Witsec

by Pete Earley

  After nineteen years in the Marshals Service, he was out. “I was determined not to be bitter, but I was hurt. I had given my life to my job, and I felt the way witnesses did when the government didn’t need them anymore: thrown away like garbage.” Partington went to work as a police officer in his hometown and then later became the public safety commissioner in Providence.

  At headquarters, his departure barely caused a ripple. In less than a year, Safir had restructured and energized its WITSEC operations. The inspectors working there were loyal to him. Their focus was on the future, not Partington and past wiseguys. None of them had to wait long to cut their teeth. The highest-ranking Mafia witness ever to testify for the government was entering WITSEC. His name was Aladena Fratianno, better known as “Jimmy the Weasel,” and the mob wanted him dead.

  CHAPTER

  THIRTEEN

  The strike force chief asked Shur to personally fly to California to explain WITSEC to Aladena Fratianno. During the flight, he thought about what he would say. “Jimmy the Weasel was precisely the sort of mob witness I hoped we could get when we first created WITSEC,” he recalled. “He knew it all. He’d been a made member more than thirty years, knew every crime boss in the country, and had the potential to be the most important witness we had ever recruited. But I had had enough experience to know I had to be tough; otherwise a wiseguy like Fratianno would eat me alive. The trick was making him understand that I was there to help him, that I had something he desperately needed, that he was going to be a dead man unless I saved him. Then I would have the upper hand in our talks, not him.”

  The sixty-three-year-old mobster looked like someone from central casting when Shur met him in a San Diego prison. With his dyed pompadour, cigar clenched in his teeth, and scrambled syntax punctuated by profanity and mob lingo, he could change in a heartbeat from a charming rogue into a stone-cold killer. Fratianno had contacted the FBI on his own several months earlier, in August 1977, after he had gotten into a tough predicament with the cops and the mob. He was being indicted for murder and was convinced that Los Angeles crime boss Dominic Brooklier had put a contract out on him. Brooklier had named Fratianno as his temporary replacement when he was sent to prison for a short stint, and Fratianno had used the opportunity to make several lucrative deals with other crime families back east for himself. That had made Brooklier suspect that Fratianno might attempt to take over the L.A. mob permanently. At least that was the reason why Fratianno believed Brooklier was trying to have him killed. Only later would he discover that the FBI had deliberately stirred up the mistrust between him and Brooklier, at one point making Fratianno believe he was being pursued by a Las Vegas hit man when, in fact, he was being followed by an FBI agent.

  Fratianno knew all about mob hits. He was known in the media as the “Mafia’s executioner on the West Coast” even though no one had ever been able to make a murder case against him stick. He’d later admit he had killed five mobsters with his own hands and helped murder six others. His specialty was the “Italian rope trick,” which he used to silence fellow gangster Frank Niccoli one afternoon when the two of them were sipping beers in Fratianno’s living room. After four men burst in and overpowered Niccoli, Fratianno looped a rope around his guest’s neck and announced matter-of-factly, “Frankie, your time’s up.” He handed one end of the rope to one of his goons and began pulling on the other end, choking Niccoli to death.

  Fratianno was currently negotiating a plea agreement with FBI agents and federal prosecutors, but he had not yet signed anything. Shur was being brought in to help persuade Fratianno that he should become a witness and enter WITSEC. While he was eager to cooperate, Shur was against using WITSEC as a reward program, and he didn’t think Fratianno was entitled to any special favors.

  “We will keep you alive and see to it that you do your sentence in a safe prison atmosphere,” Shur told the mobster. Fratianno’s attorney, Dennis McDonald, quickly interrupted. Why would Fratianno need to be sent to a federal prison? he asked. Since he was such an important witness, couldn’t he be confined by WITSEC deputies in a hotel or on a military base?

  “Mr. Fratianno is going to prison,” Shur replied firmly. “That is not negotiable.” Years later, he would recall why he had been so adamant. “I knew that each time Fratianno testified in court, some defense attorney was going to suggest he had gotten a sweetheart deal. So I took the exact opposite position that his attorney took: I felt it was crucial that Fratianno go to prison because he was so important. I wanted juries to know he was being punished.”

  Continuing, Shur told Fratianno that even after he was paroled, he wouldn’t have an easy time in WITSEC. “We’re not offering you a glamorous life and certainly nothing compared to what you’re used to. The only thing we’re guaranteeing is to keep you alive on our terms. That means we’ll choose a place to relocate you, feed you, and cover your basic needs until you start making a living. That’s it.”

  “Are you kidding?” Fratianno snapped. “You’re going to stick me in some town I’ve never seen before, and then put me to work? At my age? With all that I’m going to give you guys? Fuck that!”

  “I think you have to understand something,” Shur said. “You’re not giving us anything. You may be helping the U.S. attorneys and the FBI, but those are other parts of the Justice Department. I’m not here to cut any deals. I’m just telling you what’s going to be. If you don’t like what we’re offering, well, I can walk out of here today without a second thought about you.”

  Shur’s hard-line stance flustered Fratianno, and his attorney suggested they take a short break.

  “I felt Fratianno really didn’t have much of a choice but to say yes to our program,” Shur said later, “because he was already too far committed to turn back. No one in the mob was going to believe that he hadn’t talked to us. So I wasn’t really too worried. I also wanted to keep the upper hand.”

  When the meeting reconvened, Fratianno explained that he had several girlfriends in California and didn’t want to be relocated out of state. Shur said he’d have to cut off all ties with the women and leave the state. “Listen,” said Shur, “you need to join the program for your own protection, but there is more at stake here. You need to testify because it is the right thing to do. You need to do it for your country and your family, to have something your grandkids can point to with pride.”

  Donald “Bud” McPherson, a deputy marshal from Los Angeles sitting across the table from Fratianno, fought back a grin. “Gerry Shur was a great con man when it came to dealing with witnesses,” McPherson said later. “I had heard him sweet-talk people into WITSEC for years with his Kennedyesque ‘ask not what the country can do for you’ speech. But Jimmy the Weasel didn’t give a shit about his country or anything else that Shur was trying to move him with. It was the first time I ever saw Shur fail in trying to con a con.”

  “Get out of my fucking life,” Fratianno snapped. “The question is not what I am going to do for my country, it is what is the fucking country going to do for me?”

  Shur and Fratianno continued at each other for nearly an hour. Fratianno would make a demand. Shur would reject it. When they took another break, Fratianno approached McPherson.

  “Listen, this Shur character, now he’s the big boss in Washington, right, but you’re the guy who actually does the legwork,” Fratianno said, “so maybe you can help me out here?” McPherson knew Fratianno was trying to hustle him, but he, too, refused to promise the gangster any special favors through WITSEC. Finally, Fratianno asked: “Where you from?”

  “Brooklyn,” McPherson replied. “I grew up with a lot of guys you probably know.” He mentioned several gangsters from his old neighborhood.

  “You’re shitting me,” Fratianno replied. “You knew them guys?”

  “I used to play football with ’em,” McPherson said, “and during the war, we stole ration stamps and sold them to neighborhood wiseguys.”

  Fratianno laughed. “Hey, I didn’t know there were
guys like you out here in California. I want you to be my guy in this program.”

  McPherson told him the Marshals Service didn’t allow witnesses to choose who was going to protect them. “Sure they don’t,” Fratianno retorted sarcastically. “We’ll see about that, okay? Just remember: You’re gonna be my guy!”

  Later that day, Fratianno agreed to enter WITSEC. Shur flew back to Washington. “I was exhausted. I hadn’t really given Fratianno anything he had demanded, but we had spent the entire day going back and forth while he tried every possible angle.” Shur still needed to tie up one loose end. He had to convince Fratianno’s wife, Jean Bodul, to enter WITSEC. She had been the gangster’s longtime mistress until four years before, when they had married, but theirs was such an explosive relationship that they rarely lived together. “I contacted Jean by phone, and when I explained the rules to her—about how she would have to be relocated and given a new identity—she told me she wasn’t interested,” Shur recalled. “She said she was going to begin driving south. She wasn’t sure where she was going. I asked her to call me every day so we could be certain the mob hadn’t killed her. For several weeks she called and told me every day where she was. And then finally she agreed to enter the program.”

  Back in L.A., McPherson got a phone call from WITSEC chief Howard Safir. “I want you to personally handle Fratianno,” he announced. “I’m not putting you in charge of him just because he asked for you. I think you’re the only guy who can handle him.”

  One of McPherson’s first assignments was to sneak Fratianno into New York City so he could help federal prosecutors there decipher some twelve thousand wiretapped conversations between mobsters. Their bantering was confusing because they referred to each other by nicknames and frequently used unfamiliar mob terms or spoke in Italian. McPherson hid Fratianno in a mothballed World War II women’s barracks at Fort Hamilton, an army base on the Brooklyn waterfront. It was only a short distance from where crime bosses Joseph Colombo and Frank “Funzi” Tieri lived. “Don’t you know there are twenty-five hundred made guys in New York?” Fratianno asked the deputy. “We’re sitting right in the center of their camp!” McPherson wasn’t worried.

  “I knew wiseguys,” he said later, “and I knew they were not going to come onto a military installation and whack a guy. Terrorists might, but not wiseguys—at least not back in 1978.”

  When Safir sent word that he was flying up from Washington to personally meet Fratianno, McPherson decided to run a scam of his own. He attached empty beer cans to wire coat hangers and then looped them over the doorknobs in the barracks so the cans rattled each time someone opened a door.

  “What the hell is this?” Safir asked when he walked inside.

  “That’s our alarm system,” McPherson replied. “We don’t have any electronic anti-intrusion equipment, so we rigged up these beer cans.”

  Two days later McPherson received a crate filled with infrared alarm sensors, motion detectors, and video surveillance cameras. “I had been reaching a bit with the beer can stunt,” McPherson remembered, “but we were desperate for equipment back in those days. We never got anything in WITSEC operations until Howard Safir became chief.”

  Fratianno spent his free time in the barracks cooking for McPherson and the other deputies assigned to protect him. They pooled the per diem the government paid them, and Fratianno sent McPherson to buy groceries. “I went to shops owned by mobsters and brought back cheeses and meats for Fratianno to eat. These mobsters didn’t know it, but they were feeding the very guy who was going to destroy them.”

  Months later, when it finally came time for Fratianno to testify in a case for the first time, he stayed up all night, pacing, smoking cigars, and talking to McPherson. “All of his life, Jimmy had hated rats, and now he was going to walk into a courtroom and be one,” McPherson remembered. “It was incredibly difficult for him, but I kept reminding him of how many times the mob had screwed him, and he would pause and then tell me about some other incident where he’d been screwed. That night, and for many more nights that followed, he talked to me about his past and the things he’d done, the people he’d known. He told me his life story so many times that later, when he began giving interviews to the media, the two of us used to joke that I could have traded places with him.”

  Fratianno had arrived in America from Italy in 1913, when he was only four months old. His parents settled in a tough section of Cleveland called Little Italy. At age three, he saw three men murdered in his neighborhood by gangsters wielding machine guns. When he was six, he hit a policeman with a rotten tomato and then darted between people and cars to escape. An onlooker yelled, “Look at that weasel run!” The policeman noted in his report that the suspect was nicknamed “the Weasel,” and it stuck. Fratianno became a waiter in a speakeasy at age twelve. By the time he was seventeen, he was robbing illegal gambling joints. He turned twenty-three in prison, where he was serving time for beating up a bookie. After he was paroled in the 1940s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he fell under the spell of John Roselli, who was Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana’s man in Hollywood and Las Vegas. Had Roselli been given a choice, he probably would have been a movie producer. He made several Hollywood B movies, but none was memorable. Still, in Fratianno’s eyes, Roselli epitomized the successful wiseguy. He had style, a code of honor, respect from gangsters and movie stars. It was Roselli who sponsored Fratianno in 1946 when, at the age of thirty-three, he became a made member of the Los Angeles crime family then being run by Jack Dragna.

  During the next three decades, Fratianno established his reputation as a hit man and rose through the ranks. Casino skimming in Las Vegas; President John Kennedy’s sexual trysts with Judith Campbell Exner, who also happened to be Chicago mobster Sam Giancana’s mistress; the CIA’s attempt in the 1960s to hire the Mafia to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro—Fratianno gossiped with other mobsters about hundreds of such mob schemes. But in the early 1970s, he started to become disillusioned with the mob after he was sent to prison on an extortion charge and a fellow wiseguy tried unsuccessfully to rape his first wife, Jewel Switzer. He became even more embittered in 1975, after John Roselli’s body was discovered inside a fifty-five-gallon oil drum bobbing in Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Roselli was seventy-one years old and had been living in retirement in Florida when he was choked to death. By the time his killers got his body on board a boat, rigor mortis had set in, so they had to cut the corpse in half to make it fit into the drum. They weighted it down with heavy chains, but it floated to the surface anyway. He had been murdered shortly after he testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating Operation Mongoose, the CIA’s reputed covert attempt to kill Fidel Castro, but he hadn’t really revealed anything new, and Fratianno felt the hit was unnecessary. His relationship with the mob continued to go downhill after that.

  The pretrial jitters that had kept Fratianno awake all night before his first trial vanished as soon as he was seated in the witness chair. “Jimmy had an incredible memory,” McPherson recalled. “He could remember times, dates, names, and details. He never finished high school, but I saw him outsmart dozens of brilliant defense attorneys. I remember one attorney shouted, ‘Isn’t it true you are a proven liar?’ And Jimmy replied, ‘Yes, I’ve lied all of my life and done a lot worse, but if I lie about your client, my deal with the government is off and I will be out on the street and I will be murdered. If I tell the truth, nothing can happen to me.’ He would make defense attorneys regret they questioned his integrity. He had a way of talking to a jury and connecting with them.”

  As part of his plea agreement, Fratianno had to serve nineteen months in prison. He spent several weeks in the notorious Valachi Suite, but most of the time he was on the road with McPherson, living in motels while he was being interviewed by various prosecutors. The pairing of Fratianno and McPherson was a brilliant stroke. Rude, pushy, and often arrogant, Fratianno was considered “a royal pain in the ass” within the Marshals Service’s WITSEC operations
branch. He would strut back and forth filling the air with vulgarities, all the while threatening to drop out of WITSEC and disappear unless his demands were met. It was McPherson’s job to calm him down. “I never forgot who Jimmy was,” McPherson said. “I showed him respect, but I was firm. I told him what I could and couldn’t do for him, and I never broke a promise. That was important. He respected that.”

  McPherson was forty-five years old and had been a deputy for six years when he was assigned to protect Fratianno. “I think the fact I had grown up in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood gave me an edge with Jimmy. Everyone was either Italian or Jewish back home. I was neither, so I had to get along with both to survive.” McPherson had gone straight from high school into the army, where he served in Korea, and then returned home to become a New York City cop. But he hated the politics. “On my first day at work, I was told never to give anyone connected to Joe Profaci or Frank Tieri a hassle—not even a traffic ticket. I said, ‘Are you kidding? What the fuck makes these mobsters so special?’ But that was how it was. The higher-ups didn’t want to bother the wiseguys.”

  McPherson switched to the city’s fire department, got married and then divorced, and was injured on the job. He remarried and headed to Los Angeles to make a fresh start. Warner Brothers hired him to work as both a fireman and a policeman on movie sets, but he lost the job when the studio changed hands. He and his wife sold everything, bought a tractor-trailer rig, and spent two years delivering furniture for Global Van Lines, living in the truck cab and motels. One morning he read that the government was hiring “sky marshals” to prevent airplane skyjackings, so he applied and was hired. “I’d sit in first class flying from Los Angeles to Hawaii, where I kept a set of golf clubs in a locker. I’d play a few rounds and then return home to L.A. just in time to catch a flight to New York City, where I visited my parents.” When the hijacking threat lessened, the government grounded the sky marshals and had them begin inspecting luggage. “I didn’t want to spend my life looking through people’s skivvies, so I became a deputy U.S. marshal.” He finished first in his training class, something no deputy from Los Angeles had ever done. As a reward, he was put in charge of protecting witnesses—a job no one else in the office wanted. He’d been at work for only a few weeks in 1973 when he was told to meet a witness at the airport.