Witsec

by Pete Earley

  Kash’s fears had not yet dawned on the public. In fact, WITSEC was riding a wave of favorable publicity. A newspaper column by Victor Riesel, the labor writer blinded by the mob outside Lindy’s restaurant, was typical. Printed in 1972 under the headline “Omertà Dead: Mafia Being Cracked by Hundreds of Informants Now Protected by Special Unit,” Riesel boasted about Shur’s program. “It works! No witness has gone bad after relocation. Some have been so successful, they are now executives in corporations and fear only their new prominence will expose them. It can be authentically reported that Omertà is dead, the Mafia’s lethal code of silence has been smashed.” Reader’s Digest weighed in later with a heart-tugging story about a small-time bookie who had been ready to kill himself because of his debts to the mob. Instead, he contacted federal agents and with Shur’s help got a fresh start. The magazine noted that Shur received a Christmas card every year from the bookie, thanking him for saving his life.

  Favorable news accounts like these, however, were soon to end. Three ghosts from the past were about to visit Shur and cause havoc to his program.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  The telephone call took Buffalo strike force chief Thomas Kennelly completely by surprise. A lawyer was on the line asking where former mobster Pascal “Paddy” Calabrese was hiding. It was early 1970, two years since Calabrese had testified against the Stefano Magaddino crime family and gone into hiding with Rochelle and her children. Buffalo attorney Salvatore R. Martoche got right to the point. “I represent Thomas Leonhard, who is Rochelle’s husband and the father of their three children. He says the government kidnapped his kids.”

  Kennelly’s mind shot back to late 1967, when he had arranged for Rochelle and her children to be hustled out of Buffalo and hidden at a military base in Maine to protect them from the mob. “We knew Rochelle had a former husband,” Kennelly recalled later. “I mean, we knew she was separated or divorced, so there had to be a husband out there, but it really hadn’t occurred to any of us that he had visitation rights with the kids. We were busy trying to protect Paddy and Rochelle, and Tom Leonhard wasn’t pounding on our door, so quite frankly, no one really ever thought about him.” Kennelly was suspicious of Leonhard’s motives. Why hadn’t he complained earlier?

  “He has,” said Martoche. “He’s been trying to find his children since they disappeared, but no one will tell him where they are.” Martoche recited the facts as he knew them. Leonhard and Rochelle were still married in 1967, but they didn’t live together because she had moved in with Calabrese. The couple had, however, signed a legal separation agreement that gave Leonhard visitation rights with their three children one day each week. He had driven over on a Sunday morning to pick them up, only this time the kids weren’t there. When Leonhard rousted out the landlady, she told him several men riding in two cars had come that Tuesday and taken them away. That was all she knew. Leonhard had gone to the police, but they didn’t know anything about Rochelle. It had taken him three weeks to discover that the Buffalo strike force was behind his children’s disappearance. But federal prosecutors refused to tell him anything about what had happened to them. Leonhard was a mild-mannered blue-collar worker without much money, Martoche explained, and he didn’t have a clue how to weave through the federal bureaucracy. He had tried to hire lawyers several times, but none would take the case. Until now.

  “This has to be some sort of mistake, right?” Martoche asked Kennelly. “I mean, in Russia, maybe the government can snatch up a man’s kids without telling him, but that just doesn’t happen here. That’s why I am calling you. My client wants to be reunited with his children.”

  Kennelly remained wary. “I didn’t know Martoche and my first concern was for Paddy Calabrese and his family,” he explained. “I knew the mob still wanted Paddy dead, and I was worried that this was some sort of ruse.”

  Kennelly knew where Calabrese and Rochelle were in hiding. After the couple’s failed start in Jackson, Michigan, Calabrese had telephoned him periodically. But Kennelly didn’t tell Martoche anything when they first talked about the children’s whereabouts in 1970. “I had promised Calabrese in my official capacity as the head of the strike force that the government would never reveal where he was hiding, and that was not a promise I was going to break.”

  Kennelly stalled for several weeks, but Martoche was persistent, and after repeated telephone calls, he got Kennelly to agree to contact Calabrese and Rochelle and tell them that Leonhard was asking about his children. “Paddy and Rochelle screamed and carried on when I finally reached them,” Kennelly said later. “Paddy said to me, ‘Don’t you dare tell. If you do, we will move and you will never hear from us again. We’ll disappear.’ ”

  Kennelly felt trapped. As a father, he understood how horrible it must feel to have your children vanish without warning. But he was convinced that if he broke his promise to Calabrese, he would be putting a witness’s life in danger and undermining WITSEC by sending potential witnesses a chilling message—the government can’t be trusted to keep your new identity and location a secret.

  Kennelly told Martoche about Calabrese and Rochelle’s adamant stance, but the young attorney refused to give up. He persuaded Kennelly to forward letters to Rochelle from Leonhard. He wrote three times in late 1970, begging for a chance to be reunited with his children. “I love them dearly and do miss them so much,” he pleaded. “The years are slipping by faster and faster. I would like to see them a little before they grow up.” Rochelle didn’t respond for six months, and when she did, her answer was terse: “In no way shall I ever allow [you] to see them. Calabrese is the only father the children will ever know.” She misspelled her husband’s name in the letter, adding further insult to her reply.

  Martoche decided it was time to take Leonhard’s fight into court. He had his client file for a divorce from Rochelle and seek full custody. When she failed to appear at the hearing, the judge awarded the children to him. Armed with the judge’s custody order, Martoche marched into the federal court in Buffalo and demanded that the Justice Department reveal where Leonhard’s children were hiding. By now it was late 1971. Kennelly had resigned from the government to practice law privately in Washington and Shur was told to handle the dispute. In a letter that he would later deeply regret having written, Shur urged Leonhard to stop trying to find his children. He wrote that Leonhard should be proud of himself for allowing the United States to take them as a “sacrifice in our war against organized crime.” Shur’s letter infuriated Martoche. “I cannot help but wonder,” he replied, “if Mr. Shur would also like to sacrifice his children involuntarily in this undeclared war.”

  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 Ne
w 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.’