by Pete Earley
“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 Maf
ia, 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.
“Teresa used to call me all the time,” said Shur, “always begging for money. He was like a kid in college who calls home every week asking for a check. He reinforced my view that we shouldn’t give complete backgrounds to witnesses, that is, supply them with false financial pasts, because he just couldn’t stop conning people.”
In yet another stunt, deputies told Teresa that he couldn’t take his car with him when he left El Paso for security reasons—he would be given a different one after he was relocated. “Teresa waited until there weren’t any deputies watching him and then he drove his car up the ramp into the moving truck,” said Shur. “He’d filled the car with bottles of liquor he had apparently bought on credit, and hid everything under blankets to fool the deputies. When he got to his new relocation spot, he sold the car and all the liquor.”
Teresa’s final move was to Maple Valley, Washington, outside Seattle, but he got into trouble there, too. In 1981, his son was arrested on a murder charge, and the FBI claimed Teresa had threatened to kill two local prosecutors. A short while later, Teresa was convicted in a conspiracy to burglarize and torch a dentist’s office and collect insurance on the loss. He got off with a light sentence but in 1985 was sent to prison after he was caught smuggling hundreds of exotic and expensive birds and reptiles into the country for sale. Most were endangered species.
“Teresa made great use of the word but,” Shur recalled. “He would say, ‘Yeah, I got caught, but …’ I learned that with certain witnesses, you had to heighten your guard. I could trust some, but with others, I had to double- and triple-check everything, as well as look for corroborating evidence to make sure they were telling the truth.”
After he was paroled, Teresa returned to Maple Valley, where he died in obscurity in February 1990 at age sixty-one. The local newspaper noted that Teresa had been living under the alias Charles A. Cantino. The Marshals Service sent a deputy to pay for his funeral.
“Vinnie was an extremely likable guy,” recalled Kash, “but I never thought he could go straight. He simply didn’t know the direction, and as much as I liked him—and I did like him—I knew he was going to victimize someone after we gave him a new identity. That bothered me.”
Teresa was not the only colorful witness to frustrate Shur and Kash. Another early troublemaker was Hugh E. Wuensche, who was given a new identity in 1971 after he testified against the mob and explained to the McClellan Committee how he had laundered more than $50 million in stolen securities for gangsters. “He had a British wife, and all he wanted from us was a new name, some cash, a passport, and an airplane ticket,” Kash recalled. “That was a low bid from one of these guys.” A year after Wuensche had boarded a flight to England, Kash received a Christmas card from him. “He said he was living in a seventeenth-century mansion, had a chauffeur-driven Bentley, and owned his own bank. I didn’t know whether or not he was telling the truth, but he appeared to be fabulously wealthy.” A year later, Kash received another Christmas letter from Wuensche, this time begging for help. He was in prison. It turned out that he had been paid some $250,000 in rewards from federal agencies for helping agents recover several million dollars’ worth of stolen stock certificates. No one had informed Shur or Kash. He had used his new WITSEC identity to hide his criminal past from British authorities and had bought a controlling interest in a failing London bank with his reward money. He then contacted several gangsters back home and had them send him forged stocks and bonds, which he used as collateral in England to buy an even larger British financial company. By the time he was caught, he had looted more than $2 million from depositors. Furious that they had been hoodwinked, British authorities filed a formal complaint with the State Department and accused Shur of trying to solve the United States’ crime problem by sending felons to England under new names. “I got a letter from Wuensche that looked as if it was written on toilet paper,” recalled Kash. “He offered to testify against the mobsters who had helped him run his bank scam if I helped him return to the United States. I didn’t.” Wuensche then called Shur, but he also refused.
Shur noticed that every time a high-profile witness such as Teresa testified in court against the mob, other criminals would step forward and ask to enter WITSEC. “Word was spreading that we could keep witnesses safe and give them a fresh start,” he said. By 1972, the number of witnesses entering the program had doubled to about two hundred per year. In 1973, 338 new witnesses entered WITSEC, and by 1974 the number topped 400. By this point, Kash had gotten some help in the Marshals Service’s headquarters, but not much. Only ten new deputies had been hired to handle logistics, obtain documents, and help witnesses find jobs. Meanwhile, Kash’s WITSEC operation was responsible for overseeing what now was a total of a thousand witnesses and nearly twice that number of dependents. The program was growing at the rate of one new witness a day, and the Marshals Service simply couldn’t keep up. “Our success in attracting mob witnesses was choking the marshals,” said Shur.
After three years, Kash had had enough, but it wasn’t the lack of resources and overwhelming demands that had finally gotten to him. “I was having serious doubts about the wisdom of relocating some of these criminals in new communities,” he explained. “I knew we were sending them out to victimize people.” While Shur empathized with Kash, he also disagreed with his viewpoint. “This program was much too important to abandon, regardless of how horrible some of our witnesses were,” he said. “There is an old tort adage that says ‘You take the actor as you find him,’ and that applied to witnesses. We were not going to get witnesses to testify against the mob who were priests and rabbis, and they weren’t going to testify unless we protected and helped them.”
The breaking point for Kash came when he was asked to relocate a pornographic bookstore operator named James Kelly. Kelly had testified against a major New York City crime family and had initially refused protection. Instead, he had moved to Baltimore on his own and opened a striptease club and porno bookstore in the city’s notorious “Block,” a seedy downtown area. One morning a mechanic doing a routine check on Kelly’s car switched on the headlights, and a blasting cap hidden near the engine blew up. It apparently had jiggled loose from the three sticks of dynamite it was meant to detonate. The Baltimore strike force asked Shur to accept Kelly into WITSEC because he had been secretly providing it with information about mob activities on the Block. Shu
r agreed, but almost immediately Kelly and Kash began butting heads.
At one point Kelly asked the Marshals Service for help cashing an $85,000 certified check—proceeds from the sale of his Baltimore strip club and bookstore. Kelly had just undergone a legal name change, so he couldn’t cash the check, which was made payable to him under his old name. Kash refused. An outraged Kelly telephoned the Baltimore strike force chief. The chief sent Shur an angry seven-page letter accusing Kash of being rude, arrogant, and contemptuous. Shur urged Kash to reconsider, but he refused. Kash didn’t like the pornographer, didn’t think the government should be paying him monthly subsistence, and didn’t want to be part of his taking the money from the sale of his businesses and then disappearing. A short time later, Kash was promoted to a different job that took him away from the day-to-day handling of WITSEC. Shur got Kelly the cash that he wanted.
“Organized crime was suffering severely at the hands of the witness program, but we couldn’t keep putting some of these people out there and not get burned,” said Kash. “Someone innocent was going to get hurt someday because of these witnesses.”