Witsec (17 page)

Shur thought the best way to resolve the dispute was by requiring Rochelle to hire an attorney and face Leonhard in a domestic relations court. That way, a judge used to handling custody complaints could decide what was in the best interest of the children. But when a hearing was held in Buffalo on Martoche’s motion, the Justice Department elected to take a hard-line, no-cooperation approach. In an affidavit given to the court, Kennelly wrote: “It is my professional and personal judgment … that to divulge the whereabouts of the aforesaid children to anyone in Buffalo would seriously jeopardize their personal safety.” While the
judge hearing the case said he felt sympathetic toward Leonhard, he ruled against him. He explained that Kennelly had not “abused his power as the strike force chief” when he promised Calabrese anonymity, and since Kennelly had not done anything illegal, there was no reason for the court to require him to reveal where the children were being hidden.

Martoche and Leonhard had lost in court, but they were winning in the public arena. Lee Coppola, an investigative reporter for the
Buffalo Evening News
and a former high school friend of Martoche’s, had taken up Leonhard’s cause, and angry letters denouncing the government began appearing in the newspaper.

Martoche appealed the Buffalo judge’s decision to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but it too ruled against him. “Kennelly acted in good faith,” the New York–based court wrote, “and having found no violation of federal law, we need not attempt to indicate how we might have resolved this difficult problem … the solution of which calls for the wisdom of Solomon.”

By now it was 1973 and Leonhard had not seen his children for six years. Martoche, meanwhile, had incurred thousands of dollars’ worth of unpaid legal bills. Nonetheless, he appealed the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. “This is why I had gone to law school,” Martoche recalled, “to argue a case that would make a difference.” The court declined to hear the case. Having exhausted his appeals, Martoche tried other tactics. He filed a civil suit against Kennelly, Shur, and the Justice Department seeking $40 million in damages for Leonhard’s loss. He also persuaded Congressman Jack Kemp, who represented Buffalo, to introduce a private bill in Congress on Leonhard’s behalf. If passed, it would require the Justice Department to tell Leonhard the location of his children
or pay him a million dollars in compensation for his heartache. Continuing to turn up the heat, Martoche had Leonhard write to the White House after reading that President Gerald Ford was an adopted child who had never seen his real father while growing up. “Mr. President, you must know how I feel,” Leonhard wrote. “I worry about my children very much, their being with this man who gangsters want to kill. Plus, what about me? Don’t I have any rights?” Lee Coppola published a copy of Leonhard’s letter, whipping up still more public support for Leonhard.

While Shur was aware of the growing public pressure, it was the private bill that Kemp had introduced that worried him. “I did not want someone to get their congressman to pass a private bill saying that we had to do this or that every time we relocated a witness.” Just when the dispute seemed deadlocked, Rochelle telephoned Martoche in 1975. “It was the fourth of July and I was having an outdoor barbeque,” Martoche recalled. “I answered the phone and she said, ‘Hello, this is Rochelle. Tom can see the kids.’ I was stunned.” She was willing to send the children to visit him in Buffalo if he would pay for their tickets. Martoche assumed the growing public pressure had gotten to her. Coppola’s newspaper stories had been distributed by the wire services across the country, and a Hollywood packager had put together a book-and-movie deal for Leonhard. Author Leslie Waller had been hired to write a book, and MGM had cast James Caan to play Leonhard in a movie. Both were titled
Hide in Plain Sight
. Martoche suspected Rochelle was worried about how she was going to be portrayed.

Leonhard quickly arranged for his children to fly to Buffalo. He invited Coppola to be there when they arrived. The children said their mother had called
them into her kitchen five months earlier, opened a shoebox filled with newspaper clippings, and revealed to them for the first time that Leonhard was their biological father. “I didn’t want to believe her,” Karen, age fourteen, told Coppola. “I wrote my real name—Karen Leonhard—for the first time the other day.” Incredibly, Rochelle had managed to wipe out much of what both children remembered about their father. Mike, who was fifteen but had been seven when the family had fled Buffalo, said he only remembered “a man who used to come and pick us up and take us places, but every time I asked Mother about him, she said he was just a friend.” The children returned home to their mother a few days later, and although they kept in contact periodically with their father after that first reunion, Martoche recalled later that the parental bond between them had been so badly fractured that it never healed.

After the reunion, Coppola wrote a five-part newspaper series that described what had happened to Calabrese and Rochelle after they fled Buffalo and then Michigan. Rochelle had gotten a job in a Reno bank and Calabrese was working as a security guard at a casino, a job that required him to carry a gun. He had gotten a permit without difficulty by using false credentials. Martoche was incensed when he was told the couple lived in Reno. “I would bet that every gangster from western New York has been to Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas in the last couple of years,” he complained. “Yet the U.S. government insisted that telling Tom Leonhard where his children were would put Calabrese in mortal danger! What crap!”

The fact that it was the Buffalo strike force that had hidden Rochelle and her children without telling Leonhard didn’t seem to matter when Waller’s book
was released in 1976 and the movie began playing in theaters. The government’s witness program was cast as a heartless bureaucratic operation run amok.

“Privately, I felt what had happened to Leonhard was absolutely terrible,” Shur recalled, “and I was determined that it wouldn’t happen again, so I insisted that we begin notifying noncustodial parents whenever their children entered WITSEC. I wanted these parents to have an opportunity to visit their children in a safe place arranged by the marshals.” Years later, Sal Martoche became a federal prosecutor, and when he attended a meeting at the Justice Department, Shur sought him out. “I told Martoche,” he recalled, “that I had changed our policy because of the Leonhard case, and he was surprised. Up until that moment, he hadn’t realized that he actually had won his point.”

•   •   •

At the same time Shur was coming under fire from the public because of the Leonhard case, a second ghost from the past materialized. Gerald Zelmanowitz, the demanding witness who had testified against New Jersey gangster Angelo “Gyp” DeCarlo, had done quite well in California on his own after leaving WITSEC. Within two years, he had become president of a small dress manufacturing company in San Francisco, where he was known by his WITSEC alias, Paul Maris. Sales zoomed from $1.5 million to $8 million a year after he launched a daring ad campaign in
Glamour
and
Mademoiselle
magazines that caught the spirit of the early 1970s and turned his company into the hottest label in women’s knitted tops and clingy dresses. One ad showed a couple bragging about how they were living together without being married. “We do not have affairs nor are we adulterers,” the caption read. Maris
rewarded himself with a new Rolls-Royce and his wife, Lillian, with a Mercedes. They moved into an elaborate rural retreat, filled it with antiques, and socialized with San Francisco’s elite. When asked about his past, Maris bragged that he had once owned a manufacturing firm in Kobe, Japan, and radio stations in Cincinnati and Cleveland, “facts” that he had added to the fake background the government had created for him.

Had Maris been willing to live a less flashy lifestyle, his past might have remained secret, but that was not to be. Although the clothing company’s sales were firecracker hot, its financial backers were not earning the sort of profit they had anticipated, and they suspected that Maris was squandering profits on unnecessary perks. They decided to remove him as president but keep him in charge of sales and promotions. Maris refused to step down, and the company’s three hundred employees threatened to strike if he was fired. Eventually the investors sent in twenty off-duty police officers under the command of Hal Lipset, a well-known local private detective, to forcibly evict Maris from the company’s manufacturing plant. When the investors went through Maris’s books, they discovered he had put thirteen members of his wife’s family on the company payroll. But what really stumped them were records that revealed that Maris, Lillian, her parents, Lillian’s daughter, Cynthia, and her husband, Norman, had consecutive Social Security numbers. How could six members of the same family, each a different age, have sequential numbers?

Unaware that the investors had found a clue to his past, Maris filed a face-saving $5 million lawsuit against them for besmirching his name. This prompted private investigator Lipset to dig deeper into Maris’s past and to discover that his résumé was fake. There was no record
of a Paul J. Maris being born in Philadelphia or attending high school there. He was not on the roster of retired army officers. Still, Lipset didn’t know what Maris was concealing until an ex-cop read about the $5 million lawsuit and offered to sell the detective information for $2,000. The ex-cop said he had overheard a deputy marshal bragging at a cocktail party that socialite Paul Maris was actually a relocated federal witness who had testified against the mob in New Jersey. His real name was something like “Manlowitz.” A search of back issues of
The New York Times
for New Jersey Mafia trials led Lipset to Zelmanowitz. It was at this point in 1973 that he and the investors warned Maris that they were about to put out a press release exposing his past life as Gerald Zelmanowitz.

“It was a Saturday when Zelmanowitz called me at home,” said Shur. “He wanted protection, so I called the Marshals Service as soon as he told me what was happening.” Deputies arrived within the hour to protect him. Shur also informed the IRS that Zelmanowitz’s cover was about to be blown. Although Zelmanowitz did not know this at the time, Shur had been helping the IRS keep tabs on him the entire time he had been rebuilding his life in San Francisco. Its agents were tracking him because they still believed he had millions in cash stashed in Europe. The IRS now decided to file a $1.7 million lien against him for back taxes that it claimed he owed on profits he had earned years earlier as a criminal. It froze all his bank accounts and seized his home, furniture, cars, and other possessions.

Zelmanowitz was outraged that the IRS was choosing his weakest moment to “hound him” about unpaid taxes, especially since he claimed the Justice Department had agreed to wipe out any tax debts he had owed in return for his testimony against the mob.
He also found himself in the awkward position of having to trust Shur to protect him, having now learned that Shur was helping the IRS in its investigation. He demanded that the Marshals Service not tell Shur or the IRS where he was being hidden. Shur had no objection, so deputies flew Zelmanowitz, his wife, and her parents to Rhode Island, where deputy John Partington took charge of creating new aliases for them and finding a different city where they could live.

Through his attorneys, Zelmanowitz then filed a $12.5 million suit against Shur and WITSEC on the grounds that he had been given a faulty alias. “I came home,” recalled Shur, “and told Miriam I was being sued. She asked me how much and when I told her she broke out laughing. She said, ‘If it was for three thousand dollars or even three hundred, I’d be concerned, but this is ridiculous.’

“I didn’t have much sympathy for Zelmanowitz,” Shur said. “We’d told him to keep a low profile, and instead he named a company after himself and embellished his résumé, adding a number of conspicuously inflated claims, such as owning radio stations and a manufacturing plant in Japan. What I didn’t like was his blaming us.” Shur said they had given the family consecutive Social Security numbers because Zelmanowitz had assured them that the only family members who would be working were he and his daughter and son-in-law, and they wouldn’t be working together. Social Security numbers were used much less widely then, so there was no reason to think this would matter. In fact, Shur noted, “Zelmanowitz had set himself up for being exposed.”

After months of bitter legal wrangling, a judge concluded that the amount of taxes that Zelmanowitz owed the IRS roughly canceled out the value of the
property that it had seized from him. Meanwhile, a federal judge threw out his lawsuit against Shur, ruling that WITSEC couldn’t be held legally responsible if a witness’s past was inadvertently revealed.

But this was far from the end of the problems. Before Zelmanowitz was relocated again, he signed a contract with CBS news reporter Fred Graham, who wanted to write a book about WITSEC.
The Alias Program
, which was published in 1976, focused on the Zelmanowitz case and his charges, and it blistered Shur and his program. Its publisher billed it as a “remarkable exposé of an all but unknown government program conceived in duplicity, contemptuous of Congress, rife with bureaucratic arrogance and bungling.” Dozens of newspapers published flattering reviews, and several openly criticized Shur. The
Washington Star
noted sharply that “the Justice Department official in charge, whom Graham portrays as the villain of the book, is still running the program today.”

“I genuinely like and respect Fred Graham,” Shur recalled later, “and I thought he tried to do a credible job writing about WITSEC. But I also knew his book was seriously flawed because I could not allow myself to discuss individual cases with him, especially cases that involved witnesses we still were protecting. Because of these constraints, I hurt myself and Graham by not giving him all the facts. This also gave Zelmanowitz an advantage, because he could make statements without my challenging them or explaining why we had done what we did. Fred and I also disagreed philosophically about WITSEC and how much help the government should give witnesses after they testify. He wrote in the copy of the book that he gave
me this inscription: ‘To Gerry—good man, wrong program?’ ”