PART 1 OF 2
CHAPTER ELEVEN: OFF THE BOOKS
By the fall of 1996, Detective William Oldham had become one of the "go-to guys" in the Major Case Squad -- a successor to Detective Stephen Caracappa. Now forty-two years old, Oldham had been in the squad for more than six years. After the Born to Kill investigation, he had spent a year and a half investigating the Chinese Tong On gang in Baltimore, Washington, and New York, and an outfit known as the Mod Squad (a group of heroin dealers with a white kid, black kid, and two Chinese kids). His experience making RICO cases had expanded and deepened his ability to maneuver in the competitive world of organized crime law enforcement. He was fulfilling his deepest ambitions. "I had arrived," Oldham recalled. "I made my own cases. I was autonomous, to a large extent, free to pursue crimes and criminals that interested me. It was my version of starring on Broadway or making a fortune on Wall Street. The mafia had been pretty much defeated. I never made it to the OCHU -- which was disbanded after Caracappa left. But I was enterprising and I was busy. I scavenged for cold cases that everyone had given up on. I wanted to take the harder cases. It was ego, to some extent. But I also perceived a need.
"There were forty thousand cops in the NYPD and I loved them and would do anything for them. There were probably two hundred detectives who carried the department when it came to serious crime. They were scattered around the precincts, in Intel, Homicide, Major Case. If a case came in that demanded the best, or a question arose that needed to be answered, no matter what, there was a small group of investigators who bosses and beat cops could approach. It was what 'go-to' meant. I could help other detectives. But I had my own cases, too. My career was thriving. But it was taking a toll. I don't know when, precisely, it began to change. Police work was muddied up for me. I got muddied up as well. It's inevitable. If you spend a lot of time around evil, it hardens you. I went looking for the worst criminals. Killers, rapists, psychopaths, men who could torture and murder children. The criminals I wanted had little pity, no remorse. I saw that bet and raised it. I was willing to push the envelope. I was a little arrogant. People I worked with called me 'Billy' because the diminution made me seem nicer than I was. I got the job done but I wouldn't win any popularity contests. I had hardened myself -- heart and soul."
Oldham now operated nearly exclusively out of the offices of the Eastern District in One Pierrepont Plaza in downtown Brooklyn. Oldham wanted to be close to the action -- and a good proportion of the biggest cases in the city and the country wound up in the offices of the federal prosecutors working in Brooklyn. He rarely turned up at NYPD headquarters in lower Manhattan. He clocked in for duty by gassing up at the department pump at One Police Plaza. The printout showed that he had been at headquarters at that time on that date so it couldn't be claimed that he had not reported for work. But he went weeks without going up to the Major Case Squad office. "Half the time I didn't tell the bosses what I was working on. The leaks of the eighties and early nineties had decreased but there was still the possibility of a breach in security and I didn't want my snitches hurt. If I didn't tell the bosses what I was doing they couldn't tell me not to do it. If no one knew what I was doing, word wouldn't get to the FBI so the Bureau couldn't steal my cases. It also kept people guessing. It gave me the freedom to take on cases that I thought mattered. I always had two or three or four investigations lined up to work so I wouldn't be stuck with nothing to do after I closed a case. I called it 'the back burner.' I kept cases on the back burner for years -- just thinking about them, playing them out in my head, waiting for the time to work it, or a lucky break."
Oldham's small office in the Eastern District appeared chaotic, with crime scene photos and rap sheets and DD-5s scattered on every surface. The boxes he used to collect evidence related to the cases he was churning over in his mind also contained random items from his personal life: discarded ties, theater ticket stubs, hardcover novels. The assortment was, indeed, chaotic, but Oldham knew where everything was. Gathering material on lost causes and vagrant cases was more than a hobby for Oldham. It was a mania. He routinely made calls to contacts he had, ranging from the upper echelons of the Department of Justice in Washington to precinct detectives, to test theories or ask questions. Avoiding the bureaucracy of law enforcement had become a particular specialty of Oldham's. If he wanted a document, he contrived to get it as quickly as possible and nearly always by circumventing procedures. Even if it was relatively easy to use official channels, Oldham found pleasure in using back channels, keeping himself sharp and connected to the people who knew how to play the system.
"The back burner consisted of crimes I was interested in -- or potential crimes, or suspected crimes, or possible crimes. If a subject or a person caught my eye, I'd start up on them. I'd gather up what was available, from newspaper clippings to surveillance reports -- whatever I could get my hands on. When I was drinking, the back burner tended to go to a low simmer. But when I was sober, my mind was constantly working those cases. I kept myself from doing nothing by going through the boxes, cross-referencing and contemplating and waiting for a picture to emerge. Often I didn't know if the 'cases' I had on the back burner were cases at all. That was how it was with Caracappa and Eppolito. I saw the headlines in the newspaper in 1994 about Casso's snitching on them, like the rest of the city, and it raised my suspicions. It was why I had Mafia Cop in my desk drawer. But I figured the FBI would make the case, if there was a case. By then the FBI had been told four times of Casso's source in the NYPD -- by Al D'Arco, Pete Chiodo, Sammy Gravano, and Casso himself. I just had that book and my suspicions of Caracappa simmering away."
In early October 1996, Oldham was walking along a corridor in the Eastern District offices when he overheard a conversation about the rap sheet of one Walter Johnson, aka "King Tut." Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Buell was marvelling at the length of the document. Curious, Oldham stepped inside Buell's office and asked to see King Tut's rap. "It was literally several feet long," Oldham recalled. "Rappers rapped about their criminal history, but Tut's dully prosaic rap sheet showed he was a menace to society. Tut was an aspiring rapper but his real art was committing crime -- and getting away with it. Rap sheets don't just include convictions. They include arrests. An arrest may go nowhere but it still means something to cops, who know convictions don't necessarily comport with guilt. The arrests dated back to ripping off ten-speeds when Walter Johnson was just a boy. When he was nineteen years old, he stuck up three hundred worshippers at his mother's Jehovah's Witness church, demanding their cash and valuables at gunpoint as the congregation knelt in prayer. Out on bail pending trial, Tut and his four-man-child posse boarded a city bus and robbed half a dozen passengers of their meager possessions. On and on it went: charges of assault, gun possession, involvement in a shootout with three police officers. But there were only a couple of relatively minor convictions. As I read his rap sheet, I knew I was going to take a case."
The same day, Oldham began an investigation of Walter Johnson. Oldham started by calling up the DD-Ss for a shootout Tut had gotten into with the three cops. According to eyewitness reports from the day in question, King Tut had gone with his younger brother and his son to get a haircut at a three-chair barbershop in Brownsville, home turf of heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson and one of the roughest areas in Brooklyn. "Walter Johnson, starring in his own life story in the role of King Tut, walked in to find three NYPD cops in the three chairs. Words were exchanged. Voices were raised, threats leveled. Guns were produced. A shootout transpired in very close quarters. The so-called King and his son weren't hit. All three cops were wounded. Police Officer Richard Aviles was paralyzed -- at twenty-four years old. Tut later denied that he had fired any shots. The outcome was not unusual for him. He was infamous in the rap community, for his violence and for the inability of law enforcement to convict and imprison him."
Oldham's work on the Tut case led him to undertake an investigation of potential connections between Sean "Puffy" Combs's Bad Boy Records and violent criminal organizations. The investigation would later stall with the murder of "Biggie" Smalls in Los Angeles, and no charges were brought. In the hyper-hyped world of gangster rap, rumors ran rampant that Tut was a member of the "Black Mafia," an organization Oldham didn't believe existed. Interviewing Tut's many victims, or the few who were willing to talk, Oldham developed an informant -- a woman who was an executive in the music industry who had been robbed and brutally assaulted by Tut. She told Oldham that real gangsters like King Tut robbed "gangsta rappers."
"The faux gangstas were terrified of thugs like Tut and his sidekick Haitian Jack. Tut traveled to the BET Music Awards ceremony in L.A., high-end clubs, concerts, specifically to stick up celebrity 'outlaw' rappers. The performers looked bad on MTV, and inspired a generation of kids in the suburbs to emulate their style, but the tough talk on the TV did not impress the Brownsville boys. Victims of Tut and his posse had nowhere to turn. Law enforcement was not overly concerned about the plight of the rappers, to put it politely. The supposed gangstas were rapping about shooting cops and that didn't endear them to law enforcement officials. Stopping their victimization wasn't high on our list of priorities. It was why rappers had so much personal security."
In November 1994 Tut had accosted Tupac Shakur in the lobby of a Times Square building in midtown Manhattan. The rapper had finished a recording session and was on his way into the building for a meeting when a gun fight erupted as Tut robbed $40,000 worth of gold and diamond jewelry from Shakur. The rapper was shot five times but managed to survive -- only to be murdered in Las Vegas in September 1996 by an unidentified assailant. "Before he was killed, Tupac rapped about Tut," Oldham said. "It was the usual Shakur recipe -- profanity, violence, glorification of crime and mob life. What was different and interesting was the extent to which Shakur's encounter with Tut gave him a glimpse of the reality Tut represented. For Shakur it was the 'realest shit' he ever saw."
Through the month of October, with the assistance of Oldham's informant, Oldham and his Major Case partners, Detectives George Slater and Jimmy Haley, accumulated evidence on a string of robberies and extortions pulled off by Tut. The crimes were relatively minor, compared with the serial criminal behavior. But Oldham was aiming to build a federal case against King Tut. By the end of October Detectives Oldham, Slater, and Haley attended a hearing for Tut in Brooklyn Supreme Court. The unsuspecting gangster was appearing for a status conference on a state assault charge. On this day, unbeknownst to Tut, the Brooklyn district attorney would drop the state charges. Oldham and his partners planned to rearrest him under the new federal "three strikes" statute. The law provided that anyone convicted of three violent felonies was subject to a sentence of life imprisonment upon conviction of another violent felony in federal court. "It's a horrible law. I revile the law. It's repugnant. In California people get three different hub-cap theft convictions and they go away for life. But the law was custom-made for Tut. If you've got a tool and you have a bloodsucker like Tut you've got to use it. It was the first and last time I used the three strikes law."
On October 24, King Tut came into the courtroom with his lawyer. The pair sat in the second row of the gallery and continued a whispered conversation about the procedural matter on the agenda. Tut was free on bail and had little to fear from the state charges. Oldham and his partners had notified the court officers, the DA, and the judge of what they were about to do. "Before Tut's case was called, we surrounded him and his attorney -- one on each side, one behind. I was on Tut's left. I leaned over and explained that I was going to arrest him. I spoke quietly, but Tut didn't appreciate the courtesy. He had been arrested hundreds of times. He started emptying his pockets, pushing his possessions to his attorney -- scraps of paper with phone numbers, his wallet, his phone book, his pager, it was potential evidence. 'What did I do?' Tut whined loudly, like an innocent man. Finally I sat on his lawyer to keep him from accepting Tut's paraphernalia. He made a CCRB [Civilian Complaint Review Board] complaint, but the people in the courtroom -- the judge, prosecutors, and court officers -- thought so little of the lawyer that, when they were interviewed by CCRB, 'No one saw nothing,' even though it happened in open court.
"I reported the incident, saying I attempted to sit between the attorney and client. We put Tut in handcuffs and 'leg irons' and walked him four blocks through the busy midday traffic of downtown Brooklyn to the federal courthouse. King Tut wasn't such a king after all. It was an exercise in public relations. Tut was infamous in Brooklyn and the rap community. He thought he was untouchable. It turned out he was touchable -- and cuffable and convictable."
FAT BOBBY'S FRAME
On the Friday after Thanksgiving Day, 1996, William David Oldham III married Andrea Beth Rashish in a private Jewish ceremony at Alison's on Dominick, a small romantic restaurant in west Soho. Oldham had asked her to marry him on September 1, the anniversary of the death of his younger brother John. "September 1 was always a hard one for me. I told Andrea I wanted to invest that day with some joy. We lived in a loft on Mott Street on the border between Little Italy and Chinatown. We had a black standard poodle. Andrea was out walking the dog one evening. The area was dead at night in those days, before it became trendy. She used to walk down Mulberry Street because she knew the gangsters at Gotti's social club, the Ravenite, would provide some protection for a young woman walking her dog through the deserted streets. She often exchanged pleasantries with wiseguys smoking cigars on folding chairs in front of the club. On the night in question, a warm June night, she turned the corner from Broome Street onto Mott Street to find a group of young Asian men who seemed to be roughhousing -- five or six guys had circled one guy. She watched as the guy in the center had his head smashed into a light pole. They were actually mugging the guy. Our trusty poodle sensed Andrea's adrenaline rush and lunged on her leash, barking. Andrea shouted out, 'Okay boys, the party's over.' The muggers scattered like cockroaches. Even my wife was fighting crime, making New York City a safer place for all."
During his investigation of Tut, Oldham learned a great deal about criminal behavior in the rap world. Tut had become the entree to a much larger investigation. In March 1997, Oldham flew to California to attend the 11th Annual Soul Train Music Awards. He was now tagging rap superstar Chris Wallace, aka the Notorious B.I.G. Biggie Smalls, as he was also known, was involved a state gun charge that arose from a search of the house in Nutley, New Jersey, where he lived with Kimberly Jones, better known as Lil' Kim. "Prospecting for crime often meant finding small, or seemingly small, offenses like what I had on Smalls. One step at a time, you build and build until you have the makings of a major case. Police work, for me, wasn't a passive enterprise. Crimes didn't come to me, I went looking for them. It was like starting a small business. Rap was a hole I found in the market of criminal investigations and I set out to fill it."
On the evening of March 8, 1997, Oldham posed as one of the photographers on the dais outside the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, where the Soul Train Music Awards were being held. Shakur had been killed six months earlier but he was nominated for Rap Album of the Year for All Eyez on Me. The next day, Biggie Smalls would be killed driving away from a music industry party in Mid- Wilshire's Museum Row. Hundreds of industry executives and musicians were pouring out of the building at the time, but police had trouble finding anyone who admitted witnessing the shooting. It was a murder that spawned a subindustry of conspiracy theorists alleging law enforcement links to gangster rap.
As he stood on the dais, Oldham received a call from DEA Special Agent Eileen Dinnan. Oldham had not talked to Dinnan for more than a year. She was young and inexperienced but a gung ho DEA investigator. Oldham had helped her with her first major investigation into a mob-related marijuana ring that resulted in the conviction of a number of leading Luchese killers. Dinnan was calling from New York City. She asked when Oldham was going to be back in town. Oldham said he had to return the following day to testify in a Chinese street gang case then being tried in Brooklyn.
"You remember that pot case we worked on?" Dinnan asked. "The Kaplan case?"
Oldham did remember. After Burton Kaplan was arrested, Oldham had helped Dinnan prep Robert Molini, a convicted murderer turned cooperator. As far as Oldham was concerned, Kaplan was a wealthy businessman who dealt pot. Dinnan had told Oldham about the pressure from high officials in federal law enforcement to get Kaplan to cooperate. Kaplan was connected with a significant number of serious mobsters, Dinnan explained, which was why the government was interested in getting him to talk. "Dinnan didn't know about Kaplan's role in the Caracappa and Eppolito conspiracy," Oldham recalled. "Neither of us knew anything much more than the basics that had appeared in the press and the rumors that circulated at the time but soon died down. But Eileen knew my way of working. She knew I was always on the lookout for a good case. She knew I wasn't interested in investigation of cops, per se, but she also knew if she had a lead about a leak inside the NYPD I could be trusted to look into the matter -- and get to the bottom of it."
"I've got a cooperator I'm debriefing," Dinnan said to Oldham. "Her name is Monica Galpine. She was married to Kaplan's flunky Tommy Galpine. The other day she started talking about cops who worked for Kaplan and Galpine. They were NYPD. One of them was a big fat guy who wrote a book about the mafia. It sounds like these cops were pretty tight with Kaplan. I told Monica I didn't want to know anything about it, but that I knew someone who might. That's you. You can't talk to her until she's done testifying but I thought I should let you know. What do you think? You interested?"
"Fuck, yeah," Oldham said, excitedly.
"The memory is crystal clear," Oldham recalled. "The limos were pulling up in L.A. I immediately knew what Dinnan had to be talking about. Eppolito had written Mafia Cop. If it was Eppolito it had to be Caracappa. The moment was surreal. I was set up on gangsta musicians. I was talking about NYPD detective hit men. An old clothing wholesaler back in New York was sitting on the biggest corruption case in the history of the NYPD -- and I was going to have a head start on it. Life was great. I wasn't rich. I wasn't famous. But Jesus, I loved that job. I had the best job in the world. I went around putting bad guys in prison forever. I righted wrongs. Now I had a lead on Caracappa and Eppolito -- a pair that were notorious original gangsters, not in some rap song but for real."
Oldham started to follow the Burton Kaplan case closely. Jury selection for the trial of The United States v. Burton Kaplan and Thomas Calpine was completed in early May 1997. On May 6, Kaplan's role in the conspiracy was revealed in the press for the first time by mob reporter Jerry Capeci. "Peds Eye Rat Trap to Snag Two Ex-Cops," the headline in the Daily News said. The story ran on page twenty-six, next to advertisements for silk brassieres and gas barbecues. "The feds have hit a reputed mob associate with drug and tax charges in the hope of jump-starting an investigation of two retired New York City detectives suspected of being mob hit men," Capeci wrote. "Burton Kaplan, an alleged former associate of one-time Luchese family underboss Anthony 'Gaspipe' Casso, is being prosecuted in an effort to coerce him into testifying against the detectives, sources said." After a two-year investigation, prosecutors in the Eastern District had concluded that the only way to make a case against Caracappa and Eppolito was with the cooperation of Kaplan. James Orenstein, the federal prosecutor in charge of the file, had written a memorandum on the case, Capeci reported. "In the memo, Orenstein told his supervisor, Mark Feldman, that his investigation had 'been stalled for a long time and is likely to remain that way unless Kaplan flips.'''
Oldham couldn't wait for the Kaplan and Galpine trial to end. Until then Dinnan wouldn't talk to him, for fear of jeopardizing the prosecution's case. The trial lasted three weeks. The defense theory was that the government was framing Kaplan as a way of punishing him for refusing to cooperate against Caracappa and Eppolito. Two of the lead witnesses for the prosecution were Monica Galpine and the cooperator, Robert Molini.
"At the heart of a lot of criminal cases there are fundamental questions that can never be known for a fact. Scientific evidence like DNA and fingerprints provide certainty. But cases like the one against Kaplan and Galpine don't have that kind of proof. It's a matter of testimony, collaboration, credibility. The truth has to be decided. It's why there are juries. Kaplan believed Molini and Monica Galpine lied on the stand. There were certainly reasons to question her credibility. Monica Galpine was a woman who despised her ex-husband and his partner Burt Kaplan. Fat Bobby Molini had his own reasons to try to ingratiate himself with the government. "
Until months earlier, Molini had been housed in the Otisville Witness Security Unit with Anthony Casso and Big Sal Miciotta. Miciotta, the Colombo captain now living in an undisclosed location, remembered Molini well. "I spent countless hours playing cards with Fat Bobby Molini in Otisville," Miciotta recalled. "He was a young guy in his early thirties, short, fat, bald-headed, a Luchese wannabe. He was from Canarsie. On the outside Molini kept a lion in his house -- maybe it was a cougar, but it was an exotic cat. Inside the witness protection unit, he was a mutt, a momma's boy. Molini was one of Casso's minions. Fat Bobby was in on Casso's scam to bribe the guards. Casso was Molini's idol. Casso had a big grudge against Kaplan, because he had convinced himself that Kaplan had given up his New Jersey hideout and thus got Casso caught. It wasn't true, of course, but that didn't matter to Gaspipe. Casso had tried to get Kaplan killed. If Casso wanted to get revenge against Kaplan, Molini would be a prime candidate to help put Kaplan away."
The motive for Molini himself was strong. In September 1996, Molini had been released from Otisville as part of his cooperation agreement. But Miciotta snitching on Casso's schemes in the unit had put Molini at risk. By the time Molini was freed, the inspector general's investigation of the Witness Security Unit had revealed the depth of corruption inside Otisville. If Molini were caught participating in Casso's scam, his cooperation agreement would be "breached" and he would be put back in prison and sentenced again, to an additional four or five years. Molini decided to confess before his role was revealed. In October he told the authorities that he had bribed a guard to bring him food and clothing. He was locked up. Stuck back in prison, a snitch undone by another snitch, Molini needed to come up with a way to get back in the good graces of the government. Molini had to find a new crime to snitch on -- something big.
"Molini was a lower-level guy, but he was a conniver," Miciotta recalled. "The bribery charge was a serious offense. He was in the smuggling ring up to his eyeballs. For Molini to save his ass he had to give up a guy further up the food chain. He had to bring in the prize to get a reduction in sentence. Who better than Burt Kaplan? The government had a hard-on a mile wide for Kaplan."
In the Eastern District courthouse, Molini took the stand and testified in great detail about Kaplan's marijuana enterprise. "Kaplan listened to Molini's testimony absolutely seething," Oldham recalled. "Every day prosecutors wheeled in a shopping cart of pot that was supposed to be Kaplan's. But it wasn't. Kaplan wasn't just a marijuana dealer -- he was a quality marijuana dealer. Kaplan's pot was processed into two-foot-long ingots that looked nothing like the pile of irregular and second-rate weed in court. Tommy Galpine inspected the marijuana and told Kaplan it wasn't theirs. Kaplan wouldn't sell the low-grade grass the DEA displayed to the jury. Kaplan's pot was twice as good.
"Molini testified that he knew Kaplan, which drove Kaplan wild with fury. According to Kaplan, the two had never been introduced or talked. Molini had tried to meet Kaplan. But Kaplan wanted nothing to do with Molini. Kaplan kept his circle small and controlled. It was the same principle he used in dealing with Caracappa and Eppolito. Everything was on a 'need to know' basis. Kaplan had seen Molini at his warehouse on Staten Island but that was as far as it went. Once, at a party Molini asked another wiseguy to introduce him to Kaplan but Kaplan refused. Kaplan said there was no reason to meet Molini and he had no desire to meet Molini. And there was Molini giving sworn testimony about the inner workings of Kaplan's operations."
The case against Kaplan and Galpine was not ironclad. Much of the evidence was circumstantial, and cooperators like Robert Molini were not always credible to jurors. Kaplan had reason to hope that an acquittal might be the outcome. If convicted, he would be imprisoned for years. If he agreed to cooperate against Caracappa and Eppolito, there was an extremely high chance he would serve no time at all. Even as the trial proceeded, as the government put on their case against Kaplan and Galpine, Kaplan was approached.
"The pressure on Kaplan to cooperate was intense," Oldham recalled. "In the middle of the proceedings, the Organized Crime Task Force went to Kaplan and suggested they come to terms. It was not too late for Kaplan to cut a deal. Kaplan refused. Kaplan and his associate Tommy Galpine were convicted. After the guilty verdict, while Kaplan was waiting to be sentenced, the government came to him yet again and asked for his cooperation -- and he said no. For a year Kaplan was repeatedly and insistently offered a deal. Kaplan just as repeatedly and insistently turned the offer down. Kaplan received a sentence of twenty-seven years. The sentence was incredibly harsh. Twenty-seven years was more than a lot of murderers got.
"Burton Kaplan had chosen his life -- the life. Framed, he believed, by the federal government, he would prefer to spend the rest of his life behind bars to giving law enforcement the satisfaction of wearing him down and forcing him to give in. Post-conviction, as Kaplan and Galpine waited to be shipped out to their assigned federal penitentiaries, Kaplan told Tommy Galpine how they would conduct themselves. They would not snitch. In the post-omerta age with made men flipping by the dozen, omerta would be kept by a Jewish pot dealer and his oafish Irish-American sidekick."
"We're both men," Kaplan said to Galpine. "We got to do what we got to do. We got to go to jail."
"I'm with you," Galpine said.
MONICA'S STORY
On an August afternoon in 1997, a meeting with Monica Galpine was set for the Floridian Diner, a small place on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. Oldham and Dinnan were drinking coffee in a corner booth when Monica Galpine arrived. She gave the diner a long look-over, to make sure there was no one she recognized, and then joined Oldham and Dinnan. She sat with her back to the rest of the restaurant so only the back of her head would be visible to the other patrons. Introductions were made. Galpine lit a cigarette -- the first of half a dozen she smoked in the next hour.
"Monica Galpine was nearly good-looking but not quite," Oldham recalled. "She was a bottle blonde with big hair, dressed in tight white with spiky boots with fringes dangling down. She was tough-looking, a neighborhood girl. From the trial transcripts I knew she and Galpine had broken up badly. He was a cokehead and she was a drinker and prone to hysterical late-night calls to the Kaplans. Her testimony was critical in the conviction of Kaplan and Galpine. She was an angry woman, a scorned woman, and a scared woman. Gaining her trust and confidence wasn't going to be easy."
She was afraid Burt and her husband were going to come after her, she said, toking on her cigarette.
"He got twenty-seven years," Oldham said. "He ain't doing nothing but staring at a wall."
"Burt's got connections," she said. "He's got power and money."
She ashed her cigarette.
"Burt had cops," she said. "Tommy had cops."
"That's why I'm here," Oldham said. "I want to hear about it."
Monica Galpine began to tell her story. She told how Tommy had met Burt when he was a teenager working for an air-conditioning company. By the time she met Galpine, he was advancing up the ranks of Kaplan's criminal and legitimate operations. Monica was working as a nurse in a psychiatric ward in the city. She believed Kaplan sapped Tommy's affections with his constant demands.
According to Monica Galpine, her husband didn't just admire Burton Kaplan. Tommy Galpine was in the thrall of Kaplan. Whatever Kaplan wanted done, Galpine did. She said her husband had no time for her, or their marriage. "Tommy was Burt's 'butt boy,' she said. 'Tommy Tagalong.' Her contempt was palpable. She truly despised Kaplan. If Galpine had been even remotely decent to her she would have kept his secrets and been his defender forever. She was no innocent trying to see justice was done. She wanted to get back at Kaplan and then Galpine. Kaplan was too smart to ever treat one of his intimates so poorly. Kaplan kept his wife sufficiently content to keep her quiet. Not a dunce like Galpine, who didn't understand one of the little known precepts of a life in crime is keeping your loved ones happy -- at least happy or sedate enough that they won't rat you out."
Monica Galpine said she used to go to Burt's house on 85th Street with Tommy to get money for the cops. Tommy made her wait in the car. He always came out of Burt's place carrying a manila envelope. He'd tell her it was for "the cops." Tommy thought it was amazing that Burt had real police officers working for him. She never met "the cops," she said. She didn't know their names or anything about them except that they worked for Burt and Tommy and they got paid a fat wad of cash.
Kaplan's caution reached so far as to try to cover for Galpine. When Monica grew hysterical and claimed Galpine was beating her -- something that was never proven -- Kaplan and his wife Eleanor would pick her up and let her stay with them. When the Galpines finally split up, the Kaplans allowed Monica to stay with them while she got back on her feet. Ordinarily, such gestures might have engendered gratitude. But Monica Galpine's fury toward her husband and his millionaire mentor was all-encompassing.
"Then there was the time at the Chinese restaurant," she said.
"What's that?" Oldham asked.
"New China Inn," Galpine said. "Over on Flatbush." She'd gone there with Tommy for dinner one time. He had started laughing. She had asked why. He had jerked his head at a framed eight-by-ten glossy headshot hanging on the wall. The photograph was of a guy -- beefy, with a mustache, huge jaw, dumb eyes. "That's one of our cops," he had said. "He's got his picture on the fucking wall."
Oldham discovered the New China Inn had closed a few years earlier. But he spent days making inquiries, an effort that resulted in locating the former owners, who had retired to the Sunset Park section of Brooklyn. Oldham drove out to meet Nancy Wong, an elderly Cantonese woman who was tending a neatly kept flower garden in front of a modest row house when Oldham pulled up. After a brief chat, Oldham asked if she recalled a picture hung on the wall of the New China Inn.
"That's Rouie Epporito," Mrs. Wong said. "He think he big star and stuff. He never pay for dinner."
CHARACTER STUDIES
The lead was small, and the testimony of Mrs. Nancy Wong wouldn't amount to much in a court of law, but for Oldham the identification was not just another indication that he was on the right trail. He was definitely going to start up an investigation. Others had attempted the case, he knew, and all had failed. Convincing Kaplan to snitch seemed to have been the beginning and ending of their efforts. Oldham would try another way. He would pursue the case from an oblique angle. Instead of going directly to Kaplan and pitching a deal to him -- an approach that was proven to fail -- Oldham would start to inform himself about the lives of the people he was investigating. Studying the character of your suspects was the beginning for any serious investigation. A hunter needed to know his prey -- strengths, weaknesses, history.
The next day, Dinnan met Oldham at the offices of the Eastern District. She handed him a box from the Kaplan-Galpine trial. She said it might help him with "the cops." Oldham took it to a conference room on the tenth floor. He closed and locked the door. Alone, Oldham opened the box. Inside were financial documents, cancelled checks, pen registers, videotapes of Kaplan's warehouse, lists of associates, and memos on surveillance -- evidence that turns into moldy ephemera the moment a verdict is read. Oldham picked up Burt Kaplan's phone book. It was filled with contacts -- business associates, friends, family. The phone book had been seized from Kaplan's valise when he was arrested on the marijuana charges in 1996. The book had the appearance of disguising as much information as it revealed about Kaplan's web of criminal associations.
"I pored over the phone book for hours and hours," Oldham said. "There were numbers crossed out. There were numbers written over. Kaplan had been a cryptographer when he was in the Navy in the fifties. He understood how to bury a number or an identity. My mother had been in naval intelligence. It was the kind of puzzle I loved.
"I was in the neighborhood on an apprehension warrant that week so I decided to go by the 63rd Precinct house. I wanted to see if I could get Eppolito's beeper number. I wanted to look through Kaplan's phone book to see if it was in there -- maybe with a number reversed or scratched out. It would also give me the chance to trace the calls that came into that beeper number. Normally, I would have to get a subpoena to find that out but I had friends in the business who would run a phone number for me. I also wanted to get a read on the precinct-level rep of Eppolito. I wanted to ask around the detective squad room -- see who remembered him, what he was like. Casually. I didn't want to trip any alarms, or alert Eppolito that a Major Case detective had been in asking questions. When I walked into the detective squad room there was a photograph of Eppolito on the wall. I had half forgotten what a jerkoff he was. I told them I wanted to get in touch with him so they pulled his stuff out. I looked around, too."
Oldham discovered the detectives in the Six-Three wouldn't move the picture until something took its place. No one wanted to offend someone important. He was a great guy, they said. Oldham was not surprised. Cops accused of wrongdoing were not given the benefit of the doubt in the NYPD -- they were given the benefit beyond reasonable doubt. Police culture held that defending fellow officers was one of the foremost articles of faith. From the onset, Oldham decided not to seek permission from his supervisors in the Major Case Squad. Caracappa had left Major Case five years earlier. But word traveled rapidly in those circles, Oldham knew, and he didn't want to tip his hand about taking up the case. He would freelance for a while, fly under the radar, and see where it took him.
"CAN I TRUST YOU?"
A few weeks later, at the sentencing of Walter Johnson, aka King Tut, Oldham sat in the gallery of Judge Frederic Block's courtroom. A compact man in his forties, casually dressed, sat two rows behind Oldham scribbling in a notebook. Oldham recognized his face but couldn't remember the name. The man had a press pass hung around his neck. Oldham read the name: Jerry Capeci. "I only knew Capeci by reputation. He was the premier mob reporter -- as a much a part of the Brooklyn OC landscape as the mobsters, detectives, federal agents, criminal defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges. There were few people in law enforcement I could talk to but I needed guidance to navigate the waters of a mafia case. I had studied organized crime and I knew a fair bit -- more than people thought I did, which was an advantage in itself -- but I was looking for help. A friend of mine, Willie Rashbaum, was a crime reporter and he spoke highly of Capeci's reporting discretion and integrity. I introduced myself. Capeci had heard my name."
"You did the Plum Blossom case," Capeci said to Oldham, referring to his investigation of a Chinatown gang notorious for torturing Chinese immigrants for ransom. "That was a great case."
"Thanks," Oldham said. "Can I speak to you in the hallway for a minute?"
The two men walked out into the marble hallway on the fourth floor of the Brooklyn federal courthouse. As usual, the hallway was deserted, apart from an attorney trying to console a young mother with an infant, who was weeping at the prospect of losing her husband to federal custody.
"I don't have a story for you," Oldham said. "I need your help. Can I trust you to keep it between us?"
Capeci closed his notebook.
''I'm looking at Caracappa and Eppolito," Oldham said. "I've ID'd Louie as one of Kaplan's cops. I got him in a photograph in a Chinese restaurant in Flatbush."
"I can't believe no one has taken that case yet," Capeci said. He appeared to be offended that the prosecution had languished for such a long time.
"Well, I am," Oldham said. "You think those guys did it?"
"I know you're on the right track," Capeci said. "I've heard rumors from the other side. If I can help you, let me know."
Capeci took out a card and scribbled his cell number on the back. Oldham had another "Deep Throat" in the organized crime world to call upon.
"There were certain guys in law enforcement that I knew I could talk to. One was Matty Zeuman, a retired detective I knew from the Intelligence Division in the eighties. I knew Matty was friendly with another retired detective named Kenny McCabe. I figured McCabe was key. I had always heard no one in the city knew more about wiseguys than McCabe. Some guys call in their work, and others work hard. McCabe's life was the job. He spent his days off attending mob funerals or sitting in front of John Gotti's house taking photographs. McCabe was dubbed cosa nostra's 'unofficial photographer,' a kind of cop photojournalist. Gangsters sent out wedding cake to McCabe -- which he refused. McCabe didn't actually need the photos. He had a photographic memory. But McCabe figured, rightly, that there was no way to know what minor league figure, or unknown man in a trench coat with the collar turned up, could be the key to a huge case. McCabe was the detective who arrested Big Paul Castellano for the Commission Case. He worked John Gotti, more than once. McCabe was said to be able to tell the rank and standing of wiseguys just by looking at their behavior."
McCabe's office was on the seventh floor of the United States Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York, a large room overlooking St. Andrew's Plaza in lower Manhattan. McCabe was fiftyish, large, Irish-American, jovial. He might have looked like just another beefy cop but his eyes were alive and displayed an unusual intelligence. McCabe offered Oldham a seat. An awkward few seconds passed. Oldham wasn't sure how to broach the subject of Caracappa and Eppolito. If the two detectives were guilty of the conspiracy Casso had described, it was certain that one of the people Caracappa had duped into giving him sensitive information was Kenny McCabe. "I was afraid McCabe might think I had come to embarrass him," Oldham recalled. "Nothing could be further from the truth. But the embarrassment couldn't be avoided. The case was a stain on detectives who worked in OC and dealt with Caracappa or Eppolito. In 1994, when the accusations were published in the newspapers, detectives started to take inventory of their interactions with the two 'mafia cops' and wonder if they had inadvertently got someone killed or given away a case."
McCabe was understandably sheepish when Oldham talked about Caracappa and Eppolito. The unease passed quickly. McCabe turned out to be generous, patient, and encouraging. Like Oldham and many other NYPD detectives, McCabe had mulled the matter over many times. There was an extremely good chance that Caracappa and Eppolito were guilty. He confirmed what Oldham suspected. Caracappa had often come to McCabe with questions about ongoing investigations -- the Windows Case, the Painters Union Case, various snitches. Acting in good faith, never suspecting Caracappa was capable of betraying the force, McCabe had shared his vast store of knowledge. Access to McCabe's encyclopedic memory as well as his insider's awareness of virtually every significant law enforcement initiative against the mafia had amplified the harm Caracappa could wreak by multiples.
"I'll tell you one thing," McCabe said. "Steve was smart. I've thought about this a lot. There is no one moment that I can point to, but in retrospect I know he pumped me for information. I know what he was doing, looking back. I know it was him. There just isn't any way for me to prove it."
"You're not the only one with that problem," Oldham said.
"They did it," McCabe said. "Go get 'em."