~~~~~
Gionelli cringed at Schwartz’s identification of his hired hit man. Twenty-two years ago at the age of 15, Whiteside and his old man entered the Witness Protection Program. Gionelli and Schwartz were partners back then, both freshly assigned to the Witsec division. Gionelli rose through the managerial ranks, but Schwartz remained on the streets. Schwartz truly loved his job and never desired to leave the action and sit behind a desk. Most of the men who wantonly rejected the chance to get promoted were usually not leadership quality, marginal Deputy U.S. Marshals at best, but Schwartz was different.
Gionelli jumped at the chance to leave the streets and run the show from behind a desk. He passionately despised the snitches who became the witnesses they protected and relocated around the country. They were Gionelli’s bread and butter, but he hated them all the same. However, Marty Schwartz tolerated the lot, if not actually liking some of them. Schwartz’s acceptance fascinated and repulsed Gionelli. You would never think Schwartz capable of that kind of empathy and compassion, but it was there, lurking behind a thin, gruff veneer that he wore so convincingly. Gionelli never realized its existence until they began working with Edgar Whiteside, and especially his son, Surey Whiteside.
Surey tested high on all of the aptitude tests the U.S. Marshals Service ran him through. He excelled in the written arts, math, social studies, and nearly maxed out everything in the sciences. Gionelli never forgot the kid’s IQ test score. The albino freak pulled out a 194. He was a certifiable genius, except for one problem. He had a borderline sociopathic/anti-social disorder. It was argued that he was either a product of his outlaw motorcycle gang father’s genetic makeup or a product of the environment he lived in during his early formative years. Gionelli stood on the middle of the fence and claimed he was both, thereby a lost cause and no further tax payer money should be spent on further assessments. Let the judicial system deal with him, because no amount of therapy or medication was going to change the end result.
And that’s when Gionelli discovered Schwartz’s softer side. Marty Schwartz agreed with Gionelli’s assessment of Surey, but said that was exactly the reason the government should step up and help the kid. Schwartz pontificated that more tax payer money would be spent incarcerating and rehabilitating the kid, let alone cleaning up the wake of destruction he’d certainly leave behind. He argued for more forward thinking, than rather passing the buck for somebody else to handle. His partner’s liberal position shocked Gionelli. Up until that moment, Gionelli considered Schwartz a close minded, sexist, bigot. It was definitely incongruent with normal law enforcement thinking, and Gionelli warned him that taking that kind of position could make enemies within the service that might hold his career back.
Schwartz didn’t seem to care. Apparently carting that teenager all over the city for academic tests, psychological profiles, and providing protection to him and his family during a slew of federal trials, which featured Edgar Whiteside as the star witness for the government, built a bond between the brilliant, troubled youth and the young Witsec Inspector. Gionelli didn’t get overly concerned about it until his partner pressed for increased department spending on the young lad. By this point Gionelli was a supervisor within the program, and the Edgar Whiteside testimonial show through multiple federal courtrooms, grand juries, and local and state municipalities was coming to a successful close.
But Schwartz’s attachment to the kid was stronger now than ever. Due to the circumstances of constant movement and the unstable family life, the best they could do academically for the kid was completion of his GED. Knowing Surey’s potential caused great consternation for Schwartz and anybody who would listen to his complaints. But nobody on the inside cared. The case was over, and it was time for them to go live their lives in relative obscurity, fade into the criminal world’s forgetfulness, or violate the conditions of their protection and get tossed out of the program.
When Edgar Whiteside, AKA John Hawkins, got caught torching a local supermarket in Helena, MT, the latter became the net result. Within 48 hours of the initial appearance at the Helena Superior Courthouse, John Hawkins ceased to exist in the Witness Protection Program. The government was no longer responsible for his protection or his family’s. It was just that easy. By this time Gionelli had been promoted to Chief Inspector over the Witsec western division, and he was more than happy to bring the Whiteside chapter to a final close.
An apparent love affair between the supermarket owner’s son and Surey’s mother, Adrianna Whiteside, caused all hell to break loose within the Whiteside family. So mom shacked up with her cougar bait, dad sat in jail on a $500,000 bond for arson, and the Witness Security Program no longer stood in the shadows available to lend a helping hand. Surey had nowhere to go, except off the deep end, which was exactly what he did. Considering his fragile psychological makeup, it didn’t take much of a push as he constantly teetered on the cliff between normalcy and disorder anyway.
High-speed pursuits covering five separate states and a series of armed gas station robberies caught the nation’s attention on 20-second news snippets over the cable channels. Then the story broke about Surey’s connection to the Witness Security Program, and it became a lead story across the wire. A few high level, no-name agencies also took an active interest in Surey, due to his upper echelon intelligence and a lack of social constraints. In a short, efficient manner these spook agencies created a plan, along with a select group of Witsec personnel, to intercept the marauding teen and once again make him disappear without a trace. Schwartz was not included in this merry band.
With the assistance of satellite positioning technology and a bottomless bankroll, the United States government killed poor Surey Whiteside without the kid’s pulse ever skipping a beat. It was a remote section of road in western North Dakota. It was the kind of place nobody would see anything and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t ask any questions or make any statements. People out there liked to be left alone, and they did not welcome government intrusion or interference into their way of life. Surey couldn’t have scripted it any better for his future employer.
The heat from the fire when Surey’s car rolled multiple times and hit an abandoned fuel truck on the side of the road in east BFE could have made people second guess what really happened. But the American public is fickle and prone to attention deficit disorder. What was once a headline story became an afterthought. The intense heat from the crash that burned for hours in desolation, melted metal, leaving nothing more than a pile of ashes where a body once lay in the driver’s seat. Gionelli never knew the identity of those ashes. However, he did know that they did not belong to Surey Whiteside.
From this point forward, Gionelli had limited access to knowledge of exactly what transpired in Surey’s life. Gionelli provided all of the Witsec records he possessed for the family and was told to destroy any copies, physical and electronic. These orders came from somewhere within the Department of Justice. The U.S. Marshals Service had no option other than to comply with the orders, which Gionelli did, with one caveat. He kept one copy for his personal records, not necessarily for any criminal or under-handed reasons, but more out of abject curiosity. This was the stuff of suspense novels and high-speed action thriller movies. Gionelli just wanted to be part of the action, and it was clear he was getting edged out.
It became all the more apparent that those who pulled the strings were not going to leave any loose ends behind. Jefferson County Deputy Sheriffs found Edgar Whiteside’s beaten, stabbed body in the prison laundry, stuffed inside one of the industrial sized dryers with the note “beat, stab, repeat” pinned to his chest with a prison shank. Prison guards were immediately taken aback at the faux pas.
“They should have piled his body in the showers,” they insisted. “Lather, rinse, repeat is for bathing. These dumb asses can’t even get a simple joke right. What ever happened to an ace of spades tossed on a body?”
> Gionelli got a hold of one of the initial reports that referenced the lack of blood at Edgar Whiteside’s crime scene, suggesting the murder happened somewhere else. The final, official report made no mention of this and attributed the murder to the result of numerous underworld enemies Edgar Whiteside developed with his government testimonies. Nobody could argue against that rationale, and nobody lined up to mourn his loss. Gionelli never saw a final report, and the deputy who wrote it meteorically rose to undersheriff in just two years from penning the document. Gionelli recognized the shut up and move up deal, obviously cut behind the scenes. He just didn’t know who orchestrated it.
On the other end of the fateful marriage, the supermarket owner’s son grew weary of the cougar jabs that local townsfolk directed his way, along with the fact that Edgar Whiteside and his friends, associates, and sworn enemies scared the living shit out of him. In short order he moved out of their love nest and back into his parent’s windowless basement bedroom, feeling secure in his subterranean safe house. He left Adrianna a simple, less than eloquent note explaining his innermost feelings. It read, “I’m out, babe.” He was only a kid himself, not much older than Surey. It was really all that could be expected from someone whose life experience totaled working in the family business, going once to prom, and banging some horny older woman whose only rule in the bedroom was “there’s nothing off limits.”
Within weeks of Edgar’s unfortunate demise and her Dear Jane letter, Adrianna Whiteside fell victim to suspicious circumstances, too. Adrianna’s years within the outlaw motorcycle gang world attained her the lofty status of chattel. Such was the life for females within the gangs. However, she did develop an affinity for Harleys and was a skilled rider. Witsec allowed her to keep her bike, much to Edgar’s chagrin. His went into impoundment and subsequent governmental auction. Hers sat in the garage of their modest government paid, two-bedroom condominium in Helena. After reading lover boy’s note, she decided it was time to take the hog out for a long deserved spin and clear her head. Helmeted and adorned in leather, Adrianna let the wind flow over her body in the cool Montana air.
On the outskirts of town, barely three miles east of Johnson’s curve, a strange thing happened. Adrianna and her bike took a spill along a straight away for no apparent reason. The weather was dry, and no detectable obstructions were found in or around the road by the investigating officers. They found just the bike in a ditch, and Adrianna’s headless body about twenty yards into the sagebrush. A brief cranial search ensued until one of the officers made the discovery of a lone black helmet on the ground. He opened the visor and Adrianna’s lifeless eyes peered out.
“I guess it’s true, Larry,” the officer said. “Helmets really do protect the head. They just don’t do shit for the neck.”
Nobody was really sure just how her head separated from her body, especially so cleanly. The medical examiner likened the trauma to something one saw with a cable or thin, sharp metallic instrument. They really could not draw any conclusive results and were left with more questions than answers. But Adrianna was the sole victim of the accident, there were no witnesses, and nobody even stepped up to claim the body. Lack of curiosity by investigators and anybody else in the world helped classify the investigation as an accidental death. Gionelli understandably developed reservations about his own safety. He decided he needed to make himself an integral part of Surey’s transformation to whatever the government expected him to become, for his welfare, if nothing else.
As it turned out, Gionelli became a useful tool for whom he could only define as the intelligence community. Nobody handed out business cards or exchanged phone numbers and emails. Gionelli provided information as to how the program handled Surey and the kid’s interpersonal relationships that were not documented in the reports he surrendered. In return, they provided silence. This was not a tit for tat relationship, but he suspected as much going into it. Gionelli believed Surey would be used for some type of clandestine, black operations. He theorized it would be the kind of stuff politicians deny exist and Hollywood makes a killing on. Yeah, you could say there’s a killing to be made in killing.
He briefly thought about bringing Schwartz into the fold, but later decided that his more liberal views on the kid would most likely not be a suitable fit into this world. Besides, knowledge was power, and Gionelli knew it now, better than ever. Schwartz remained on the outside for decades, until tonight.
Over the recent past, Gionelli and Whiteside had become quite useful to each other, and there were many people involved on the periphery with their capers and stunts. As much as it bothered him that this professional relationship was on its last legs, Gionelli was a pragmatist. It was time to sever all ties with Surey Whiteside, as cleanly as possible.
The Bernie Factor Page 29