Brooklyn Federal Judge Jack Weinstein gets his first look at “Mafia cops” Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa next week when they are expected to be arraigned on the sensational murder and racketeering charges that were lodged against them a month ago.

Judge Weinstein goes way back with the man prosecutors are counting on to help put the ex-detectives behind bars for life: a turncoat mob associate named Burton Kaplan. Based on court records from the last time they were dealing with one another, the judge might have good reasons to be skeptical of claims by the star witness.

Judge Weinstein, now 83, is the senior judge at Brooklyn Federal Court, both in age and years on the bench. Kaplan, now 71, is in the federal witness protection program. Their first encounter was in 1967, the year Judge Weinstein was elevated to the federal bench.

That time, an apparently sympathetic Judge Weinstein sentenced Kaplan to probation in a fraud case. Five years later, Kaplan was back in front of Judge Weinstein again, pleading guilty to a new charge: possessing a truckload of stolen clothing that he was conspiring to sell.

At his sentencing on December 8, 1972, Kaplan insisted he had finally realized the errors of his ways and had turned his life around. He had done so, he told Judge Weinstein, after discovering a newfound love and concern for his mother, his wife, and his daughter.

“This arrest taught me a lesson,” said Kaplan. “I started spending all my nights home. I went to work and I became successful at my job, and I became successful at my marriage, and I’m home every night at 7 o’clock, and I spend all my spare time with my family.”

That wasn’t all. Faced with the prospect of losing his family, Kaplan said he had stopped going to race tracks and had gotten a new job selling hosiery, making $100 a week. “I think I have a good future in this business, your honor. I’m not doing anything criminal,” he said.

Having been burned once, Judge Weinstein sentenced Kaplan to four years. Even so, the judge gave him two months to report to prison so he could earn money during the busy Christmas season to help tide his family over.

On February 17, 1973, two days after Kaplan arrived at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, he picked up a pen and wrote a four-page letter to his friend the judge, telling him about more problems that had befallen his family since his sentencing. His father-in-law had died, his mother was heartbroken and embarrassed, and his wife and daughter were depressed and suffering tremendously.

During that same two months, Kaplan had worked hard and “greatly increased the scope and volume of sales” for his new employer, he wrote. “I finally realized that with the proper attitude and lots of hard work it is just as easy to sell legitimate merchandise as stolen. Also a lot more morally and socially rewarding.”

Meanwhile, he told Judge Weinstein, one of his co-defendants was fencing stolen goods, two others had been arrested again on similar charges, and the fourth was “one of New York’s biggest pimps.”

“I have never been involved in any violence in any form, physical or verbal in my life. I detest it and all it stands for,” wrote Kaplan.

If that were so, he obviously changed his mind somewhere along the line. Kaplan has since admitted passing money and messages between murderous Luchese underboss Anthony “Gaspipe” Casso and his alleged killer cops from 1986 through 1993.

Kaplan ended his letter to the judge with another vow he couldn’t keep, one that could win a blue ribbon in a “famous last words” contest: “I promise you that the name of Burton Kaplan will never again come before you or the court or any court again in regards to anything that is against the law.”

The cagey gangster’s ploy worked pretty well, even though Judge Weinstein refused to reduce his sentence.

Moved by Kaplan’s tales of woe, however, the judge recommended that the Bureau of Prisons “give urgent consideration to parole of the defendant at the earliest possible moment.”

On January 16, 1974, Kaplan was released to a halfway house in Manhattan. Paroled that April, he quickly moved up in the underworld, as a drug dealer and sleazy businessman, becoming a trusted Casso associate. Along the way, the mobster often used Kaplan as a nominee, placing cars, property, even his Mill Basin home in Kaplan’s name.

In 1980, Kaplan was charged with being the mastermind of a drug ring that conspired to manufacture and distribute $1 million worth of methaqualone a week out of a cosmetics company he ran in Brooklyn. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.

While serving that term, Kaplan has told the feds, he met Bonanno mob associate Frank Santora, who would later serve as Kaplan’s entree into the allegedly murderous world of Mafia cops Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa.

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The feds are still investigating a variety of criminal charges against mob lawyer Larry Bronson but last week the attorney made peace with a former client who accused him of threatening to sabotage her criminal case if she stopped having sex with him.

Brooklyn Criminal Court Judge William Miller granted a prosecution motion to dismiss the charges against Mr. Bronson in October if he behaves himself during the next six months and avoids any contact, either in person or by telephone, with the Russian emigre.

According to court records and several participants in the case, that may be easier said than done for Mr. Bronson.

Prosecutors were on the verge of dropping the misdemeanor coercion charges several months ago, but then Mr. Bronson, 59, was arrested again and charged with aggravated harassment and criminal contempt for allegedly calling and cursing at the woman on two occasions.

According to a complaint that was filed on February 17, the phone calls violated a court order of protection that directed him to “refrain from assaulting, harassing, menacing, intimidating or threatening” his former client.

Last week, after assurances from Assistant District Attorney Judith Aarons that the woman did not object, Judge Miller okayed the plea deal. Mr. Bronson’s lawyer, Hillary Schaeffer, did not respond to a request for comment.

Assistant U.S. attorneys Robert Henoch and Caren Myers declined to comment about the status of the federal probe, which includes allegations that Mr. Bronson allowed mobsters to use his office to violate court orders that prohibited them from meeting each other.

This column and other news of organized crime will appear later today on www.ganglandnews.com.