by Pete Earley
Me and Anna knew there was deputies listening to our telephone conversation so we didn’t say nothing about where we was. Anna says the Captain is really getting depressed. Someone had broke into his house in Brooklyn and spray-painted the word “snitch” on the front door in big red letters. When the Captain got on the phone, it was like he didn’t care about nothing. He didn’t even ask me about the kids. It was so sad. I told him he had to sell his house because the government wasn’t going to help him buy another one unless he sold the first one first. “Angel,” he says—that’s what he always called me since when I was little—“I was born in my house. Your mother was born there, too. How can I sell it? It’s got too many memories.” He asked me if I thought he was going to be able to move back home after all this trouble with Tony blew over and I said, “Yeah, why not? I’m sure you can move home,” and he seemed upbeat about that. I’m sure I made the deputies mad, but the Captain, he was almost eighty. I felt he needed something to look forward to, you know? It wasn’t like they could put him in jail or toss him out into the street if he kept his house. Besides, it was their problem, not mine.
Two months later, the deputy told Angela that the Captain had suffered a stroke and died. His body was being taken to Brooklyn for a funeral and burial, but neither she nor her sister would be permitted to attend. The legal cases against Tony and the members of his mob crew were in the courts, and the prosecutors handling them were afraid it was too dangerous to allow either granddaughter to attend the funeral.
It killed me not to be able to be there. I felt all this relocation trauma caused the stroke and I blamed Sal. It was no different from putting a gun to the Captain’s head and pulling the trigger. My last memory of him was him getting into a car with deputies at that lousy motel on the beach and me and the kids waving goodbye. He left everything he owned to me and Anna, but we had different last names now—all legally changed—so probate was complicated, especially since the deputies had to keep our new names a secret. The Captain left some certificates of deposit but we couldn’t cash them because we couldn’t prove we was related to him. Imagine, not being able to prove your grandfather is really your grandfather. The deputies didn’t know what to do either. I did get my great-grandmother’s wedding ring. Anna had it sent to me through the deputies and that meant a lot to me.
When Sal and Angela’s furniture arrived, the box that contained the only photographs Angela had owned of her parents was missing.
I thought the deputies had destroyed the pictures because they told us we couldn’t take anything from our past, you know, like my high school diploma. I was upset and cried. I had no pictures of my mom and dad but the deputy says, “Oh well, it’s a good thing really, Someone might recognize them.” I thought that was the stupidest comment I’d ever heard. Who in Rapid City, South Dakota, is going to see a picture of my two dead parents and recognize them? I wondered how he’d have felt if it was a picture of his parents.
In Brooklyn, we used only cash. Nobody in Tony’s crew had a checking or savings account in a bank. The IRS could use those records to keep track of how much money you had. Sal kept cash in his pocket and I kept cash hidden around the house. Sal used to tell me not to bother hiding it because no one with any brains was going to rob us in Brooklyn. They knew what would happen to them. The deputy took us down to this bank in Rapid City and showed us how to use bank accounts. I was watching Sal and the whole time we was in this bank, he isn’t paying any attention to the deputy. He is checking out the security. I thought he was going to rob the place right then. A judge had changed our names but we still didn’t have new birth certificates or any permanent identification or Social Security cards with our new names, but this deputy talked to the bank manager and took care of it somehow. I had trouble at first remembering my new last name. Anytime anyone asked me a question about where I was from or something personal, I would freeze and not know what to say. Of course, it was easy for Sal. Oh, lying, it came easy to him.
The deputy gave them cash each month for their living expenses and said it was pointless for Sal to find a job because federal prosecutors would soon call him to testify in Brooklyn and he could be gone for weeks at a time.
All Sal did was complain. I was used to being home with the kids, okay, but he was useless. The kids got on his nerves. Back in Brooklyn, Sal would go out every night to different clubs and restaurants to meet with Tony and his crew. Every night except Sunday, usually. Sal didn’t know how to sit at home with his family watching TV. What bugged him the most was no respect, you know, being a nobody. In Brooklyn, if Sal walked into a restaurant, the owner came running up to say hello. There was no standing in line for Sal, and Sal never ever made a reservation. Not him. He was too important. Out in Rapid City, he was a nobody. He hated it. I got him to go with me and the kids to this real nice Catholic church once. There was a big air force base outside town so it wasn’t like the people in Rapid City had never met anyone from New York or New Jersey. Even so, Sal really stuck out. He was wearing gold chains and he liked to keep his shirt unbuttoned because he had a big, strong, hairy chest. These people were cowboys, you know, quiet and conservative. His entire personality didn’t fit with the place. Sal says to me one night: “If I had some of Tony’s crew here, we could run this city, but what would we have? Two goddamn grain elevators.” I laughed but I was having a tough time, too. I missed Anna, and to be honest, I was bitter and angry at Sal. I blamed him for busting up my family and he resented my attitude. He’d say, “Hey, you knew who I was before you married me so don’t come crying to me now.”
One afternoon I decided it was time for me to get over it. I was feeling bad for myself, I wasn’t really there for the kids. I said to myself, “This can be an opportunity.” I kept telling myself that. Me and Sal could live like ordinary people. I met this girl, Carol, at the grocery store. Our kids were the same ages. She and her husband, Dan, were good people. Dan liked to fish and he invites Sal and John to go with him. Now, Sal had never even held a fishing pole. They go up to this creek in the mountains and Sal can see the fish swimming around but he can’t catch any. He gets so mad, he throws the pole at them! Dan falls down because he is laughing so much. Later, Sal catches one and he was like a little kid. He comes running in to show me this slimy, dead fish. Dan cleans it and we had this fish fry. It was a good time. I thought, “Hey, maybe this will work.”
STARTING OVER AGAIN
Things got better in Rapid City once Sal started flying back to Brooklyn to testify. He’d come home and tell me what he did. He’d say, “I looked them bastards right in the face when I was testifying. I didn’t blink. When they bring Tony in, I’m going to point my middle finger at him and really get him good.” Sal would tell me he was lying about some things he testified to in court but he wasn’t worried at all about getting caught. For him, it was payback time and he wanted to please the prosecutors. He’d tell me how he and these FBI agents were making this case. It was “we” this and “we” that. All of his life he hated cops and now he’s acting like one. I said, “Sal, there isn’t any ‘we.’ These prosecutors and cops—you think one of them is going to give a damn about you once you finish talking? They ain’t gonna remember your name.” He got all pissed off. He says, “Why you trying to put me down?” Then he walked out the front door. I didn’t know where he was going. He’d stay out all night. I didn’t care. I’d call my sister, Anna. [The two had exchanged telephone numbers in violation of the WITSEC rules.] But she was very bitter about our grandfather dying and she sorta blamed me because I was married to Sal. She was doing okay without me. The deputies had gotten her into a beauty school in Philadelphia.
I began spending more time with my friend Carol, but she made me nervous, too. You don’t realize how much you talk about your past until you don’t have one to talk about. We’d be talking away about something, maybe guys we had dated, and I would have to catch myself because I was about to say something about Brooklyn. Like innocent things would throw you of
f, you know. I felt sure she knew I was lying sometimes. The deputy told us to say we were from Camden, New Jersey, because people out West wouldn’t know the difference between it and Brooklyn. One day Carol says, “I’ve heard of Camden because they make Campbell’s soup there.” I didn’t know. I had to go down to the library and read about Camden. We told everyone Sal was a warehouse foreman because no one knew what a warehouse foreman did. Sal could bullshit anyone anyway. It was our son, John, who scared me because he was too little to understand. When he turned five, Carol and her kids came over for a party and John and Carol’s son begin wrestling and suddenly I hear John saying, “My daddy is going to kill your daddy. He’s been in jail and a real sheriff comes to our house and gives us money.” I grabbed him and made him say he was sorry and then I said something about how he was watching too much television.
Sal finished testifying two years after he and Angela were relocated. The deputy in Rapid City found Sal a job at Ellis Air Force Base as a civilian security guard.
Sal guarding government property—what a joke. He bought this big Cadillac with some cash he got as a reward for testifying. We fought a lot about money. Sal had never been any good with it. If he had cash, he spent it. If he needed more in Brooklyn, he just went out and took it. He couldn’t do that now. We had a budget, or I had one. Our relationship was a mess. All we did was fight, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t care. I didn’t love him anymore. I hated him. Before we left Brooklyn, I thought he was a good husband. Now I’d seen how Dan treated Carol. I saw normal people who were happy, you know. Not that there weren’t any normal people in Brooklyn—it’s just we never hung around them.
One Saturday afternoon John, then age seven, rode his bike down a steep hill at the edge of town into a busy highway intersection. He was struck by a car.
No one could find Sal. I rushed to the emergency room. I could see John. The doctors and nurses were working on him and then everyone stopped and I knew he was dead. Carol and her husband were there with me but Sal never showed up. He comes home late that night and he doesn’t even know what’s happened. He told me he was at work but I knew he was lying. Those next few days were hell. I would have gone nuts if Anna hadn’t flown out to be with me. We buried John in a cemetery in Rapid City. He didn’t even have his real name on the monument. Anna stayed on for a while. Sal was useless. Our daughter, Marie, was too little to understand. She’d ask me why I was crying and then she’d keep saying, “Where’s John?” Anna and I got real close again. She was out of the witness program and had gotten married to a really nice guy. She was working in a beauty parlor that she was buying. She told me she had gone back to Brooklyn without telling the marshals because one of her best friends was getting married. She said a cousin of Tony’s was at the wedding and he told her Tony had gotten sent to prison for life because of Sal and Tony wanted revenge, but not against her or me or the kids. He tells her, “Tony ain’t like that. He ain’t gonna punish a man’s family, but Sal, he’s filth, garbage. Everybody in the neighborhood hates him for what he’s done.” Anna acted like she agreed and she played dumb when he asked where Sal was hiding. She got out of there because she was scared. As soon as Anna left Rapid City, I got real depressed again. I’d go into John’s room and just sit there and cry. Somehow I felt responsible. I kept thinking, what if we hadn’t left Brooklyn, what if I’d married a square, what if Sal had just toughed it out in jail?
Sal wasn’t coming home at all. A week would go by and I’d not see him. I was spending a lot more time with Carol. We decided to start a preschool where other mothers could drop off their kids. It was her idea, I just helped. Carol was the teacher. But I had a real knack with kids and enjoyed reading them stories. It made me feel closer to John somehow. One afternoon me and Marie were coming home from Carol’s house and the deputy’s car is parked in front of my house. I thought Sal was dead or had stolen something. Then I got scared because I thought something had happened to Anna. Maybe Tony’s crew had tracked her down. The deputy tells me Sal is gone. I said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He says Sal had come to see him and told him about Anna’s visit and how she had gone to the wedding in Brooklyn. Sal told the Marshals Service he didn’t feel safe anymore in Rapid City because Anna knew where he was hiding and she hated him. He wanted to be relocated. The deputy said the government was required to move him because me and Anna had violated his security. He said Sal had taken all of our money out of the bank. He says, “I couldn’t legally stop him because both of your names were on the accounts. Besides, this is all your fault for contacting your sister.”
I was really angry at that creep. I looked in the house and Sal had left the furniture. By this point, the deputy is acting strange and then he tells me Sal is being relocated with another woman. I ask, “Who?” and he tells me the name of this bitch I knew back in Brooklyn. At first I couldn’t understand how Sal got in touch with this girl and why him seeing her wasn’t a security violation and then it falls into place. Back when we all lived in Brooklyn and Sal was part of Tony’s crew, I’d heard Sal was messing around with this eighteen-year-old neighborhood slut named Rose. He’d been seen by a girlfriend of mine with her. I never said nothing but I was mad. Lots of Tony’s crew had girlfriends. They would take us wives out on Friday night and then on Saturdays they’d take out their whores. Sal swore he didn’t have no one like that.
The deputy tells me Rose was relocated with us when we was moved out to Rapid City! I said, “You moved her out here when you moved us?” He said they had to move her because they was afraid Tony would hurt her because she was Sal’s girlfriend. They’d tried to put her somewhere else, but Sal and she insisted on being together. All the sudden, all these things begin making sense—like where Sal was going at night, why we was short of cash, even where Sal was when John was killed and no one could find him. I lost it. I screamed at this deputy. I said, “You knew that bitch was here the entire time and you never told me!” I freaked out. He said Sal and Rose had left that morning on a flight. I am boiling mad. It’s like the government is giving them a honeymoon. I can’t believe the deputies brought that woman to Rapid City and dumped me here with her, and now Sal and this whore are like a prince and princess and me and Marie are all alone. I screamed: “Where’d you send them?” and he says he can’t say because Sal and Rose are getting new identities. I’m so angry I can’t even talk.
He says I am going to be relocated. He doesn’t ask if I want to. He tells me I have to move because the deputies don’t want Sal to be able to find me. That’s how they do it when there’s a divorce. I start screaming again. I say, “How about Marie? Is Sal going to pay child support?” The deputy says he don’t know. He tells me, “Look, I don’t even know where Sal and Rose are being taken.” I tell him, “I’m not changing my name or Marie’s neither.” Then I started crying and he says, “Isn’t there someone you can call?” And that really puts me over the edge. I yell, “Like who? I’m not supposed to be talking to my sister, right? Just who in the hell am I supposed to talk to?”
I sold everything we owned. I didn’t want to keep a damn thing that reminded me of Sal. Get this, Sal took my great-grandmother’s ring—the one the Captain gave me. He stole it. Anyway, the deputy had me and Marie relocated. He said me and Marie could keep our names but he lied. We had to change our last names again. I didn’t care anymore about Sal. It was saying goodbye to John that hurt. I hate he is buried there and don’t even have the same name he was given. That wasn’t right.
The night before we left, I went to see Carol and I told her everything. I didn’t care anymore about the marshals and security and I figured I’d never see her again anyway. It was funny. She told me she thought something was weird about us, especially Sal, but they didn’t know the government hid people like that. I think she was afraid of me because when I went to go, she didn’t even want to give me a hug. I don’t know why I told her. I just needed someone to listen to me, I guess. I just needed to tell someone the truth.
It didn’t change anything at all but I felt better.
MOVING ON
Angela and Marie were resettled in Phoenix, Arizona, with new last names that once again had been legally changed. Angela became a close friend of the deputy marshal helping her there and he frequently stopped by to visit.
I had to explain to Marie why we had a new last name. I said sometimes people change their names when their mommies got married or when they moved to new towns. She was only five and she believed me. She asked about Sal, but not as much as I thought she would. He had never spent much time with her but she knew he was her daddy. After a few months, I began telling her Sal was really her uncle and he had moved back east. One day I told her her real daddy had been a pilot in the air force and had been killed. I told her he had loved her a lot but she probably was too young to remember him. She remembered seeing all the big airplanes in Rapid City at the air force base there so this lie made sense to her. It was what I was telling people in Phoenix, too—that I was a widow whose husband had died. Marie seemed to me to believe it. She thought Sal was her uncle and her daddy was dead. I didn’t feel bad about lying. Sal was a scumbag and I didn’t want Marie to know anything about the mob and Brooklyn. That was behind me and her now.
We lived in an apartment and the deputy got me a job working in an office at the courthouse. I’d never really had a job and it was really, really tough at first. But the other girls who worked there were great and they helped me a lot. I started trying to lose my Brooklyn accent and I tried to become more like everyone else. I dressed like they did. I avoided talking about my past. I’d say my husband was dead and it was too painful to talk about and no one would hassle me about it. There were a couple of good-looking guys at the courthouse but I didn’t date any of them. I was afraid. I told them I still loved my husband. I remember when Marie was about ten, she was looking through old shoe boxes of photographs and there was a picture of Sal holding her and John in South Dakota. I’d kept it because of John. I couldn’t bear to throw pictures of him away but I thought I had got rid of all the ones of Sal. Anyway, Marie asked me who Sal was! She had forgotten completely about him in the five years we’d been in Phoenix. I was happy about that. I thought, “If Uncle Sam can lie about stuff, why can’t I?”