The Good Rat (16 page)

• Q:
  Mr. Kaplan, can you tell the jury, who was Edward Lino?
  
• A:
  Edward Lino was a captain in the Gambino crime family. Casso’s relationship to Mr. Lino wasn’t very good. Casso thought that he was one of the people who tried to get him killed.
  
• Q:
  Did Casso put out a contract on Edward Lino?
  
• A:
  Yes. Probably originally around ’87 or ’88.
  
• Q:
  Did Casso tell you the reasons, in addition to the attempted murder on him, the reasons that he wanted Edward Lino killed?
  
• A:
  He said that he was one of the shooters in Paul Castellano’s killing. Casso wanted to be—be involved in retribution for that, because it was unsanctioned.
  
• Q:
  Did there come a time that Casso had a conversation with you regarding murdering Eddie Lino?
  
• A:
  He wanted me to see if my two friends would take a contract on Eddie Lino. Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa. I spoke to Louie and asked him if they wanted the contract.
  
• Q:
  Did Casso specify a dollar amount?
  
• A:
  Yes. Sixty-five thousand dollars.
  
• Q:
  When you offered the contract to Mr. Eppolito, what did he say?
  
• A:
  He said he would talk it over with Steve but that he couldn’t see any reason for not taking it. He would get back to me in the next day.
  
• Q:
  After Eppolito told you he was going to check with Steve, what happened next?
  
• A:
  He came back and accepted the contract. Louie said that they would take the contract but they—they needed the car and they needed some guns. I went to see Anthony Casso and told him they needed guns.
  
• Q:
  What happened?
  
• A:
  Casso went into a big act, and he said, Don’t these guys do anything for themselves? But he got—he got the two guns. I gave the guns to Louie Eppolito.
  
• Q:
  Do you recall what types of guns at all?
  
• A:
  One was an automatic and one was a revolver.
  
• Q:
  How did you become familiar with guns?
  
• A:
  I am not very familiar with guns, but I was in the navy. I fired some guns, and I know the difference between a revolver and an automatic. An automatic has a clip, and you put the clip into the gun, and it fires automatically. You can hold the trigger down, and it will keep firing. When you use a revolver, you put the bullets individually into a chamber around a circle, and it—pull the trigger one time for each shot.
  
• Q:
  Did there come a time, Mr. Kaplan, that you received eye surgery?
  
• A:
  Yes. Three times.
  
• Q:
  Did there come a time that you saw Mr. Eppolito after having that surgery?
  
• A:
  Yes. I was—it was about nine thirty or ten o’clock at night, and I was sleeping in the hospital. I had gotten my operation that day or the day before, and Louie came in the door, and he tapped me on the foot, and he woke me up, and first I jumped up when I seen him. I thought it was bad news. And I said, What’s the matter? What’s the matter? He said, No, no, take it easy. I got good news. I said, What? He says, We got Eddie Lino. I said, What do you mean you got him? He says, We killed him. And he went in his pocket, and he took out two newspaper articles about how a guy got pulled over on the Belt Parkway and got shot.
  And I asked Louie how did he do it. He said, I followed him from the club on Avenue U, and he went on the Belt Parkway, and we turned on the light, and we pulled him over, and he pulled over on the grass, and I walked over to him and I said, Hey, Frankie, how are you? And Eddie got all happy. Then he says, I’m not Frankie Lino. I’m Eddie Lino. And Louie says, Oh, we thought you were Frankie Lino. And then Louie says, I pointed across to the passenger floor of the car and said, I asked Eddie Lino, What’s that? And Eddie bent down to look, and Steve shot him a number of times.
  
• Q:
  Mr. Kaplan, did there come a time that you paid money for Eddie Lino’s murder?
  
• A:
  Yes. Anthony Casso sent it to my house.
  
• Q:
  How much money did you pay?
  
• A:
  When—it was a box full of money, a little box full of hundred-dollar bills. I counted it. There was seventy thousand dollars in it. I didn’t know if Casso was testing me or what, because the agreed-upon price was sixty-five thousand dollars. I gave the money to Louie, and I told him, I don’t know if this five thousand is for you or the guy is testing me. If it’s for you, keep it. If he’s testing me, I’m going to tell him about it and ask him if he wants it back. And I said to Louie, Don’t worry about it, because we’ll take the money off the next—next month’s four thousand.
  
• Q:
  How did you get the money?
  
• A:
  It was brought to me, and I had to—the big eye patch on my head. A guy came to my door, rang the bell. My wife answered the door, and he said he wanted to see me. And my wife said, Why don’t you come in? He said, No, I don’t want to come in. He stood at the door, and he had a baseball cap over his head, and the best of my ability I believe it was Georgie Zappola, but I can’t say for sure.
  
• Q:
  Did Georgie—whoever that person was, whether it was Georgie Zappola or whomever—did they hand you that box?
  
• A:
  He said, This is from Gas.
  
• Q:
  How long after you got out of the hospital did the person bring you the box of money?
  
• A:
  Within two days.
  
• Q:
  How long after getting the box of money did you give it to Mr. Eppolito?
  
• A:
  The next day. I didn’t want it. I wanted to pay the bill.
  
• Q:
  Did there ever come a time when you had a conversation with Mr. Eppolito about why Mr. Caracappa was the shooter?
  
• A:
  In the hospital that night, I asked him how come if he walked over to the car and had the conversation with him, why did Steve shoot him? He said Steve was the better shot.
  

In court, Burt Kaplan says to the prosecutor, “I could use water.”

“Certainly.”

The prosecutor pours fresh cold water out of a decanter.

“Thank you very much.”

As he drinks, he stares at his former partners over the top of the glass.

Timmy Byrnes kept up with the trial testimony through newspapers and word of mouth. His honor was out there in everything Kaplan had to say.

Timmy is in the front room of the Byrnes Funeral Home in Gerritsen Beach, in Brooklyn, another of the low-sky neighborhoods, where streets hold their feet into the first waters of the Atlantic.

The woman on the phone at the reception desk is saying, “I’m so sorry for our loss, honey.”

In Gerritsen Beach even the funeral directors refer to the deceased as “ours.”

In the chapel on this day is the late Elizabeth Ryan, age ninety-three. Timmy Byrnes is saying, “If I wasn’t running the funeral, I’d be going to it anyway.”

Timmy Byrnes is out of this neighborhood and the family funeral parlor, and his is a way of life older than the street names. The corner outside is empty. All Brooklyn funeral homes have at least one saloon within eyeshot, but the Byrnes parlor seems to sit on a desert. This is only a disguise. Right across the street is a VFW post whose back door opens to the least push, especially that of a mourner. Inside, a great big bar serves all and at all hours.

It is a short distance, minutes, from Coney Island. A parkway runs alongside wetlands and water, with inlets streaming under bridges to clusters of houses. Gerritsen Beach has streets of two-story brick houses made graceful by sturdy maple trees. Then the brick homes end at alleys of wood houses, many in a jumble at a narrow slip of water filled with small, odd boats. The water widens and, sparkling, runs out to a bay and the pounding ocean just beyond.

It isn’t big-city life. It doesn’t have easy mass transit. The B31 bus is a sixteen-minute ride to the Kings Highway subway stop of the Q train. Then it is a half hour more to Manhattan. At the start of the line, the B31 stops in front of Resurrection Roman Catholic Church and school, dull red stone buildings that cover a block and are large and ominous enough to look like a Catholic Pentagon.

Of course it isn’t Tribeca or Lincoln Center or any of the other districts within a walk or a quick subway ride of the jobs of such great importance, such as investment banker, corporate lawyer. It is one of the few neighborhoods of the city where police officers live.

Timmy Byrnes is Catholic, Irish, marines, bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, police department, detective, lieutenant, captain. Retired as an inspector. Funeral director. At all times the passion is to protect and serve. He is sixty-two now and looks forty-five. He is strikingly handsome, thin, with tousled light hair, blue eyes that are warm and notice everything, and a good smile.

Long ago Timmy Byrnes worked with Louis Eppolito in the Senior Citizens Robbery Unit, Brooklyn South. Timmy had worn shield number 3179, one of the famous gold and blue detective shields of the New York Police Department. Timmy put it up there on the dresser when he went to sleep. The badge, his monument, his statue, was the outward personification of everything he was.

Who knew that someday Louie Eppolito would get Timmy Byrnes’s badge number 3179 and betray everyone who ever wore it, betray all honor, betray an entire way of life that was the sinew of Brooklyn and the heart of its honesty?

This, rather than Mrs. Ryan, for whom I would offer a prayer anyway, is what brings me to the old funeral home.

Louie Eppolito was promoted to detective on July 1, 1977. As with everything else to do with him, there was the hint of lousiness. Tim Byrnes remembers, “What I was told
was that he had an order from the chief of personnel saying he was to be made a detective, and the personnel guy retired, and Louie busted in on the new chief of detectives and showed him the letter, and the chief said, ‘Well, you’re a detective.’ I don’t know if the letter was real or not. But Louie carried it off.”

New York City has a most sophisticated screening for police candidates, yet Caracappa, with a burglary conviction—and not as a kid breaking into a gas station but a member of a professional burglary ring—passed all screening. On January 5, 1960, at the age of seventeen, he was arrested for grand larceny on Staten Island. He and an accomplice rented a truck—it was needed because they were not stealing by the handful—and ransacked a lumberyard for building materials for which they had a buyer. Caracappa was given youthful-offender status for a felony. The records were sealed. There was no sentence. Maybe there should have been.

Certainly the police department had no right to allow him to go out into the public with a badge and gun. They turn applicants down because of traffic violations and street quarrels. Caracappa should not have been allowed to take the test. That he did take it, that he passed and became a patrolman and then that he was made a detective and up the grades, that he did all this with a background that said to anybody, I am a criminal and I might even shoot for money, just about screams “fix” or “fixes” or “continuing fix.”

Can you tell me how Louis Eppolito became a cop? He
came from a Mafia family. His father killed people. His uncle was known as Jimmy the Clam, and he lived as a mobster and died as a mobster. The son, Louie’s cousin, was murdered by the mob.

Tim Byrnes became a detective because of his hard work and because everyone trusted him. He took shield 3179. Sometimes he looked at the badge for long moments. Lord, what a beautiful thing. Put that shield out on the dresser and stare at it for as many minutes as you have.

Tim Byrnes worked the streets and put up so much of his life to study for promotion exams. He became a sergeant in 1974 and was named squad commander for the Sixtieth Precinct, on West Eighth and Surf Avenue in Coney Island. His badge changed with the title. He turned in 3179 at the Shield Desk in police headquarters and was given a sergeant’s badge.

If Byrnes had had a brother, a son, or a cop he worked with, he could have had 3179 reserved for them. He had nobody. Or if this had been some cheap jersey for a sports team, Timmy’s number would have been retired with tears and tumult. But he only carried that number when he was out trying to save lives, to protect people. He did it day or night, did it with a ton of bravery and a cop’s common sense.

Lou Eppolito came to work with that same badge and his jacket over his shoulder, his collar open, his black hair full, his voice bawling. Big-city detective. He is supposed to carry a Smith & Wesson .38 with a four-inch barrel. His off-duty is supposed to be a Colt with a two-inch barrel. He
came roaring into the precinct with a six-inch Ruger. Who said he could do this? I got permission from Sullivan. This was the chief of detectives. Byrnes spoke to Sullivan, who thought he might have spoken to Eppolito but he wasn’t sure, and besides, isn’t it late to bother with it? Eppolito had bulled his way through again.

Every time Byrnes saw Eppolito, he noticed that shield hanging from his breast pocket or on the chain around his neck. Three one seven nine.

The senior citizens squad of Brooklyn South was set up to try to protect the elderly in the area, mostly Jewish, from attacks by the waves of the young, who were of color. Daily life can hardly get any uglier.

The big street, Flatbush Avenue, was one small store after another, block after block of them, with some larger chain outlets breaking up the alignment. Some of the blocks had three and four furniture stores, whose signs proclaimed full bedroom sets for affordable money.