in prison without the companionship of his wife, his daughter, Deborah (a recently appointed criminal-court judge in Manhattan who had taken the stand at her father’s trial and impugned the testimony of a government witness), and his baby grandson. Or Kaplan could tell all he knew, and live to cash in the get-out-of-jail-free card they kept waving in front of him.
Kaplan listened attentively, but it was difficult for either of the men to read his mood. Was he weighing their offer? Or was he simply playing them, glad to fill his empty days with a diversion?
The answer came shortly after New Year’s Day of 2004. Kaplan’s lawyers notified the U.S. Attorney’s Office that their client wanted to negotiate a deal.
When Ponzi announced the news, the men in the war room broke out in a cheer.
FOR THE NEXT THREE MONTHS, Intartaglio met several times a week with the old man. With a squad of federal marshals stationed outside, they sequestered themselves behind closed doors, not too far from the Brooklyn prison where Kaplan returned each night. The talk, fueled by food and drink, flowed freely. With Kaplan as his guide, Intartaglio went back over the gangland wars he had lived through in a previous life. Missing pieces were filled in and mysteries explained. Yet of all the ancient episodes that these rambling sessions brought back to life, two shootings held him like a magnet.
In his mind’s eye, Intartaglio could once again see the thick fog rolling in. He was on the roof of New Dorp High School, on Staten Island, peering across the street as best he could on a night in October 1987. He and a team from the NYPD’s Major Case Squad were staking out a garden store called Frank’s. Informants had told