Post by Admin on Mar 7, 2014 12:57:00 GMT
The story of Burton Kaplan’s life, as it emerged, was at once remarkably international, spanning several continents, and remarkably provincial, set in a New York so small and narrow as to be almost unrecognizable. Kaplan, we learned, was born in Sheepshead Bay, and he confessed to being a gambling addict from the age of thirteen, although he persisted in showing law-abiding potential for a while longer, attending Brooklyn Tech, and then joining the Navy, where he studied Russian radio codes in Japan. He was even offered a job in the National Security Agency, he said, but he turned it down in order to return to Brooklyn, and join his family in the appliance business—principally, installing and repairing air-conditioners in and around the neighborhood of Bensonhurst, which was then a Mafia stronghold.
Gambling debts necessitate a lively entrepreneurial spirit, and Kaplan, it turned out, once concocted a scheme to sell hair grease in Africa; when the grease turned brown in transit, he had a chemist try cooking the remains into Quaaludes. (It failed, and he went to jail.) He dealt in diamonds with the nephew of a government official in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso. He sold Peruvian passports to the Hong Kong Chinese. And he did business with a Mr. Ho, from Hubei Province, in China, whom he called “one of the first people to represent a Communist country in the free world.” All the while, back in Brooklyn and in a warehouse on Staten Island, he also sold clothes—leisure suits and bluejeans, Gloria Vanderbilt and Calvin Klein.
Kaplan, who wore large round glasses, blinked incessantly, and spoke in unbending Brooklynese, had a knack for introducing novelistic detail about incidentals. He said he learned that Gaspipe Casso was a rat in 1994. The problem was that Casso could easily have implicated Kaplan in several of the thirty-plus murders that he eventually admitted to. Kaplan went on the lam, travelling under an alias, first to Mexico and then to Portland, before settling in Las Vegas. There he reconnected with his old cop friend Louie Eppolito, who had retired from the police force and moved West to start a new career as a screenwriter and actor—with limited success. (He played Fat Andy, a bit part, in the movie “GoodFellas.”)
Gambling debts necessitate a lively entrepreneurial spirit, and Kaplan, it turned out, once concocted a scheme to sell hair grease in Africa; when the grease turned brown in transit, he had a chemist try cooking the remains into Quaaludes. (It failed, and he went to jail.) He dealt in diamonds with the nephew of a government official in Upper Volta, now Burkina Faso. He sold Peruvian passports to the Hong Kong Chinese. And he did business with a Mr. Ho, from Hubei Province, in China, whom he called “one of the first people to represent a Communist country in the free world.” All the while, back in Brooklyn and in a warehouse on Staten Island, he also sold clothes—leisure suits and bluejeans, Gloria Vanderbilt and Calvin Klein.
Kaplan, who wore large round glasses, blinked incessantly, and spoke in unbending Brooklynese, had a knack for introducing novelistic detail about incidentals. He said he learned that Gaspipe Casso was a rat in 1994. The problem was that Casso could easily have implicated Kaplan in several of the thirty-plus murders that he eventually admitted to. Kaplan went on the lam, travelling under an alias, first to Mexico and then to Portland, before settling in Las Vegas. There he reconnected with his old cop friend Louie Eppolito, who had retired from the police force and moved West to start a new career as a screenwriter and actor—with limited success. (He played Fat Andy, a bit part, in the movie “GoodFellas.”)