The Good Rat

The Good Rat Read Online Free PDF Page A

Book: The Good Rat Read Online Free PDF
Author: Jimmy Breslin
Mark Feldman, who was in charge of organized crime in the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York, which was Brooklyn.
    “What are we talking about here?” Feldman said.
    “I can do my time,” Burt said.
    “What are you, the last honorable man?” Feldman said. “Do you know what’s going on? Do you know how many of these guys have turned? I’ll tell you: all but you.”
    “I can do my time,” Burt Kaplan said. But now his voice was drained of faith. He was arguing with a man who had a letter in his desk saying that Kaplan could get out of jail at once. Suddenly he could sense what it would be like to be on the outside. He could feel the breeze on Bay Parkway in Brooklyn. Kaplan did not say any of this in the office, however. He didn’t have to.
    Leaving the room, Feldman said, “He’s turning.”
     
    The Mafia’s final hours pass in moments like this, of quiet anguish and betrayal. Once, a gangster might answer such questions in style, as was found in this account, among the papers of Chicago’s Mike Rokyo, the late national treasure,
Q: Do you know Al Capone?
A: No.
Q: You don’t?
A: No.
Q: I show you this picture. Who is in the picture?
A: Me and Al Capone.
Q: You just said you didn’t know him.
A: I met him. That don’t mean I know him.
Q: What does Mr. Capone do for a living?
A: He told me he sold ties.
    Today step into any federal courtroom and you can’t get tough guys to shut up. In the big new courthouse inManhattan not long ago, you could hear a rat named Joseph Quattrochi, whose confessions are like purse snatching when compared to Kaplan’s.
Q: You had a Ponzi scheme.
A: Yes.
Q: You’d agree that you’re a dishonest guy.
A: Yes.
Q: You didn’t have an honest day in your life.
A: Yes. I made my bed and had to lie in it. It’s all right, as long as the bed doesn’t roll me into a prison.
    In March 2005, in a sealed tenth-floor courtroom in the federal courthouse in downtown Brooklyn, Burton Kaplan walks in with two platoons of prosecutors, FBI agents, and marshals. He pleads guilty to all his crimes. Choose a number—eighteen hundred, two thousand, whatever you like. On paper, Kaplan named Eppolito and Caracappa in eight murders that could be proved at the moment, with many more to come, all committed by the men while wearing the badges of the Police Department of the City of New York.
    After Kaplan’s guilty pleas, Judge Jack B. Weinstein goes over the charges against Eppolito and Caracappa. He tells Mark Feldman, Robert Henoch, and the other assistant U.S. Attorneys present that he sees a big problem.
    The problem is with the calendar, which has never been stopped, not even by the U.S. government. To understand why this is troubling to Weinstein, let me tell you a littleabout the federal law known as RICO, which stands for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations. RICO was born of the fervent love of punishment possessed by a man named Robert Blakey, a law professor at Notre Dame who wrote it in 1970 for the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs. He named the law after Edward G. Robinson, who played a racketeer named Rico in the movie Little Caesar. Beautiful! Blakey thought that was exciting. He also was an admirer of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
    Before RICO the usual federal sentence for gangsters was five years or so. Most tough guys could do that standing on one hand. And they did. That’s why there were no rats back then. You kept your mouth shut, did your time, and came home a hero. Once RICO was put in, suddenly there were fifty-year jail terms. If you were committing federal crimes together with other tough guys as part of an ongoing operation, you got RICO. And if you got RICO you got a sentence that makes Siberian justice look easy.
    The language of a RICO indictment usually goes something like this:
    “On or about November 12, 2006, the defendants Joseph Orlando and Jerry Degerolamo attended a meeting…”
    That alone is a crime. And under RICO the
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