'The Good Rat: A True Story' by Jimmy Breslin

Twenty years ago, John Gotti ruled the tabloids, and before him Joey Gallo, Joe Colombo, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano -- the list goes on and on.

As to why this is . . . well, Jimmy Breslin has an opinion. "I can barely handle legitimate people," he writes in the opening pages of "The Good Rat: A True Story." "They all proclaim immaculate honesty, but each day they commit the most serious of all felonies, being a bore."

"The Good Rat" is many things, but boring isn't one of them. What it is, mostly, is the story of Burton Kaplan, a seventysomething guy from Bensonhurst who, while raising a daughter and running a garment business, also trafficked in drugs and set up hits for the mob.

From 1986 to 1993, Kaplan was the middleman between crime boss Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso and Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, two New York City police detectives who passed along information about investigations and together committed at least eight murders-for-hire. In 2004, a third of the way through a 27-year prison sentence for conspiracy to sell marijuana, Kaplan turned state's evidence against the two crooked cops.

This is where Breslin first discovers him -- on the witness stand at the trial of Eppolito and Caracappa, testifying "in simple declarative sentences, subject, verb, and object, one following the other to start a rhythm that is compelling to the jury's ear."

For Breslin, Kaplan is a figure "out of all the ages of crime, out of Dostoyevsky, of the Moors Murders, of Murder Inc.," a contemporary Raskolnikov.

"I am at an early hearing," he writes, "when the defendants come into the courtroom, Eppolito fat and sad-eyed, Caracappa a thin, listless nobody. I stare at my hands. Am I going to write seventy thousand words about these two? Rather I lay brick.

"Then the trial starts and I am pulled out of my gloom. An unknown name on the prosecution witness list, an old drug peddler, a lifelong fence, steals the show and turns the proceeding into something that thrills: the autobiography of Burton Kaplan, criminal. Right away I think . . . I have found my book."

The saga of Eppolito and Caracappa has been written about elsewhere, most notably in Guy Lawson and William Oldham's 2006 book, "The Brotherhoods." Breslin, though, is less interested in them than in what happened to the New York mob, for which Kaplan is a kind of Rosetta Stone.

"He is probably the last true believer in the code of the Mafia, the omertà," one of his lawyers says to Breslin, which makes turning state's evidence "an atrocious, unforgivable act."

So why did Kaplan do it? He had no choice; if he hadn't, his former associates would have rolled over on him.

The Mafia, Breslin tells us, has changed a lot in the last generation, a result of federal racketeering laws that mandate extended sentences for conspiracy. As a consequence, the old ideal of the "stand-up guy" no longer applies. (Just this week, dozens of members of three New York crime family were arrested by federal authorities, who made their case with the help of an informant well placed on the inside.)

"Stand-up is what I used to be," Kaplan says from the witness stand. "When someone has a problem, they take their punishment and go to jail, they don't give up anybody. They take -- they take responsibility for the crime."

In one of "The Good Rat's" most amusing passages, Breslin quotes a bit of ancient trial testimony to illustrate exactly what that means:

Q: Do you know Al Capone?

A: No.

Q: You don't?

A: No.