Witsec (15 page)

The deputies’ courage won the Marshals Service
new respect, and McShane quickly capitalized on it. He convinced the Justice Department to remove the authority to hire and fire deputies from the politically appointed marshals and to make the deputies federal civil service employees, a move that required them to meet minimal standards. This created an awkward chain of command. The deputies still reported to individual U.S. marshals, but because they were federal employees, they were obligated to answer to McShane, too.

McShane lost his White House backing following Robert Kennedy’s resignation after JFK’s assassination. Although he stayed on as chief until his death in 1968, the Marshals Service floundered. Matters did not improve under Nixon’s choice to replace him. The tenure of retired army general Carl C. Turner was brief. He had seen the job as a stepping-stone that would allow him to eventually replace the FBI’s aging Hoover, but soon after he took charge, he was accused of stealing government firearms and forced to resign. Nixon appointed an interim director until January 1970, when Wayne B. Colburn, the U.S. marshal from San Diego and a veteran police officer popular with California Republicans, was named director.

Colburn hit the ground running. A series of hijackings of commercial airliners and armed conflicts with the American Indian Movement, known as AIM, had pushed the marshals back onto the front pages. Colburn resolved the air piracy threat by assigning armed “sky marshals” to ride on key flights disguised as passengers, but his battles with AIM were not so easy to fix. They would continue for three years, climaxing in a deadly armed standoff at Wounded Knee, a village on the Lakota reservation in South Dakota that AIM militants seized in February 1973. During the
seventy-one-day confrontation, two Indians were killed and a deputy marshal was paralyzed in gun battles. Colburn eventually negotiated a peaceful end to the uprising. Not surprisingly, he had little time for or interest in WITSEC during those early years.

William Hall, who was Colburn’s deputy director, would later recall his boss’s reaction when he was given the WITSEC assignment. “Colburn returned from a meeting at the Justice Department and told me, ‘I think this whole protection program is a mistake and I don’t want to do it, but no one else wants to do it, either, so it is going to be our baby.’ We all knew it was going to be a can of worms, and we had absolutely no training or extra money. It was like asking lawyers to perform brain surgery with a can opener.”

Colburn assigned the task of overseeing WITSEC to one of his top aides, Reis Kash, a newcomer to the Marshals Service with an impressive military past and an impeccable reputation for honesty. He had become a deputy less than two years earlier after a twenty-year stint in the army, where he had risen through the ranks to become the service’s top criminal investigator. Besides being the first criminal investigator sent to interview soldiers involved in the controversial My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, Kash had gained national attention by unmasking a gang of ruthless army officials who were operating an international crime ring. He had become suspicious of them and had just launched his own investigation when he was ordered by his commanding officer to drop the potentially embarrassing probe. Ignoring the order, he kept digging, at great risk to his career and at times his own life, and his findings eventually led to a congressional hearing and the arrest of the gang, which the media dubbed the Khaki Mafia.

Kash had been brought on board at the Marshals Service to investigate the death of a witness in a Baltimore case, not involving WITSEC, after the witness was fatally shot while duck hunting with the deputy in charge of guarding him. He had been shocked to discover how far behind the Marshals Service was when compared to the military police and the army’s criminal investigators. “Not much had changed from the old Wild West days,” said Kash. “The deputies had simply substituted automobiles for horses. It was a very politically driven operation and a scandalously cheap one.” Marshals used their personal automobiles to transport federal prisoners so they could collect mileage payments from the government as well as a per diem payment for food. One deputy was notorious for buying cans of chili and heating them on the manifold of his car so he could pocket the entire per diem when he traveled. In the Baltimore case, Kash had decided in the end that there was no evidence that the deputy had intentionally shot the witness. However, the incident prompted him to write an instructional manual for deputies, based on his military training, that explained some basic dos and don’ts for guarding witnesses and prisoners. When Colburn looked around at his small headquarters staff, Kash seemed the obvious choice to become the service’s first WITSEC chief.

“I was delighted when Kash was put in charge,” Shur recalled, “because I knew he was a no-nonsense, take-charge administrator, but it quickly became clear to me that he was not going to be given the support that he needed.” The Marshals Service had estimated it would need to hire a hundred deputies to run WITSEC efficiently, but Kash got none—not a single new deputy was hired. Nor did he receive a penny more to handle
the additional costs of protecting and relocating witnesses.

“Director Colburn never wanted the Marshal’s Service to be in charge of WITSEC, so it was simply not a high priority with us or with the top brass at the Justice Department,” deputy director William Hall later candidly recalled. “Yes, it was a high priority to Gerald Shur, but whenever Colburn met with the attorney general and his people to ask for money and more manpower, they told him that our first job was to protect federal judges, then deal with AIM, and then, after a dozen other assignments, at the very bottom of the list, came protecting witnesses. It was
always
at the very bottom.”

Despite a lack of staff and money, Kash safely relocated 92 witnesses and 156 of their dependents during 1971, the first full year the program was under his direction. He did it by demanding, cajoling, and sometimes begging deputies and U.S. marshals for help. He also tried to create guidelines for the program. He asked the ninety-four U.S. marshals to contact state offices in their judicial districts so deputies there could obtain driver’s licenses and other documents for witnesses. Kash also asked marshals to contact local chambers of commerce to develop area job banks. Few marshals, however, followed through with his requests, in part because they were afraid Kash would relocate witnesses in their jurisdictions. “They didn’t want any mobsters put into their districts,” Kash said, “and I couldn’t really blame them.”

Shur realized this. “There was a lot of resistance by marshals and deputies to what I was doing,” he later recalled. “Most deputies had joined the Marshals Service because they wanted to catch criminals, and now we were sending them out to buy groceries for the
crooks.” During a meeting with Kash, one deputy had declared that he was not going to die by “stopping a bullet for some scumbag witness.”

“If you take the government’s dollar to protect a witness, you have to be prepared to take the bullet whether it is for a scumbag or the president of the United States,” Kash told him. “You don’t take a bullet for the mafioso, you take it because you are a professional.” These were gallant words, but many deputies remained unconvinced. Deputy director Hall would later recall that it wasn’t just deputies who felt uneasy about WITSEC. “A lot of judges called me with questions about the morality of using mobsters to testify against other mobsters and then relocating them in communities with new names and identities,” Hall said. “They considered it buying testimony, which was illegal, and they really didn’t like us rewarding these guys.”

Nonetheless, such obstacles did not stop Shur’s program from booming. Its first mob star was Vincent Charles Teresa, better known as “Fat Vinnie” because he weighed more than three hundred pounds. Although he was not a made member of the LCN, he had grown up in a Mafia family and had spent twenty-eight years working for New England crime boss Raymond Patriarca. Teresa claimed he had stolen more than $10 million for himself and another $150 million for his mob buddies by dealing in stolen and forged Wall Street securities.

Kash assigned John Partington to keep Teresa alive. It was an ironic assignment because Teresa had been one of the hit men who had been sent four years earlier to kill Joe Barboza while Partington was shielding him on Thacher’s Island. “I had you in my rifle sights once,” Teresa boasted to the deputy. With
Partington now watching his back, Teresa crisscrossed the country testifying in nineteen different mob trials, helping convict fifty gangsters. He also made a special appearance before the McClellan Committee in Washington and during a televised hearing entertained the senators with his quirky sense of humor. At one point he was asked about a loan shark company that he ran called Piranha Inc.

“Why did you call it by that name?” a senator asked.

“Because if youse was late in paying me, I stuck your hand in a tank of piranhas I kept in my office,” Teresa said, deadpan.

Between trials, Partington often hid Teresa inside a safe house that the deputy had established in Smithfield, a suburb of Providence. The Victorian house had been equipped with closed-circuit television cameras and electronic sensors that would trigger alarms if anyone entered the yard. “John Partington is the closest thing the federal government has to a thug on the right side of the law,” Teresa told reporters after one trial. “He knows everybody who is anybody in the mob and he knows their habits, where they are, what they do, and how they think.” Partington managed to foil several attempts to kill Teresa, including a plot that involved dropping sticks of dynamite down a chimney at the courthouse while he was testifying.

Teresa relished his mob star status. In 1972, he invited Kash to a Christmas party at a house outside Washington. “We were hiding Teresa there with his family, and when I arrived, I was stunned to find thirty people at this party,” Kash recalled. “Vinnie began introducing me around, and every one of these guys was connected somehow to the mob! Here this guy is with a price on his head and he’s throwing a mob party! It
was nuts! Vinnie served lobsters that the superintendent of the state police in Massachusetts had gotten flown in for him. He had a Christmas tree that cost seventy bucks, which was almost half of what many deputies earned each week. Everyone was suspicious of my wife and me—we stuck out—until Vinnie says, ‘Hey everyone, this is my protector, my witness protection guy,’ and then everyone relaxed. It was surreal. All the men talked about what federal prisons served the best food and which prisons they liked the best, and then a few of them got up and started singing arias from Italian operas.”

By 1973, Teresa had run out of stories to tell. Prosecutors no longer needed him to testify, but he didn’t want to leave the spotlight. “All of our mob witnesses loved the attention they got,” said Kash. “They were celebrities but only for a moment, and that was something they didn’t understand.” When Kash began making plans to relocate Teresa, the mobster decided to up the ante. He told prosecutors that he could deliver a prize that none of them had been able to grab: the legendary Meyer Lansky, who along with Salvatore Lucania—better known as Charles “Lucky” Luciano—was credited with creating the American Mafia. Teresa claimed he had personally delivered bags of mob cash to Lansky in person at his Miami home. Teresa’s word was good enough to get the seventy-two-year-old gangster indicted in Florida. The trial attracted international coverage and quickly proved to be an embarrassment for federal prosecutors and Teresa. When the government’s star witness was called to testify, he couldn’t remember Lansky’s Miami address or describe his house. Even more humiliating, Lansky had proof that he was in Boston recovering from a double hernia operation on the day Teresa swore he met with him.
Lansky was acquitted and Teresa’s credibility was shot. He was finished as a witness.

Because Teresa had testified in public so many times, Shur suggested the Marshals Service alter his appearance by sending him to a hospital to lose weight. “The forced diet worked and he looked like a different person after he shed the pounds,” said Shur, “but as soon as the deputies picked him up at the hospital, Teresa had them stop at the first doughnut shop he saw so he could buy a couple of dozen to eat. He was soon back to his old size.”

Teresa was forty-three years old and needed a job to support his wife and children, but no one had a clue what to do with him. “Vinnie had held only one legitimate job in his life,” Kash said. “He had been hired by an uncle to drive a grocery truck, and he had hijacked that truck.” A staff member on the McClellan Committee came to WITSEC’s rescue by introducing Teresa to Thomas C. Renner, a reporter for the Long Island newspaper
Newsday
. Together, they sold the rights to Teresa’s autobiography to Doubleday. The mobster’s cut was $175,000, a significant sum at the time. His story,
My Life in the Mafia
, was published shortly after the release of Francis Ford Coppola’s movie
The Godfather
, and the book became a best-seller.

Shur was against allowing witnesses to appear on television shows because it made them more recognizable and therefore more difficult to hide, but Partington ignored him and took Teresa to Los Angeles so he could publicize his book on a nationally televised talk show. During the flight, an excited admirer approached Teresa.

“I know you!” she exclaimed. “I saw you on television!”

Partington grimaced. The last thing he wanted was for everyone on the aircraft to know Teresa was on board.

“You’re Minnesota Fats, the pool player,” the woman continued. “Can I have your autograph?”

Teresa, whose bulk filled two airplane seats, signed a slip of paper. By the time the flight landed, he had given autographs to nearly every passenger on board and regretfully turned down a request by the flight crew to give a demonstration of his pool skills in the airport’s recreation room. Partington kept quiet during the charade.

Kash relocated Teresa in a seaport town, where the government bought him a fish store to run. “Within a few weeks, other fish dealers were complaining because someone was breaking their store windows and doing other nasty tricks to slow down their businesses,” said Kash. “We had to move him.” Before leaving town, Teresa sold the refrigeration units in his store and pocketed the cash even though the machines were rented. The government next helped Teresa buy a motel and bar in El Paso, Texas, but that didn’t last long either, because he got drunk one night, climbed on the bar, and started telling everyone who he really was.