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!
Suddenly, the microphone the techies had planted in a flowerpot on top of the store's safe started broadcasting: tap, tap, tap! It was the sound of the gang coming through the roof-and the signal the police had been waiting to hear. A police helicopter swooped toward the roof. Squad cars rushed from their hiding places.
But no one had counted on the fog. It had sheathed the island in a dense black veil. In the darkness, the Bypass Gang escaped.
That same month, John "Otto" Heidel, a safecracker who was cooperating with the police on the Bypass case, was gunned down. He bent down to examine the flat tire on his car and a fusillade of bullets riddled his back. A year later, another informant, Dominick Costa, got shot five times as he pulled into his driveway. Somehow, he survived.
After those two shootings, Intartaglio knew "without a doubt" that there was a leak. Something was rotten in the department. Now, fifteen years later, he felt able to confirm his suspicions: Stephen Caracappa had been a detective in the Major Case Squad.
For Doug Le Vien, the hit on Eddie Lino back in November 1990 gave a definitive shape to his wary thoughts about the department. He had gone over the crime-scene reports at the time and seen right away how it must have gone down. The black Mercedes pulling obediently to the side of the road on the Belt Parkway. Lino lowering his window.And the shooter squeezing off nine bullets at close range. Mortally wounded, with his foot on the accelerator, Lino had crashed into a schoolyard fence. At the scene was a wristwatch the shooter presumably had lost as he fled. Lino, it seemed, would have never stopped his car and rolled down his window to speak to another wiseguy. But he would have for someone flashing a badge.
At the time, LeVien had called up a buddy who was advising the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau. LeVien listened carefully as his friend shared a similar fear. Then the friend spoke the unspeakable: "You're right. I think a cop whacked Eddie Lino."
To this day, Joe Ponzi wears a gold ring with his eighty-year-old father's shield number. In fact, he had first met Lou Eppolito when the detective worked under his father in a Brooklyn precinct. Now his thoughts focused on the two accused cops.Why did they do it? he kept asking.