Ratting out the Mafia

NEW YORK has always been a gangster’s paradise. That’s part of its romance and its lore. From groups like the 19th century Plug Uglies, immortalized in Herbert Asbury’s 1928 “The Gangs of New York,” to their 20th century counterpart, the Mafia, the city has a peculiar fascination with its least repentant miscreants, the ones who flaunt their lives outside the law.

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 omerta,” 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.

Q: I show you this picture. Who is in this 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.

This is the ethos in which Kaplan was raised. Yet when even a Mafia don -- Joe Massino, boss of the Bonanno family -- is willing to turn, the old standards are dead and gone.

In some sense, that’s the true subject of “The Good Rat,” which becomes Breslin’s lament for a lost way of life. “I keep hearing people talk about the end of the Mafia,” he writes, “but I don’t know what that means. I do know that illegal gambling, which once was a glorious fountain of cash for the outfit, now is a government-owned lottery machine that buzzes in every newsstand and deli in the city.”

Here, Breslin reveals his toughness, his lack of sentiment, which is, of course, what he admires in Kaplan. For him, it’s not that the Mafiosi were good guys, just that they were honest about who they were.

It was only after Gotti decided he was too big to be accountable that organized crime’s house of cards came down. Gotti was known as the Teflon Don because the government couldn’t convict him, but when he fixed a 1986 jury trial, new battle lines were drawn.

“That got the government mad,” an aging mobster named Tony Cafe tells Breslin. “Nobody was safe after that. They got Gotti, and then they came after everybody else. Because of him, all of a sudden I’m standing out here alone.”

This is all part of the tapestry of the city, and to Breslin its diminishment represents a kind of loss. Not for the rule of law but for something more intangible; when Tony Cafe has his bankroll snatched on Park Avenue, it is “past anything we even imagined. It is the end of the year 2006. They are mugging Mafia bosses on the street.”

That’s a classic Breslin moment -- bittersweet, funny and a little sad. The same could be said of “The Good Rat” as a whole. Breslin does not offer apologies for the Mafia. Yet he’s also willing to admit his attraction, to tell the stories that made their legend what it was.

If this sounds like a contradiction, that’s part of what Breslin means to evoke.

Just look at Kaplan, an antihero among the antiheroes, a stand-up guy who ratted out his friends. In his story, Breslin has found a perfect metaphor for what the Mafia once was and for what it has become.

david.ulin@latimes.com

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David L. Ulin is book editor of The Times.