Uncle John’s Unstoppable Bathroom Reader (29 page)

Shur was convinced that this was the best way to protect government witnesses like Barboza. He knew it could work because some deputies in the Marshals Service were already beginning to move mobsters around the country on their own initiative. But Shur wanted to put an official program in place. He figured that if potential witnesses knew that such a program existed, they were more likely to cooperate with prosecutors.

Not many people agreed with Shur. But when President Lyndon Johnson’s political opponents accused Johnson of being soft on crime, a presidential commission on law enforcement started looking for new ways to nab criminals. In 1967 Shur pitched his witness protection idea to the commission. They recommended it to President Johnson, but it didn’t become law until President Nixon signed the Witness Security Program (WITSEC) as part of the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970.

Glenn Burke of the L.A. Dodgers is credited with inventing the “high-five” in 1977.

WITSEC BY THE NUMBERS

Initially Shur figured that no more than a few dozen new witnesses would enter the program each year. His guess was way off. For one thing, government prosecutors were eager to use witness testimony to win convictions. But just as importantly, every time a mob witness was able to break
omertà—
the Mafia’s code of silence—and survive, it became more likely that other disgruntled or imprisoned mobsters would agree to rat out their crime bosses. By 1972 witnesses were entering the program at a rate of 200 a year; two years later the number had doubled.

To date, WITSEC has relocated more than 7,000 government witnesses and 9,000 of their family members. The Marshals Service estimates that more than 10,000 convictions have been obtained with the help of WITSEC witnesses. So far none of the witnesses in the program have been murdered in retaliation for their testimony, although 30 witnesses who left the program have been murdered…including the mobster who helped to start it all: In February 1976, Joe “The Animal” Barboza left the program and returned to a life of drug dealing, extortion, and murder. He was gunned down in San Francisco, California, in a drive-by shooting that police believe was a mob hit.

Though WITSEC was originally set up to battle the Mafia, today more than half of the people who enter the program are witnesses in drug trials; fewer than one in six are connected to the Mafia.

STARTING OVER

•
Any
relatives or loved ones of a witness are eligible to enter the program if they are potential targets. This includes grandparents, in-laws, girlfriends, boyfriends, even mistresses.

• When a witness enters WITSEC, they get a new name, assistance moving to a new city, and help with rent and other expenses until they find a job. They also get a new birth certificate, social security card, and driver’s license, but that’s about it. The Marshals Service doesn’t create elaborate fake pasts or phony job histories, and it doesn’t provide fake credit histories, either.

Have you heard? According to experts, a dog can’t hear the lowest key on a piano.

GETTING A JOB

• It’s not easy finding a job without a résumé or job history. “You go to get a job, you got no references and they’re not going to lie for you,” says former mobster Joseph “Joe Dogs” Iannuzzi. “They don’t help you get references for an apartment. You have to go and muscle it for yourself.”

• But the Marshals Service does what it can to help. It has compiled a list of companies whose CEOs have agreed to provide jobs to government witnesses.

• When a witness is placed with a company only the CEO or some other high corporate official knows that the employee is a government witness, and even they are not told the person’s true identity. They are, however, given details of the employee’s criminal history. “You go to the head of the corporation,” says retired deputy marshal Donald McPherson, “and you tell him the crimes. You have that obligation. You’re not going to help a bank robber get a job as a bank teller.”

STAYING IN TOUCH

• Witnesses are strictly forbidden from revealing their new identities, addresses, or even the region of the country they live in to friends and loved ones back home. If family members don’t know the names and whereabouts of their relatives in the program, the mob is less likely to come after them and try to get the information.

• It’s a myth that when witnesses enter the program they are forbidden from ever contacting loved ones outside the program again. They’re only forbidden from making
direct
contact—letters and phone calls can be forwarded through the Marshals Service. In-person meetings can be arranged at safe, neutral sites, such as federal buildings or safehouses.

• Does the program work? It’s estimated that as many as one in five return to a life of crime after entering the witness protection program. That’s about half the recidivism rate of convicts released from prison.

Don’t be cruel! On an average day, 4 people call Graceland and ask to speak to Elvis.

FABULOUS FLOPS

Some folks have an eye for business, and some businesses have an “i” for idiot.

Y
OU SAY TO-MA-TO, I SAY TO-BLAH-TO

In 1994 a small biotech company called Calgene got FDA approval for the first genetically engineered whole food to hit the stores in the United States—the
Flavr Savr
tomato. It was genetically altered to delay ripening, which allowed growers to keep the plant on the vine longer, shippers to keep it in the trucks longer, and grocers to keep it on shelves longer. It sounds good, but the tomatoes had problems: they didn’t taste very good; crop yields were below expectations; and the machines used for packing them, built for still-green and firm tomatoes, mashed the Flavr Savrs to mush. After two years on the market, the original “Frankenfood” was pulled from stores. Calgene’s loss: an estimated $150 million.

PUT A SOCK IN IT

Remember the
Pets.com
sock puppet? He appeared in 2000 in TV commercials for the online pet store and was wildly popular. He showed up on
Good Morning America
and floated in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade as a 36-foot balloon. Unfortunately,
Pet.com
’s concept—selling pet supplies over the Internet—wasn’t as popular as the puppet. After little more than a year,
Pets.com
was gone…and so was $100 million in start-up funds.

Flop-Flip:
And the sock puppet? He reappeared in 2002 in ads for 1-800-BarNone, a company that offered loans to people with bad credit, and has written an autobiography,
Me By Me
.

BEERZ IN THE HOOD

In June of 1991, G. Heileman Brewing Company, makers of Colt 45, came out with a new beverage: PowerMaster, a malt liquor with a 5.8% alcohol content (the average American beer has 3.5%; most malt liquors have 4.5%.) Black community leaders immediately protested, charging that the product was aimed specifically and irresponsibly at urban African Americans. For proof, they pointed to the billboard ads for the beverage that were popping up in black neighborhoods. The protests quickly spread around the country, and by July the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ruled that the “Power” in PowerMaster had to go. A beer’s name, they said, cannot reflect the strength of its alcohol content (even though they had approved the name just a month earlier). Heileman was forced to pull PowerMaster, at a marketing loss of more than $2 million.

Original name for the Bank of America: the Bank of Italy.

Flop-flip:
A year later, the brewer quietly introduced Colt 45 Premium, a malt liquor with a 5.9% alcohol content. The can was black with a red horse on it—the same design as PowerMaster.

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer Inc. spent 10 years and tons of money developing a “fountain of youth” drug designed to slow the aging process and keep people feeling young and vital well into old age. Initial research showed promise, prompting the company to pour even more money into the project. The reasoning was obvious: if it worked, the drug could make them millions, or even billions of dollars. In 2001 an independent testing lab performed a study that Pfizer executives expected would vault the drug toward FDA approval…but it didn’t work out that way. The study actually concluded that people who took the “fountain of youth” drug had about the same results as those who’d taken sugar pills. By June 2002, the project had been canned. Cost of the decade of work: $71 million.

FELT TIP FOLLIES

In late 2001, Sony Music came out with a “copy-proof” CD. It was a much-heralded step toward preventing the piracy of their artists’ music, which they claimed hurt sales. Sony spent millions developing the technology and in the first few months of 2002 shipped more than 11 million of the discs. But by May the innovation proved to be a total flop. Word had spread like wildfire on the Internet that the high-tech copy-proofing could be thwarted…by scribbling around the rim of the CDs with an 89¢ felt-tip marker.

*        *        *

“Wise men learn by other men’s mistakes, fools by their own.”

—
Anonymous

Buenos Aires has more psychoanalysts per capita than any other city in the world.

KIBBLE ME THIS

What would Porter the Wonder Dog have eaten 200 years ago, before there was Alpo or Dog Chow? Here’s the history of the multi-billion-dollar dog food industry.

C
HOW DOWN

• More than 2,000 years ago, Roman poet and philosopher Marcus Terentius Varro wrote the first farming manual. In it he advised giving farm dogs barley bread soaked in milk, and bones from dead sheep.

• During the Middle Ages, it was common for European royalty to have kennels for their hounds. Kennel cooks would make huge stews, mostly grains and vegetables with some meat or meat byproducts—the hearts, livers, and lungs of various livestock.

• Dogs in common households had meager diets. They were fed only what their owners could spare. A normal domesticated dog’s diet consisted of crusts of bread, bare bones, potatoes, cabbage, or whatever they could scrounge on their own.

• In the 18th century, farm dogs, which had to be fairly healthy to do their jobs, were regularly fed mixes of grains and lard. In cities, you could make a living by searching the streets for dead horses, cutting them up, and selling the meat to wealthy dog owners.

• There were exceptions: The very wealthy, throughout history, have fed their pet dogs fare that was much better than what most humans ate. In the 1800s Empress Tzu Hsi of China was known to feed her Pekingese shark fins, quail breasts, and antelope milk. European nobility fed their dogs roast duck, cakes, candies, and even liquor.

LUXURY FOOD

Then in the mid-1800s, as the Industrial Revolution created a growing middle class with more money and more leisure time, pets began to be regarded as “luxury items” by everyday folk. Result: pet food became more closely scrutinized.

More pets and more money meant a new profession: veterinary medicine. It was officially founded in the United States in 1895, but many self-styled experts were already giving advice on dog diets. Many said that dogs needed to be “civilized,” and since wild dogs ate raw meat, domesticated dogs shouldn’t. (That advice influenced the pet food industry for decades after.)

Snapping your fingers is called a
fillip
.

In the late 1850s, a young electrician from Cincinnati named James Spratt went to London to sell lightning rods. When his ship arrived, crew members threw the leftover “ship’s biscuits” onto the dock, where they were devoured by hordes of waiting dogs. That gave Spratt an idea. “Ship’s biscuits,” or hard tack, were the standard fare for sailors for centuries. Flour, water, and salt were mixed into a stiff dough, baked, and left to harden and dry. The biscuits were easily stored and had an extremely long shelf life, which was important in the days before refrigeration. And they looked a lot like today’s dog biscuits.

Spratt had the idea that he could make cheap, easy-to-serve biscuits and sell them to the growing number of urban dog owners. His recipe: a baked mixture of wheat, beet root, and vegetables bound together with beef blood. When Spratt’s Patent Meal Fibrine Dog Cakes came on the market in 1860, the pet-food industry was born. Spratt’s Dog Cakes were a hit in England, so in 1870 he took the business to New York…and began the American pet food industry.

A GROWING TREND

Others followed in Spratt’s footsteps:

• In the 1880s, a Boston veterinarian introduced A.C. Daniels’ Medicated Dog Bread.

• The F. H. Bennett Biscuit company opened in 1908, making biscuits shaped like bones. Bennett also made the first puppy food, and was the first to package different-sized kibble for different breeds.

• In 1931 the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) bought Bennett’s company and renamed the biscuits Milkbones. Then they hired 3,000 salesmen with the specific goal of getting Milkbones into food stores—and the national consciousness. For the first time, dog biscuits were part of regular grocery shopping.

• In 1922 Chappel Brothers of Rockford, Illinois, introduced Ken-L Ration, the first canned dog food in the United States. It was horse meat. In 1930 they started sponsoring a popular radio show,
The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin
. Ken-L Ration became such a success that by the mid-1930s they were breeding horses just for dog food and slaughtering 50,000 of them a year.

Many restaurants in France allow dogs and even offer special menus for them.

AW, DRY UP

By 1941 canned dog food had a 90% share of the market…until the United States entered World War II and the government started rationing tin and meat. Then dry dog food became popular again.