Witsec

by Pete Earley

  Even by the mob’s twisted standards, the illiterate Magaddino was considered vicious. The most shocking example the strike force uncovered was the 1961 killing of Albert Agueci, who along with his brother, Vito, was a drug trafficker. The two brothers had been paying Magaddino for protection from the police, but the crime boss turned his back on them when they were arrested for their drug activities. Albert Agueci threatened Magaddino, saying that if he didn’t use his connections to free them, Agueci would squeal to the FBI about the crime boss’s operations. Magaddino ordered him killed. Albert’s badly burned body was found a few days later in a barn. An estimated forty pounds of flesh had been carved from it. His arms and legs had been broken, his jaw shattered, and half of his teeth knocked out. All of this had apparently been done while he was still alive. He had then been strangled with a clothesline and his remains doused with gasoline and set on fire.

  The strike force spent its first three months in Buffalo buttering up local agents who resented its intrusion into their jurisdiction. “The local Bureau of Narcotics agent wouldn’t even talk to me,” recalled Peloquin. The special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo office was more belligerent. “He wrote letters criticizing our every move to Director Hoover, who then sent them to the attorney general, who then sent them to me,” said Peloquin. “I adopted a policy: If he wrote ten pages complaining about us, our answer had to be eleven pages long. We always wanted our replies to be one more page than his letters.”

  Unlike the local agents, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were eager to cooperate because the Magaddino crime family also operated over the border in Canada. It sent a Mountie to work with the strike force, and one day he volunteered to sweep its offices for electronic bugs. Sure enough, he found a microphone hidden in a conference room, but it hadn’t been planted by the Magaddino mob. “It belonged to the FBI,” recalled Donald Campbell, another strike force attorney.

  With few local sources, the strike force’s investigation sputtered and stalled. Then it got a lucky break. Sam Giambrone, a Buffalo police sergeant, told the strike force that a Magaddino crime member might be willing to cooperate, but only if certain conditions were met. Pascal “Paddy” Calabrese, who was serving a five-year prison sentence for a daring daylight robbery in the city hall treasurer’s office, wanted out of prison. He also wanted his girlfriend and her children moved out of Buffalo and given new identities so Magaddino couldn’t find them. He was willing to deal only with Giambrone and federal agents because he knew Magaddino had several Buffalo cops on his payroll. Initially, Giambrone had taken Calabrese’s offer to the FBI, but its agents said their office wasn’t equipped to relocate a family. His next try had been the strike force, and Peloquin jumped at the chance.

  Calabrese was angry at the mob, he said, because Magaddino had abandoned him as soon as he was arrested, just as he had the dope-dealing Agueci brothers. The difference was that Calabrese was a made LCN member. “A basic tenet of the LCN was that if a member got into trouble, the crime family was supposed to take care of his family while he was doing time in prison,” said Peloquin, “but Magaddino was a cheap old man.” Sergeant Giambrone had given money from his own pocket to Calabrese’s destitute girlfriend, Rochelle, so she could buy food and presents for her children at Christmastime, and it was that generous act that had finally swayed Calabrese.

  In a secret meeting on February 27, 1967, Calabrese identified every major criminal in the Magaddino family and told the strike force about numerous crimes the Buffalo LCN had committed. Although he couldn’t tie Magaddino directly to these crimes, he was able to implicate his top two underlings: Freddy Randaccio and Patsy Natarelli. Both were juicy targets. Randaccio was believed to be the murderer who had tortured and executed Agueci, and Natarelli was known for sticking an ice pick into the ears of borrowers who had gotten behind in their repayments to Magaddino’s loan sharks. Convicting them would deal a major blow to the Magaddino organization. Just as important, it would prove that the strike force concept worked. But first Calabrese’s girlfriend and children had to be spirited out of Buffalo.

  The strike force moved fast. “We called Attorney General Ramsey Clark, and he got us permission from the Department of Defense to hide the family on a military base,” Thomas Kennelly recalled. Racing to Rochelle’s apartment, the team hustled her and her children into unmarked black cars and sped away. Their final destination was the tiny Strategic Air Command post outside Presque Isle, Maine, where Rochelle was given an alias and housed in a bungalow usually reserved for married naval officers. Her neighbors were told that her husband was a marine pilot on a secret overseas mission. Even the base commander didn’t know the truth. Simultaneously, Calabrese was taken from his cell in the Elmira Reformatory under heavy guard and brought to the “Valachi Suite” inside the federal prison in La Tuna, Texas, for safekeeping. Only the warden knew his true identity.

  The strike force was now geared to arrest Randaccio and Natarelli, but on what charge? The most damaging information Calabrese had offered was thin at best. He claimed they had once sent him to California to rob an armored car and steal some precious gems, but neither man had gone with him. In fact, Calabrese himself had been called home before he could commit the robberies. Since the mobsters hadn’t gone to California and no one had been robbed, what possible crime had they committed? It was Kennelly who came up with an answer. The armored car that Calabrese had targeted routinely collected a bag of cash and checks from the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Since most of the checks were written by hotel guests on out-of-town banks, Kennelly contended that Randaccio and Natarelli had violated federal interstate commerce laws. According to Section 1951 of Title 18 in the U.S. Code, better known as the Hobbs Act, anyone who “obstructs, delays or affects commerce or the movement of any article or commodity in commerce by robbery or extortion, or conspires to do so” is breaking the law. “Checks are part of commerce,” Kennelly reasoned, “and a robbery would have clearly affected their movement.” The fact that the armored car was never robbed didn’t matter, he explained; it was enough that Randaccio and Natarelli had conspired to rob it. At least that was Kennelly’s argument. It was clearly a long shot, but it was the only case the strike force could make. It helped that the Hobbs Act was a federal law. This meant the case would be heard in a federal courtroom before a federal judge, completely bypassing the local district attorney and district court. The mob wouldn’t be able to pull strings.

  As soon as Randaccio and Natarelli were arrested, the Magaddino family began hunting Calabrese and Rochelle. Rumors surfaced that Magaddino was offering $100,000 to anyone who could find them. Mobsters questioned Rochelle’s neighbors, harassed the couple’s friends and relatives, even interrogated Calabrese’s former barber. No one knew where they were hiding. As the trial date drew closer, the LCN became bolder. “Several of us on the strike force began getting threatening telephone calls,” recalled Donald Campbell. “We were shocked because there had always been an understanding that the mob didn’t go after federal agents or their families. You just didn’t cross that line.” Strike force members began traveling in pairs, taking special precautions. Campbell sent his wife out of town. Finally, Giambrone and a Bureau of Narcotics agent took matters into their own hands. They drove to the Magaddino family estate in Niagara Falls. “Giambrone goes up to the door and knocks, and when Magaddino is summoned and comes to the door, Giambrone whips out his revolver, sticks it in Magaddino’s mouth, and says, ‘If one more phone call comes in or anyone attempts to do harm to my family or anyone else’s on the strike force, we are going to come back and blow your fucking head off,’ ” Campbell recalled. “I knew Giambrone and this other agent and so did Magaddino, and he knew they meant it. From that moment on, the harassment stopped.”

  Kennelly personally argued the case against the two mobsters when it finally came to trial in late 1967. “I was worried about two things,” he recalled. “Would jurors believe Calabrese—an admitted criminal, scoundrel, and mob member—and
if they did, would they buy the conspiracy theory?” Calabrese, who was brought to the courthouse encircled by agents, was grilled for hours by the defense attorneys. They tried to portray him as a hot-tempered thug and pathological liar by dredging up everything they could from his criminal past. But Calabrese proved unflappable, and Kennelly called several witnesses to buttress his testimony. “Everything Paddy Calabrese said—down to details about which hotel he stayed in while he was in California—was corroborated,” said Kennelly. “It was clear that Paddy was telling the straight story about the robberies, but I didn’t know if that was going to be enough. It all hinged on whether or not jurors accepted our conspiracy theory.” They did. Randaccio and Natarelli were found guilty, and each was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  The strike force was so grateful to Calabrese that Kennelly personally appeared on his behalf before the state parole board. It voted him an immediate parole. “Suddenly we had to figure out what to do with him,” Kennelly recalled, “and none of us had a clue.” Kennelly suggested that Calabrese change his last name to Angelo. “One of our strike force members got a priest in Buffalo to give Paddy and his family new baptismal certificates with their fake names on them.” At the time, those were sufficient for the couple to obtain new driver’s licenses. Another strike force attorney persuaded a Buffalo school superintendent to change the last names on the children’s school records to Angelo so Rochelle could take the records with her. “The hardest job was finding someplace to hide them. One of our guys on the strike force had a brother who ran a manufacturing plant in Jackson, Michigan,” Kennelly said, “so we arranged for him to hire Paddy. Everything we did was through strike force members. There was no one else we could ask for help.”

  Kennelly conjured up $600 to pay three months’ rent for Calabrese. Members of the strike force passed around a hat and collected another $500 so the family could buy a used car. That was it. After the “Angelos” were delivered to Michigan, they were on their own. From the start, Kennelly wondered whether they could adjust. “Paddy had been a mob guy all his life, and now he was supposed to work forty hours a week in a manufacturing plant. It was unrealistic. He was supposed to start carrying a lunch bucket to work, but he didn’t even know what one was!” Within a week, Calabrese was on the telephone to Kennelly. “We’re dying here,” he griped. “You got to give us more money.” Kennelly suggested he take out a bank loan. That’s what legitimate families did. Three months later, Kennelly received a call from Calabrese’s boss at the manufacturing plant. The “Angelo” family had taken out a loan and then vanished without repaying a cent, leaving behind a very angry bank manager.

  Paddy Calabrese would later be identified as the first mob witness to be given a false background and relocated by the Justice Department. It was not an awe-inspiring beginning.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  At about the same time the strike force was trying to decide what to do about Paddy Calabrese, the FBI was dealing with a mob witness of its own in New England, and its agents, much like their counterparts in Buffalo, were traveling in uncharted waters. Joseph Barboza, nicknamed “the Animal,” had agreed to testify against New England crime boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca after he learned Patriarca was trying to kill him. Like Calabrese, the Barboza case would become one of the steppingstones that was eventually to lead to the creation of WITSEC.

  A ruthless contract killer, Barboza was responsible for at least twenty murders, nearly all done at Patriarca’s bidding. He was such an important mob witness that J. Edgar Hoover personally called his agents each day when they were interrogating the hit man to hear what he was telling them. There would be speculation later that Hoover was hoping Barboza would somehow link the mob to the Kennedy family, since Patriarca controlled the LCN in Massachusetts, but apparently he didn’t know of any ties. The thirty-five-year-old Barboza had been arrested in October 1966 on several minor charges and had assumed Patriarca would post his bail, as he had done before. Instead, the crime boss seized the opportunity to kill three of Barboza’s closest friends and put a contract on him in prison. Patriarca had heard gossip that Barboza was secretly plotting to take over his operations, which stretched from the outskirts of New York City to the Canadian border with Maine. As soon as Barboza agreed to testify, the U.S. Marshals Service sent deputy U.S. marshal John J. Partington to protect the gangster’s wife, Janice, and his young daughter, Terri. The Marshals Service is the oldest of all the federal law enforcement agencies, dating back to 1789, when the first Congress created the job of U.S. marshal to oversee federal court proceedings, protect judges in court, and handle witnesses. Partington, who was stationed in Providence, Rhode Island, was chosen for two reasons: He’d guarded witnesses before in local cases, and he was familiar with Patriarca, who operated out of an office in a laundry in Providence. Partington suspected the FBI had another reason for passing him the job—its agents didn’t want to be bothered baby-sitting a mobster’s family.

  As soon as Partington arrived at Barboza’s house in Swampscott, Massachusetts, he posted deputies with shotguns at the front and rear doors. “Looking back on it now, I’ve got to say we were like the Keystone Kops,” he later recalled. “Protecting families was new to us. There were no manuals, no instruction books. We were learning as we did things.” Partington proved to have good instincts. To this day, he is considered by many to be one of the best deputies the U.S. Marshals Service ever produced when it comes to witness protection. Partington had just turned thirty in 1966, but he looked even younger. He had sandy brown hair, sparkling blue eyes, a lanky frame, and aw-shucks, small-town manners. He’d grown up outside Providence in a tiny hamlet, where he’d gotten his first job as a police officer after a two-year stint in the army. In 1961, he had joined the U.S. Marshals Service, and when Robert Kennedy fingered Patriarca as one of the LCN bosses he wanted to indict, Partington was sent to help two IRS agents nab him. They were not the first to try. As early as 1930, Patriarca had been identified as Providence’s “public enemy number one,” but he had been sent to prison only once, and that incident had sparked a statewide scandal. Patriarca had been sentenced in 1938 to five years for armed robbery but was paroled by the governor after serving only a few months. It turned out that one of the governor’s aides had arranged the release in return for a large campaign contribution.

  Partington had first met Patriarca in 1961, when the newly hired deputy was sent to serve a subpoena on the aged mobster in Federal Hill, an Italian American neighborhood that overlooks the state capitol in Providence. A Long Island newspaper reporter described Federal Hill this way back then: “It is Patriarca’s stronghold, an armed camp where gnarled old men with undersized fedoras watch suspiciously from their chairs propped against the walls of darkened social clubs, ready to make hand signals whenever a stranger approaches.” The moment Partington stepped through the front doors of the Patriarca-owned Nu-Brite Cleaners, two bodyguards stopped him. “Patriarca came out from his office in the back to see who I was,” Partington recalled. “He was eating a sandwich.” Not knowing any better, Partington started to reach inside his coat jacket for his badge. Patriarca dove behind a door, dropping his sandwich. His bodyguards grabbed Partington’s arms and pinned him to the wall. They thought he was reaching for a handgun.

  “It’s okay!” Partington yelled. “I’m a federal man.”

  After Partington handed Patriarca the subpoena, the LCN boss lectured him about mob etiquette. “Anytime you want me, kid, I am here. But don’t you ever go to my house, you hear? My wife, she don’t have nothing to do with my business. Capisce?” The FBI, which had an illegal bug planted in the cleaners, overheard Patriarca telling his attorney a few minutes later that he’d been served a subpoena by a “real Boy Scout.”

  Partington was surprised when he met Barboza’s wife. Janice Barboza was not the mob moll he expected. Still in her twenties, she was polite, bright, and beautiful. Her three-year-old daughter reminded him of the child movie star Shirley
Temple. “I wanted them to live as normal a life as possible while we were protecting them,” Partington recalled, “so I told my men that no one was allowed to use the bathroom in the house. I didn’t want her cleaning up after us. I also had the Marshals Service send out a matron to be with us because I didn’t want three men alone with this very attractive woman every day and night.” Within minutes after Partington arrived, the Barbozas’ cat escaped out a back door, and Terri began to cry. The two deputies with Partington were not about to run outside and look for it, but Partington did—much to their irritation. “A lot of deputies didn’t like protecting witnesses or their families because they considered them scum, but I didn’t feel that way,” he recalled. “What had Barboza’s little girl ever done? It wasn’t my job to judge them. We were there to keep them alive, and I knew it would be easier if they knew I cared enough about them to chase down a family cat.”

  During the next month, Partington spent sixteen hours a day at Barboza’s house, and although he lectured his men not to get personally involved with Janice and Terri, he grew close to both of them. Terri waited in the kitchen each morning for “Uncle John” to arrive. At night, he read her stories before she went to bed. Once a week, deputies took Janice to visit Barboza, who was being hidden under an alias in a jail on Cape Cod. Otherwise she never left the house, and soon she was going stir-crazy. One morning she asked to go to a nearby beach. Partington knew his bosses in Washington would say it was too risky, but he agreed to take her. She came downstairs wearing an eye-popping bikini. A few nights later she asked him to take her dancing at a local nightclub where mobsters sometimes socialized. Partington set it up. “You got to have balls in this business,” he said later, “and I wanted Patriarca’s men to know we weren’t scared of them.” Partington also started bringing his wife, Helen, to the house to visit with Janice. “I knew it wasn’t professional to involve my wife, but Janice needed someone to talk to besides us men, and I knew my wife would feel better about this situation, too, since I was spending all of my time with another woman.”