Cover Story: The un-made man

It's the Gold Club's last night on Earth, and Steve Kaplan is nowhere to be seen.

"Where's Steve?" defense attorney Don Samuel yells down from the upstairs VIP bar.

Below, shoulders shrug. As this endless Thursday winds down, a bizarre cast of characters has assembled: haggard defense attorneys, their lucky plea-bargaining ties loosened; dancers teetering forward on stiletto pumps to hug each other farewell; newspaper reporters huddled uncomfortably near the bar; defendants relieved to have copped a plea to avoid jail time. But no Kaplan.

Upstairs, Samuel chuckles as he pours one final flute of high-test champagne onto the storied carpet of Gold Room VII, the notorious corner closet where, over the years, an All-Star roster of pro athletes had come to get their axles lubed and their fenders polished. Downstairs, a half-drunk stripper does a half-hearted last twirl on the brass pole.

Around 10 p.m., club manager Jimmy Carillo, arrayed in a UNC warm-up suit complete with a powder-blue ball cap, calls the evening to an end. "I see everybody partying and having way too good a time on our worst day and I need to get everybody out!" he shouts, shooing dancers toward the gilded doors.

And, finally, there is the diminutive, balding Kaplan. Out of his ill-fitting suit, he's now in jeans and a sweatshirt, leaning against a column, talking quietly with a well-wisher. Soon, federal marshals will come with chains to padlock his primary asset, his money-minting machine, his X-rated playpen, the crown jewel of a staggeringly successful business career.

Earlier that day, the Gold Club trial skidded to an abrupt halt when defense attorneys struck a deal with the feds. As part of the same package, 10 other defendants got away with likely probation.

As his co-conspirators and defense team made their way to the courthouse parking lot, the collective spin began: Kaplan had fallen on a grenade for his compadres by agreeing to a deal that put himself behind bars for as much as three years while his partners in crime would need only pay occasional visits to their friendly neighborhood probation officer.

Kaplan, who already was picking up a mountainous legal tab for all his fellow defendants — an amount possibly even exceeding what some prize suckers had involuntarily spent in his club — had traded his own freedom for the sake of loyal employees who refused to roll over on their boss, the saga went. Here was a Jewish-American prince of a man. A real mensch, already.

But although Kaplan has been on public display every day at his trial, many observers hadn't actually heard him speak until he stepped up Thursday to plead guilty to federal racketeering charges in a choked voice. The only real portrait of him has come from his former co-workers and friends, perhaps not the most reliable group.

"Steve's a stand-up guy; he took the heat for the rest of us," Carillo says.

So how did a nice Jewish boy from New York like Stevie Kaplan end up being measured for striped pajamas by the feds?

Like father ...
Carillo, who could easily segue into a second career as Joe Pesci's stand-in, met Kaplan 23 years ago when they played neighborhood hockey together in New York. Back then, Kaplan worked at his father's newsstand.

By most accounts, Steve Kaplan is nothing if not his father's son. He took over his dad's magazine business and built it into a thriving retail stronghold in New York's busy Penn Station. George Kaplan's involvement was welcomed in his boy's other enterprises, such as nightclubs in Boca Raton and New York and, ultimately, the Gold Club.

And he maintained his father's social relationships, say federal prosecutors, who had been following the senior Kaplan's involvement with various Mafia button-men since the 1980s. By the time Steve Kaplan bought out an estranged business partner to take sole possession of the Gold Club in 1994, he had already begun following in his father's footsteps as an "earner" for the mob, paying cash tributes to ensure protection and privileges, the feds contend.

Steve always made friends easily, Carillo says, but isn't what you'd call boisterous, or even especially talkative. He has a boyish charm. He favors torn jeans and T-shirts over the tailored suits he had to wear during the trial. Just a regular Joe. He's taken up golf recently. Steve liked the earning potential of adult entertainment, but "he never loved the business, knowhutimean?" (Carillo is now officially laying it on thick.)

He continues: Steve adores his two daughters and kept his wife, Mona, away from Atlanta because he didn't want her to have to endure the media circus surrounding the trial.

After his dad died of cancer in 1998, Steve even paid for one of his dancers to receive expensive cancer treatments from a specialist in Houston.

"When I say Steve is a humanitarian, people think I'm bullshittin', but it's true," says a poker-faced Carillo.

And yet not everyone thought the world of Steve, as evidenced by wiretap conversations between father-and-son mobsters Greg and Craig DePalma. In the months leading up to a face-to-face that Kaplan was trying to arrange, the pair of intergenerational gangsters alternately and repeatedly refer to the upstanding Mr. Kaplan as a "jerk-off," a "fucking asshole," a garden-variety "asshole" and — attention, ADL — "that little Jew prick."

Oy, omerta!
Of course, if Kaplan's status as one of the chosen people rendered him ineligible to ever become a true wiseguy, he could still enjoy rich, rewarding friendships with such New York organized crime figures as acting Gambino boss John "Junior" Gotti Jr. and Michael "Mikey Scars" DiLeonardo, a swaggering caporegime who reputedly was once a crew member under the turncoat Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano. (As "The Sopranos" confirms, La Cosa Nostra members have more nicknames than the White House press corps.)

By 1995, according to dozens of pages of hearsay testimony and secretly taped second-hand conversations, Kaplan had so much clout within the ranks of the mob that he was able to orchestrate a Mafia "sit-down" to review a personnel dispute involving the then-trendy Manhattan strip club Scores.

Facing off at the fabled late-night détente session were Kaplan and DiLeonardo versus journeyman gangster Craig DePalma. The role of Solomon was played by Junior. Although the notion of rubbing out Scores owners Lyle Pfeffer and Michael Blutrich and installing a Kaplan crony as the club's steward may have appealed to him, Gotti the Younger opted instead to follow DePalma's suggestion and extort the Scores duo for $100,000, a sum he is said to have generously split with DiLeonardo.

The decision proved costly for Gotti. The Scores extortion was one of the main elements that helped send him to Club Fed in late 1999, as the FBI had long had the DePalmas and the Scores crew wired to the teeth.

It's Kaplan's loyalty to his friends that brought about his own 33-page, 21-count indictment for racketeering, prostitution, loansharking, fraud, etc., according to Carillo. He maintains that the government's multi-year, multi-agent, multi-jurisdictional grudge against his law-abiding boss was born out of retribution for Kaplan's unwillingness to join the ratfink choir against John Jr., an acknowledged chum. Ditto for Carillo himself and the other small-fry defendants who didn't squeal on their employer.

Kaplan wouldn't even know Gotti in the first place had their kids not gone to the same Oyster Bay school, Carillo offers.

Small underworld, isn't it?

Kaplan's attorney, Steve Sadow, says his client was likewise asked to give up DiLeonardo before the trial began, but that request fell by the wayside after prosecutors realized Mikey Scars was staying at Kaplan's crib for the duration.

Greed is fuckin' good
If Gotti and the DePalmas epitomize the Ugly American-of-recent-Italian-descent, then Kaplan unfortunately plays down to another unpleasant ethnic stereotype. As he realized the money-making potential of the Gold Club, he began to make fictive corporate raider Gordon Gecko seem like an underachieving Ben & Jerry.

By late 1997, he was trying to cozy up to the folks at Scores by offering profanity-laced purchasing tips to club co-owner and FBI stoolie Pfeffer:

Kaplan: These vendors. Right, Lyle? Beat them up. Get what you can. You know why? 'Cause you deserve to have it. You deserve to get everything at the cheapest price and have everything. 'Cause you're a big fucking account. You're not like the normal guy. You should get everything. Don't feel guilty at all.

Pfeffer: Oh, I don't. (Laughs.)

Kaplan: Beat them the fuck up. Beat them the fuck up. They're all fucking ... If, you know what? If Scores went down to, God forbid, 40 thousand a week. Fuck you, they'd ram it up your ass. Ram it up their ass. Believe me.

Pfeffer: You know, before we got in here, they took such advantage of us.

Kaplan: Fuck them. You've got to get everything free. They got to give you your fucking name on everything. You got to make them pay. Make them all pay. They all pay me. Make them all pay. Fuck them.

While Kaplan may find future work as a business strategist for Microsoft, conversations like this one seem at odds with the sweet, generous, downright shy fellow described by Carillo.

In another discussion, Kaplan distilled his approach to the skin trade: "It's all about making money. Now, I don't give a fuck about any of these girls and any of this kind of shit. It's about how much more money I can make."

That's the Steve Kaplan that George Kontos knew when he worked at the Gold Club from late 1994 to December 1996 — an otherwise personable guy who got so greedy he was willing to bend rules, break laws and use friend and foe to make a few extra truckloads of money.

And customers with more dollars than gray cells made it all so easy.

"We dealt with people for whom dropping $10,000 rather than $5,000 was like splurging for the king-sized candy bar," says Kontos, who watched guys willingly blow 30 grand in an evening.

In order to keep the big-spenders coming back, Kaplan made sure they got seriously laid, and the girls certainly didn't do that kind of heavy lifting for free. Jeff Johnson, another manager who also took the witness stand against his former boss, last week recounted seeing Kaplan pay dancers in cash for services rendered moments earlier to favored customers.

"Prostitution is sex for money, and that's what was going on" at the Gold Club, says Kontos, who wasn't threatened with indictment, but admits now that he stood by while sauced-to-the-gills schmucks were defrauded.

"Some customers got so drunk they couldn't sign their own credit-card receipts," he recalls. "I saw a girl use one guy's hand to sign a bogus $3,000 tab — and Steve knew about it."

But, geez, talk about temptation. Steve Kaplan was sitting atop the city's largest barrel with a hunting rifle, watching the fish swim in with fluorescent bull's-eyes painted on their backs.

According to testimony by some very unlucky saps just before the trial was cut short:

Chump No. 1 was leaving the club with some friends after having dropped $5,500 in two hours. As he was stepping into the limo, two dancers beckoned to him from the doorway. "Why don't you come back in?" they cooed. His answer: "OK." He trooped back upstairs. Four hours later, he'd blown through $23,000. He knew was in trouble, he said, when he got home at 4:30 a.m. and his wife was standing in the driveway.

Chump No. 2 kept blindly signing Gold Room receipts bearing larger and larger totals, assuming each was inclusive of the last. They weren't. Total soak: $28,000 for six hours of laughs. His excuse: "I wasn't looking at the details at the time." What had he actually intended to spend that night? Around $10,000, he said — about the cost of a decent late-model Honda Prelude.

Chump No. 3 used his cell phone to call his bank in mid-lap-dance to elevate his credit limit. Three guesses as to what happened next and the first two will cost you $5,000 a pop, big boy.

You've heard of coyote ugly? These guys and many like them ended up coyote broke, willing to chew their arms off to get away from their newly grotesque credit ratings.

Suckers unite
But for every sorry-eyed loser who signed whatever a naked woman held in front of him, there were two others claiming to have been charged a year's Ivy League tuition for a couple of drinks and a platter of rubber shrimp.

After all the witness-protection thugs and turncoat dancers, after the parade of limo drivers, floor managers and disreputable flies-on-the-wall, it was the prospect of a month's worth of fraud sob stories pummeling the jury that most worried the defense team, says attorney Don Samuel, who last week initiated the third and final round of backroom negotiations.

It wasn't practical to tag as liars a veritable busload of witnesses telling similar rip-off tales, Samuel explains. It had come time to cut the best package deal that could be haggled. His own client, Larry Gleit, chief financial officer for Kaplan's empire, was the only one to get off with a misdemeanor.

Nine others — including six defendants-in-waiting — took felony raps, admitting they knew that heavy shit was going down and they, like, didn't report it to the proper authorities. A fallback charge, to be sure, but a guilty plea nonetheless. They are all expected to get probation when Judge Willis Hunt hands down sentences in another week or so.

Jacklyn "Diva" Bush, the über-harlot who has pulled the taffy of seemingly every pro athlete between here and the Hoosierdome, basked in the post-plea newscam feeding frenzy as she might a bank of tanning lamps. Holding court underneath the Russell Federal Building, where she'd spent the previous three months, she insisted she was innocent of prostitution.

"If this could happen to me, this could happen to anyone," she said. Consider yourself warned, Martha Stewart. Would she now remain in town, a professional journalist asked Bush? "Yes, I'm very respected in Atlanta."

(Well, she has at least one ardent ad-mirer in veteran WSB-TV reporter Lynn Harasin. A visible Gold Club booster while covering the trial, Harasin checked her journalistic objectivity at the door, offering big, sloppy hugs and words of encouragement to Bush and Carillo at virtually every jury nicotine break. Coincidentally, WSB was the only news crew allowed in to broadcast the club's final hours.)

Score card time
So, was it worth it? The largest grand jury investigation in state history; three months and counting on the federal court meter; wear and tear on the witness stand from 50-plus people — all to accomplish what, exactly?

(The big winner, of course, is indignant NBA star Antonio Davis, who'll be spared strippers' testimony that they, well, now we'll never know.)

The feds attest they achieved their central goals:

Secure convictions on everyone involved — so far, so good, but the guvment reportedly backed off insisting on treating everybody to free room, board and an hour of exercise a day.

Make Kaplan serve real time — between one and three years, say the expert handicappers. Heck, even Junior will be back on the street in 2004.

Nail Mikey Scars to the wall. Still on track, but easier said than done.

Many pundits feel this is the wobbliest part of the government's case, without direct testimony from refusenik Craig DePalma.

After all, the Silverstone capo Scars escaped indictment by an organized crime task force in his home base in New York; what gives Atlanta an edge over the Big Apple cops? At least Assistant U.S. Attorney Art Leach will no longer need to divide his attention among a slate of other defendants.

And, most importantly, break the Mafia connection to the Gold Club, which is why Kaplan wasn't allowed to sell the property to a potential straw buyer who could continue to funnel money to the Gambinos, say sources with the feds.

This last objective is one that has sparked conspiracy rumors, which have even been repeated publicly by Sadow: namely, that the trial was simply a pretext for a federal land grab so the choice real estate could be flipped to MARTA.

Sadow concedes there's no evidence to support this speculation, and it seems somewhat far-fetched to imagine that government agencies which normally have little reason to communicate would — or even could — forge such a clandestine and effective partnership.

But Sadow's client, Stevie Kaplan of Oyster Bay, remains mum on this and all other subjects until his sentencing is complete and his immediate future is set forth in court records.

We're waiting for the real Steve to stand up.??