The Best American Crime Writing 2006 (31 page)

After sulking through a long year in federal prison, Casso, with a wiseguy's easy relativism, agreed to a deal. He would tell all he knew, and in return the feds, no less pragmatic, would forget about his complicity in thirty-six murders, enroll him in the witness-protection program, and then set the volatile sociopath loose in some unsuspecting corner of America.

With their first questions, the earnest debriefers focused on Casso's sources in the New York City Police Department. "My crystal ball," he acknowledged. Then Casso quickly gave up Eppolito and Caracappa. He detailed how, starting around 1986, he had placed the two cops, as the government put it, on "retainer." Employing one of his associates, Burton Kaplan, as the middleman, he claimed he paid his moles four thousand dollars a month. In exchange, the two detectives, wired into the world of organized-crime investigations, let him know whatever the police and federal organized-crime units were secretly up to.

But there was more. Casso matter-of-factly went on that, after the attempt on his life, he was determined to get even. (Or, as one of the alleged hit men was heard wailing on an intercepted phone call that was leaked to the Daily News, Casso wanted to "put me on a table, cut my heart out, and show it to me.") So, using Kaplan once again as negotiator and paymaster, he said he gave the two detectives "additional work."

Jimmy Hydell had been one of the hapless shooters in the botched assassination, and, as Casso told the story, the two detectives were sent out to bring him in. They tracked him down in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and, with a flash of their gold badges, arrested him. Only, Hydell wasn't taken to the precinct.They drove him to a nearby body shop, where they shoved him, kicking and screaming, into the trunk of a car.As Casso told the FBI, the detectives drove the car to a Toys "R" Us parking lot in Flatbush. Gleeful and triumphant by his own account, Casso was waiting. He got behind the wheel and, with Hydell curled up in the trunk, headed to an associate's home in Brooklyn.

Hydell was carried into the basement. It became a torture chamber. After Hydell shared the names of his two accomplices, Casso was satisfied but not finished. "I shot him fifteen times," he boasted.

In subsequent sessions, Casso told his interrogators that he had employed the two detectives in connection with seven other murders. In one, according to Casso's unapologetic account, they somehow made a mistake and gave him the address for the wrong Nicholas Guido. As a result, a twenty-six-year-old who had the same name as one of the men who had allegedly ambushed Casso was gunned down on a Brooklyn street on Christmas Day 1986. On another occasion, in November 1990, according to Casso, the two detectives pulled Eddie Lino, a captain in the Gambino crime family, over to the side of the road.When Lino lowered the window of his Mercedes, Caracappa allegedly pulled out his revolver and fired into his head and chest.The detectives, Casso said, were paid $65,000 for the hit.

To the FBI, Casso seemed like the perfect witness. His stories flowed easily and without apparent embellishment. The details were convincing. There was only one problem-Casso had never actually talked to the two cops or handed them any money. He claimed he had left it to Kaplan to handle those chores. In fact, he conceded to his suddenly disconcerted debriefers, Kaplan never even shared their names.

But, he explained, he had seen them once: when he retrieved Hydell in the parking lot. And the way things worked out, it was enough.

On the lam, looking for ways to fill the long days in his suburban hideout, Casso had picked up a book.The author's photo came as a shock. He later said it was the same stolid tough guy who had stood guard while Jimmy Hydell lay in the trunk. He'd never have trouble identifying Lou Eppolito or his grim, wraithlike partner, Stephen Caracappa, to any jury.

Only, despite Casso's willingness to get on the stand and point a condemning finger at the two detectives, he would never get his chance. He screwed up. Repeatedly. Housed in a prison section with other cooperating prisoners, he hatched a bug-eyed plot to kill a federal judge. He persuaded a prison employee to provide him with food, drugs, and fellatio.To avenge a jailhouse fight he had lost, Casso attacked Salvatore "Big Sal" Miciotta in the shower room after discovering that the three-hundred-pound wiseguy had been left handcuffed. And he offered the feds a loopy story about Sammy "the Bull" Gravano's role in the 1991 stabbing of the Reverend Al Sharpton, a tale quickly proved false, since Gravano had been in prison at the time of the attack. In the end, the feds had to concede that Casso was pathologically savage, reckless, and ultimately unreliable. And, more significant, any defense attorney worth his six-figure retainer would shoot their star witness's credibility full of holes.

In the summer of 1998, after determining that Casso had breached the terms of his agreement, the government sentenced him to life without parole. Without his testimony, police and federal authorities quickly decided, there was no hope of ever making a case against the two Mafia cops.

That, in brief strokes, was the story that was told in the mountain of FBI criminal-investigation summaries, police reports, and crime-scene accounts that the U.S. Attorney's Office delivered on four overloaded handcarts to the "war room" on the fourteenth floor of the Brooklyn district attorney's building, on Jay Street. It was the fall of 2003, and in the weeks after Tommy Dades shared his new discovery, there was a flurry of activity.

Mark Feldman of the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney's Office, a man whom Eppolito had admiringly described in his fateful book as "a tough Jew," issued the marching orders. The D.A.'s investigative unit, a team of retired detectives whose long careers had been measured out in Mob cases, would lead the charge. They were assisted by William Oldham, an ex-cop and federal investigator in Feldman's office.Their mandate was to dig up the past and scrutinize the present.To go back, and to go forward.To do whatever was necessary to make the cases against two cops who had allegedly betrayed the city's trust. The men whose crimes they were investigating were of their generation, detectives who had been their colleagues. It was their own legacy they would be working to redeem.

To a man, they looked forward to the task with a special zeal. "I know what happened back then. I know all the names, all the players. This isn't history to me," says Robert Intartaglio. A fabled detective known throughout the department as Bobby I., he had retired after twenty-eight years on the job and had spent the last nine working in the D.A.'s office.

"All the years on the job," he explains with a forlorn shake of his head, "you couldn't help feeling that the wiseguys were onto us.

You don't talk on the phone.You don't call some people. Leaks are the worst thing that can happen. And yet they kept happening. Now it was payback time."

Retired detective Doug LeVien embraced the case as his unexpected summons to the front lines. Back in the seventies he had posed as a corrupt cop to infiltrate the Lucchese crime family. Now, after twenty-five years on the streets, he was strapped to a desk as a detective investigator in the D.A.'s office.This was, he realized, a chance to head back into battle. Maybe his last one.And if it were, it would be a fitting last hurrah. "We would clean our own house," he says. "Cops would get other cops."

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 retaining a team of expensive lawyers to plead his case during a three-week trial, Kaplan was convicted of marijuana trafficking and tax fraud.They threw the book at him. He got twenty-seven years.

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.