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.
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 them that the Bypass Gang, a mobbed-up group of thieves who had found a way to defeat sophisticated alarm systems using electronic devices, were going to strike. The gang, the police believed, was raking in tens of millions of dollars, and the word had come down from One Police Plaza: Get those crooks!