Friends of the Family (24 page)

Kaplan started getting really edgy, eventually getting up and pacing back and forth across the room. Finally, he said, “Look, I really gotta go. I wanna go. Again, no disrespect, you seem like a fine young gentleman, but I don’t even want to be in this room. I told this guy already…” His anxiety was growing into anger. “I wish I could help you, but I can’t.”

“You know you can help us, Mr. Kaplan,” Ponzi said right back. “You can help us and we can help you.”

He was done. “I wish I could; I can’t.”

He began walking slowly toward the door. Ponzi was desperate, believing that if he let Kaplan walk out the door he might never get another shot at him. For the first time he raised his voice. “Listen to me,” he said. “You’re telling me these guys had nothing to do with any of this?”

He didn’t even stop. “That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Then stop right there!” Ponzi practically shouted at him. “I want you to look me in the eye and tell me these two guys had nothing to do with the abduction and murder of Jimmy Hydell. Look me in the eye and tell me
that and I’ll never come back here. I give you my word, you’ll never see me again.”

Kaplan continued walking toward the door.

“You can’t do it, can you?” Ponzi challenged him. “Go ahead, turn around, look me in the eye and tell me how wrong I am, tell me these guys got nothing to do with the murder of Eddie Lino. Tell me that Casso is a complete fucking pathological lunatic liar and I give you my word as a man you will never see me again.”

Kaplan grasped the doorknob and turned it, pushing open the door. By now Ponzi was shouting desperately, “Mr. Kaplan! Mr. Kaplan! Look me in the fucking eye and you tell me that these two guys had nothing to do with the murder of Nicky Guido. I dare you to look at me, turn around and look at me and tell me that and I swear to God you’ll never see me again.”

Kaplan stopped. Slowly he turned around. His face was red with anger. Very deliberately, never taking his eyes off Ponzi, he walked back to the table and sat down.

Nicky Guido, the innocent kid; that was the key. Ponzi was stunned, absolutely stunned. He didn’t know why Nicky Guido struck a nerve in Kaplan, but he did. Maybe because this was the one completely innocent person who was killed perhaps due to his actions. Whatever it was, something about Nicky Guido caused him to stop and come back into the room. Sitting down, he pointed a warning finger at Ponzi. “That’s the problem with you guys. You fucking guys think you know everything.”

Ponzi smiled. “Mr. Kaplan, I don’t purport to know everything or anything. But I think you do. I think you do and I want to hear it from you. Why don’t you tell me what I don’t know?”

Kaplan just sat there silently, looking at the biggest step he’d take for the rest of his life. And all he had to overcome to take that step was everything he’d ever done or been or believed.

Ponzi knew when to shut up.

“I need some time to think about it,” he said softly. He wanted to talk to his lawyer, he said, mull it over a little. Probably, Ponzi guessed, he wanted to see if he could live with the idea.

“How long?”

He shrugged. “I need sixty days.”

“You can have thirty.”

“I need forty-five days.”

They argued back and forth for a few minutes, but both of them knew it was all show. Kaplan held the winning ticket; he could take as much time as he needed and nobody would dare push him. He had been careful not to mention either cop by name, but at the very end of this meeting he asked Ponzi a question. “What if there were more than two?”

Ponzi tried not to reveal his shock. “What does that mean?”

“What if wasn’t just these two guys?”

More than two? More than Eppolito and Caracappa? Ponzi tried to press him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Kaplan smiled knowingly. He’d tossed out the bait but wasn’t prepared to reveal any more information. Rising, he stuck out his hand and said, “It was nice meeting you, Mr. Ponzi.” He walked out of the room without looking back.

Ponzi, Oldham, and Campanella sat there for another few seconds. There was no deal, not even the outline of an agreement—Kaplan hadn’t even asked what they could offer him—but he was interested. The moment he’d turned around and come back into the room Ponzi had begun thinking they had him—but he’d seen too many guys touch the possibility and get burned. He might get back to his cell, shake his head, and decide he just couldn’t do it. It happened; it happened too often. Once, Ponzi remembered, somehow he’d managed to convince a stone-cold killer named Victor Breland to flip. Breland asked for a sheet of paper and began making a list of the murders he had some knowledge about. Ponzi left him alone—and when he returned to the room a few minutes later Breland stuck the paper in his mouth and swallowed it. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I changed my mind. I can’t do it.”

So when Ponzi got back to his office the most he dared tell Dades, Vecchione, and Feldman was that Kaplan showed some interest. “There’s at least a possibility,” he told them. He wasn’t superstitious, but hey, you never know.

Each of the investigators on this case had been through this particular process too many times to feel confident Kaplan would flip. But the possibility…it was pretty damn exciting.

A month later, on July 30, Tommy Dades officially retired from the NYPD. Exactly twenty years to the day and out. He’d actually turned in
his shield and completed his paperwork in early May, then spent his accrued vacation time, but July 30 was the official date. The enormity of his decision didn’t really hit him until the papers kicked in, and then it hit him much harder than he had expected. “Being a cop was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says he finally understood. “It saved my life. Because most of the people I grew up with went the other way. Their lives got turned upside down; they started using drugs or ended up criminals. I was right there with them. But the day I put on that uniform something good began happening for me. I put my life into it. And when I finally decided to quit I made a hasty decision. But when it ended, the way it ended, it made me feel like I was on the bottom of the barrel.”

Dades began running a boxing gym on Staten Island for the Police Athletic League, teaching kids how to protect themselves. But he also got a brand-new badge when he began working for Joe Ponzi. As a new detective investigator, Dades was back on the cops case—at least temporarily.

While everyone was waiting, often impatiently, for Kaplan to make his decision, the investigation rumbled forward. The meetings were now being held almost exclusively in the U.S. Attorney’s office and were run by Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Henoch. Henoch was another one of those solid, no-nonsense prosecutors, a lieutenant colonel in the army reserves who had served in the Middle East. The meetings generally lasted about two hours and usually were attended by eight to ten investigators. The faces changed meeting to meeting. DEA agent Mark Manko was there most of the time. Joe Campanella was there, and Bobby I. An able young prosecutor from Vecchione’s office, Josh Hanshaft, had been cross-designated to represent the state on the case and attended most of the meetings. After dropping out for a brief period Bill Oldham was back on the case. Ponzi would attend an occasional meeting. Feldman would drop in and spend a few minutes. This certainly wasn’t a cohesive, spirited group held together by the pursuit of a noble cause. Rather there were continuing relationship problems, between both individuals and jurisdictions. And progress was achingly slow.

Henoch did his best to hold the team together. He would sit at the head of the table, his binder open in front of him. He was calm and organized, a list maker, proceeding logically and methodically, rarely showing any emotion. During each meeting the team would review whatever progress had been made and Henoch would hand out new assignments. Everybody
would get an assignment—here’s three things for you to do, here’s three things for you to do. People who had expertise in a specific area would get whatever work there was to be done in that area. Much of that work consisted of searching for old records and files; if they could be found—and a lot of records disappear in a decade—then someone would pore over them, sifting for a nugget. The work wasn’t glamorous, it wasn’t made for TV; instead it was the essence of detective work. Corroborate this piece of information. Find out where that guy lived. Get the computer ID locator and pull up this record. See if you can find someone with a fifteen-year-old memory. There were a thousand paths to follow, most of them leading nowhere.

Out in Las Vegas Louie Eppolito was still hustling to make his big deal. He was working on several projects, including a script about the NYPD’s Harbor Patrol Unit. Legendary Las Vegas casino owner Bob Stupak had been talked into hiring him to write a screenplay about his extraordinary life; he paid him $5,000 but canceled the deal after reading the first few pages. Renowned TV producer Dick Wolf supposedly had
Mafia Cop
under option for several years, although not much seemed to be happening with that project. Finally Eppolito argued with Wolf, demanding he return the rights if he wasn’t going to develop the movie. Wolf agreed, and Eppolito told his friends that another company was getting ready to make the film. According to those same friends, Louie also claimed he’d done some work spicing up some dialogue for Pulitzer Prize–winning writer David Mamet, showing off a beautiful ring that Mamet supposedly had sent him in appreciation of his effort. If people listened to Louie, director David Lynch had called him several times, and his close friend Robert De Niro really wanted to develop
Mafia Cop
but wouldn’t put up any money to option it.

Eppolito played the tough-guy role so well that it had become apparent he wasn’t acting. That was Louie Eppolito: He just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He bragged to the FBI’s cooperating witness, Steve Corso, that when he had been caught red-handed with confidential NYPD documents concerning wiseguy Rosario Gambino he beat “a federal case,” after an FBI agent admitted the wrong man had been arrested. In actuality, not only had Eppolito never been arrested, the only charges brought against him in that case had been made in an NYPD administrative hearing.

The DEA set up a simple scam. Corso had proposed putting together a
three-movie package and raising $6 million by selling shares to the public, estimating they could make as much as $250,000 just in filing fees. Louie was gung-ho for the deal, putting up three screenplays he’d written as his contribution in return for stock. Some of Eppolito’s legit friends were considerably less enthusiastic. One of them, a stockbroker, suggested, “Louie, let me meet this guy. There’s just something wrong about this. It doesn’t sound right.”

“No, no,” Louie said. “Believe me, this is the chance for all of us. We’re gonna have some money, we’re finally gonna get to make some movies.” Reality never got in the way of Louie Eppolito’s fantasies. “We’re gonna be the first real movie company in this town. We’re gonna have complete control.”

A low-budget movie producer friend who was going to be part of the deal pleaded with him, “C’mon, Louie, what’ll it hurt? Why don’t you just let us meet this guy? In five minutes we’ll know if he’s for real.”

Eppolito refused and continued to meet with Corso, and Corso continued to tape every single word he said.

Meanwhile, in New York everybody was waiting for Burt Kaplan to make his decision. A month passed, then two months, and they were deep into the summer. Still no word from the old man. As more time passed Vecchione and Ponzi and Dades began to doubt Kaplan was going to flip. Whenever they got together or spoke on the phone they’d wonder what was going on in his mind. Obviously he was wrestling with the concept, which was a good sign, but thus far it didn’t look like he was winning the match. They also spent a considerable amount of time speculating about his tantalizing suggestion that there was a third player in this scenario. They racked their brains trying to figure out who that might be. There was absolutely no hint of another dirty cop mentioned in Casso’s 302s. Not a clue. It had to be a cop, but who? And how did he fit into the program? They tried to figure out who Louie was closest to, who Steve was closest to, who they trusted enough to bring into the inner sanctum. And did Gaspipe know about this mysterious player and protect him for some reason?

Whoever it was, they knew they weren’t going to put a name on him until Kaplan handed it to them.
If
Kaplan decided to flip.

Occasionally Ponzi would wander across the street to the U.S. Attorney’s office to find out what was going on. At that time Kaplan was being represented by a noted civil rights lawyer in Alabama, who would have to
negotiate any deal that was made. “You hear from the lawyer?” Ponzi asked Feldman.

“Yeah, Burt’s still thinking about it. He wants to talk to his family before he decides.”

Ponzi and Mark Feldman had been close friends for two decades. But as the weeks passed he began to think that maybe the U.S. Attorney had already met with Kaplan and Hynes’s office was being iced out. Until the day in August when Robert Henoch called. “You ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“We’re flying down to West Virginia to see Burt. I just got the call. His lawyer’s gonna be there.”

It turned out Kaplan hadn’t agreed to anything more than a second meeting; this was just a meet-and-greet, a feeling-out process, but based on his previous hard-line attitude both Vecchione and Ponzi were optimistic he was going to flip. Mark Feldman, Henoch, Ponzi, and Mark Manko from the DEA flew to Morgantown. Oldham was supposed to go with them but failed to show up at the airport; he explained later that he had some difficulty making the flight.

During Ponzi’s more than three decades in the DA’s office he’d seen numerous investigators travel on business to a lot of interesting and sometimes exotic places—and, he mused, he got to go to Morgantown, West Virginia. Kaplan was being held nearby in a federal prison in Glenville, West Virginia. They met with Kaplan and his attorney in a secure DEA facility. This time Kaplan was dressed modestly in trousers and a T-shirt rather than a prison jumpsuit.