Authors: Jimmy Breslin
Later, I am in another courtroom in Manhattan, one with a nameplate that reads
HON. DEBORAH KAPLAN, PART SA
, for “substance abuse.” The judge sits with her palms clasped to a slender face and looks straight ahead.
Deborah Kaplan comes from an unlikely place where crime mixes with the neighborhood air you breathe. Bensonhurst is quiet and substantial, and yet for so long the place was Fort Benning for the Mafia. The young watched and mimicked the regular infantry and foraged wherever
they could. The house where she was raised is a two-story red brick with a basement, a stoop with seven steps, and a small front porch. There is an American flag outside on the day I take a look. The house next door has an evergreen tree in front. There is a Dental Associates and a Chase bank on the corner. It is a solid neighborhood house, from which Burt Kaplan left for a day’s work selling clothing or to murder or for a couple of years in a federal prison. His parting was always the same as he walked out the front door: “I’ll be back.”
She came out of the State University at Albany, a big-league school, and St. John’s University Law School, which turned out Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, consecutive governors of New York. She was a clerk for Jerry Shargel, a highly intelligent defense lawyer. One of her father’s own lawyers, Judd Burstein, was able to place her as a clerk for his mother, State Supreme Court Judge Bea Burstein, as substantial a name as you can get in New York judiciary and politics.
Deborah Kaplan knew how to go from there. She was president of the State Women’s Bar Association and then ran for a civil-court judgeship out of the East Side political club, the Tilden Democratic Club.
She has flowers on her high bench and a family photo in a silver frame. She has a mother, a husband, and a son adopted from Russia.
In the quiet courtroom, a prisoner is brought from the detention pen, behind a door to her left. He wears a blue basketball jacket. A large man with a sheaf of papers, a Legal Aid lawyer, comes up to stand beside him.
A woman assistant district attorney says the man was arrested for the attempted theft of a computer printer from a Bronx appliance store.
The defendant mumbles to his lawyer, who says to the judge, “He was passing the store, and he found the printer atop a parked car. He was walking it back into the store when the guard stopped him.”
The assistant district attorney says, “He has himself going the wrong way. He wasn’t going back into the store. He was walking out of it with the printer when the guard stopped him.”
The defendant protests. The judge looks through her papers. He had been in for a couple of days while they moved his work from the Bronx to her court. She gives him time served.
As he walks up the aisle, he stops and asks me for subway fare home to the Bronx. All I have is a ten-dollar bill. I ask if he has change.
He shakes his head. The lawyer, a big rumpled man, comes rushing over. What am I doing to his client?
I show him the ten. “Can you break it, and I’ll give him carfare?”
The lawyer holds up his hands. He is unable to break a ten. He has no pocket change for his client either. He walks off. I tell the defendant that I am sorry, but I can’t give him the whole ten. I have to get home, too.
He leaves. I concentrate on Deborah Kaplan. She stares straight down the aisle at me but gives nothing, no nod, no look to show that she knows why I am there. No, she has not answered the note I had sent earlier. She does not wish to talk.
As I told Steve Caracappa the night I left to go on the lam, I asked him if he could guarantee me that Louie would stand up, and Steve said, Yeah, I could do that.
And after nine years, I felt that they were going to be indicted by the state on this case and I didn’t think that they would stand up, and I was tired of going to jail by myself, and I would be at the defense table now, and Steve Caracappa and Louie Eppolito would be sitting up here.
Kaplan steps off the witness stand. A marshal holds a door. Kaplan leaves as if he has not been here.
“Anybody want pound cake?” Bruce Cutler says. He has dessert and coffee on the defense table. The jury is out.
In the corridor Ms. June Lowe, the court officer, dressed today in brown, comes around the corner from the jury room. She has a small smile as she brushes past people. She has a piece of paper in her hand.
“Verdict,” she says.
She swings into the courtroom, causing those on benches in the hallway to rise up and follow.
The defendants are at the table. The judge strides to the bench. The jury enters. June Lowe stands directly in front of the bench with several pages of verdict sheets. The jury forewoman is about fifteen feet away. She stands, and the other jurors sit. She faces June Lowe, and June Lowe faces her, and the two of them take the breath out of the room.
June Lowe says, “Racketeering Act One. Israel Greenwald Kidnapping. Conspiracy. Defendant Eppolito.”
This forewoman, whose name is hers and not of the record of this matter, who comes from a place you don’t know, whose faith, if any, is hers, and who was brought here today by chance, stands and says in the same small voice we first heard during voir dire:
“Proved.”
“Defendant Caracappa,” June Lowe says.
“Proved,” the small voice says again.
Seventy times they say this in a courtroom that is still. There are no sighs of hopelessness, no rustles of satisfaction.
The voice grows smaller as the magnitude of what it is doing rises. This woman is destroying forever the evil she has been asked to judge.
When the last charge is read, the judge tells the jury thank you, you may go home, and they leave, and now he says immediately, “Bail is revoked. The defendants are remanded. Marshals take charge.”
The word “remanded” frightens Leah Greenwald, the widow of Jeweler Number Two. “Does that mean he can go free?” she asks. The man next to her says, “No. It means they put two locks on the cell door.”
A towering marshal moves up to Eppolito. Another goes to Caracappa. Others are around the room.
I’m a cop and I know what to do, Louie Eppolito says with his hands. He reaches under his jacket and pulls out his belt and throws it on the defense table. No guard has to tell him about prisoners hanging themselves. He is in a gray suit that has been stretched by a torso now as wide as a sidewalk. It is wrinkled from all the hours of writhing in a chair at the defense table. He takes off his gold-yellow tie and throws it on the desk. He takes the gold chain from around his neck and drops that. Then a watch, a ring, a wallet, and still more items. His daughter, sitting behind him, holds out her hand, and he gives her the watch and chain. I know every step that a man takes when he has been convicted. I am Louie Eppolito, and I am a first-grade detective, a hero cop.
Down the table, Caracappa has his tie off without anybody noticing it. You cannot see what else he put on the table.
One kisses a daughter, one hugs a tearful lawyer. Caracappa, without tie, walks ahead of the marshal to the door to the detention pens. Behind him, Lou Eppolito swaggers, tieless and collar open to show a huge neck.
They disappear in midafternoon in Brooklyn through a door and into the perpetual darkness of their lives to come.
Somewhere astride his blue Schwinn, Nicky Guido calls out, “One Adam-twelve.”
Later, in a cell at the Federal House of Detention several blocks away, the two cops decide that their lawyers were no good in that they had not won the case. Forget that the cops had failed to come up with one witness to refute a single solitary sentence of Burton Kaplan’s crashing and thoroughly believable testimony. “They refused to let me get up and testify for myself,” Eppolito says, claiming incompetent representation. He wants new lawyers and a new trial.
Weinstein sets June 5 for sentencing. When that day comes, he says, “It is hard to visualize a more heinous offense.” He says the two cops had been convicted of “the most serious series of crimes ever tried in this courthouse. There has been no doubt, and there is no doubt, that the murders and other crimes are proven without a reasonable doubt.” He says he was going to sentence them to life and million-dollar fines, but he cannot do this because of their appeal, which is based on the RICO statute of limitations problem that has hung over this trial since day one. Weinstein is not throwing away the law at the moment. Nor does it look like he will ever do so. He says he will give his decision on June 30.
THE COURT:
Does the defendant wish to make a statement?
EPPOLITO:
Yes, sir.
THE COURT:
I will hear you.
EPPOLITO:
Your Honor, I have been a police officer for twenty-two and a half years. I know the feelings that every single family had here today. I handled as a detective many, many homicides, and I know how they feel from inside their guts. Sometimes I’m the one that goes to the house and knocks on the door and tells them there has been a death in the family. I don’t know what I’m allowed to do or what I’m allowed to say. Of course, it comes from my heart. I would invite the Greenwalds, the Linos, the Hydells to come and visit me in jail, let me tell them the story. I was not allowed to do that. I had no opportunity to do that.
THE COURT:
I don’t want to hear that.
EPPOLITO:
Okay. If I was afforded the opportunity to talk to these families, if it was okay, if they wanted to sit with me and ask me and I could provide to them, I think I would prove to them I didn’t hurt anybody ever.
My first seventeen years as a police officer, I went to work with broken fingers, broken hands, stab wounds. I never missed a day’s work. It is when I had my first heart attack I couldn’t work. After I had my heart attack, I started writing, and I could find out I was able to write and tell a story. That’s what I concentrated on. When I moved out of New York, it was not to move away from the people.
(Mr. Gibbs stands.)
THE COURT:
Marshal. Mr. Marshal. Stop.
MR. GIBBS:
Remember me? Remember, Mr. Eppolito?
THE COURT:
Remove him.
Mr. Barry Gibbs jumps out of the middle of the spectators, a large and loud shambles of a man. The judge is not terribly provoked. The marshals do not rush up to him so quickly. Gibbs is breaking all rules of courtroom behavior. But he also has been frightfully wronged by this fat cop.
MR. GIBBS:
I had a family, too. You remember what you did to my family? You don’t remember what you did to my family and to me? Remember what you did to me? Me. Do you remember? You framed me. Do you remember what you did to me? Barry Gibbs. Do you remember? I had a family, too. You remember what you did to my family? You don’t remember what you did to my family and to me? Remember what you did to me? Me. Do you remember?
Gibbs has come here from his single room in the Prince George Hotel, which takes the indigent and is in the dreary commercial blocks on the lesser streets of the East Side of Manhattan. This is far better than the prison cell Gibbs inhabited for nineteen years. He was there because Eppolito had threatened a witness into testifying falsely that Gibbs had strangled a prostitute. Now he has been released from prison, and his case is in the hands of Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, who run the Innocence Project in New York. Their record of using DNA to open cell doors for people wrongly convicted and put away for long sentences is astounding. They have freed some two hundred poor souls so far. If they don’t get a Nobel Prize, it is a contempt of life that even Judge Weinstein cannot correct.
(Mr. Gibbs exits the courtroom.)
THE COURT:
I request that those present in court not repeat this demonstration. Proceed, sir.
EPPOLITO:
As far as Mr. Gibbs was concerned, he also was afforded the same opportunity I was, and he went before a jury, and he had a very good attorney who fought for him. I never, ever in my career interviewed the man who stated that I forced him to talk bad about Mr. Gibbs, ever. That’s what I can say about that. I never interviewed that man or that witness.
Getting back to what I’m saying for today is, I have a family. I would feel the same way these people do. I could feel the hate and the sorrow. Your Honor, I’ve always felt that’s why I became a cop. I had to live down my father. My father was a member of the Gambino crime family. I told people many, many times, it is like holding a child and saying to a child, I’m going to work hard. I’m going to give you the best education, I’m going to give you college and make sure you become a doctor or a lawyer, and put him down. My father didn’t do that to me. He told me, You better get a job and do what you’re going to do. You’re an Eppolito, you will not be able to get a liquor license, a license anywhere in the state because of who I am. I was already crucified with the name before I had an opportunity.