Witsec (32 page)

It was that hint of doubt that was on a WITSEC inspector’s conscience when he sent a known killer into a community. “You saw this witness as someone who deserved a chance to start over, not as the enemy. The real disappointment, of course, came when you discovered that someone you had helped had gotten into trouble. All your work—finding them a place to live, getting their kids into school, finding them a job—everything you had done to help them succeed suddenly didn’t matter. Sometimes you would spend years helping someone, only to have them get into trouble again. I would confront them and tell them exactly how disappointed I was. I’d say, ‘We put a lot of effort into helping you become a success, and you failed us.’ But then you would have a success. There are dozens and dozens of witnesses out there I relocated who have never gotten into trouble. I know witnesses who had children, and now they’re grandparents. I doubt their grandchildren have a clue about their grandparents’ past. We helped change three generations of lives because of what we did as inspectors. That’s what you focused on and strived for. That’s what made all of the
frustrations that came with the job worthwhile. At the end of the day, while your colleagues were locking bad guys behind bars, you had the quiet satisfaction of knowing there was a family living in the suburbs who used to be criminals and you helped them turn their life around.”

•   •   •

Shur felt WITSEC had reached a turning point in 1984, and so did the Senate subcommittee that drafted the Witness Reform Act. “The Federal Witness Protection Program has become so essential that it is difficult to imagine federal law enforcement without it. That is a high and well-deserved compliment to pay a program that is only fourteen years old—and a program that is replete with the potential for many problems of great magnitude,” the subcommittee wrote in its final report.

“We had reached a point where no one, either inside or outside of the government, was arguing anymore about whether or not this was a worthwhile program,” said Shur. “They might disagree with who was allowed into the program, but WITSEC was here to stay.”

T
his is how it happens. You’re cooking dinner. Your son is playing with Carmine, the kid from next door, and your baby is taking a nap. Your sister has stopped by and you’re gossiping about the woman who is having sex with this Jewish guy who owns a corner deli and there’s a knock, and when you open the door two men show you badges and your life suddenly ends. I mean, I had tomato sauce simmering. I knew Sal was thinking about cooperating with the cops. The last time I’d seen him in jail, he’d told me he was going to be down a long, long time, like fifteen or twenty. He was worried. I’d never seen him so worried. He tells me there is talk going around about him, you know, and that ain’t good. You see, even if you aren’t going to rat, if someone thinks you are, then you’re going to end up being whacked and you might not ever have said a word to the cops. A guy like Tony, he isn’t going to take chances with you, and even if you knew him since you were babies and you had first communion together, it don’t matter. “Business is business.” That’s what Sal used to say all the time. Of course, he also used to say, “No one gets whacked unless they deserve it, because they got greedy or screwed up.”

One of the U.S. marshals introduces himself as Larry and he says real polite-like that we got to go, like
right now—just toss some clothes for a beach-type resort into a bag and go. He says Sal is in protective custody, which means everybody in jail knows he’s a rat, which means Tony may be sending guys over right now to whack us. This other marshal, he keeps looking outside, like he is making sure it is safe. Anna, she’s my only sister, and me send Carmine home and start grabbing swimsuits, T-shirts, baby stuff, and I wake up Marie, my two-year-old. I come out of the bedroom and Anna is arguing with the marshals because they are saying she and our grandfather have to come, too, since Tony might kill them to get to Sal. You see, Sal was close to Tony. He knows a lot and they figure Tony is going to start whacking people just to make sure no one else decides to flip over and start talking. Tony has got to keep control of his crew.

Anna lives with our grandfather a few buildings down and the marshal says there is another marshal down there getting him. Anna and I just looked at each other. We were thinking: “The Captain moving? Oh yeah, like
that
is going to happen.” We call our grandfather the Captain, everyone does, because he wears a blue sailor’s cap. He has every day since World War I. The Captain spent his entire life in our neighborhood. We all had. But I don’t think I had ever seen him outside five blocks from here. Once we asked if he wanted to go into Manhattan. He says, “Why? They got something I can’t get here?” His daddy came directly over on the boat. Everyone knows the Captain. He’s all the family me and Anna got. Our folks are dead and Sal’s mom is dead and his dad married some woman in New Jersey and Sal hasn’t talked to him in years.

Anna is telling the marshal she isn’t going to go because she is about finished with beauty school, and the phone rings. Everyone looks at each other and I finally
answer it. It’s a marshal. He speaks to Larry. Then Larry tells me the Captain is refusing to go. By this time, Marie is crying and John, my four-year-old, is getting restless and Anna says, “Okay, I’ll go, but I got to be back tomorrow for class,” and the marshals are just trying to get us the hell out of there. So we all head downstairs with these marshals looking out into the hallway first and checking out the street. When they give us the all-clear signal, we come dashing down the front steps to a van they got running there and my neighbor, Mrs. Bonavolonta, is sitting on her stoop—she always sits there watching things—and she calls out, “Hey Angela, can you get me some salt if you are going to the market?” It’s hard for her to walk because of her arthritis so she’s always asking me to run errands. Here I am, running for my life, with Marie crying and John tagging along and Anna carrying suitcases, and Mrs. Bonavolonta is asking me to bring her back some salt!

The marshals drive us down to where Anna and the Captain live and I race upstairs, still carrying Marie, and try to talk to him, but the Captain says he is staying so I signed some stupid paper for the marshals about how they tried but he refused to go and Anna comes and gets in the van with her suitcase and her puppy. He is part German shepherd and part Labrador retriever and John loves him but Marie is scared and starts fussing again. What a sight! We’re all crowded in this van with these two marshals and there’s another car behind us with another two marshals and we are all afraid Tony’s crew is going to come racing up and open fire any second. Meanwhile, all around us, life is going on as normal. People are walking their dogs, talking to neighbors, and us hurrying around. I don’t think I really understood what leaving meant until we pulled away. There wasn’t time to think and then I looked through the glass and
there is the Captain standing on the porch stoop watching us go. For godsakes, how safe is that? The Captain is angry, but he has tears in his eyes and suddenly I am blubbering like a baby and then Anna starts and the kids begin and even the dog starts whimpering and these marshals are trying to get us quiet and the next thing you know, we are pulling out of the neighborhood where I lived my entire life—twenty-seven years—never having gone no further than New Jersey and the shore, and I am thinking, “What the hell is going to happen now?” and I am worried about the Captain being shot and suddenly I remember I had promised to help Mrs. Rizzo at a baby shower she is giving for her daughter-in-law tomorrow and how I had already bought a cute little baby outfit and then I realize I didn’t have time to get any of the photographs of my parents from the bedroom. And then I started laughing and Anna says, “What’s so funny?” and I am laughing so hard I can’t even tell her because, you know, about a week before Sal got pinched by the cops, I had decided to begin putting away money just in case there was an emergency and I had five hundred bucks hidden in a coffee can up on the top shelf in my kitchen. I had thought about spending it a lot of times, but no, I kept saving it, and now it was there and I figured I’d never see it again, and for some reason that struck me as just being really funny, like a good joke on me, you know? I was a wreck.

We looked at this dump and were in shock. There was some nice rooms there, but they didn’t give them to us, and the owners, they treated us like trash. We were the only guests because it was out of season. My room had a pullout couch and a bed and was connected to Anna’s room. The bathroom was filthy, the sheets and blankets smelled, the dresser drawers were filled with mildew. But John liked it because it was at the beach, and the dog seemed okay. That night a marshal stayed in a room next door, and me and Anna could hear him talking on the telephone because the walls were so thin and we hear him say, “Hey, I’m all alone out here! What if some heavy-duty shit goes down?” We just looked at each other. I mean, if this guy is scared and he’s a big marshal, then what are us two women going to do? Sal had given me a pistol—a little .32 automatic—a long time ago and I had stuck it in my bag without the marshals seeing me and I got it out. Anna says, “Can you shoot?” I said, “Hey, if Tony and his goons come crashing through that door, I’m going to begin blasting and not ask questions. Just hit the floor because I don’t aim real well.” Anna laughed. We both needed a drink.

I didn’t sleep that night. I just sat there with my pistol thinking about Sal and the Captain and the kids and what was going to happen to us. The marshals said we could never go back to Brooklyn. Never. I’d thought they were joking at first. I couldn’t believe it. How can you be expected to just pick up like that and leave? I got really angry at Sal for being so goddamn stupid. I was glad my parents were dead. They would have been ashamed. They had never liked Sal. They hated me dating him. They said he was Mafia trash. But I liked how he walked through the neighborhood. He was someone important because he was part of Tony’s crew, you know? We’d go out and people treated us with real respect. Sal
never paid for a dinner. He always gave big tips. When we spent time with Tony, it was like we were royalty. Tony ran everything. I was lying in bed thinking when suddenly Anna comes into the room and asks if I am sleeping. “I was just thinking,” she says. “You think Mrs. Bonavolonta is still waiting for the salt?” We both giggled.

The next morning, Anna and I got into this terrible fight. I was talking about how worried I was and suddenly she says, “Hey, what about me? I’m not even married to Sal but my life is ruined.” She had been doing real well in beauty school. Just like me, she’d grown up in the neighborhood. I hadn’t thought about her and how this was messing things up. We didn’t speak all day. Finally, after dinner I apologized and we had a good cry. We were sitting outside when this car comes down the road directly in front of the motel and dims its lights. There’s this young guy in there and he sees us and pulls into the motel and asks us if there is a bar anywhere close. Anyone could see that nothing was open but he sort of hangs around for a few minutes. Anna got his license tag number and we hurried down to the motel office, since we didn’t even have a phone in our room, and called this emergency number that the marshals had given us. The marshal who was supposed to be watching us had gone into town to eat dinner. About three hours later, he comes to our rooms steaming mad. He has gotten chewed out for leaving us and he thinks we got him into trouble on purpose because we don’t like him. You can tell from his comments he thinks Sal is a piece of garbage who should be locked up forever and you can tell he isn’t happy about being stuck out here guarding us. He thinks we are lying about the car, but when he checks, he finds out it belongs to some guy who I guess was trying to pick up a date. The next day, the marshal packed
up and left without saying a word. He left us there wondering what was going to happen and not knowing what to do. It was unreal.

Later that same day, a car pulled up and out steps the Captain. He says he started getting threatening telephone calls the same day we left. His friends who he’d played chess with stopped playing with him. Who could blame them? They were afraid. People would leave whenever he went to get a cup of coffee. These were people he’d known all his life and they were scared to talk to him. He told me he would never talk to Sal again. Not another word. We put him in Anna’s room. I’d never seen him so sad.