The Good Rat (17 page)

The homes were apartment houses or two-story unattached frames. From these streets came old women out food shopping and then home to apartments where an aging husband waited or, more often, to the emptiness left by widowhood and children off and married. For Louie Eppolito it was a million-dollar assignment. He could wrap his arms around an old Jewish woman out of a concentration camp and soothe her. Don’t worry, Mama. I’m here.

Byrnes was called one night to an apartment where one of the young had pushed in after an old woman and was
robbing her when Louie Eppolito, running a raiding party, arrived. Louie beat the kid senseless. The blood was over the room like fresh paint.

“You told him,” Byrnes said. “I don’t think it did any good.”

Soon Eppolito decides he is detective of the century, pounding down Flatbush Avenue. He sounds like an ice cream truck. Chiming in the air are the gold shield and all his medals on a chain around his neck. In his wallet he had a picture of an ape with a criminal-identification license plate around his neck. Louie would say, “Here is my Most Wanted.”

Does he have medals? He is the eleventh-most-decorated cop in the city. Yes, he is. He reports this to you himself. That is what he will swear to. Detective Eppolito of the senior citizens squad, protector of the aged, pounding after this kid who has just stolen an old lady’s purse.

Louie’s big paws clout the kid on the shoulders and drive him into the sidewalk.

“They come in here on the Soul Train, and they think they can rob our decent seniors,” Louie exults.

The kid is booked. And Louie Eppolito is right back on Flatbush Avenue. He bursts into the storefront office of the
Courier-Life,
which publishes weekly papers that cover the area.

“I just collared a kid was about to murder a senior on Glenwood Road. He had a .38 in his pocket. He was going to use it on her. Then maybe turn it on me. But he got a
look at me and he took off. I got him all right. Don’t fuckin’ worry about Louie’s running,” he assured the reporters. “You fellas ought to be onto what we’re doing. I made more collars than anybody in Brooklyn this week. Twenty-five arrests! Where is the photographer? People see my picture, they fuckin’ well know.”

In handling domestic-violence calls, he first got the husband outside and beat him blind. Then he went back later to see the wife. “Battered wives were the most vulnerable,” he said. “Every time we went on a call where a husband smacked his wife, I went back that night and smacked it to her, too.”

Now Eppolito is retired in Las Vegas. There, he and a guy from Jamaica, Queens, Jackie Rosaludi, earning a good living as a stunt man and actor, are reminiscing.

“Khe Sanh,” Louie says. “That was hell.”

“You were there?” Jackie says.

“Oh, yeah. Marines.”

“I was in the marines,” Jackie says. “Two oh oh one seven seven eight.”

That was the military serial number, and it becomes part of your name. Nobody forgets it.

“What’s yours?” he asks Louie.

“Gee, I can’t remember it right now,” Louie says.

He was never in, Jackie says to himself. He listens in wonderment at the ease and extent of this guy’s lying.

“Ever since Khe Sanh, I been ready,” Louie says. He shows a .38 inside his belt. And a derringer.

“What do you need the derringer for?” Jackie asks.

“You never know,” Louie says. “We never knew at Khe Sanh.”

The day Jackie decided that some disturbing darkness was moving underneath Louie’s big, loud front came when he was out with Louie and Louie’s son in Las Vegas and they stopped at a baseball-card shop. Jackie, a collector, bought a hundred dollars’ worth of cards. Back in the car, Louie showed his son three hundred cards that he had lifted from the store.

“Another hour and I could’ve had the whole store,” he told the kid proudly.

Then there was a night in Manhattan, when Jackie wanted to stop at a pizza place and Louie insisted they go instead to some restaurant. He remembers how Louie proudly described his background, his Mafia lineage. “I’m Fat’s son,” he boasted. “Fat was a Mafia hit man. I’m Jimmy’s nephew.”

Louie spent the entire hour and a half during dinner looking to his left, at the restaurant door.

“He’ll be here,” Louie said.

“Who?” Jackie said.

“Gotti. This is his place.”

He didn’t show.

There came a night when Louie’s grandmother was in the Torregrossa Funeral Home on Avenue U, and Louie, coming from work, was in jeans and a leather jacket. When they reached the funeral parlor, he told Jackie that he would
sit in the car. He wasn’t dressed for a wake. He said he would try tomorrow. It didn’t matter. “She is just like a dead cat in the street.”

Swaggering and swinging, Louie Eppolito had heard other cops talking about Dan O’Leary of the Seventy-first Precinct, who was a boxing instructor and could fight more than somewhat. Eppolito didn’t have to hear it a lot. There was going to be a smoker in Izzy Zwerling’s Gym, two flights up from Church Avenue, only steps away from Erasmus Hall High School, where Louie had won the first award of his life, for bodybuilding. Now he wanted to box Dan O’Leary in the smoker. When the other cops heard of the proposal, Eppolito versus O’Leary, heavyweights, they were immediately excited and began betting. Irish versus Italian. Eppolito said he couldn’t wait for the match to prove to the entire police department that he was the champion of all who wore blue.

Dan O’Leary thought, Why does he want to fight me so much? Then he shrugged. Another fight.

He received in the mail an unsigned condolence card. It was not a good idea. Who else would have sent him that taunt?

I had an idea of what O’Leary was like. I talked to Denis Hamill of the
Daily News,
and he told me about O’Leary and Eppolito and gave me O’Leary’s phone number. “Tell him I told you to call. Even better, tell him Pudgy Walsh told you.” Pudgy Walsh is the coach of a Brooklyn sandlot
football team that is known all over the country. O’Leary used to play. So I called O’Leary and got a tape and announced that Pudgy Walsh had told me to call. I left a number but never heard back.

Later I asked Bob Nardoza of the U.S. Attorney’s office if he could put me in touch with O’Leary. Nardoza is one of the most efficient communications people I’ve ever known. A day later I got a call.

“This is Dan O’Leary. You called me, and I never returned your call. You said that Pudgy Walsh told you to call. Well, I called Pudgy Walsh, and he said he never spoke to you. That’s why I didn’t call you back. You told a lie.”

“All right,” I said. “I guess that rules me out with you.”

“No, it doesn’t. It means that you shouldn’t lie to me. You never should have said that you talked to Pudgy Walsh about me when you never did.”

He was Irish. He also would have enjoyed the Third Punic War. He is six feet two and weighed 240 on this night. He had that straight face that demands it his way, tell me the truth, and a pair of very good-size hands.

Eppolito was so pleased with himself that he could not envision anything getting in his way. Notably not Dan O’Leary. In a crowded third-floor gym, Louie Eppolito came out of his corner like a steer out of a rodeo chute, snorting, filled with rage, and he threw a roundhouse left hook that was meant to kill.

Weight lifters who try boxing have some difficulty in
addressing an opponent, in that their arms have trouble reaching the front of their body. Eppolito’s left hook was a full six inches out there in the smoky air.

O’Leary picked it off with his glove. A bee.

Eppolito threw a second left hook that was more vicious than the first.

O’Leary’s glove picked this one off, too. Another bee. I thought I chased you before.

O’Leary threw a straight hand into Eppolito’s face. Now he jabbed. Jabbed once, then he doubled up. And so it went. “I was triple-jabbing him,” O’Leary remembers.

The fight was scheduled for three two-minute rounds.

Somewhere in the second round, Eppolito was trying to swallow all the air in the room. He could not get enough. Soon, jabs and straight rights had him on crazy street.

They stopped the fight. Somebody who had an idea of what the match might become had brought oxygen to the gym. Eppolito needed it. There goes the toughness that arrives on a loud voice.

This is November 6, 1990. Timmy Byrnes is on patrol when there comes a call about a car with a dead man on the grass alongside the Belt Parkway, where it runs in front of Gerritsen Beach. He answers the call and sees a car with the front door open. The body inside is slumped with the head almost to the floor. The guy had been shot in the back of the skull.

The supervisors coming on the scene are talking about a possible roadside mugging gone bad. Byrnes considers the
car, on the grass with the door open. Nobody pulls to the side of the road like that unless it is for somebody he knows well, or for police, Byrnes tells himself. He tells an inspector in charge, “This is OC.” Organized crime.

He also knows immediately that when they lay this body out, they are going to have to put the head on the right-hand side as you approach the coffin, instead of the standard left, for the bullet had gone in with a neat hole but had caused an ugly exit wound.

This had him wondering about the shooting for a long time. Timmy Byrnes heard other detectives complaining that the FBI knew something about it and would not tell. The victim was Eddie Lino. Byrnes didn’t know much about Lino except that he was a gangster with the Gambinos of John Gotti. But now he heard whispers, cops coming in off the streets and talking in toilets, and it all told him to picture his shield, 3179. Picture Louie Eppolito pulling Eddie Lino over on the parkway. The gold badge flashes in the gunfire that murdered Eddie Lino.

Now in the family funeral home in Gerritsen Beach, he reads what I have brought along, Burt Kaplan’s sworn account of how Louie Eppolito disgraced the badge that Timmy had worn so proudly.

Timmy flinches.

• Q:
  Mr. Kaplan, did Anthony Casso ever put out a murder contract on you?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  

This development came in the early nineties, after Burt Kaplan got a phone call one night from Lou Eppolito. He said that a massive sweep was going to be made next morning of suspects in the mob’s scheme to profit from the New York City Housing Authority’s window-replacement project. The term “replacement windows” sounds unpromising, but the mobsters knew better. They were stealing two dollars per replacement window, and the city was buying almost a million of them. Kaplan called Casso, who wasn’t home. He then called Casso’s co-boss Vic Amuso. “I’ll come around in the morning,” Amuso said. Kaplan said no, get over here now. Amuso came in a hurry. He listened to what Kaplan had to say.

“I’ll go home and pack,” Amuso said.

“I would leave right now,” Kaplan said. “I wouldn’t go home.”

Amuso was gone by late night. Casso got word and also immediately disappeared. He was not seen for the next
three years. Amuso went to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and lasted a short time before he began telephoning most of Brooklyn. He found a pizzeria where he could hang out. But he was so used to being a man of honor and importance that he had to tell the waitress, “What do I do? Me, I’m a gangster.” Soon the waitress was replaced by a team of six FBI agents, and he never saw the outside again.

Gaspipe found a house in the woods at Budd Lake in New Jersey, which he decorated expensively, including with a woman.

• Q:
  When was that?
  
• A:
  I believe it was 1993. I was harboring, helping harbor Anthony Casso when he was on the lam from the government. I used to meet him, I used to take his wife to him, and the last time I had—was taking his wife to him, we stopped at a hotel because I had to go to the bathroom. It was a hotel that I normally got rooms in for Casso and his wife under my name, and I was going to meet him someplace else this particular day, but this hotel was on the way, and I had to use the men’s room, and I asked her, I said, I’d like to stop at that hotel because I have to go to the bathroom. And we stopped there, and we got—I got out of the car. She stood in the car, and I seen two gentlemen in a car who to me definitely resembled FBI agents, you know, the typical sunglasses and the unmarked car with the antennas, and I looked at them, and I went in and used the bathroom, and when I came out, I said to
  her, to Lillian Casso, I said, I think there’s FBI agents in the parking lot. And I drove by them and let her see them, and then I said, I think we should drive around for a half an hour or so before we meet Anthony and see if I could spot anybody tailing me. And I took her to a parking lot in a shopping mall, and I let her out, and I told her tell her husband what I said about seeing the people, and I would drive away, and he would come and meet her or send somebody to meet her and take her to where he was.
  When I saw him Monday, when I picked up his wife to take her home—this originally started on a Saturday—and I met him in the parking lot of the same shopping mall, and I said, Anthony, I think you should be careful because it looks like to me there was definitely agents there, and the hotel room was under my name, and I think he should be very careful.
  And the next day he got arrested, and the fact that I warned him, he put it in his head that I was the one who gave him up, and unbeknownst to me he put a contract out on me, which I didn’t find out about until I was arrested in ’96. When I went to MDC and I was locked up, three or four people told me they had pleaded to the conspiracy to kill me for Anthony Casso.
  
• Q:
  When was the last—sorry, Mr. Kaplan, you were going to say something else?
  
• THE COURT:
  Strike that last testimony about what he was told.
  
• Q:
  You said you learned about a murder contract against you.
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  Who did you speak to about that?
  
• A:
  George Zappola, Frank Papagni, Michael Bloom.
  
• Q:
  Did you have a relationship with them at the time that they had that conversation with you?
  
• A:
  Yes. I was friends with them.
  

The arrest of Gaspipe came about not because of anything Kaplan said or did but because Casso, like Vic Amuso, had an overpowering need to talk. He had made call after call from Budd Lake to the phone of Frank Lastorino, a fellow hoodlum. Casso phoned Lastorino at night. He phoned early in the morning. He phoned after his Jersey girlfriend left for work. A little detective work followed. One day Casso failed to make his usual call when he came out of the shower, because his hands were in cuffs. He was hauled off to a detention cell in New York, where he faced about fifty major charges. He pled guilty and said he would be a witness against two cops who were doing murders for him. He would testify against Burt Kaplan and anybody else the government wanted, too.

• Q:
  After Casso’s arrest, did there come a time that he asked you for information regarding a federal prosecutor and a federal judge?
  
• A:
  Yes. The judge was Judge Nickerson, and the prosecutor was Charlie Rose.
  
• Q:
  What did Casso ask you to do?
  
• A:
  Get their addresses, where they lived.
  
• Q:
  Did you bring that request to Mr. Eppolito or Mr. Caracappa?
  
• A:
  Yes.
  
• Q:
  Did they refuse to do that?
  
• A:
  Absolutely refused.
  
• Q:
  Did they give a reason for that?
  
• A:
  They didn’t want to get involved. It would bring too much heat.
  

As you can imagine, the attempt by Casso to murder Burt Kaplan put some strain on their friendship.

• Q:
  Tell the jury, sir, did Mr. Casso live in a house you owned?
  
• A:
  Yes. Casso came to me and—in, I believe it was 1985, and he said that he wanted to move into a bigger house and that he wanted me to buy his house. I said, Anthony, I really don’t want your house, and I’m happy where I’m at. He says, Yeah, but I trust you, and I’m going to sell you the house cheap, and you can make a profit on it, and I really don’t want the whole world to know that I’m selling my house, and I need the money so that I can show it when I buy the bigger house. He was buying Fortunoff ’s house. Fortunoff ’s, the department store.
  
• Q:
  So Mr. Casso moved into a house you owned?
  
• A:
  No, he owned the house originally, and he stayed in the house while he was building the house on Fortunoff ’s property.
  
• Q:
  Did he ever live in a house you owned?
  
• A:
  That’s the same house. He lived with his wife, his son, and his daughter.
  
• Q:
  And is anybody from his family still in that house?
  
• A:
  His son.
  
• Q:
  What happened to Mrs. Casso?
  
• A:
  She died recently from a stroke.
  
• Q:
  Did you have any communications with Mrs. Casso since 1993?
  
• A:
  Yes. Once. She asked my wife if she could visit me in Allenwood, if I would put her on my visiting list, because she wanted to speak to me about buying the house back.
  
• Q:
  What were the terms of her purchase of the house as Mrs. Casso proposed them to you?
  
• A:
  Originally she said she would give me back my money, and I also told her that her son-in-law owed me some money that he didn’t pay me, and I wanted the purchase plus the interest I paid on the mortgage, and the money the son-in-law owed me, and she said okay, and then she changed her mind and said, I want the house for nothing.
  
• Q:
  What happened?
  
• A:
  I wouldn’t give it to her. Why would I give it to her?
  
• Q:
  Today do you still own that house?
  
• A:
  Yes. I just served her son with an eviction notice through a lawyer.